ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Coughing] Hi. Time of year. Merry Christmas, everybody. Yeah. Oh, my word. Are you home,

00:00:11 ◼   ► or are you upstate? I am home for one day. Just you? Me and Tiff are here, and then we

00:00:17 ◼   ► are going to Cancun tomorrow morning. Oh, nice. I've never been to Cancun, or Mexico,

00:00:22 ◼   ► actually. Neither have I. Mostly good things. We discussed this on an earlier show, Casey,

00:00:26 ◼   ► but you've forgotten already. Oh, yeah, this does ring a bell. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now

00:00:30 ◼   ► I'm remembering. It's all coming back to me. I think there's like five of Casey, and only

00:00:33 ◼   ► one of them is on the show at any given week, and then the next one shows up. It's like

00:00:37 ◼   ► those TV shows where twins trade lives with each other, and they have to coordinate what

00:00:40 ◼   ► each person knows. You'll never know, John Craig. You'll never know. You're the one who

00:00:45 ◼   ► knows my middle name. So, John, what computer are you using this week? Dammit, Marco, you

00:00:51 ◼   ► took it from me. I was about to ask. I'm on my Mac Pro. Yay! What monitor? Wait, they're

00:00:58 ◼   ► both Mac Pros. I did the same joke both weeks, and you had different reactions both times.

00:01:02 ◼   ► I'm on my Mac Pro. That's the joke. Does it have small holes or big holes in the front?

00:01:08 ◼   ► It's fine, big. Everything old is new again. All right, what year did this Mac Pro come?

00:01:14 ◼   ► Is this Mac Pro old enough to vote? No, not vote. Is it old enough to not drive? I don't

00:01:20 ◼   ► know. Is it ancient or is it not? This is a 2019 Mac Pro. It actually shipped in 2019,

00:01:25 ◼   ► and it's set up and running in 2019. We did it. 2019 Mac Pro. Are you using your ancient

00:01:32 ◼   ► monitor or are you using something else? I'm using my PlayStation monitor. Because that's

00:01:38 ◼   ► all I got, because my other one hasn't shipped. Destiny has been given a back seat? You've

00:01:43 ◼   ► said to Destiny, "No, thank you. I have more important things." Not entirely. We'll address

00:01:48 ◼   ► and follow up. All right, so a certain somebody I know sent you an early birthday present,

00:01:55 ◼   ► since your birthday is coming up extremely soon. Why are you not leveraging that to use

00:02:00 ◼   ► your ancient monitor? Because, A, my ancient monitor, by the time I got that thing, was

00:02:05 ◼   ► already packed up and put Raiders of the Lost Ark style into my attic and is not easy to

00:02:11 ◼   ► get at. And the second reason is that monitor was non-retina, and I just can't do that to

00:02:16 ◼   ► my Mac Pro. You know, I don't blame you. So what do you have now? Like a 4K, 24-inch kind

00:02:21 ◼   ► of thing? Yep. I'm actually kind of surprised they make the 4K monitors that small. It seems

00:02:26 ◼   ► like nobody wants that, except Mac nerds. But it seems like everyone, like the entire

00:02:31 ◼   ► PC and gaming worlds, want 4K resolution at much larger sizes, but nobody seems to want

00:02:39 ◼   ► retina scale. It feels so tight to me. Again, obviously it's bigger than the other monitors

00:02:45 ◼   ► I've replaced, but I'm used to the 5K iMac, and everything just feels so much bigger on

00:02:49 ◼   ► this screen. I know 5K is not that much bigger than 4K, but I'm just like, "Wow, is that

00:02:55 ◼   ► how big my browser window normally is? Why is everything taking up so much?" Like, the

00:02:59 ◼   ► screen seems so short. Anyway, I'll be happy when I get my real monitor, but for now, it's

00:03:05 ◼   ► 4K. And that has not even shipped yet, is that correct? It has not. So other people

00:03:09 ◼   ► are getting scary messages that say that their shipment has been delayed, but so far I have

00:03:14 ◼   ► not received that notification. So, fingers crossed. I feel like I should update you on

00:03:19 ◼   ► my computer situation. Alright, go ahead. Wait, what? There shouldn't be an update.

00:03:26 ◼   ► There shouldn't be. That's not a good thing. Well, it's me, and where would I be if not

00:03:31 ◼   ► with—no, I'm just kidding, everything's fine. Oh, God. I was so afraid you messed

00:03:34 ◼   ► with the RAM or something. No, not yet. Just don't case up this computer, please. Keep

00:03:42 ◼   ► all liquids and third-party RAM away from it. No promises. No, everything is good. I

00:03:47 ◼   ► will say, though, that I realized that one of the three of us is now running Catalina.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Does that mean I can too now? No, I replied to you in Slack. You don't have to. I have

00:03:59 ◼   ► to. I have no choice. My machine doesn't run anything earlier than Catalina, so I am

00:04:03 ◼   ► stuck, but you don't have to upgrade. You can just hang out for a while. But Dad! Yeah,

00:04:08 ◼   ► I've been running Catalina on my laptop all week as I've been moving around. As I've

00:04:12 ◼   ► been using it for a week, I'm reminded why I don't have it on my desktop yet. So all

00:04:17 ◼   ► kidding aside, tell me why, because I feel like any of the bad experiences I had with

00:04:21 ◼   ► Catalina were really the hardware that I was running on, not the software, because on my

00:04:25 ◼   ► MacBook, it's been fine. I can't think of anything that's been particularly wrong

00:04:29 ◼   ► with it, although naturally I've been using my MacBook less and less recently. But what

00:04:34 ◼   ► has reminded you of the bad—what are the bad that you've been reminded of? I've

00:04:39 ◼   ► had two, maybe three issues so far. Two and a half issues so far. Number one is just the

00:04:45 ◼   ► annoyance of all the stupid permission dialog boxes. Like, yes, for God's sake, I let

00:04:50 ◼   ► this app that I just opened access the downloads folder or the desktop or whatever. It's

00:04:54 ◼   ► like, yeah, I just put files there. That's what I want. It just feels like Windows Vista,

00:04:59 ◼   ► which I never actually use, but it feels like what people say Windows Vista was like. It's

00:05:04 ◼   ► just constant barrages of permission dialogs that you just think—I mean, this is well

00:05:10 ◼   ► trotting ground. I don't need to go over it, but could there really have been no better

00:05:14 ◼   ► way to do this? Was this really worth it? Was this really the right design for the security

00:05:19 ◼   ► of the system? It just doesn't—it seems like this is going to be looked back on as

00:05:24 ◼   ► a mistake. So that's one big problem. It's just the annoyance of all the permissions

00:05:30 ◼   ► and everything. And then problem number two, which I'm not sure is a Catalina problem,

00:05:35 ◼   ► but I sure as hell hope it is, is that I seem to be getting frequent keyboard input lag.

00:05:43 ◼   ► And this is on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new keyboard, which has me slightly concerned.

00:05:47 ◼   ► But I'm hoping—it feels like software because it isn't all the time, and I haven't

00:05:51 ◼   ► been able to pin down when it happens exactly. It isn't just in one app, but I am definitely

00:05:57 ◼   ► seeing keyboard input lag. And that is extremely concerning. But it feels like a software issue,

00:06:06 ◼   ► so I'm hoping that's it. Yeah, this sounds familiar. Yeah, right? And I forget, that

00:06:11 ◼   ► was with Catalina, wasn't it, on your old, you know, weirdo? It was definitely with Catalina

00:06:15 ◼   ► because that's where it is right now. It has Catalina on it right now. I don't recall

00:06:20 ◼   ► in this long and sordid tale if I had seen that in Mojave or not. I do remember that

00:06:25 ◼   ► I had intended to downgrade to Mojave at the point in which I said, "Screw it all. I'm

00:06:30 ◼   ► just going to get an iMac Pro." So I'm not sure—I can't recall—somebody would

00:06:34 ◼   ► have to remind me where it was in the timeline, this terrible, terrible timeline that I was

00:06:40 ◼   ► seeing the input lag and if it was in Mojave as well. But I don't think it was. Alright,

00:06:44 ◼   ► alright. Well, so anyway, so I am seeing significant keyboard lag sometimes using the built-in

00:06:50 ◼   ► keyboard with nothing else connected, and that is extremely concerning. So I'm hoping

00:06:55 ◼   ► that's a software thing that gets resolved. And then finally, the touch bar seems buggier,

00:07:01 ◼   ► which is funny because it doesn't seem like they've actually done anything to it. Like,

00:07:04 ◼   ► it doesn't seem like it's different. The— Well, it is, though, because it's smaller

00:07:08 ◼   ► because of the escape key. Right, but like— No, I'm serious. I'm not trying to be funny.

00:07:11 ◼   ► No, you're right, but it seems like the software side of the touch bar seems pretty

00:07:15 ◼   ► much unmodified from where it has been since 2016, which is funny. Like, if they're going

00:07:21 ◼   ► to keep saying how nice it is and that they're not going to give us an option to not buy

00:07:25 ◼   ► it, they're also not making it any better, which is, you know, I have issues with that.

00:07:30 ◼   ► But anyway, it's— I have to more frequently do the— whatever the kill-all command is

00:07:35 ◼   ► that like reboots the touch bar because it either gets stuck on something or it has an

00:07:40 ◼   ► empty gap in the little control strip area or something. Like, it just— Function keys,

00:07:46 ◼   ► man. Like, they worked every time. I just— Well, did they?

00:07:50 ◼   ► Yes! Well, yeah, they did! Like, why, why, Apple? Why take something and make it worse

00:07:57 ◼   ► and make us use it? Like, I just— Even if the touch bar worked 100% of the time, I still

00:08:04 ◼   ► would prefer function keys, but the fact that it doesn't work 100% of the time and the

00:08:09 ◼   ► fact that it goes to sleep all the time, which I also, like— It turned something that was

00:08:14 ◼   ► one tap into two taps because you have to wake up the touch bar first and then tap the

00:08:19 ◼   ► pause button or the brightness button or whatever. Like, I just— Ugh! Please, Apple, give us

00:08:24 ◼   ► more touch bar free options. I'm sorry. Anyway, so those are minor issues. Other than those

00:08:29 ◼   ► issues, I actually have been extremely happy with the 16-inch as I've been traveling

00:08:35 ◼   ► and using it more. I still love everything else about it. It just does seem like there's

00:08:41 ◼   ► these weird little software glitches with Catalina.

00:08:43 ◼   ► I'm dealing with the permissions stuff, too, and in particular the strain of it that

00:08:47 ◼   ► really bothers me is apps that were— They're like recent semi-modern apps but not quite

00:08:54 ◼   ► modern enough to know that Catalina was a thing, and on first launch— Like, these

00:08:58 ◼   ► are installing apps that I didn't have or reinstalling them or whatever. On first launch,

00:09:02 ◼   ► they have some kind of first launch experience, whether it's prompting you to set something

00:09:07 ◼   ► up, or even if they're just trying to run an auto-updater because I'm launching an

00:09:10 ◼   ► older version of an app that needs to be updated. That process is not accounting for the fact

00:09:16 ◼   ► that the OS is also going to throw stuff up in your face about permissions, and often

00:09:19 ◼   ► they fight with each other. The app expects to be able to do a thing on first launch,

00:09:22 ◼   ► but it can't because it hasn't been given permission yet. You have to pick which one

00:09:27 ◼   ► of the dialogues you want to do, or do you want to go back to system preferences and

00:09:30 ◼   ► try to give permission? When you give permission in system preferences, it requires you to

00:09:33 ◼   ► quit the app, but it could be in the middle of the first run setup. It's just a mess

00:09:37 ◼   ► figuring out, "All right, what state are we going to be in? Can I trigger the first

00:09:40 ◼   ► run experience again? Do I have to go through it again? Has it already done it? Have I already

00:09:43 ◼   ► signed up or registered or updated or downloaded?" Half the time the solution is to throw the

00:09:49 ◼   ► app out, reinstall, go to system preferences proactively and add it to full disk access

00:09:54 ◼   ► so you just don't get asked about it, but then what if it's asking about something

00:09:56 ◼   ► different that doesn't have to do with full disk access? It's quite a long road,

00:10:01 ◼   ► Mel. The one thing that Catalina is doing to me, and it's like, "This is a custom-tailored

00:10:05 ◼   ► bug just for me because I've got to be the only person who cares about this bug in the

00:10:11 ◼   ► entire universe. I don't know if you know this about me. Maybe you have seen me use

00:10:16 ◼   ► my computer." I try mightily, as documented in 15 years of Mac OS X reviews, I try mightily

00:10:24 ◼   ► to get the finder to behave how I'm accustomed to, not as a browser. Windows for each folder,

00:10:32 ◼   ► no sidebar, no toolbar. I'm not against the browser. Sometimes I will open a browser

00:10:38 ◼   ► window, so to speak, because the separation is not clean and has never been. But anyway,

00:10:43 ◼   ► I try to get my finder windows with nothing on them. This is something that almost nobody

00:10:47 ◼   ► ever does, so this is probably a problem they don't have. But, two, you can do this now.

00:10:50 ◼   ► You're on your Macs. Go to the finder and pick a folder and try to make the window as

00:10:56 ◼   ► I described. Maybe you don't even know how to do it because it never occurs to you to

00:10:59 ◼   ► do this, but just try it.

00:11:00 ◼   ► Status bar on or off?

00:11:02 ◼   ► On.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Okay, so you basically only have the top bar and the status bar below it.

00:11:09 ◼   ► But when you say top bar, what do you mean?

00:11:11 ◼   ► Like the title bar, sorry. Like with the traffic light controls and the name of the folder.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Exactly. So that's how I try to have my windows. And of course, the finder in Mac OS X has

00:11:20 ◼   ► always had no respect for me setting the state of any window because it doesn't associate

00:11:26 ◼   ► windows with state and folders and yada, yada, yada, right? So right now I'm looking at my

00:11:30 ◼   ► documents folder. It's in list view. It shows documents on the top and then it's got the

00:11:34 ◼   ► status bar that says how many items and how much space is available and then it's got

00:11:37 ◼   ► headers for name, date, modified, size, whatever, and then a bunch of folders, right?

00:11:42 ◼   ► This is how I want pretty much all my finder windows all the time. This is how I set all

00:11:46 ◼   ► my finder windows all the time. And Catalina Finder, if I have a bunch of windows open

00:11:52 ◼   ► like this, I can watch it happen. I'll be working in one window or I'll switch to another

00:11:57 ◼   ► app and I'll come back to the finder. On its own, without me doing anything in the finder,

00:12:02 ◼   ► I'm not dragging anything into the finder, I'm not activating the finder, I haven't just

00:12:06 ◼   ► done something with it. Just literally on its own, will say, "You know what? You're

00:12:10 ◼   ► getting a toolbar." And all my finder windows will spawn toolbars spontaneously without

00:12:15 ◼   ► the finder even being active. I swear to you, I'm doing nothing in the finder. I'm not sending

00:12:19 ◼   ► an Apple event for another app. They will spawn toolbars. The first hundred times this

00:12:23 ◼   ► event, I'm like, "I must be going insane." I swear, I just hit that toolbar with command

00:12:27 ◼   ► option T. How does it have a toolbar now? In fact, I'm looking at documents right now,

00:12:31 ◼   ► I'm going to go back to Chrome. I'll just hang out in Chrome. We'll see, maybe by the

00:12:35 ◼   ► end of this episode, that window will have spawned a toolbar. They come back and I can't

00:12:39 ◼   ► get rid of them. They refuse to stay dead. They just keep coming back. And you wouldn't

00:12:46 ◼   ► think, "Well, who cares?" I made the toolbar icon only, I actually make it text only to

00:12:51 ◼   ► make it even smaller, but I don't want the toolbar there. And by the way, it screws up

00:12:54 ◼   ► the size of the window. So if you have an icon view window, like my applications folder

00:12:57 ◼   ► is icon view, and I have it sized and set up so I can see an integer number of icons

00:13:01 ◼   ► and rows and columns, right? But when the toolbar comes, the bottom ones get cut off,

00:13:05 ◼   ► right? Because it doesn't push the view down. And I have literally never seen this bug in

00:13:12 ◼   ► any other version of Mac OS or Mac OS X, where the view changes in currently open windows

00:13:18 ◼   ► behind your back before your very eyes. I've seen it happen. It animates in. It's like,

00:13:23 ◼   ► "What is going on?" I cannot figure it out, and it's driving me batty. So far, no input

00:13:31 ◼   ► lag issues or anything like that. So yeah, it's just permissions and then the Finder,

00:13:36 ◼   ► just really, really sticking it to me for no reason.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin I'm so sorry, Jon. The struggle is real.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Jon Patton I just realized when I had my keyboard input lag, I was using a Bluetooth Magic Mouse,

00:13:52 ◼   ► which I normally don't use a mouse with my laptop, but at this time, there was one. This

00:13:58 ◼   ► shouldn't affect the built-in keyboard, but it might be related to the bug. I don't know.

00:14:02 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin I saw much better performance when I put my

00:14:04 ◼   ► trackpad in wired mode rather than wireless mode.

00:14:08 ◼   ► Jon Patton Unfortunately, you can't really use the mouse

00:14:10 ◼   ► in wired mode. Steve McLaughlin That is true. That is very

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00:16:12 ◼   ► [Music]

00:16:13 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin I would like to quickly drop something in

00:16:18 ◼   ► the chat room and I would like you guys to look at this. I stumbled across this earlier

00:16:22 ◼   ► today and I thought it was hilarious. What I've put in the chat, in case you can't see

00:16:25 ◼   ► it, this is AudioQuest Diamond USB cable, type A to type B, .75 meters, which is 2.6

00:16:33 ◼   ► feet. So this is a cable that goes from the traditional USB that, you know, your lightning

00:16:39 ◼   ► cables always used to come in, to one of those big, chunky USB things that, like, a printer

00:16:44 ◼   ► would take in.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin The connectors have names, Casey?

00:16:46 ◼   ► Casey Neuman I said A to B, but that doesn't mean anything

00:16:49 ◼   ► to anyone. Come on, man.

00:16:50 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin If it means anything to anyone, it's listeners

00:16:52 ◼   ► of this show.

00:16:53 ◼   ► Casey Neuman Although, doesn't type B come in two different

00:16:56 ◼   ► shapes?

00:16:57 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Well, there's the micro B, which is that

00:16:58 ◼   ► weird, like, double, long, skinny rectangle thing.

00:17:00 ◼   ► Casey Neuman Three different, is that micro? Because it's

00:17:02 ◼   ► no smaller than this B.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Oh, it's mini B. Well, there's, so there's

00:17:06 ◼   ► mini...

00:17:07 ◼   ► Casey Neuman There's three shapes.

00:17:08 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin I rest my case.

00:17:09 ◼   ► Casey Neuman A, but A, everybody knows. Anyway, yeah.

00:17:11 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Anyway, this cable, AudioQuest Diamond USB

00:17:15 ◼   ► cable, type A to type B, .75 meters, 2.6 feet. I haven't looked at Monoprice, but I would

00:17:21 ◼   ► assume on Monoprice this cable is $4, something like that.

00:17:25 ◼   ► Casey Neuman If that.

00:17:26 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin If that.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Casey Neuman This is the kind of cable that, like, when

00:17:28 ◼   ► you're going through your cable bin and trying to clean it out, you just throw away, like,

00:17:32 ◼   ► five of these.

00:17:33 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Right.

00:17:34 ◼   ► Casey Neuman Because you just have these around. Like, they

00:17:35 ◼   ► come with everything.

00:17:36 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin They call them printer cables nowadays, which

00:17:38 ◼   ► is funny.

00:17:39 ◼   ► Casey Neuman Yeah, exactly.

00:17:40 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin The history of things that have been called

00:17:41 ◼   ► printer cables. In this current moment in time, this is what people call a printer cable.

00:17:43 ◼   ► Casey Neuman Exactly, exactly.

00:17:44 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin You can find it under that name on Amazon.

00:17:45 ◼   ► Casey Neuman So, it would appear that this kind of cable,

00:17:49 ◼   ► and maybe Marco can fill in for me, this kind of cable is occasionally used for audio purposes.

00:17:54 ◼   ► And I can tell you that certainly the XLR box that I'm using to speak to you right now

00:18:00 ◼   ► takes in a USB Type B, you know, the big, kind of chunky one. And on the other end of

00:18:04 ◼   ► that is currently USB Type A, but what started me down the search was me thinking I have

00:18:09 ◼   ► all these USB-C ports. Maybe I'll just get a USB-C to USB-B. Yes, I think I have that

00:18:13 ◼   ► right. It doesn't matter. Anyway.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Yep.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Casey Neuman So, that is an example of a piece of audio

00:18:17 ◼   ► equipment that perhaps would use one of these style cables, but I don't know what else there

00:18:22 ◼   ► is. Maybe, does your DAC use this, Marco, or anything like that?

00:18:25 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin This is the kind of cable that any USB DAC

00:18:29 ◼   ► that is, or any USB sound card that is, you know, that is not super portable, like a desktop

00:18:36 ◼   ► one, this is the kind of cable that almost all of them would use.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin I'm speaking to you right now through a cable

00:18:41 ◼   ► just like that. In fact, one I just bought new. I'll have some cable follow-up related

00:18:45 ◼   ► to this, actually.

00:18:46 ◼   ► I'm also speaking to you through actually two of these. One of them is going to my main

00:18:50 ◼   ► DAC and one of them is going from my microphone interface to the computer.

00:18:53 ◼   ► Marco

00:18:53 ◼   ► Yeah, so all three of us are speaking to you through one of these cables. Now, mine very

00:18:57 ◼   ► well may be a Monoprice cable, which, by the way, Nietzsche in the chat has pointed out

00:19:02 ◼   ► on Monoprice, $1.27. I have been procrastinating in telling you that this exact cable on Amazon.com,

00:19:08 ◼   ► $599.95. This is a USB cable that is less than three feet long, $600. And sure, I look

00:19:17 ◼   ► at the reviews thinking, "Surely that can't be right." Ridiculously expensive, but it

00:19:22 ◼   ► sounded really good. Five stars. Listen to this USB cable before making judgment. This

00:19:27 ◼   ► last one continues, "So I'm amazed at how many people have had reviews without ever

00:19:30 ◼   ► listening to the cable."

00:19:31 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Ah, what the hell? Hold on, a ladybug just

00:19:34 ◼   ► landed on my...what? Sorry.

00:19:36 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin First the cricket was killed with an iPad 2. 2019 ladybug massacre. Do you have any devices heavy enough to kill a ladybug anymore, Marco? Oh, there it is.

00:19:47 ◼   ► Marco Yep, a 30 watt USB-C power brick. There you go. They're pretty small.

00:19:52 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Well, anyway, so I just wanted to point out $600 for this friggin' cable. Why? Why?

00:19:57 ◼   ► Marco My favorite review is one star, subject line, all capital, LOL period. I said they put the period.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Period and capitalized it. I like that.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Marco Review text, LOL period.

00:20:09 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Seventeen people found this helpful.

00:20:12 ◼   ► Marco I'm gonna rate that helpful. Yeah, this is, I mean...

00:20:16 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Oh, audio files. You're so crazy.

00:20:18 ◼   ► Marco There are some places where cable quality matters,

00:20:23 ◼   ► but way fewer than most people think, and the ceiling of how much it matters is usually

00:20:29 ◼   ► reached at far lower of a level than anything marketed to audio files. This is all mumbo

00:20:37 ◼   ► jumbo BS, and you know, audio, yeah, audio sound quality is famously easy to fool, just

00:20:45 ◼   ► similar to like wine tasting. There's all sorts of like wine gadgets that are mostly placebo

00:20:49 ◼   ► effect as well, but you can also kind of argue that like the, that, you know, the placebo effect

00:20:55 ◼   ► is real and you can say like people who pay a lot of money for something and then think

00:21:01 ◼   ► it sounds better are getting their money's worth. Like if they, if they pay something

00:21:07 ◼   ► ridiculous and then they get enjoyment out of it, even if it's totally fake, they did

00:21:14 ◼   ► pay to, for it to get a better experience and they are tricking themselves into believing

00:21:18 ◼   ► they are getting a better experience. So you can kind of argue that maybe it works, but

00:21:23 ◼   ► yeah, this is all BS and it's not really changing anything.

00:21:25 ◼   ► I like how you're trying to move on real quickly from you killing a ladybug, one of the cute

00:21:30 ◼   ► bugs, Marco. It's not cute when it lands on your hand as you're trying to use your computer.

00:21:34 ◼   ► All right, well, let's let Marco know how you feel about killing ladybugs. Don't we

00:21:39 ◼   ► have a surplus of them? I think, I think we do. Aren't they like invading the entire continent?

00:21:45 ◼   ► Like isn't it actually like a big problem in a lot of places? I don't know. I think,

00:21:49 ◼   ► I think it actually is. All right, maybe we should start with some

00:21:53 ◼   ► follow up 20 minutes. Andrew Woods has some information about MagSafe connectors that I

00:21:59 ◼   ► don't even understand why we're talking about this. What did I forget this time?

00:22:02 ◼   ► Cause there was like the, the cable that was hooked up to my old monitor that had like

00:22:05 ◼   ► the, uh, that split into multiple cables that split into mini display port and USB. And

00:22:10 ◼   ► also there was the MagSafe ones. You could connect your laptop right to it. And I was

00:22:13 ◼   ► like, I don't like that magnet wanging around cause I'm trying to, you know, I don't have

00:22:17 ◼   ► anything to do, but I didn't want to have like this powerful magnet touching like electrical

00:22:23 ◼   ► cables and everything like that. Well, it turns out that in MagSafe, that part, the

00:22:29 ◼   ► part that like connects to the laptop does not actually have any magnets in it. It's

00:22:34 ◼   ► just a ferrous block of metal. So I shouldn't have worried too much about it being in your

00:22:38 ◼   ► other cables. Um, so that's good to know. Uh, the magnet's on the computer side, not

00:22:42 ◼   ► on the cable side. You still have to find a place to put it. And it is kind of heavy

00:22:46 ◼   ► and you know, flopping around. But anyway, I just thought that was worth throwing in

00:22:50 ◼   ► there in case people wondered, uh, MagSafe magnets on the computer. I am unable to find

00:22:55 ◼   ► a definition of Wang as a verb. You just heard it. You got to use the context clues. Marco

00:23:01 ◼   ► closest I can find is wangle, which means a Wang is the, is it going to be the new yeet

00:23:07 ◼   ► to obtain by persuading others to comply such as I think we should be able to wangle it

00:23:13 ◼   ► so that you can start tomorrow or I wangled limitation to her party. There you go. But

00:23:18 ◼   ► wanging around does not have to be an actual word. Take that dictionary and yeet it over

00:23:23 ◼   ► here and then I'll wang it over to the KC and we'll be all set. It's just wanging around.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Before we move on, it just occurred to me, I have two questions. One, we just get banned

00:23:32 ◼   ► in England. One, Marco, have you ordered a Mac pro yet? What do you think? I don't think

00:23:41 ◼   ► so, but I am not confident about this at all. So December is coming to a close as we record

00:23:48 ◼   ► this and therefore that 6% incentive is coming to an end. Oh, here we go. I also just got

00:23:52 ◼   ► a whole bunch of gift card credit to the Apple store from trading in a bunch of old devices.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Oh, here we go. But I still haven't ordered anything and I'm not going to. Oh, okay. Good.

00:24:00 ◼   ► I got you there. Now would you tell us if you had, if you asked, I mean like I wouldn't

00:24:04 ◼   ► volunteer it necessarily, but if you asked, I wouldn't lie. But no, I really, again, my

00:24:11 ◼   ► opinion remains, I'm still extremely happy with my iMac pro and there is nothing about

00:24:17 ◼   ► it that is in dire need or motivation to upgrade. Like I'm very happy with it. And like it'd

00:24:24 ◼   ► be different if I was like, you know, constantly hitting its limits or if I was like, you know,

00:24:28 ◼   ► if I had bought too small of an SSD with it or I needed more RAM, like if there was something

00:24:32 ◼   ► like that about my computer that I was like kind of itching for an upgrade, I would probably

00:24:37 ◼   ► do it even though I shouldn't. But the fact is none of that is true. Like I'm extremely

00:24:42 ◼   ► happy with everything I have in my iMac pro currently. I'm not, I'm not pushing any of

00:24:46 ◼   ► its limits yet. And so as long as that remains the case and as long as it still continues

00:24:50 ◼   ► to work properly, I think I'm going to keep it the way it is.

00:24:53 ◼   ► All right, good. I'm glad. I'm surprised when I'm glad. All right, moving on. John, tell

00:24:57 ◼   ► us about setting up your Mac pro please. Yeah, so I did finally decide to set it up because

00:25:01 ◼   ► I had the time to do it and I had a gap in my podcast schedule, which is basically what

00:25:05 ◼   ► I was looking for. And the earlier episode you'd reminded me about the HDMI connection.

00:25:09 ◼   ► So I'm like, I can just bring my PlayStation 4 monitor. So I began the process of setting

00:25:14 ◼   ► things up and I think I said this last show, I decided not to do ethernet. I decided to

00:25:19 ◼   ► do direct connection of one of the, took the SSD out of my old Mac pro and connected it

00:25:23 ◼   ► to my new one. And that went by surprisingly quick, the magic of SSDs. They're very high

00:25:28 ◼   ► bandwidth. I put it in a, not the fastest external case in the world, but it was like

00:25:33 ◼   ► 10 gigabits, which is 10 times better than one gigabit now, isn't it? I don't know how

00:25:37 ◼   ► fast it actually went, but anyway, it didn't take too long. I used migration assistant.

00:25:41 ◼   ► Everything seemed fine. I spent a long time deleting tons of 32 bit applications, sadly,

00:25:48 ◼   ► but God, so many of them. Installing application updates, getting stuff to work with for the

00:25:52 ◼   ► most part, it has been pretty smooth. A couple of things I want to talk about in using this

00:25:58 ◼   ► thing. The first is like, you know, all right, these days computers don't get that much faster

00:26:02 ◼   ► year over year, especially desktop. So we've talked about this many times. You're lucky

00:26:05 ◼   ► if you get a single digit percentage increase in single core performance, maybe you get

00:26:09 ◼   ► one with more cores, maybe you get one with less, but they're not, it's not like it wasn't

00:26:12 ◼   ► the nineties where your new computer that you buy a couple of years later is like twice

00:26:15 ◼   ► as fast, right? But I was replacing a 10 year old computer. So you would think this thing's

00:26:19 ◼   ► going to seem a lot faster. You would hope. Yeah. And it absolutely does. I mean, just

00:26:23 ◼   ► if you wait 10 years, the computer seems a lot faster. Not only does it seem faster,

00:26:27 ◼   ► it also seems faster than my wife's 5k iMac, which granted is also old. And this computer

00:26:32 ◼   ► probably isn't, it might not even be faster than single core. I haven't even compared

00:26:35 ◼   ► it to her old iMac, but yes, it feels faster. But the thing I feel the most, and this is

00:26:40 ◼   ► part of the most fun of having a new Mac, I feel like, and Marco has touched on it in

00:26:44 ◼   ► the past, is the effect of having so much more storage and so much more RAM. Because

00:26:50 ◼   ► these days, unless you're, you spend a lot of time doing things that are very CPU intensive,

00:26:56 ◼   ► like all you do all day is like, you know, encode or decode video and it takes a long

00:26:59 ◼   ► time and you're waiting on the computer. These days, the thing you will feel the most is

00:27:03 ◼   ► the removal of previous limits. And if you're replacing a computer, probably the limits

00:27:08 ◼   ► that you had have to do with RAM or disk space, both of which were smaller many years in the

00:27:11 ◼   ► past, either because you always kind of buy a computer for the same price or, or, you

00:27:15 ◼   ► know, and then, you know, the storage goes up a year over year, or usually when you replace

00:27:18 ◼   ► it, you want to replace it with something bigger. So this has so much more RAM than

00:27:21 ◼   ► my other computer. Like it basically has infinite RAM. I keep looking at the RAM diagram. I

00:27:25 ◼   ► don't think I've hit quarter full, right? So I may have overbought on the RAM, but the

00:27:28 ◼   ► point is RAM no longer exists for me. It's just an abstract concept. I don't care about

00:27:33 ◼   ► it anymore.

00:27:34 ◼   ► And you use Chrome, right? That's saying something. You can keep Chrome and Slack open

00:27:38 ◼   ► at the same time.

00:27:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I haven't really, yeah. So RAM is fine. And then storage. I went from

00:27:43 ◼   ► a one terabyte SSD to four. And granted, I brought over my entire photo library. So I

00:27:48 ◼   ► immediately used half of that four terabytes. So I'm slightly over two terabytes, but

00:27:53 ◼   ► still, my disk is half full. And this is after living for many years on the ragged edge of

00:27:58 ◼   ► the one terabyte. I was so close to the edge of the one terabyte that I didn't even have

00:28:01 ◼   ► my own photo library on it. Like not even an optimized storage mode. I just literally

00:28:05 ◼   ► didn't have iCloud photos enabled because I just ran out of room. So having that breathing

00:28:10 ◼   ► room and just feeling like, you know, I was doing some stuff where I was copying some

00:28:14 ◼   ► things around. I'm like, I can copy, you know, a couple of 500 gig files on here just temporarily.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Why not? I have so much room. I brought them over copies from there. Like just the luxury

00:28:23 ◼   ► of having all that extra space. And you can have this extra space with a Mac mini to be

00:28:29 ◼   ► clear, you know, in a Mac Pro to feel these effects. That's what I'm getting at. Just

00:28:33 ◼   ► get a new computer or, you know, on your existing computer, add more RAM and more storage, like

00:28:38 ◼   ► humongously more, not 5% more, but like double, triple, quadruple. Feels super awesome. So

00:28:43 ◼   ► I'm enjoying that. The next thing I experienced with this is I, when I was setting it up,

00:28:48 ◼   ► I had the opportunity, I had no reason to go inside it, but come on, you get a Mac Pro.

00:28:51 ◼   ► You got to, you got to look inside. So I took off the, the case, which was surprisingly

00:28:58 ◼   ► difficult. I mean, it was the granted it was up on a high desk, but like you have to pull

00:29:01 ◼   ► it straight off and straight up and there's a lot of friction there and you have to keep,

00:29:06 ◼   ► you know, you just want to like yank it off like voila, but you have to pull it exactly

00:29:10 ◼   ► straight. Otherwise it doesn't come up and it goes very slowly. And also I echo what

00:29:14 ◼   ► other people have said about the, the turny thing on the top, like the little handle that

00:29:17 ◼   ► you turn, it's like metal on metal inside there. It's not scratchy or scrapey, but it's

00:29:23 ◼   ► not smooth either. It is, you know, I'm assuming machined aluminum against machined aluminum.

00:29:27 ◼   ► So it is not a particularly pleasing untwist. It's a little bit like, like you would imagine

00:29:33 ◼   ► aluminum rubbing against aluminum, right? Which is probably good for precision and fit,

00:29:37 ◼   ► but it's not good for feel. Not that this matters in the grand scheme of things, but

00:29:40 ◼   ► lots of people commented on it and I agree. But it is very precise fitting. So anyway,

00:29:46 ◼   ► I got it off and I'm looking around inside it and yes, it's beautiful in there. Lots

00:29:50 ◼   ► of YouTube videos out there that show sort of teardowns. And in particular, one thing

00:29:54 ◼   ► I took note of after mostly after seeing these videos, like I had been telling people about

00:30:00 ◼   ► it, you know, people in my family, anyone else who's interested, my children who don't want

00:30:03 ◼   ► to hear about it. But anyway, that, you know, it's not just like a tower computer. It's very

00:30:07 ◼   ► neat inside there. And I had been referring to it with the same language as I had talked

00:30:11 ◼   ► about my power Mac G5 or the G3 for that matter, or my, you know, my Mac Pro 2008 macro that

00:30:18 ◼   ► everything sort of fits in and you don't see any cables flopping anywhere. Like all the

00:30:22 ◼   ► cables and everything are routed so that like it looks like just, you know, this, everything

00:30:26 ◼   ► is perfectly fit. Like that if you were, if you could manufacture everything to be exactly

00:30:29 ◼   ► the right length and, you know, sort of hidden behind things. Like if you looked at those,

00:30:33 ◼   ► you know, my old Mac Pro or the G3 tower, it's hard to even find like where they routed

00:30:38 ◼   ► the cables because they put them like behind the motherboards and up through little plastic

00:30:41 ◼   ► things and just, you know, it looks beautiful and clean. And of course this Mac Pro is all

00:30:45 ◼   ► color matched and it's all black inside there and it's very sleek and cool looking. But

00:30:49 ◼   ► the thing I hadn't realized until I had seen people like actually disassemble this computer

00:30:53 ◼   ► down to the studs like I fix it or whatever. Is that as far as I'm aware, this computer

00:30:59 ◼   ► has no cables inside it. How do they connect with components? Like, I mean, it's got,

00:31:05 ◼   ► for example, it's got a bunch of fans. Surely the fans connect with little cables to power

00:31:09 ◼   ► the fans, otherwise how the fans get power. The power supply that's got to plug into

00:31:15 ◼   ► something with power, right? But if you think about it, first of all, a lot of things in

00:31:19 ◼   ► this are our card slots. The SSDs, they're not cables. Those are, they go into little

00:31:23 ◼   ► connectors, right? You've seen what those are like. PCI cards like the, you know, or

00:31:26 ◼   ► the video cards, those go into connectors. Again, no cables. And because of the MPX module,

00:31:31 ◼   ► they don't need like a cable from the power supply to power the GPU because they have

00:31:34 ◼   ► a second connector. They get all the power through the slots. The CPU, obviously no cables

00:31:39 ◼   ► there. There is no hard drive. There is no optical drive. The USB ports, again, on a

00:31:45 ◼   ► card, so no cables there. The fans, where you think, surely this is the place where

00:31:48 ◼   ► they have to be cables. No, they have like these, you know, contacts essentially. There's

00:31:53 ◼   ► contacts on the fan assembly and there's contacts on the motherboard and they like, you know,

00:31:58 ◼   ► mechanically friction fit against each other to power them. The power button and the ports

00:32:02 ◼   ► on top all sort of go down and do pressure fit contact things. Like this is so over engineered

00:32:09 ◼   ► and ridiculous and awesome and I love the inside of it and I just think about it and

00:32:12 ◼   ► it makes me smile. So this is one of the other nice benefits of having a machine like this.

00:32:17 ◼   ► It is better designed and more beautiful inside than the Mac Pro in the same way that the

00:32:22 ◼   ► Mac Pro is better than the, you know, Power Mac G3, G4. The G5 and the Mac Pro are similar

00:32:29 ◼   ► but this is like the next step up. Like everything in it is custom and beautiful and color matched

00:32:34 ◼   ► and has, I don't know, I love it in there. I could live in there. I could make a little

00:32:39 ◼   ► like apartment design like that. It's amazing. I should have found one of the better links.

00:32:44 ◼   ► I forget who it was but somebody had a really good just like literal disassembly of let

00:32:48 ◼   ► me take all the pieces out. iFix did it as well but they did it more towards an eye of

00:32:51 ◼   ► repairability. This person was just doing it to say look at how this thing is put together.

00:32:55 ◼   ► I was super impressed by it.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I too found a couple videos that mentioned the whole no cables inside thing and it blew

00:33:01 ◼   ► my mind. I'm like wait a minute. Yeah, there aren't any cables in there.

00:33:06 ◼   ► And by the power supply, I mentioned it briefly, it goes into like a slot type thingy too.

00:33:11 ◼   ► Like it doesn't have a cable. It's just into a slot with connectors.

00:33:15 ◼   ► Yeah, that's incredible. I mean it was probably not necessary to design this this way. Like

00:33:22 ◼   ► you know when as the pro community and people who wanted this computer to exist, as Apple

00:33:28 ◼   ► was taking its sweet ass time making this computer and developing it, we were all saying

00:33:33 ◼   ► like just ship a PC tower. It's not that hard. Like it isn't like everyone else does it and

00:33:39 ◼   ► it's fine and if you want to do something fancier later, great but just ship a PC tower

00:33:42 ◼   ► now while we're waiting. And you know that's not really Apple's style. They're not going

00:33:45 ◼   ► to like you know quote just do things the way everyone else does them for better and

00:33:48 ◼   ► for worse. And all the time that it took them to develop this computer, because again like

00:33:54 ◼   ► I have a pretty good sense of how and when this thing started with all the different

00:34:01 ◼   ► things we've heard and picked up over time and things we've whispered and everything.

00:34:04 ◼   ► It really does seem like the development of this project started very shortly before they

00:34:09 ◼   ► held that Mac Pro Roundtable. Like it wasn't already in the works for three years before

00:34:15 ◼   ► that. They started it fairly recently before that. And so it basically took them about

00:34:21 ◼   ► three years to develop this. And this is why. Because they didn't just do a tower and this

00:34:28 ◼   ► is also why it cost $6,000. Like they really over engineered the crap out of it and it

00:34:35 ◼   ► took them three years and they're selling it at a very high base price because it's

00:34:39 ◼   ► a very fancy design. They did things the best way not the most economical way. They're

00:34:45 ◼   ► going to sell this thing in very low volumes and so they have to make up all their R&D

00:34:49 ◼   ► costs with low volume. So if you're going to amortize out the cost of all that development

00:34:57 ◼   ► and engineering per unit you have to do it over fewer units so each one bears more of

00:35:01 ◼   ► that cost. And not to mention the fact that they leave their healthy profit margin. So

00:35:06 ◼   ► like there's a reason why this machine is so expensive. There's a reason why it's

00:35:11 ◼   ► so nicely made inside and so nicely designed. I hope it has no major flaws and so far no

00:35:17 ◼   ► one seems to have found any. And so like it does seem really awesome. Now we can argue

00:35:23 ◼   ► and many people are whether that's the right decision. Whether they should have made this

00:35:27 ◼   ► crazy fancy thing that kind of maybe had to be very expensive depending on how it's

00:35:32 ◼   ► designed and how they're budgeting for and everything. Like yeah they probably should

00:35:35 ◼   ► have made a cheaper one but if you are willing to swallow these costs it does seem like this

00:35:41 ◼   ► is a really awesome computer. And pretty much the only reason I don't have one yet is

00:35:48 ◼   ► because I don't have any need for all this upgradability at the moment. But if I did

00:35:54 ◼   ► like our friend Stephen Hackett bought one and he's been documenting like the various

00:35:58 ◼   ► upgrades he's done to it so far and it started out with like a storage upgrade. He bought

00:36:03 ◼   ► that drive enclosure thing that goes in the top slots and put some SSDs in it. And like

00:36:07 ◼   ► that's just really cool that you can do that. And you know right now I don't have the

00:36:10 ◼   ► need for more internal storage than what I have on my Mac Pro. But if I did the ability

00:36:16 ◼   ► to just pop in a bracket with an SSD on it from Amazon or like a PCI card with an SSD

00:36:23 ◼   ► module on it like that's awesome. And I don't know if I'll ever need that kind of

00:36:28 ◼   ► upgradability again but if I do I'm going right to the Mac Pro.

00:36:32 ◼   ► But more on that later and follow up about expandability in the Mac Pro. But for now

00:36:36 ◼   ► let me say like this strategy that you just described of like making a very nice tower,

00:36:42 ◼   ► Apple has always done that strategy. It's just that time marches on, tech marches on

00:36:46 ◼   ► and Apple gets better at it. I think there is a fairly linear progression from the G3,

00:36:52 ◼   ► G4, the Yosemite L-cap tower case to the Power Mac G5/Mac Pro cheese grater case to this

00:37:01 ◼   ► case, taking a detour into the trash can. In terms of how many components are there,

00:37:07 ◼   ► how much does it look like a PC, how much can we hide the cables, like what can we do

00:37:10 ◼   ► to make this accessible with a door and what's on the door and what's on the case and how

00:37:15 ◼   ► easy is it to remove things and what kind of tools you need. They have always tried

00:37:19 ◼   ► to make a computer like this. It's just they are getting better at it and tech gets

00:37:22 ◼   ► better. Like I don't think you could have made this computer for you know any reasonable

00:37:28 ◼   ► amount of money or even a slightly unreasonable amount of money back when the blue and white

00:37:32 ◼   ► G3 was made but they did the best they could. That case was amazing. It's like wow, you

00:37:36 ◼   ► can just open it up, pull this handle up, look at the side and here's all the components.

00:37:39 ◼   ► First of all, there were so many more components and many of them had to be like commodity

00:37:43 ◼   ► data, optical drives and hard drives which Apple does not make so there's a limited

00:37:46 ◼   ► amount you can do and you don't want to make that proprietary. It just so happens that

00:37:49 ◼   ► in this technical error, they can do this type of design. It must have, when they were

00:37:54 ◼   ► talking about it like, "Oh, we want to do this and that," and it's like, "Wait

00:37:56 ◼   ► a second. We don't have any of those things that we absolutely have to have a cable for.

00:38:00 ◼   ► So why do we have to have cables for anything? Forget about routing them cleverly behind

00:38:04 ◼   ► things so they're not in people's faces and they look needy and make them the right

00:38:07 ◼   ► lengths. Why do we need cables at all?" That wasn't the case on the earlier computers

00:38:10 ◼   ► but they've always tried to custom engineer and arguably over engineer. That's what

00:38:18 ◼   ► Mac users like. I mean it's kind of a tautology and a self-fulfilling prophecy but it's

00:38:22 ◼   ► like people who buy Macs and like that type of thing, these tower computers that are accessible

00:38:27 ◼   ► and cleverly designed, it's something that people like and are willing to pay for. In

00:38:33 ◼   ► this case, I'm hoping that this design has not sort of gone too far and sacrificed reliability

00:38:39 ◼   ► for aesthetics. We've talked about this a lot in the past. It could be that this is

00:38:45 ◼   ► more reliable than having cables everywhere or it could be much worse and those connections

00:38:48 ◼   ► corrode and we're all going to be sad and I'll sell this sooner rather than later

00:38:52 ◼   ► to get an RMac or something. Time will tell but for now, I appreciate the engineering

00:38:55 ◼   ► involved. It is aesthetically beautiful and from an engineering perspective, it just pushes

00:38:59 ◼   ► all my buttons. I think also, I think that seeing quite how over engineered and just engineered

00:39:08 ◼   ► this product is suggests to me that this is not a one-off, that this is not intended to

00:39:15 ◼   ► be a short-term product. I don't think they would have put this much effort and this much

00:39:21 ◼   ► development into this product if it was going to be one and done, just a temporary patch

00:39:27 ◼   ► until the arm transition or they just want to satisfy people once and then never update

00:39:32 ◼   ► it. I don't think that's what happened here because if that was their goal, I think

00:39:37 ◼   ► they would have done a much smaller scale job on it. It wouldn't have been this custom.

00:39:42 ◼   ► It would have been maybe more like the old cheese grater or something. It wouldn't

00:39:47 ◼   ► have been so much new custom high-end development and design but it is and that suggests to

00:39:54 ◼   ► me that this is a product category and form factor that they're intending, at least

00:40:01 ◼   ► at this moment, to keep around for a long time. It does raise the increasingly worrisome

00:40:07 ◼   ► question for me of will the iMac Pro ever be updated again because I look at this and

00:40:14 ◼   ► the more I think about it, the more I think that the iMac Pro was intended to be the long-term

00:40:22 ◼   ► thing, they changed their mind and made the Mac Pro instead, released the iMac Pro as

00:40:27 ◼   ► it was but are now not going to put any effort into it because why would they? Because every

00:40:32 ◼   ► iMac Pro buyer is somebody who, if the iMac Pro didn't exist, would be very likely to

00:40:38 ◼   ► buy a Mac Pro instead. And so it seems like they have a severe cannibalization angle to

00:40:43 ◼   ► never update the iMac Pro again which I would be very unhappy with.

00:40:46 ◼   ► I don't know if I agree with that because an iMac Pro is an all-in-one system. Everything

00:40:52 ◼   ► is ready to go right out of the box for about five grand, right? That's where it starts

00:40:56 ◼   ► or is it?

00:40:57 ◼   ► Yep, five grand.

00:40:58 ◼   ► Five, right? So you can have, for $5,000, a completely functional computer which is

00:41:03 ◼   ► to my eyes and amongst anyone I can think of probably the upper limit of what an average

00:41:11 ◼   ► person would do even for people like us that are independent professionals, right? I don't

00:41:17 ◼   ► think most normal independent professionals would look at a $7,000 to $15,000 computer

00:41:24 ◼   ► purchase and say, "Oh yeah, that's the breaks." So I think I understand what you're saying,

00:41:28 ◼   ► Marco, and I'm not feeling confident about the iMac Pro getting updated but I wouldn't

00:41:32 ◼   ► necessarily say that the Mac Pro is taking that spot in the lineup. I think that the

00:41:38 ◼   ► iMac Pro has a very clear spot in the lineup. The question is whether or not Apple cares.

00:41:43 ◼   ► Well yeah, that's the thing. I'm not saying that there's no room for it but I think

00:41:49 ◼   ► the way Apple developed the Mac Pro, I think they're going to want people to buy it and

00:41:54 ◼   ► they're going to want to funnel the iMac purchasers who are going for the iMac Pro

00:42:01 ◼   ► upmarket into the Mac Pro. They're going to want to upsell us basically and enough

00:42:06 ◼   ► of us will come along for the ride that they will because most of the people I know who

00:42:10 ◼   ► have iMac Pros right now didn't have Mac Pros before, they had regular iMacs because

00:42:16 ◼   ► the regular iMac is also a damn good computer. So I think what Apple might see is, "Hey,

00:42:23 ◼   ► why don't we just split this market up and down basically that people who really need

00:42:28 ◼   ► the Pro hardware, we want them to now buy our higher end Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro,

00:42:34 ◼   ► and those who don't want to or can't spend that much money on it, they'll be well

00:42:38 ◼   ► served by our consumer iMac line." I'm not saying I agree with that statement but I think

00:42:43 ◼   ► that's what Apple very well might want us to do. Because if you think about it, we've

00:42:48 ◼   ► heard from a couple people now, I think I haven't verified this, I'm sorry, but I

00:42:52 ◼   ► think the next processors that would go in the iMac Pro are out by Intel. I think they're

00:42:58 ◼   ► available, they're out. Somebody said they're also a lot cheaper actually than the current

00:43:03 ◼   ► ones because Intel is getting a lot of competition from AMD recently and so they're competing

00:43:09 ◼   ► on price a little bit with some of these lines. And so apparently we have what we need to

00:43:16 ◼   ► have an updated iMac Pro and it hasn't happened yet. And I was thinking, I mean this is kind

00:43:21 ◼   ► of a cynical thought but like, why would Apple update the iMac Pro right now? Because if

00:43:26 ◼   ► they update the iMac Pro anytime soon, it's probably going to make their brand new Mac

00:43:31 ◼   ► Pro look bad. Because it's probably going to beat it on single thread and it's at least

00:43:36 ◼   ► going to perform extremely well and it's going to almost certainly give it a really good

00:43:42 ◼   ► run for the money for value because it does now. Unless they dramatically raise the price

00:43:47 ◼   ► on the iMac Pro, I think it will continue to be a way better value than the Mac Pro.

00:43:53 ◼   ► And so if they release a new iMac Pro anytime soon, I think it would make the Mac Pro look

00:43:59 ◼   ► bad. And if you follow that logic, like okay, well that kind of makes sense why they wouldn't

00:44:03 ◼   ► update the iMac Pro now, but why would they ever update the iMac Pro if that's the logic?

00:44:09 ◼   ► So again, I don't know if this is how they're thinking, but I think it's likely that this

00:44:14 ◼   ► is probably what's going to happen. I think the iMac Pro is not going to be updated again

00:44:18 ◼   ► and that makes me very sad to think about.

00:44:20 ◼   ► I don't know why, unless you have some info that I don't, I'm not as pessimistic as you

00:44:23 ◼   ► about that. I mean, and getting back to your other point about the Mac Pro being the case

00:44:27 ◼   ► being designed for a long term, if you look at Apple's tower case history, they've gotten

00:44:32 ◼   ► a lot of mileage about all of them, again starting from the G3 Yosemite style case.

00:44:38 ◼   ► I know it's confusing because it's an OS, but anyway, the case with it looks like a square

00:44:44 ◼   ► with handles coming out at an angle and it was all plastic and had the door on the side.

00:44:47 ◼   ► They used essentially that same case design, although they changed the colors, blue and

00:44:51 ◼   ► white G3, then the G4, then what, Quicksilver, mirror drive door, like they got a lot of

00:44:57 ◼   ► mileage out of that.

00:44:58 ◼   ► They did a lot of surface finish changes like car models do by changing like the front and

00:45:02 ◼   ► rear fascia, right, but otherwise it's basically the same chassis. And then of course the cheese

00:45:05 ◼   ► grater launched with the Power Mac G5 and they kept using it right through the Intel

00:45:09 ◼   ► transition, basically the same case with different ports and stuff on the front and the back

00:45:14 ◼   ► and they changed the fan holes and changed all the internals, but that case lasted a

00:45:17 ◼   ► long time. And this case, assuming they continue to make tower computers, they'll keep using

00:45:22 ◼   ► it straight through the ARM transition if they have one. If you look inside that case,

00:45:27 ◼   ► it's a good design that can support basically any kind of computer that has a motherboard

00:45:30 ◼   ► and stuff stuck into it. So it is very versatile and I think they'll keep going with that.

00:45:35 ◼   ► The iMac is another example. We've had essentially the same iMac design ever since someone came

00:45:39 ◼   ► up on stage at an Apple keynote and said "friction stir welding" and I remember how many years

00:45:43 ◼   ► ago that was. Even though the iMac Pro is totally different on the inside and shares

00:45:47 ◼   ► zero parts with that original iMac that shipped in this case, you look at it from the outside

00:45:51 ◼   ► and you're like "yeah, if I made a mold of that case it would basically be the same as

00:45:54 ◼   ► that first one", right? And so they got a lot of mileage out of that case because it

00:45:57 ◼   ► was, you know, hard to design. I think an iMac redesign is coming. If they do it Porsche

00:46:02 ◼   ► 911 style, they'll redesign the iMac and they won't touch the iMac Pro and Mark will be

00:46:08 ◼   ► like "see, I told you, they're not making an iMac Pro, they just came out with a new

00:46:11 ◼   ► iMac and it looks different and whatever the hell, but it's an all in one computer and

00:46:15 ◼   ► it is a different physical case, but there's no new iMac Pro and I'm sad". But when Porsche

00:46:20 ◼   ► comes out with a new 911, they don't launch with the 911 Turbo, right? They just give

00:46:24 ◼   ► you the Carrera 4S or whatever and then you wait and then the Turbo comes out and same

00:46:29 ◼   ► thing with the BMW and the 3 Series. Like the M3 doesn't launch with the new generation.

00:46:32 ◼   ► In fact, for some period of time, if you get an M3 you get the previous gen because the

00:46:36 ◼   ► new gen isn't out, right? So maybe the iMac Pro ships later in the new form factor.

00:46:40 ◼   ► Obviously I think the iMac is going to stay around. I think it's due for a redesign. I

00:46:44 ◼   ► think they'll keep making an iMac Pro just because they either have to make a new iMac

00:46:48 ◼   ► Pro or they have to make a non-obscenely priced monitor because no one who is buying an iMac

00:46:54 ◼   ► Pro is going to be upsold on the Mac Pro if the only monitor available is that thing or

00:46:59 ◼   ► the LG. So I still have more faith than Marko, let's say, that the iMac Pro will be updated

00:47:05 ◼   ► even if the iMac gets redesigned and the iMac Pro doesn't come with it. I expect the iMac

00:47:09 ◼   ► Pro to come later.

00:47:10 ◼   ► I hope so. I really do because I just, speaking for myself, there's no way I'm going to be

00:47:15 ◼   ► pushed into a Mac Pro. It's just not happening. I would get a Mac Mini and a crappy LG monitor

00:47:20 ◼   ► before I would get a Mac Pro.

00:47:22 ◼   ► You would just get the other iMac.

00:47:23 ◼   ► But the reason people got the iMac Pro though is because the iMac Pro is the best iMac.

00:47:28 ◼   ► It's not because it's fast, not because of Xeon, it's not because of ECC. It is a better

00:47:31 ◼   ► iMac. Its cooling system is better and apparently its reliability is better so far, right? Is

00:47:37 ◼   ► it because of the Xeon and ECC? Probably not. Probably just because they put more engineering

00:47:41 ◼   ► resources into better design and cooling system and drop the support for the spinning hard

00:47:45 ◼   ► drive that let them have the bigger fan and yada yada. We've talked about this before.

00:47:49 ◼   ► It's the best iMac. It just also happens to be darker colored and have a fancier CPU and

00:47:54 ◼   ► ECC RAM. But I really hope and whatever the next iMac is, we'll share, even the plain old

00:48:01 ◼   ► regular 5K iMac or 6K or whatever the hell, whatever they call the base iMac, I hope it

00:48:05 ◼   ► inherits all of the good sort of runtime performance characteristics of the iMac Pro even if it

00:48:11 ◼   ► doesn't have a Xeon or any of that stuff in it. That's my hope for the model. And when

00:48:15 ◼   ► that comes out and there's no new iMac Pro, I still hope and believe that there will be

00:48:19 ◼   ► a subsequent iMac Pro that will be sort of the all-in-one sibling to the Mac Pro. I think

00:48:25 ◼   ► there's enough differentiation for Apple to do that and I don't think they're going to

00:48:28 ◼   ► try to upsell people.

00:48:29 ◼   ► I'm just surprised when you brought up the 9/11 that you weren't making a joke about

00:48:33 ◼   ► how the iMac will always and forever look the same just like 9/11.

00:48:36 ◼   ► I look the same, man. 9/11's involved too. It gets bigger and wider every year. Almost

00:48:42 ◼   ► every year.

00:48:43 ◼   ► Plus 10% every year.

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00:49:54 ◼   ► What are you doing about Time Machine in your Mac Pro, John?

00:49:59 ◼   ► This is one thing about my setup experience. I've got all this data on here. I copied

00:50:04 ◼   ► the photo library from a different SSD, because my photo library is an external SSD. At first,

00:50:09 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, just sign in to iCloud, and it will sync this stuff down." But iCloud

00:50:12 ◼   ► does not sync your projects, which sucks. It syncs your photos and your keywords. It

00:50:19 ◼   ► syncs a lot of stuff, but not everything. In particular, projects, like I do all those

00:50:22 ◼   ► photo books, iCloud does not sync those. So I had to actually physically copy my photo

00:50:27 ◼   ► library, which is on an external SSD. I just brought it over here, hooked up to this one,

00:50:34 ◼   ► copied it over, launched it. Then I have to allow iCloud to get itself in order and be

00:50:40 ◼   ► like, "Oh, what are all these new pictures? I feel like I need to upload these, but it

00:50:43 ◼   ► doesn't, so it has to go through all of them." So I was doing that, and then of course I've

00:50:46 ◼   ► got Backblaze. I had to inherit my backup history and Backblaze, and no, you don't need

00:50:51 ◼   ► Backblaze. You don't need to re-upload everything. This has a lot of the same data as my old

00:50:55 ◼   ► computer. I didn't have to transfer the license. It basically thinks this is my old computer,

00:50:59 ◼   ► so I had to let Backblaze run. I'm like, "All these things will take time." Those things

00:51:03 ◼   ► finish relatively quickly. The photo is synced. Backblaze is all set. Everything is good.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Time machine. Now, I don't have an internal time machine drive yet. I'm still letting

00:51:13 ◼   ► Steven Hackett be the pioneer here and figure out what the good internal storage solution

00:51:16 ◼   ► is. Again, more on that a little bit later. But I have my Synology, where my old time

00:51:21 ◼   ► machine backup was for my Mac Pro with a very long history because I had a generous amount

00:51:25 ◼   ► of time machine space on there. I didn't want to lose all the history, so I had time machine

00:51:29 ◼   ► inherit that backup history. Time machine is like, "Okay, I'm doing that, and I've got

00:51:33 ◼   ► to go through all your stuff, and then plus you have all this new stuff for me to back

00:51:36 ◼   ► up because this photo library is new, and it's like a terabyte photo library that I've

00:51:41 ◼   ► got to deal with." Time machine has got a lot of work to do. Time machine has been running

00:51:48 ◼   ► on this computer for four days, five days. It is not completed yet. It is showing me

00:51:55 ◼   ► new kinds of progress messages that I've never seen before. If you see time machine go, it

00:52:02 ◼   ► does preparing to back up and then backing up and backed up X amount of Y. You can look

00:52:06 ◼   ► at the preference pane in time machine, and it will show a little message underneath in

00:52:12 ◼   ► a progress bar. You can look in the little menu and see what it shows. It has given up

00:52:17 ◼   ► trying to give me any progress other than telling me how much it has backed up. Right

00:52:21 ◼   ► now it is saying backed up colon 1.41 terabytes. It doesn't give me X out of Y. It doesn't

00:52:28 ◼   ► give me percentage. The progress bar in this preference pane is indeterminate. It is doing

00:52:33 ◼   ► work. Occasionally I peek at it with FSU usage and say, "Backup D, are you doing anything?"

00:52:36 ◼   ► It's totally doing stuff. In fact, for the past day or so, it has been wandering over

00:52:41 ◼   ► all of the individually stored messages that Outlook shoves in some obscure folder. It

00:52:45 ◼   ► makes one file for each email message. It has been going for a long time. I made a mistake

00:52:52 ◼   ► after the first day of trimming the exclude list in time machine, and it was like, "Oh,

00:52:56 ◼   ► I have to start over." I trimmed from the exclude list directories that no longer exist.

00:53:02 ◼   ► I don't know why they were in there. It was like my PS4 movies folder back from when I

00:53:07 ◼   ► was using a DLNA server with my PlayStation 3. I'm like, "Oh, I don't need that. I'm

00:53:11 ◼   ► just going through everything, getting rid of old stuff. Let me trim that." Time machine

00:53:14 ◼   ► says, "Stopping backup." I'm like, "Oh, no." It says, "Preparing backup." Normally,

00:53:21 ◼   ► I stop time machine when we record podcasts because I'm paranoid, but I've got 12 chorus,

00:53:26 ◼   ► and there's no way in hell I'm stopping it, so time machine has been running this

00:53:28 ◼   ► entire time. Since this is the first recording on this computer, I'm hoping everything

00:53:32 ◼   ► will go off well, but just so you know, I have been running a time machine backup this

00:53:35 ◼   ► whole time, which shouldn't cause this computer to break a sweat. Speaking of that, I've

00:53:42 ◼   ► got this computer here. It is on my little end table thingy, so it is up off the ground,

00:53:47 ◼   ► about two and a half feet-ish. It's a lower level table than my desk, but it's higher

00:53:54 ◼   ► than the floor. I mentioned that I had my Power Mac G5 and various points of my Mac

00:54:00 ◼   ► Pro on the desk next to my monitor, but it was just too loud. Power Mac G5 was way too

00:54:06 ◼   ► loud, and I had a chirping power supply that was bad. My Mac Pro, in general, was quiet,

00:54:10 ◼   ► but it was still too loud to have on my desk. This computer is quieter than my Mac Pro,

00:54:17 ◼   ► my 2008 Mac Pro. Definitely quieter than my Power Mac G5. It is not quieter than my wife's

00:54:24 ◼   ► 5K iMac when it's not doing anything.

00:54:26 ◼   ► Ah, interesting.

00:54:27 ◼   ► So the 5K iMac is basically silent if it's not doing anything. Obviously, as soon as

00:54:33 ◼   ► you do anything, the 5K iMac makes a racket, right? But if you're idle, the 5K iMac is

00:54:39 ◼   ► almost entirely silent. At idle, sitting not on the floor, but raised up sort of, you know,

00:54:47 ◼   ► I can touch it with my left arm, barely, you know, like I'm touching it with my left arm

00:54:51 ◼   ► now without moving my body, but barely can reach it. It's right there. It makes a noise

00:54:56 ◼   ► that's kind of like, imagine like the wind moving through like a deserted Grand Central

00:55:03 ◼   ► Station after the apocalypse.

00:55:04 ◼   ► A terminal.

00:55:05 ◼   ► But not a strong wind. Just kind of like, or it's not like the, what do they call it?

00:55:12 ◼   ► Mark would know this. What is it called? Room noise? What is that called? An audio engineer?

00:55:16 ◼   ► Yeah, room tone.

00:55:17 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go. It's not the same as the Star Trek room tone or the sci-fi ship room

00:55:22 ◼   ► tone, but it's very kind of like, but in really low volume, right? Like you think at first,

00:55:29 ◼   ► like am I hearing anything, but if everybody else is really silent, you can kind of hear

00:55:35 ◼   ► like even with my headphones on, I can kind of hear it, but it is like all the stuff I

00:55:40 ◼   ► talked about of like randomizing the fan blades, like it has no discernible frequency and it

00:55:45 ◼   ► is very sort of, it's like the most inoffensive, it's not even fan noise. It's like, it's like

00:55:50 ◼   ► air noise, right? If it was under my desk, I think it might be entirely silent. So, so

00:55:57 ◼   ► far I've had it up here and I'm probably going to keep it up here because I don't mind it

00:56:01 ◼   ► because like it's the type of noise that if you're not concentrating on it, it disappears

00:56:04 ◼   ► entirely. For about 20 minutes today, earlier today, I figured I really need to stress this

00:56:11 ◼   ► thing because I've been messing with it in backblaze and running a time machine has been

00:56:14 ◼   ► running and I've been deleting stuff and copying things and installing programs and whatever

00:56:17 ◼   ► I'm like, but I need to like see what this thing, so I ran a handbrake thing for 20 minutes.

00:56:22 ◼   ► Saw all the, you know, 24 threads, 12 CPU cores being pretty much pegged. It didn't

00:56:29 ◼   ► make any different noise like ever. The noise that I've described to you, that's how it

00:56:36 ◼   ► has sounded the entire time I've owned it. They don't even spin up when you boot. Like

00:56:40 ◼   ► I don't know what these fans sound like if they ever get loud. Like I have, I'm pretty

00:56:45 ◼   ► sure the volume has never increased and there's nothing I can do to it to make it increase.

00:56:50 ◼   ► I've played Destiny on this more than that in a little bit and it sounds the same. So

00:56:55 ◼   ► I'm not sure. Is the computer on? Like in this way it is like the iMac Pro but more

00:57:02 ◼   ► so. Like I, I honestly, let me tell you how deep, I installed iStat Mains. Can I see the

00:57:08 ◼   ► fan RPMs? Because I was like, tell me, are the fans spinning any faster? Because it would

00:57:12 ◼   ► make sense that I don't hear any noise if the fans are not spinning any faster because

00:57:16 ◼   ► they're the only moving part in the machine. Like there's no hard drives, there's no optical

00:57:20 ◼   ► drives. Like only, there's only three fans and then a blower fan in the back. So there's

00:57:25 ◼   ► four spinning things in here. And I don't know, iStat Menu couldn't make heads or tails

00:57:29 ◼   ► on this computer. It gave me a bunch of temperature stuff, all of which was like ridiculously cool.

00:57:33 ◼   ► I couldn't get any fan RPMs out of it. I'd have to buy it or register. Anyway, I installed

00:57:37 ◼   ► it. You know. That's what I always do with iStat Menu. I install it and I'm like, alright,

00:57:41 ◼   ► I want you to stop now. And the only option is to uninstall. So I can't figure out how

00:57:45 ◼   ► to make this thing make any more noise. So the noise that it makes, like I said, so much

00:57:48 ◼   ► quieter than my previous towers. But I feel like an iMac at idle is still more silent

00:57:54 ◼   ► than this because this is moving a lot of air through it somehow magically. I am a little

00:57:59 ◼   ► bit disappointed that you can hear it at idle though because the iMacs that Apple has made

00:58:05 ◼   ► in recent years, especially the iMac Pro, are so damn quiet. That's because the fan

00:58:09 ◼   ► is on the other side of you. That's what it is. Like you have a screen between you and

00:58:12 ◼   ► the fan whereas these fans like, it's like open air headphones. Like these are open air

00:58:17 ◼   ► fans. They're right there. Like huge openings are in front of them. There's no way, like

00:58:21 ◼   ► if they're moving air through it, you're going to hear it. Whereas in the iMac, it's all

00:58:25 ◼   ► just like behind you. Like I bet if you turned your iMac around and stared at it that way,

00:58:30 ◼   ► you'd hear it at idle. But you don't. You stare at the screen side. Like closed back.

00:58:34 ◼   ► I mean, you have a closed back Mac. I have an open.

00:58:37 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. I think I would have to keep it on the floor for that reason because I'm spoiled

00:58:42 ◼   ► now. Like now that I have had, you know, basically silent iMacs for, geez, six years, something

00:58:50 ◼   ► like that, five years, I'm now ruined and I really don't want to ever hear my computer

00:58:56 ◼   ► again.

00:58:57 ◼   ► Yeah, it couldn't, I don't think you would like it on the desk like next to you. Again,

00:59:00 ◼   ► mine is off the side of the desk. Like if this was one foot farther away or it was under

00:59:05 ◼   ► the desk, I wouldn't be able to hear it probably.

00:59:07 ◼   ► That's good. And especially because like it's such a massive thing that I think almost everybody,

00:59:11 ◼   ► myself included, would not keep it up on anything. Like I'd keep it on the floor. So it wouldn't

00:59:15 ◼   ► be, it wouldn't be a problem.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm keeping it up. I mean, I said for, you know, because the floor is a dangerous

00:59:19 ◼   ► place for a fancy computer, but also because it's nice to look at it and I like to look

00:59:22 ◼   ► at it. It may eventually like graduate to slash be relegated to the floor later in its

00:59:27 ◼   ► life. But for now, I'm happy to have it up here so I can look at it and appreciate it

00:59:32 ◼   ► because it is like, like a lot of new cars that look kind of weird when you first see

00:59:37 ◼   ► them cyber dark excluded, which will always be weird. This has really grown on me. And

00:59:42 ◼   ► just having this in your house is a beautiful thing to look at, which again is one of my,

00:59:46 ◼   ► one of my sort of fitness criteria for having a Mac. I enjoy, I enjoy looking at it. I enjoy

00:59:50 ◼   ► seeing it there. It's a nice thing to have in your house.

00:59:57 ◼   ► So more, more setup stuff. I know Casey used to joke like, oh, that's the Mac Pro. We're

01:00:02 ◼   ► going to be talking about the Mac Pro for such a long time. Like, how much is there

01:00:05 ◼   ► to talk about it? I now concede that Casey was correct. Mostly because like, mostly because

01:00:11 ◼   ► the setup process like is never ending. I don't even have the monitor yet. Like this

01:00:15 ◼   ► is going to get dragged out. I feel like it's not entirely my fault, but it's partially

01:00:19 ◼   ► my fault. It's entirely your fault. No, because if I had everything, I can get it all out

01:00:23 ◼   ► in one show, but you're going to be hearing more about the stupid Mac Pro for a while.

01:00:27 ◼   ► No, I'm sorry. But hopefully I'm touching on topics that are at least educational or

01:00:31 ◼   ► interesting. Here's one that is not Mac Pro specific, but it's, well, you'll see. So I've

01:00:37 ◼   ► got this thing. It's still on my PlayStation monitor. I want to play Destiny. I can of

01:00:41 ◼   ► course just bring the monitor back and forth. And I did that a couple of times, but that's

01:00:44 ◼   ► a pain. You got to go into the desk and find the stupid power brick for the LG monitor.

01:00:48 ◼   ► And then it's just carried over and reconnected and it's a pain. And I did want to also play

01:00:55 ◼   ► Destiny on this computer to see what it's like to play at more than 30 frames per second.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Because as I noted in the last show, for people who don't know, Destiny on PlayStation runs

01:01:02 ◼   ► at 30 frames per second. Destiny on PC runs at whatever frames per second that your computer

01:01:08 ◼   ► can run it at. And there's some speculation about how crappy the base video card is, what

01:01:12 ◼   ► it would be able to do, but I wanted to try it. So to run Destiny on this Mac, obviously

01:01:16 ◼   ► I need to install Windows. To install Windows, I need to do Boot Camp. Boot Camp is always

01:01:21 ◼   ► sort of this mystery. We've joked about if it's still being supported. You know, would

01:01:25 ◼   ► it run? Does it still work? It is apparently still supported. When I ran Boot Camp Assistant,

01:01:34 ◼   ► it wanted to install Boot Camp partition on my boot drive, basically. And I didn't want

01:01:42 ◼   ► to do that because I'm not even done setting up my boot drive and time machine is running

01:01:47 ◼   ► and I don't want to repartition it and I didn't know what it was going to do. I'm like, no,

01:01:51 ◼   ► don't touch. Don't touch my 4TB SSD. Leave it alone. That's just, that's mine. I don't

01:01:55 ◼   ► want Windows taking any of that space. That's a precious commodity. I enjoy having a lot

01:01:59 ◼   ► of it. I don't want you messing with that. I'm going to install Boot Camp on an external

01:02:04 ◼   ► drive, which is exactly what I had in my Mac Pro. I had a whole, I had a hard drive mechanism

01:02:07 ◼   ► in there that was my boot camp. My quote unquote boot camp partition, but it was a whole drive.

01:02:12 ◼   ► That was ages ago. Like, you know, 2008 I installed it. I had Windows XP on it originally. I think

01:02:17 ◼   ► I might still have Windows XP. Anyway, I need Windows on this thing. I have an external

01:02:22 ◼   ► drive. I hook up an external SSD. I'm going to be fancy. I got this temporary. I'm just

01:02:26 ◼   ► going to use it to see how Destiny runs. I go, you know, I connect them to the SSD. It's

01:02:31 ◼   ► an external USB-C connected again, 10 gigabits per second, but it's plenty for playing Destiny.

01:02:37 ◼   ► And I go launch boot camp assistant and boot camp system is like, you have an external

01:02:42 ◼   ► drive attached to your computer. Get that crap out of here and then relaunch this program.

01:02:48 ◼   ► And not to say I can't install boot camp or Windows on external drive. It said you can't

01:02:54 ◼   ► even run this program if external drives are connected to your computer. I'm pretty sure

01:03:01 ◼   ► I unmounted the drive and it still said, looks like you have external drives connected to

01:03:06 ◼   ► your computer. You got to get that crap out of here. I'm like, it's unmounted. To physically

01:03:11 ◼   ► disconnect it, but like, here's the thing. I want to install boot camp on an external

01:03:15 ◼   ► drive and boot camp assistant is like, nuh-uh. No, you are not going to do that. I'm like,

01:03:22 ◼   ► what? I guess I don't, you know, so many times I'm like, oh, I just want to just go through

01:03:26 ◼   ► the system and let it do it to my boot drive. I'm like, but you know what? No, I don't know

01:03:29 ◼   ► how to get rid of that partition. I don't know what it's going to do. Will Shipley just

01:03:32 ◼   ► had a question on Twitter right before the show. It was like, does it do the APFS volumes

01:03:36 ◼   ► thing where you can easily add and remove volumes to an APFS container? You know that

01:03:40 ◼   ► whole thing, like how easy it is to add them and they share the space. And I was like,

01:03:44 ◼   ► I don't know, but I didn't want to find out. Like it made it look like it was going to

01:03:47 ◼   ► partition. Like there would be the APFS container and then there would be like these sort of

01:03:50 ◼   ► a, you know, GPT partition level thing. And then there would be the, like, I didn't want

01:03:54 ◼   ► to find out. And I was like, but it would work and it would be fast. And I'm like, no,

01:03:57 ◼   ► I'm going to do this. I'm going to figure out how to get boot camp installed on an external

01:04:03 ◼   ► drive. And thus began probably the worst computer battle experience I've had in the last five

01:04:09 ◼   ► years, maybe the last 10 years. I can't, nothing in memory was worse than this experience.

01:04:16 ◼   ► You know, and as many of these things do these days, it starts with, you know, you do a Google

01:04:21 ◼   ► search because surely someone else has had this problem. And boy, Google searches come

01:04:25 ◼   ► up with a lot of results, which is usually a blessing and a curse because it shows lots

01:04:29 ◼   ► of people have this problem. But if there was one answer, they're feeling like there

01:04:33 ◼   ► would be fewer results. So we're going to put a bunch of links in the show notes. I

01:04:38 ◼   ► put a bunch of links to things that I found in the show notes. None of these links had

01:04:45 ◼   ► a procedure that would work for me to accomplish the task. I'm going to put them all in there

01:04:50 ◼   ► though just to show you kind of what's involved and what's involved. And the solution that

01:04:57 ◼   ► I actually did do is like a modified mix of these, but it more or less starts with installing

01:05:05 ◼   ► VirtualBox, which is a bad sign. Yeah, which is because the free version of VirtualBox,

01:05:12 ◼   ► like there are ones that use VMware too. And I own a copy of VMware. VirtualBox is free.

01:05:17 ◼   ► People don't know it's an emulator that runs like x86 OS is like VMware. So you can install

01:05:21 ◼   ► Windows and VMware. You can install Windows or Linux and VirtualBox and it runs like natively

01:05:26 ◼   ► on your Intel Mac alongside your other thing. Anyway, this is also, you can get yourself

01:05:34 ◼   ► to a situation where the virtual Windows machine thing that's running inside VirtualBox views

01:05:41 ◼   ► your external drive as if it is like the one in all the internal drive and can install

01:05:50 ◼   ► Windows onto it. So you end up creating like a VMDK virtual disk thing in raw mode against

01:05:59 ◼   ► your unmounted drive using the device. This is all command line stuff. Using your drive's

01:06:04 ◼   ► device number, which is a terrifying experience when you're typing. Anytime you find yourself

01:06:07 ◼   ► typing /dev/disksomething in Mac OS, it's like, "Oh my God. Let me just take this opportunity

01:06:14 ◼   ► to reiterate one of my rules of computing for young people and old people like do not

01:06:20 ◼   ► type things on the command line. Do not type process IDs. Do not type device numbers. Do

01:06:25 ◼   ► not type things on the command line." Because you know what happens when you type things?

01:06:29 ◼   ► You get typos. Kill -9 PID and you type out the PID. Oops, you killed in it because you

01:06:35 ◼   ► put a space before the first one. Device numbers /dev/disk5. Oh, I typed 4 instead. I just

01:06:42 ◼   ► deleted my boot drive. When you're running all this as root, do not type things. Copy

01:06:49 ◼   ► and paste. Copy and paste and also confirm because you can copy and paste and think you

01:06:53 ◼   ► copied but really you did and you pasted the previous number. But yeah, do not type things.

01:06:56 ◼   ► So I'm carefully doing this and then I'm running Windows in the virtual machine. I have a legit

01:07:01 ◼   ► copy of Windows 10, a Windows 10 ISO that I purchased and downloaded for this purpose

01:07:05 ◼   ► and you can make that be the optical drive for the VirtualBox thing. And you go through

01:07:11 ◼   ► this whole procedure and you have to type in your, in VirtualBox, type in your Windows

01:07:17 ◼   ► product key. It doesn't allow copy and paste. There's no copy and paste from the Mac world

01:07:22 ◼   ► so I typed that Windows product key so many times that I almost have it memorized. It's

01:07:26 ◼   ► one of those things that I may remember portions of that Windows product key. Oh my God, I

01:07:30 ◼   ► typed it so many times. I actually did have my college Windows XP key memorized. Yeah,

01:07:34 ◼   ► it's a good thing to know. I also installed it on a lot of computers. Anyway, you follow

01:07:40 ◼   ► the procedure in one of these things and they're like, they're like, you know, use VirtualBox,

01:07:44 ◼   ► get the thing set up as a drive, partition it with DiskUtil and then, you know, reformat

01:07:50 ◼   ► the partitions during the Windows setup process and do a custom thing and type in your Windows

01:07:54 ◼   ► key and then let the Windows 10 installer run and this is my favorite part of the procedure

01:07:59 ◼   ► that I ended up doing. RM233FR4RHJP89H, I forget the rest. Damn it. I was hoping I could

01:08:09 ◼   ► do that. No free copy of Windows XP for anyone listening. Sorry, you can get, you almost

01:08:13 ◼   ► got it but not quite. If you know the checksum rules, maybe you can figure out what the missing

01:08:17 ◼   ► numbers are. And the, and they let's, you're supposed to run the Windows installer and

01:08:22 ◼   ► the instructions say, did I say 2PRQQ? That was in there somewhere. The instructions say,

01:08:27 ◼   ► when it says we need to restart Windows, like after like all the little progress steps go,

01:08:34 ◼   ► power down the VirtualBox thing. So like hard power off, like hit the red button, red window

01:08:38 ◼   ► widget on the thing and it's like power off because you don't want it to continue the

01:08:42 ◼   ► process. You want it, the thing was like, at this point you have a, you have taken your

01:08:48 ◼   ► actual external drive connected to your Mac and convinced the VM that it's one of its

01:08:52 ◼   ► virtual drives and it has installed Windows on it to the point where now your Mac can

01:08:55 ◼   ► boot from it. Oh my goodness. So you're basically using VirtualBox instead of the boot camp

01:08:59 ◼   ► assistant to do that. You also, there's also another step where you download the drivers

01:09:03 ◼   ► for boot camp, which they actually do make easy in the boot camp assistant. You can download

01:09:06 ◼   ► just the drivers and put them on like a fat 32 USB key and then copy them onto the thing.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Like that, that's a side, like that's part of it more or less worked. But this part of

01:09:14 ◼   ► it, it's like do this procedure, set up this disc, which is a pain because you have to

01:09:17 ◼   ► unmount it and then it gets auto remounted. Then you have to unmount it again and then

01:09:21 ◼   ► set up the virtual drive and you can't give it the same name twice because it thinks it

01:09:24 ◼   ► knows about the virtual drive, but the UUID is different and it's a whole bunch of details

01:09:27 ◼   ► that make it more complicated. But the point is I did this fairly lengthy procedure many

01:09:31 ◼   ► times and then I would reboot my Mac and hold on the option key and it would not see my

01:09:35 ◼   ► external drive. Like it wasn't an option. It would just show my internal drive, the

01:09:39 ◼   ► external drive would be connected and it would not show it at all. And I was like, what?

01:09:45 ◼   ► But just I'm doing what it says and people saying there because I tried the VMware approach

01:09:49 ◼   ► and similar type of things. Like my Mac would not see that external drive. I'm like, maybe

01:09:54 ◼   ► it's lying to me about the partition format. Maybe it shouldn't be master boot record.

01:09:58 ◼   ► Maybe it should be GPD. Maybe it should be a FAT32 versus NTFS. Then just I went around

01:10:05 ◼   ► and around in circles forever and just trying to get it to the point where the thing would

01:10:08 ◼   ► even see my external drive. This took many, many hours alone to convince myself that I

01:10:14 ◼   ► was at the point where I thought I was right. And then there was one instruction like I

01:10:17 ◼   ► found the comment someone's articles like pages of comments and one is like everything

01:10:21 ◼   ► this article works up to step 36. This is not a joke. Up to step 36 and then it says

01:10:28 ◼   ► you're supposed to do X, Y and Z. But it turns out what you're supposed to do is when you

01:10:31 ◼   ► get to that step in the Windows installer, delete all your previous partitions and then

01:10:35 ◼   ► just let the Windows installer run and it will create the correct partitions for it

01:10:39 ◼   ► to be bootable. That's a lie and this person is wrong.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Oh no. But I was at the point because he's basically

01:10:47 ◼   ► saying, the instructions say this but instead you should do the opposite. But I was at the

01:10:51 ◼   ► point where I had done this so many times and was so familiar with what it was trying

01:10:54 ◼   ► to accomplish. I read that comment and I had, speaking of Galaxy Brain, I had that moment

01:10:59 ◼   ► like this would be like the dramatic music. I looked at that comment and I said, "If I

01:11:03 ◼   ► do the opposite of this comment, I bet it will work." So I did the opposite of the comment.

01:11:11 ◼   ► Instead of deleting those partitions or whatever, I set them up the way the comment said they

01:11:15 ◼   ► shouldn't be and I left them there. I'm like, "This has to be it." I figured it out. I figured

01:11:21 ◼   ► it out by reading an article that's wrong and then reading a comment and then knowing

01:11:25 ◼   ► that I have to do the opposite of the comment. Even though the comment says, "Hey, I read

01:11:29 ◼   ► the article and it didn't work and I had to do something different," do the opposite of

01:11:32 ◼   ► that. I was so proud of myself. I'm like, "This is awesome. This is going to work."

01:11:38 ◼   ► I rebooted and it wouldn't see the drive. It just does not see the drive. This is where

01:11:46 ◼   ► being old is bad. This is where being like Casey who doesn't remember what happened previously

01:11:49 ◼   ► on the show. In my memory bank somewhere was the information I needed to figure out the

01:11:53 ◼   ► final piece that I needed to know because at this point I had installed Windows 10 like

01:11:56 ◼   ► a dozen times. I'm an expert Windows 10 installer. I'm an expert VirtualBox virtual machine setter

01:12:03 ◼   ► up. I did all sorts of other experiments by setting up multiple virtual machines and having

01:12:05 ◼   ► one talk to the other. I did lots of stuff. I'm like, "This should work." Further Googling

01:12:13 ◼   ► tickled something in my mind. I'm like, "Wait a second. People who are listening to this

01:12:18 ◼   ► are shouting right now. They're shouting at me right now. They all know what my problem

01:12:21 ◼   ► is. You two also know this information because we talked about it in ATP, but then we all

01:12:26 ◼   ► forgot."

01:12:27 ◼   ► Yeah. Didn't I create an external boot disk to play inside?

01:12:30 ◼   ► Yeah, but what is the key piece of information that I'm missing that's thwarting me? Assume,

01:12:35 ◼   ► which is the correct assumption I can tell you right now, that I had correctly put the

01:12:39 ◼   ► bits on that external drive. What's my problem? Why is this not working?

01:12:44 ◼   ► Is it a weird Catalina thing that it's not booting some kind of unapproved drive? You

01:12:50 ◼   ► got it. Remember when we discussed this back like ... It was actually when that ... Not

01:12:53 ◼   ► Catalina but like the T2. Remember when the T2 Max first came out and we just talked about

01:12:57 ◼   ► the T2 Max?

01:12:58 ◼   ► No. Is it a T2 thing?

01:13:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:01 ◼   ► What is it that we know about the T2 in terms of security?

01:13:03 ◼   ► That would be why some people in the comments would have this issue and some people wouldn't.

01:13:07 ◼   ► If they had a new Mac, they would have this issue.

01:13:10 ◼   ► No one in the comments as far as I could see had this particular issue. They were just

01:13:13 ◼   ► arguing about how to get the bits onto the disk and they were all wrong and so was the

01:13:16 ◼   ► article. I eventually got the right bits onto the disk. The T2, the reason you can't take

01:13:21 ◼   ► the SSD out of the Mac Pro and just put it in a third party one is because it's paired

01:13:25 ◼   ► to the T2. It's paired to the T2 so it can have a secure boot environment where it boots

01:13:30 ◼   ► knowing that what I'm booting from is a known good secure disk that has had system integrity

01:13:35 ◼   ► protection that is keyed to the T2. You know all that crap?

01:13:40 ◼   ► I hope nobody at Apple who worked on all that crap heard you summarize it that way.

01:13:45 ◼   ► It's basically trying to ... Like we have discussed and I have made this exact analogy

01:13:48 ◼   ► many times, the assumption used to be that when you have physical access to a Mac, all

01:13:53 ◼   ► security bets are off because you could just boot from an external drive and you own the

01:13:56 ◼   ► thing, right?

01:13:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:58 ◼   ► Assuming the disks aren't encrypted whereas the assumption with the iPhone has been like

01:14:00 ◼   ► even if you have physical access, it's really hard to get in. The Macs with T2 are trying

01:14:04 ◼   ► to be more like iPhones. Even if you have physical access, if I encrypt the disks and

01:14:07 ◼   ► put a firmware password on, you shouldn't be able to just boot from an external drive

01:14:11 ◼   ► and I'll be able to run hacking software and try to crack your thing. T2 Macs will not

01:14:16 ◼   ► boot from an external drive, period. There's a security setting in T2 Macs that says, "Hey,

01:14:25 ◼   ► should I allow booting from an external drive?" If you don't turn that on, it will never see

01:14:29 ◼   ► an external drive that you've just installed Windows from and it will never boot from it.

01:14:33 ◼   ► It will never even show it. That was the final piece of information. I boot into recovery

01:14:37 ◼   ► mode and I go to the setting and it says, "Hey, do you want this Mac to be able to boot

01:14:40 ◼   ► from external drive?" I said, "Yes. Yes." That's what I've been trying to do over the

01:14:44 ◼   ► past literally 10 hours. It's like 3 a.m. at this point. I'm like, "Yes. Boot from the

01:14:50 ◼   ► external drive." I reboot, hold down the option key and there it is. There it friggin' is.

01:14:55 ◼   ► Oh my gosh.

01:14:56 ◼   ► My boot camp disk and I boot from it and Windows 10 launches and I'm in Windows 10 and I can't

01:15:01 ◼   ► do anything because it doesn't see my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. But that aside, this is

01:15:08 ◼   ► my first Mac that I've had a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard because they came in the box

01:15:11 ◼   ► and I really like this keyboard. This is my favorite keyboard feel. The key layout is

01:15:14 ◼   ► still – I wish the function keys were far away from the numbers but I like the big escape

01:15:17 ◼   ► key. I really like these key switches. The mouse, I hate. I've used it for a week now.

01:15:22 ◼   ► I knew I would hate it. I still hate it. Anyway, maybe I'll talk about them a little more

01:15:25 ◼   ► later but when you reboot into Windows, it has no freaking idea what input peripherals

01:15:31 ◼   ► are so I had to get a wired mouse and keyboard, connect them so I could type in my username

01:15:34 ◼   ► and password and blah, blah, blah. Then get it to pair with the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard

01:15:38 ◼   ► and every time I reboot into Mac OS, it's the same deal.

01:15:41 ◼   ► But other than that, I was so relieved. So if you have a T2-based Mac and you are trying

01:15:46 ◼   ► to install anything on an external drive and boot from it, be readvised as discussed on

01:15:54 ◼   ► past episodes of ATB that we all forgot about. It's a setting. You have to allow external

01:16:00 ◼   ► booting. Otherwise, you can't boot from an external drive. So that's my boot camp

01:16:07 ◼   ► battle. It was long and terrifying. Anything that involves like a 30-minute install process

01:16:14 ◼   ► as your sort of iteration step size, it's just bad. Even if I only did it like 12, 13

01:16:21 ◼   ► times, it seems like forever and each time I was just banging my head against the wall.

01:16:25 ◼   ► So all the end of that story is I installed Steam, installed Destiny, ran it. The answer

01:16:30 ◼   ► to the question is this crappy Radeon 580X. It can run Destiny at like 90 frames per second

01:16:39 ◼   ► in 1080 in 4K. When you run it in 4K, it gets more than 30 frames per second but it dips

01:16:47 ◼   ► below 60. So luckily, Destiny has lots of settings on PC. So I basically set the screen

01:16:51 ◼   ► resolution to 4K and the render resolution to 75% and that gets pegged at 60 frames.

01:16:58 ◼   ► And I have a 60 hertz monitor anyway so there's no point in being faster than that. So I did

01:17:02 ◼   ► get to play Destiny at 4K at 60 frames per second a lot. And it's really good. I love

01:17:07 ◼   ► the wider field of view. It's super smooth. I enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy playing against

01:17:11 ◼   ► PC users with mouse and keyboard because they kill me a lot but it was fun. There were more

01:17:19 ◼   ► battles with Steam by the way because I have a PlayStation controller and I've paired it

01:17:24 ◼   ► with my wife's iMac to play on Geforce Now and Stadia that I've talked about in the past.

01:17:29 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, I'll just pair my PlayStation controller with this Windows 10 computer that

01:17:33 ◼   ► I'm booted into and I'll be able to play Destiny with my PlayStation 4 controller on this."

01:17:38 ◼   ► And I pair it and it works fine and I'm using it to move around the Steam user interface.

01:17:44 ◼   ► So I know Steam sees the controller. Every time I launch Destiny, all it sees is the

01:17:47 ◼   ► mouse and keyboard. I'm like, "I used the controller to launch this game. Steam knows

01:17:52 ◼   ► about the controller. I can customize the settings in Steam. Why, Destiny, do you not

01:17:56 ◼   ► see the controller?" You know when you get in that mindset after you've battled with

01:18:01 ◼   ► the computer for -- this is the next day at this point but I went to bed at like 3 a.m.

01:18:04 ◼   ► This is the next day. I'm like, "Now I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and I can't

01:18:08 ◼   ► get the controller to work." I tried mouse and keyboard. I suck so bad at mouse and keyboard

01:18:12 ◼   ► in Destiny. There's just too many controls. I cannot handle it. I am garbage. So I'm like,

01:18:15 ◼   ► "Well, back to controller for me." I couldn't get it to see. I was so just distraught that

01:18:21 ◼   ► like nothing on a computer will work for me ever again. Like that's it. Last night was

01:18:24 ◼   ► all -- I gave all I had and I succeeded but now nothing will ever work. I think people

01:18:31 ◼   ► who play Destiny on PC know the answer to this question and would be yelling at it and

01:18:35 ◼   ► say, "You dummy." Yes, of course, the PlayStation controller works in Steam and your PC recognizes

01:18:41 ◼   ► it and it's paired but Destiny does not use Steam's control thing. It does its own thing

01:18:46 ◼   ► and Destiny has no friggin' idea about Bluetooth's PlayStation controllers. You have to plug the

01:18:50 ◼   ► PlayStation controller into your "PC" with a USB cable and then Destiny sees it. And

01:18:57 ◼   ► so yes, I finally played Destiny with a controller at 60 frames per second at 75% resolution

01:19:01 ◼   ► on a 4K monitor and it was good. This entire segment has been the biggest advertisement

01:19:08 ◼   ► for just getting a gaming PC that I think we've ever had. Well, this segment is an advertisement

01:19:14 ◼   ► for getting your monitor shipped to you at the same time as your computer because I don't

01:19:17 ◼   ► plan on playing on PC. I'm going to play on my PlayStation but this thing is hogging the

01:19:21 ◼   ► PlayStation's monitors. If I want to play it, it's just such a pain to carry it back

01:19:25 ◼   ► and forth. I did it a couple of times and it's just... yeah. So I'm not going to use

01:19:30 ◼   ► this as a gaming PC. I'm not going to reboot into Windows 10. I can be a little bit more

01:19:35 ◼   ► familiar with Windows 10, by the way, doing this, which is not as terrible as I thought

01:19:38 ◼   ► it was going to be. But I'm comparing it to Windows 7 and 8 and XP, I suppose. I don't

01:19:44 ◼   ► have much experience with it. But anyway, I got Steam installed and I ran a game. But

01:19:47 ◼   ► yeah, not recommended. All this to say is that 580X is a garbage gaming card and yeah,

01:19:53 ◼   ► I look forward to my next GPU.

01:19:57 ◼   ► What are you using for peripherals other than this PlayStation controller?

01:20:01 ◼   ► Yeah, so like I said, the keyboard, I would like to keep this. It annoys me that like

01:20:08 ◼   ► I don't think... the solution that is being recommended to me is unpair it from your Mac

01:20:12 ◼   ► before you reboot into Windows and then maybe Windows will pair with it. But I wish it was

01:20:18 ◼   ► the case that when I rebooted into Windows, it would remember that it was paired with

01:20:22 ◼   ► this one. I wish I didn't have to do anything. I wish I could just reboot and then it would...

01:20:26 ◼   ► it doesn't matter. I'm not going to be rebooting into Windows anymore. But having done it like

01:20:29 ◼   ► a dozen times trying to fight with this thing, it annoys me that I can't do that. So I kind

01:20:33 ◼   ► of wish this keyboard could be wired because I don't care if my keyboard is wired. I have

01:20:37 ◼   ► little wire guides under the desk. It doesn't affect my life. But I really like this keyboard.

01:20:42 ◼   ► So I'm going to use the wireless keyboard even though I wish it was wired. And I think

01:20:46 ◼   ► maybe one of you can confirm, I'm assuming if I were to plug it in with the Lightning

01:20:50 ◼   ► USB thing, that's just power, right?

01:20:52 ◼   ► >> No, no. I believe it makes it a wired keyboard.

01:20:54 ◼   ► >> Does it?

01:20:55 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

01:20:56 ◼   ► >> All right. Well, I might try that then if I can get a cable long enough to reach

01:20:58 ◼   ► my computer because the one it comes with is not going to reach like under the desk

01:21:01 ◼   ► and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go or wherever. But I would like to try

01:21:05 ◼   ► that because I think that would make my life a lot easier. The mouse do not like it. And

01:21:11 ◼   ► for a new reason, like I'm having... I don't like it. I've been using it. I don't like

01:21:16 ◼   ► it because it's low and it's not shaped the way I like it.

01:21:18 ◼   ► >> But you weren't gaming with that mouse, are you? The Magic Mouse?

01:21:21 ◼   ► >> No, no.

01:21:22 ◼   ► >> Okay. I was going to say, like I love the Magic Mouse but I would not game with it.

01:21:26 ◼   ► >> The thing I did actually try like on the first launch to, you know, I was just trying

01:21:29 ◼   ► to get stuff to work. And something, I'm pretty sure this is physically impossible with this

01:21:33 ◼   ► mouse but it didn't occur to me until I tried to do it. People who don't know the Apple

01:21:37 ◼   ► Mouse looks like a piece of sushi. It has one flat surface on top of it. Like just the

01:21:42 ◼   ► top surface is one continuous thing. There are no seams or gaps in it anywhere. But it

01:21:46 ◼   ► does handle right click because it senses where your fingers are. Like it's got a touch

01:21:49 ◼   ► surface on top. So if you click on the right side of the mouse, that's right click. And

01:21:53 ◼   ► if you click on the left side, that's left click. But every time you click, the whole

01:21:55 ◼   ► mouse surface goes down, right? There is no... It's just one big button.

01:22:00 ◼   ► So in Destiny, I get right in the game and I go to ADS and then I go to Fire and the

01:22:05 ◼   ► default key bindings and setup is ADS is right click and Fire is left click. ADS, for you

01:22:12 ◼   ► too who are listening have no idea what I'm talking about, is Aim Down Sights. I thought

01:22:15 ◼   ► it was ADS because Destiny is a game where you aim down sights and then right click for

01:22:20 ◼   ► ADS. You cannot right click to ADS and then left click to Fire on the Apple Mouse. Because

01:22:24 ◼   ► as soon as you right click to ADS, the button is down already. You can't left click because

01:22:31 ◼   ► it's in the middle of a click. You're holding it down. Now you can do right click toggle

01:22:36 ◼   ► ADS. I thought maybe it would be touch sensitive and I could tap the left side of the mouse

01:22:39 ◼   ► while holding the right, but that didn't seem to work. Anyway, it's not a gaming mouse.

01:22:43 ◼   ► That's not why I don't like it. The new reason that I dislike this mouse, other than the

01:22:47 ◼   ► ergonomics which alone would be like they don't match the way I want to use a mouse,

01:22:51 ◼   ► right? But the new thing that's driving me nuts is it's like the Apple TV remote. The

01:22:56 ◼   ► way I just go and grab my mouse, I end up accidentally swiping the thing and my windows

01:23:00 ◼   ► are scrolling all over the place and I'm activating mission control. It's like my computer is

01:23:06 ◼   ► haunted like my TV. Like every time I try to pick up that remote, it's like, "Why is

01:23:08 ◼   ► it fast forwarding? Why did it skip around? What is it doing? Did it go to the next episode?"

01:23:12 ◼   ► Because my fingers brush the touch sensitive surface. This is not what I want in a mouse.

01:23:17 ◼   ► Looks nice. It's black and sleek. I think it's a beautiful piece of art. I don't want

01:23:20 ◼   ► to use it as a mouse. Yeah, in all fairness, I disabled most of those gestures the first

01:23:24 ◼   ► time I set up a Mac. Even just horizontal scrolling like swipe sideways or swipe vertical

01:23:29 ◼   ► for crying a lot. Like I'm not going to disable scrolling, right? I'll go to grab the mouse

01:23:33 ◼   ► and in the act of grabbing it, I will scroll my window two lines that I didn't mean to

01:23:38 ◼   ► do because my fingers just hit it. So anyway, I'm not going to use this mouse. So I've been

01:23:41 ◼   ► in the market for a new one and I have ordered two mice, two mouses, two mises. I tried both

01:23:47 ◼   ► of them in person and I couldn't really decide if either of them, if I would like them, but

01:23:52 ◼   ► I'm going to give them both a try. I got an expensive one and a cheap one. I'm hoping

01:23:57 ◼   ► I like at least one of them because it's been slim pickings. Like these are the least objectionable

01:24:02 ◼   ► mice that I have found. They both have things about them that I don't like and I'm not really

01:24:06 ◼   ► a fan of, but I think hopefully one of them will be okay. I have coming to me the Microsoft

01:24:11 ◼   ► Precision mouse, which is Microsoft's current normal mouse. It's not super gamey. Yeah,

01:24:20 ◼   ► exactly. But it's also their fancy one. So it's got the thing that Marco talked about

01:24:25 ◼   ► where almost every mouse that has a score wheel has this feature where it's either in

01:24:31 ◼   ► clicky mode or free spinning mode. Oh, they'll do that now? Yeah, well, not all of them,

01:24:36 ◼   ► but the nice ones do it. In fact, Microsoft sells the same mouse without the mode switch

01:24:41 ◼   ► that just is clicky. Anyway, it's got one of those. Logic has a name brand for it. And

01:24:46 ◼   ► the switch that switches the two modes is really nice and satisfying, which I enjoy.

01:24:51 ◼   ► It's got three side buttons that I hope to never use. It's got a left and a right button

01:24:55 ◼   ► and it's got that little flange off to the left. Like if you know the Logic MX Master

01:24:59 ◼   ► has like a huge shelf over there for you to like put your rest your hand on or some shopping

01:25:04 ◼   ► or groceries, this has a tiny flange, which I'm like, you know what? I've never used a

01:25:09 ◼   ► mouse with the flange. This flange is very small. I don't find it particularly objectionable.

01:25:13 ◼   ► If I just pretend it's not there and grip the sides of the mouse, maybe it'll be fine.

01:25:17 ◼   ► So this is the fancy mouse. This is like 70 bucks. So I'm getting this one. And I think

01:25:24 ◼   ► it's Bluetooth, which may or may not be an issue depending on how Catalina's Bluetooth

01:25:27 ◼   ► issues evolve for you too. So far, I haven't seen any of the stuff you've described, but

01:25:31 ◼   ► I'm on the lookout for it. And the other one is the Logitech Marathon Mouse M705, which

01:25:36 ◼   ► is one of the cheaper Logitech mice. It's also one of the simpler ones. I think it also

01:25:42 ◼   ► has the mode switch wheel, less satisfying. It has two side buttons instead of one. And

01:25:47 ◼   ► it also has a small flange for your thumb. And it's just generally like, this is 30 bucks.

01:25:52 ◼   ► It's a $30 mouse. It is not Bluetooth. It's Logitech's weird RF thingy, which I actually

01:25:59 ◼   ► kind of like because my experience that RF thing they use is rock solid and doesn't interfere

01:26:04 ◼   ► with Bluetooth. Yeah, if it's for a desktop, those are way better, honestly. Yeah. So I

01:26:11 ◼   ► mean you don't have that choice on the Microsoft one. It just it is Bluetooth or whatever.

01:26:14 ◼   ► So I got that one. My plan is whichever one I don't like, I'll try to pass off the other

01:26:19 ◼   ► one to my wife because she has a Logitech wireless mouse now, but it's one of those

01:26:22 ◼   ► portable ones. Right. And I always thought it was silly for her to use that at her desk.

01:26:27 ◼   ► It's like one of those little it's it's miniature. It's like 75 percent of a normal size. Oh,

01:26:32 ◼   ► yeah. I don't mind it. But anyway, so I'll keep you updated on those two mice. And also

01:26:39 ◼   ► the final thing I've ordered is way too many cables for what? So many things. Well, this

01:26:46 ◼   ► is this is the problem when you get new things. I did the you know, the preparing the way

01:26:49 ◼   ► the new power supply just ripples outward like I mentioned this on a past show. I want

01:26:55 ◼   ► everything to be braided in black. I don't want any white cables. I don't want any plastic

01:27:01 ◼   ► cables. I don't want to buy anything sold, bought or processed. I want everything to

01:27:06 ◼   ► be black braided cables. Why braided? Why? Who cares about braided braided cables appeal

01:27:12 ◼   ► to me because they are less, less kinky. Oh, boy. Like if you have a typical plastic cable,

01:27:19 ◼   ► it comes to you in a package that's usually tightly wrapped in either a circle or an oval

01:27:23 ◼   ► or whatever, and you sort of unfurl it and those kinks kind of stay and you can kind

01:27:28 ◼   ► of resonate. It's like, well, these kinks are ever going to go out probably sometimes

01:27:32 ◼   ► eventually. But then you might sort of bend in new kinks. Braided cables, in theory, remain

01:27:37 ◼   ► supple and able to sort of flow and don't they don't come with you get out of the package

01:27:41 ◼   ► and you just string it out and it hangs pin straight straight down for like six feet.

01:27:45 ◼   ► Right. That never happens with a plastic cable. And then in theory, if you use them for a

01:27:50 ◼   ► long time, they won't pick up kinks from the other places. Oh, I said in theory again,

01:27:55 ◼   ► I'm sorry phone. Oh, man. So black braided everything. So any cable that I had in my

01:28:03 ◼   ► life that was not black and braided needs to be black and braided. Of course, the computer

01:28:08 ◼   ► comes with a black braided power cable and a black braided USB-C to lightning cable to

01:28:13 ◼   ► charge harpoon your turtle mouse and to charge your keyboard. And that sort of began the

01:28:19 ◼   ► whole thing. So I have a black braided USB-C to USB-C for my portable hard drive, another

01:28:26 ◼   ► black braided USB-A to B to connect my existing black USB hub, like a black braided speaker

01:28:35 ◼   ► cable to connect my speakers and going a little overboard. I mean, cables are cheap. Like

01:28:39 ◼   ► when you buy expensive computers, like I can get a cable for five dollars. I should buy

01:28:42 ◼   ► two of them. They're five dollars. And so I did. So I've been buying cables.

01:28:48 ◼   ► So I'm not entirely in the braided cable lifestyle. I have a few here and there. But do they not

01:28:54 ◼   ► just wrap like a cloth braid around the same rubber that every other cable has on the outside?

01:29:00 ◼   ► So first of all, I think no, I think they don't. I think the braiding replaces the rubber.

01:29:06 ◼   ► The second thing I worry about is that they are less well shielded than the other ones.

01:29:09 ◼   ► Like, you know, it's used like a foil wrapper and then inside of the actual conductor is

01:29:13 ◼   ► each of which is separately insulated. And then around that they have plastic. I think

01:29:16 ◼   ► it's all the same except the outer plastic is replaced with braids. I don't know. I honestly

01:29:22 ◼   ► don't know anything about cables. And these are all like five dollars. So I have no idea

01:29:25 ◼   ► what the hell I'm buying. Although I did buy a Thunderbolt one that was like 30 bucks or

01:29:30 ◼   ► whatever because I'm pre buying for stuff that I think I'm going to get. Like, I think

01:29:34 ◼   ► I will eventually have some high speed external SSD peripheral thing. But yeah, I'm assuming

01:29:42 ◼   ► that is the only difference is a aesthetics and B how the cables flop. Basically, I'm

01:29:49 ◼   ► hoping there's no C interference. Susceptibility is worse. I'm hoping that's not true. Anything

01:29:54 ◼   ► else about the Mac Pro, John? Are we done? No, we're not. Sorry. One more thing. Oh my

01:30:00 ◼   ► God. This is not for me though. This is from I've been consuming lots of Mac Pro content

01:30:05 ◼   ► as you can imagine. There's lots of good YouTube videos. So am I apparently. Yeah. Well, you

01:30:09 ◼   ► you're mentioning something. So Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs is had one of the many videos

01:30:14 ◼   ► that's like, hey, I got this Mac Pro. What the hell can I put in here? And a lot of these

01:30:18 ◼   ► YouTube channels are not Apple specific. So they have tons of, you know, essentially PC

01:30:21 ◼   ► hardware hanging around. We will put a link in the show notes to this particular video.

01:30:25 ◼   ► He said, let me just shove some stuff in there and see how it goes. So the first thing he

01:30:30 ◼   ► stuck in was a USB card to put a bunch more USB ports on the thing. And that didn't work

01:30:39 ◼   ► because there was no drivers for it. He's looking around inside the case for power connectors.

01:30:46 ◼   ► Most PCs have SATA style power connectors coming off the power supply. That is not the

01:30:50 ◼   ► case in the Mac Pro, which is why there's that $80 Belkin thing, because they've got

01:30:53 ◼   ► a proprietary power header on the motherboard so you can add cables to your previously cableless

01:30:57 ◼   ► Mac. Like there are no Molex style connectors. There's no place in there except for the Apple

01:31:03 ◼   ► proprietary place to connect to things. So anything that requires power, you have to

01:31:06 ◼   ► get at least that power cable thing from Belkin, which I think is the only one that makes one

01:31:13 ◼   ► for now, or have something that's powered through the slot. There's the Pegasus drive

01:31:17 ◼   ► bay thing that Steven Hackett bought. It's $400 for a bracket plus an eight terabyte

01:31:21 ◼   ► hard drive. Steven said that hard drive is incredibly noisy, so that kind of turned me

01:31:27 ◼   ► off. Like I wasn't a fan of buying that anyway, but I certainly don't want a noisy spinning

01:31:31 ◼   ► hard drive in there. And that comes with its own power thing, or do you have to buy it?

01:31:37 ◼   ► I think it comes with its own thing too.

01:31:39 ◼   ► It does, yeah.

01:31:40 ◼   ► Anyway, PCI Express cards that you put M.2 SSD or NVMe things in, that worked right out

01:31:48 ◼   ► of the box, is a tiny little PCI card that connects into your PCI slot, and it's got

01:31:52 ◼   ► a tiny little M.2 slot where you put one of those little NVMe sticks in there. Stick not

01:31:58 ◼   ► included. Work fine, no drivers, you can boot from it. You buy an NVMe SSD for however much

01:32:04 ◼   ► they cost these days and you plug it in there, the card itself is $13. $13. $100 for each

01:32:11 ◼   ► wheel on this machine, but if you want to, you put an NVMe SSD in there, for $13 you can

01:32:16 ◼   ► do it. And then you can spend $400 on a 2TB NVMe SSD, and for $413 you have 2TB worth

01:32:23 ◼   ► of very fast bootable stuff. He also tried U.2 SSD cards, which is the standard for those

01:32:30 ◼   ► enterprise over-provisioned SSD things. And that didn't work, even though it had worked

01:32:35 ◼   ► in previous ones, and it turns out that it's because Catalina is missing drivers for the

01:32:38 ◼   ► Intel U.2 drive that he tried. But that's $50 for the card if you want to get one of

01:32:43 ◼   ► those fancy enterprise SSDs, you just need to use a mechanism that has drivers. Mojave

01:32:47 ◼   ► had drivers for this thing, but Catalina doesn't for whatever reason. He did a bunch of RAM

01:32:53 ◼   ► upgrading and saw the cool RAM slot advisor thing that tells you, "Hey, you got your DIMMs

01:32:57 ◼   ► in the wrong place, and put this one here and put that one there." So that's a cool

01:33:02 ◼   ► feature and app if you ever want to upgrade the RAM, but like I said, I probably don't

01:33:05 ◼   ► because I've already got tons in here. Blackmagic video capture card, hey, it worked magically,

01:33:11 ◼   ► even though it's more or less PC hardware, that worked fine. Sound Blaster, which one

01:33:15 ◼   ► of you was talking about Sound Blaster? They still make products apparently for PCs.

01:33:21 ◼   ► That was the bigger shock is that they're still in business.

01:33:24 ◼   ► Yeah, and he bought a Sound Blaster card and put it into his Mac, and the Mac was like,

01:33:28 ◼   ► "Nope." Unless you also buy this external box that they have and use it in Windows, then

01:33:33 ◼   ► it works. And a bunch of other people have tried other things in it. So right now, in

01:33:38 ◼   ► the absence of any Mac Pro-specific products like the Pegasus thing that Apple sells, and

01:33:44 ◼   ► like I'd imagine third-party Apple-specific vendors will sell, you can try shoving in

01:33:50 ◼   ► lots of PC hardware. Some of it might work in Windows, and some of it might work in Mac

01:33:53 ◼   ► OS. It's somewhat hard to tell, but I am excited that literally any of it works with

01:33:58 ◼   ► like no drivers and no awareness. They just plain work like that PCI Express thing because

01:34:02 ◼   ► that basically means if you want to have a bunch of internal SSDs, you can buy those

01:34:06 ◼   ► NVMe sticks and just slap them in there. They have cards that hold four of those NVMe sticks,

01:34:10 ◼   ► and you can mount it as a single drive and get insane speeds if you can afford all that

01:34:16 ◼   ► NVMe storage. The card itself is like nothing. Although one of them I did see had a fan on

01:34:20 ◼   ► it, which is a little upsetting. Anyway, of course. I am excited about putting things

01:34:27 ◼   ► into my Mac Pro, and I am plotting what those things might be, but I'm not in a rush because

01:34:31 ◼   ► it seems like the video card options—that was another thing. Lots of people were trying

01:34:33 ◼   ► different video cards in there. Video card options are not currently great. As we've

01:34:37 ◼   ► discussed in the past, I want something that's an MPX module if possible, so I'm just waiting.

01:34:41 ◼   ► The final thing Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs talked about, which hadn't occurred to me

01:34:44 ◼   ► but looking at all the pictures, but I know I had been thinking about it the wrong way.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Even after I had taken the case off, my Mac Pro didn't realize this, but obviously we've

01:34:52 ◼   ► said before when you take the case off, the computer powers down. You can't have it turned

01:34:57 ◼   ► on. There's a literal physical power disconnect thing that if those contacts are not touching

01:35:04 ◼   ► from the top of the case down to your Mac, it will not run. The power will not be connected.

01:35:08 ◼   ► The circuits will not be complete. So you have to turn your Mac off to take the case

01:35:12 ◼   ► off, but what people might not have mentioned, people realize now that they have them, is

01:35:16 ◼   ► not only do you have to turn it off, you have to unplug every cable from the back of your

01:35:21 ◼   ► computer, because the case in the back is not like a U-shape, like there's a bar on

01:35:28 ◼   ► the bottom, and so as the case comes up, that bar goes chu chu chu chu, and if the cables

01:35:32 ◼   ► are in the way, it will block them. So you have to unplug every single cable, the power

01:35:36 ◼   ► cable, all the USB cables, your display cable, any cable that is connected to the back of

01:35:40 ◼   ► his computer needs to be unplugged to take the case off, which is kind of a shame because

01:35:44 ◼   ► you're like, "Okay, fine, the power has to be off, but do I have to unplug all those

01:35:47 ◼   ► things?" Because if you have a lot of stuff connected, especially if you have cards installed,

01:35:50 ◼   ► like lots of people put in different video cards, and you can have all these monitors

01:35:54 ◼   ► connected, you can do all sorts of cool stuff, you've got to disconnect all of those, and

01:35:58 ◼   ► if it's on a desk or in some place deep, it's hard to see back there, and they might

01:36:02 ◼   ► slide down, and it's just not convenient at all, but it's so clear that Apple does

01:36:08 ◼   ► not want you mucking around inside this thing when it's anything close to being plugged

01:36:12 ◼   ► in or turned on.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Doesn't that also make it so that it's not grounded anymore?

01:36:14 ◼   ► Yeah, that's one of the many theories I'm working with, is I'll keep it plugged in

01:36:21 ◼   ► so it's grounded, but you should also have a grounding strap separate from that. It doesn't

01:36:25 ◼   ► mean you can't plug it back in after you get the case off. You could plug the power

01:36:27 ◼   ► cable back in. It just means it has to be out to get the case off.

01:36:30 ◼   ► Yeah, because I was always told, "Keep the power supply plugged in when you're working

01:36:36 ◼   ► inside of a PC because then it keeps it grounded, and then you have extra ESD protection through

01:36:39 ◼   ► the case."

01:36:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I suppose we haven't seen the repair guide for this computer. I imagine it might

01:36:44 ◼   ► still tell the repair technician to do that, but I don't know how he's got to unplug

01:36:48 ◼   ► everything because otherwise that case is not coming off.

01:36:51 ◼   ► There's also, you can look at the picture we'll put in the show and the tweet, someone

01:36:54 ◼   ► was mentioning the BNC connector that's poking out here. I think that's what it's

01:36:59 ◼   ► called. That's from the Blackmagic card. Someone said, "Hey, do you have 10 base 2

01:37:02 ◼   ► Ethernet on that thing?" But anyway, if you have a long enough connector poking out of

01:37:06 ◼   ► the back of your computer, it could be that you can't get the ... Well, I suppose you

01:37:09 ◼   ► couldn't get the case on then because you'd insert the card and then when you tried to

01:37:12 ◼   ► put the case back on, it wouldn't go down because it would hit the connector. But that's

01:37:16 ◼   ► not the case. It clears the Blackmagic card, obviously. But I can imagine there might be

01:37:20 ◼   ► some card somewhere that expects you to ... expects to be able to stick out the back of your computer

01:37:25 ◼   ► as long as it needs to, and that's not going to work on this.

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01:39:17 ◼   ► All right, now that we're done with follow-up, let's start the show. All right, well, we're

01:39:24 ◼   ► out of time, so let's move on to Ask ATP. Dimitri Tabakuro writes, "My relatives and

01:39:30 ◼   ► I have iPhones and we use iCloud photo sharing. It was working fine until my father decided

01:39:34 ◼   ► to print some photos from one of the shared albums. He is not able to get full res images

01:39:39 ◼   ► from shared albums, only images resized down to about 2048p. Am I supposed to send zip

01:39:43 ◼   ► files to my parents so they can print photos? Also, why does it appear that photos are downloaded

01:39:47 ◼   ► to the local device before adding them to a shared album? Can't Apple do this process

01:39:52 ◼   ► on the server side? It's very inconvenient when I want to share a lot of photos from

01:39:55 ◼   ► some trip when those photos already exist on the cloud. It takes up to tens of minutes,

01:39:59 ◼   ► fails often, and so I have to share photos by batches. I hope you'll help me so I'm not

01:40:03 ◼   ► going back to Google Photos/OneDrive." I don't use iCloud photo library. I do use iCloud

01:40:09 ◼   ► sharing, but only very sporadically, so I haven't really personally run into any of

01:40:13 ◼   ► this. John, I think you're the heaviest user of this stuff out of the three of us. Any

01:40:19 ◼   ► other solutions? I like this question because it highlights many failings of iCloud, like

01:40:26 ◼   ► all the major failings of iCloud sharing things. This is true in things that a lot of people

01:40:30 ◼   ► don't realize if you're not a computer nerd into these things, that shared albums don't

01:40:36 ◼   ► share photos at full resolution. You might not notice the end, you're like, "I've got

01:40:40 ◼   ► the picture," and you give it to your relatives, they're happy to have the picture, but if

01:40:43 ◼   ► they ever try to print it, like in a photo print, especially if they want to make an

01:40:46 ◼   ► eight by ten, it's not happening. They're not high enough resolution for that, which

01:40:50 ◼   ► is a shame. I understand that Apple does it to save space and whatever, but this is a

01:40:54 ◼   ► decision that was made many years ago, and they should revisit it because then the next

01:40:58 ◼   ► question is, "Okay, well, whatever. Shared albums is just so people can see them on their

01:41:01 ◼   ► phone. What if I want to give the full res ones? What do I do then?" There are tons of

01:41:06 ◼   ► ways to do it, but none of them are part of Apple's photo experience, except maybe AirDrop

01:41:12 ◼   ► or iMessage, and even iMessage, I'm not sure. For downscales, I think there's a preference

01:41:15 ◼   ► for downscaling somewhere in the iMessage settings. You can email them. My solution

01:41:21 ◼   ► is usually to use Google products, as in I put them in Google Drive and send them a link.

01:41:26 ◼   ► It really depends on what the person on the other end has access to. If they have Apple

01:41:32 ◼   ► things, I know I can use that Apple Mail thing where it doesn't actually attach it to the

01:41:37 ◼   ► message. It puts it at a public iCloud link. You know that feature? It was in Sierra or

01:41:42 ◼   ► something. I always try to do that, and people in my family always yell at me mid-sentence

01:41:47 ◼   ► and say, "Don't do that! It's too big to be an attachment!" I'm like, "It's not going

01:41:50 ◼   ► to actually attach it. That's the point. It's going to put it in iCloud, then it's going

01:41:55 ◼   ► to send them an email with a link, and then they're going to click the link." I like that

01:41:58 ◼   ► system because it gets around the attachment stuff, and you know they're getting the full

01:42:00 ◼   ► res thing, but it is easier and better if you know everyone on both ends to do Apple

01:42:04 ◼   ► stuff. iCloud and iCloud. Google Drive, if you just put it into Google Drive, Google

01:42:10 ◼   ► Drive just thinks it's a file. You can make a public link that can download the file.

01:42:13 ◼   ► The web interface to Google Drive will try to be clever and say, "Oh, this is an image.

01:42:18 ◼   ► I can present this to you." You have to tell -- this is the annoying thing -- you have

01:42:22 ◼   ► to send them, "Don't just click on the image and right-click or drag to your desktop or

01:42:26 ◼   ► whatever. Go find the download button, which is a download-facing arrow." You have to actually

01:42:32 ◼   ► not let Google Drive try to be nice and decode the thing for you. You just want the file.

01:42:38 ◼   ► The zip file, although it's stupid to zip JPEGs, which are already compressed and you

01:42:41 ◼   ► won't save space, at least that will make it so that everything in the chain understands

01:42:46 ◼   ► like, "I don't know what this is. It's just a file. I'm just going to send you all the

01:42:48 ◼   ► bits. Here are the bits." Then you have to worry about attachment stuff. If you put that

01:42:51 ◼   ► zip file in Google Drive and have people download the zip file, and hopefully Google Drive doesn't

01:42:55 ◼   ► crack the zip file open for you conveniently, see how complicated this is? It shouldn't

01:42:59 ◼   ► be this difficult. The thing about copying it down to the device, he's right. Apple does

01:43:03 ◼   ► have it. Why, if you want to send it to somebody else or add it to a shared album, do you have

01:43:08 ◼   ► to bring it down to the device and then put it back up to the shared album? It's both

01:43:12 ◼   ► in the same place, but that's, I don't know if it's a privacy thing or they don't want

01:43:17 ◼   ► to do it server-side. There's lots of inconveniences for people with bad, slow connections or not

01:43:21 ◼   ► a lot of space on their phones. They have to end up fighting with Apple's photo system.

01:43:26 ◼   ► I don't have a great solution to this. There are tons and tons of mediocre solutions, most

01:43:30 ◼   ► of which I get by with, but I really wish Apple would do this better.

01:43:32 ◼   ► Yeah, we also got a question from Todd Vaziri, I don't know, in the last week or so, saying,

01:43:38 ◼   ► "Hey, when is family-based, like, shared photo libraries ever going to be a thing?" And,

01:43:44 ◼   ► "Oh, do I ever want it to be a thing, but I don't see that being a thing anytime soon."

01:43:48 ◼   ► Yeah, we talked about that a lot. His question, he listens to the show, so he knows, like,

01:43:52 ◼   ► his question was not, "How can we do that?" It was like, "Are there any indications, as

01:43:57 ◼   ► in any birdies or any hints anywhere, is there any hope saying, 'Yes, Apple is going to address

01:44:02 ◼   ► this need?'" I haven't heard anything, but as we've discussed in past shows, Apple has

01:44:08 ◼   ► taken many steps over the past decade to prepare for that by having families and iCloud photo

01:44:14 ◼   ► library. Like, all those are prerequisites. I just don't have any actual information about,

01:44:18 ◼   ► "Oh, in the next year or two or three, they're going to roll out this feature." They desperately

01:44:23 ◼   ► need to, and they have laid a lot of the foundations. I just haven't heard anything rumor-wise.

01:44:27 ◼   ► JK Cross writes, "I remember Marco saying something like, 'Swift is such a d*ck' in an episode

01:44:32 ◼   ► a few months ago. As someone who has been writing almost exclusively in Swift so far,

01:44:37 ◼   ► I've been wondering, would you please elaborate on that statement, Marco? And I would just

01:44:41 ◼   ► like to say, I didn't implore this to happen. I didn't bring this up at all. I didn't even

01:44:45 ◼   ► put this in the show notes. So I am excited to get in a fight with you. I mean, to discuss

01:44:50 ◼   ► this with you." I mean, it's a matter of style and preference. I mean, lots of people like

01:44:56 ◼   ► d*cks. And so, you know, we just have different preferences, I guess. That's totally okay.

01:45:03 ◼   ► You know, there are trends and waves in programming languages, and we've gone through the history

01:45:10 ◼   ► of programming languages. We've gone from, you know, very strict to more flexible languages,

01:45:17 ◼   ► more dynamic languages, and now we're kind of in a wave that's swinging back towards

01:45:21 ◼   ► very strict languages, very, like, you know, super strictly typed and everything. And this

01:45:26 ◼   ► is what Swift is. You know, Swift is extremely strict and rigid and picky. And, like, in

01:45:35 ◼   ► the way that, like, you know, some languages don't require you to differentiate between,

01:45:40 ◼   ► like, levels of integer precision. Like, you can cast a 64-bit integer to a 32-bit integer

01:45:45 ◼   ► context transparently, and it doesn't bother you about anything. And that's the kind of

01:45:49 ◼   ► thing where Swift will generally bother you about stuff like that. It is not the only

01:45:53 ◼   ► language that does this and things like this. This is not the only thing it is a d*ck about.

01:46:00 ◼   ► But just as I am using Swift, which honestly I haven't been doing a lot of recently because

01:46:04 ◼   ► I've been working in an existing Objective-C code base, so I've been mostly writing that,

01:46:08 ◼   ► but whenever I write Swift, it just nitpicks everything I do to death in a way that I understand

01:46:16 ◼   ► what it's doing. I understand that it wants everything to be explicit and correct and

01:46:19 ◼   ► everything, but it just, in a way that is not logical or, you know, or factual, it is

01:46:27 ◼   ► just, it seems like it's being a d*ck to me. I don't know, it's hard to explain.

01:46:34 ◼   ► I think I understand what you're saying. Obviously, I have a very different opinion about what

01:46:40 ◼   ► is happening and why it's happening. I think, even as someone who quite likes Swift, it

01:46:45 ◼   ► is extremely picky. I don't really see there's any two ways about that. It is very picky.

01:46:51 ◼   ► It wants you to do things in the safest way possible. It wants you to be as explicit as

01:46:57 ◼   ► possible. To me, Objective-C is much happier shooting from the hip and just pew pew pewing

01:47:04 ◼   ► all over the place. And that's fine. I think for certain developers, that's how they prefer

01:47:10 ◼   ► to work, and that's great. For other developers, that's not as great. I think that the thing

01:47:16 ◼   ► that bothers me about Swift is, to my eyes, the language nerds have not only gotten hold

01:47:24 ◼   ► of it, but have performed a hostile takeover of it. And I feel like early on, you know,

01:47:31 ◼   ► in the first couple of years of Swift, it had a lot of these jerky tendencies, but was

01:47:36 ◼   ► workable. And decisions were made pragmatically relatively often. And I wish I could cite

01:47:43 ◼   ► a specific example, and I can't off the top of my head, but I try to keep up with the

01:47:47 ◼   ► general gist of what's going on in Swift evolution and the general kind of trends and what's

01:47:52 ◼   ► going on in Swift. And even as someone who I think is more language nerdy than your average

01:47:59 ◼   ► developer, and I am not bad at all, I'm just saying more than your average developer, I

01:48:02 ◼   ► think I appreciate the nuance of a lot of languages. I don't care for the direction

01:48:10 ◼   ► Swift is going, which is, let's let the academic language nerds just go bananas and eschew

01:48:16 ◼   ► any sort of pragmatism whatsoever. And I'm sure that that's not literally what's happening,

01:48:21 ◼   ► but that is what appears to be happening to me. And man, I do not like it. I do not want

01:48:26 ◼   ► it, and I do not like it. And I don't know, that frustrates me. That frustrates me a lot.

01:48:32 ◼   ► And that is where I think Swift is taking a turn for the worse. But I don't know, maybe

01:48:38 ◼   ► that's just me. John, do you have thoughts on this?

01:48:40 ◼   ► I do, that's why I put the question in.

01:48:42 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

01:48:43 ◼   ► I wanted to hear about Marco's assessment of Swift's dickishness. My own assessment

01:48:50 ◼   ► of it, like I spent my career programming what they call dynamic languages, which are

01:48:54 ◼   ► the least dickish of any, depending on how you look at it. If you ask someone of a dickish

01:48:59 ◼   ► language, they will say the opposite. But like, yeah, in Perl, JavaScript, anything

01:49:04 ◼   ► goes to the nth degree, right? That's the beauty and some would say the curse, right?

01:49:10 ◼   ► And my impression is that what I thought Marco was saying when he said Swift is such a dick,

01:49:14 ◼   ► like I thought I understood what he was saying, because I feel the same way about statically

01:49:19 ◼   ► typed languages. Basically, any language that has a strong, complicated type system that

01:49:26 ◼   ► you have to participate in, I find it annoying to be writing a program and for it to say,

01:49:32 ◼   ► your program's cool and everything, but like, this is not the exact type that that says

01:49:37 ◼   ► it is. And you're like, oh my God, they're trivially convertible with each other and I

01:49:40 ◼   ► know this thing is always going to be in this range and it's fine. And it's like, yeah,

01:49:42 ◼   ► but I'm the language and you, I can't, I'm not going to take your word for it. You have

01:49:46 ◼   ► to actually make the types match. For me, any amount of brainpower and time I spend

01:49:52 ◼   ► dealing with a type system annoys me. For other people, types are your whole program.

01:49:58 ◼   ► My problem is solved by defining types. Once I've defined the correct types, the problem

01:50:03 ◼   ► practically solves itself. Furthermore, I cannot be reassured that anything I write

01:50:07 ◼   ► is remotely correct in any way if I am not assured that all the types are matched up

01:50:11 ◼   ► down to the nth degree, because that makes me feel comfortable that it, well, my logic

01:50:16 ◼   ► might be wrong, but at least I know all the types thread through the system and that makes

01:50:19 ◼   ► me feel reassured. Lots of people have that as a big security blanket and they flip out

01:50:23 ◼   ► in any language that isn't that strict and they're like, how can I use this language?

01:50:27 ◼   ► This, I don't know if it's an integer or it's a string, how do you write anything that works?

01:50:30 ◼   ► And yet gigantic companies in millions of lines of code have been produced and work

01:50:35 ◼   ► just fine without that. And those people can't even imagine how can you have millions lines

01:50:39 ◼   ► of anything with note, with quote unquote, no types, even though there are types, but

01:50:42 ◼   ► not the types of types they're interested in. Strings being coerced into numbers and

01:50:47 ◼   ► vice versa, nothing will ever work and that's just not true. So that's the divide. And I

01:50:51 ◼   ► think languages that appear dickish to people who are accustomed to working in a sort of

01:50:56 ◼   ► a loosey useier language are like, oh God, don't make me tell you again about the types.

01:51:01 ◼   ► I don't care, or like, why can't I just have this thing as a bucket of things that all

01:51:06 ◼   ► conform to this protocol? Oh, I'm not allowed to have that? Oh, then I have to figure out

01:51:09 ◼   ► some other way to do it. Just take a bunch of things of type ID, like an Objective-C,

01:51:13 ◼   ► like just, you always want to just have that out to say, I don't want to deal with types.

01:51:17 ◼   ► Just like, and so that's my impression of the dickish, non-dickish divide, which is,

01:51:22 ◼   ► it's not an accurate assessment because depending on which camp you're in, the other side is

01:51:25 ◼   ► a dick of saying like, oh, you're just going to let me pass a string to this thing that

01:51:29 ◼   ► takes a number and you're going to give me an answer and not say anything? You're going

01:51:31 ◼   ► to let me call a method and you have no frigging idea whether that method exists? Oh, sorry,

01:51:35 ◼   ► you're going to send a message and you don't know if that you didn't even receive this

01:51:38 ◼   ► message? How does that even compile? You don't know if this thing has a foo message and you're

01:51:44 ◼   ► just going to let that compile and I'm going to find out at runtime that it doesn't have

01:51:47 ◼   ► a foo message? How can you write anything in this language? Obviously, everyone knows

01:51:50 ◼   ► you can't write anything useful in Objective-C because you can send a message. You can send

01:51:54 ◼   ► a message to nil and it's a no op? What the hell? You'll never be able to make a successful

01:51:59 ◼   ► commercial system in this language, as we all know. There will never be any successful

01:52:03 ◼   ► products or a company based on a language that acts like this without static types,

01:52:07 ◼   ► nothing works. Obviously, you know which side of this I fall down on. Swift tends to be

01:52:12 ◼   ► more dickish in that way. When I wrote that long thing about Swift when it first came

01:52:17 ◼   ► out, which I smuggled into a Mac OS X review because that's the forum I had for a lot of

01:52:21 ◼   ► my writing, I described all of that. But my perspective on it then and still mostly now

01:52:27 ◼   ► is that Swift is dickish in this way to a much greater degree than Objective-C because

01:52:33 ◼   ► that's how it can figure out how to make your code run fast. And its ambition was to be

01:52:38 ◼   ► expressive and able to write cool programs, but also as fast as it can possibly be, like

01:52:43 ◼   ► a systems programming language. Like you could write an operating system in it, like it is,

01:52:47 ◼   ► you know, you should never have to resort to C because this should be just as fast.

01:52:51 ◼   ► And there's no way a language can be that way unless it knows down to the minute detail

01:52:56 ◼   ► exactly how everything is set up and the fact that they match up. It needs to know that

01:53:00 ◼   ► method exists, so it knows that it can call it, so it doesn't have to do like a method

01:53:04 ◼   ► table lookup or a runtime check or no runtime coercion. Like you have to know everything

01:53:09 ◼   ► that it does down to memory allocation and stuff and with ARC, you know. Anyway, that's

01:53:13 ◼   ► one reason it's like that. But I think Swift also, this gets to Casey's point, again, you

01:53:20 ◼   ► two use the language way more than I do. I read about it, but I'm not actually using

01:53:23 ◼   ► it. But my impression from reading about it of the debates among the language nerds, as

01:53:27 ◼   ► you derisively called them, those are my people as far as I'm concerned, which may sound weird

01:53:31 ◼   ► based on what I said there, but my people were like the Perl language nerds, which is

01:53:34 ◼   ► a different breed of language nerd. But anyway, based on those conversations, I think what

01:53:37 ◼   ► they're trying to do is say, Swift needs to know about all the crap in the program so

01:53:42 ◼   ► it can make an efficient and so it can turn runtime errors into compile time errors and

01:53:47 ◼   ► help you in that way to make a secure, more correct program that runs really, really fast.

01:53:52 ◼   ► But we don't want it to bother you that much. We don't want it to be so d*ckish. That's what

01:53:55 ◼   ► type inference is about. And half of the Swift stuff is, how can we make it so you can write

01:54:01 ◼   ► something that looks simple and the compiler can figure out what it is that you meant and

01:54:06 ◼   ► whether it's valid without having to ask you, cast this to that or reassure me that this

01:54:11 ◼   ► conforms to that protocol or don't say anything about types at all and I'll figure it out.

01:54:15 ◼   ► Like the whole type inference engine and all the type erasure and the protocol system and

01:54:20 ◼   ► all their generics and everything like that, they're trying, I think, to make a language

01:54:25 ◼   ► that has all the attributes of the, you know, the, I forget what the Perl people used to

01:54:29 ◼   ► call it, the something in bondage. It was a sex analogy. I'm sorry, nerds in the 90s.

01:54:36 ◼   ► Anyway, the bondage and discipline languages that want you to say everything about types,

01:54:41 ◼   ► you want to get all that performance, we don't want you to have to deal with that. And I

01:54:43 ◼   ► feel like that's what they're trying to do. Pragmatically, like the number of times they

01:54:47 ◼   ► change the string system. They need it to be efficient. They need it to not have to

01:54:49 ◼   ► go through conversions. They need it to like, to be able to efficiently get offsets and

01:54:55 ◼   ► split and join strings without you having to worry about all the Unicode stuff, but

01:54:58 ◼   ► they want it to be really fast under the covers. So that's why they get rid of UTF-16 behind

01:55:02 ◼   ► the scenes, even though that's what Objective-C and a string use for all those years, because

01:55:06 ◼   ► it was back when UTF-16 they thought would be the thing, right? And for backward compatibility,

01:55:10 ◼   ► it was good to do that, but they changed the system again and all the different methods

01:55:14 ◼   ► to get offsets and indexes and just, I see the Swift language people trying to make Swift

01:55:20 ◼   ► less of a dick while also making it blazingly fast and convenient to use and expressive.

01:55:26 ◼   ► Obviously they're failing to a degree that Casey feels like he's getting put upon by

01:55:30 ◼   ► new things. That's why I wish you had some more concrete examples, you know, where you

01:55:33 ◼   ► feel like it's getting more dickish, not less. But for sure, Swift is on the bondage and

01:55:38 ◼   ► discipline side in terms of the compiler needs to know what the hell's going on, right? But

01:55:43 ◼   ► I think they're trying to be much less dick. They have the whole dynamic dispatch thing

01:55:47 ◼   ► they added for Python support and everything like that, where you can actually call a thing

01:55:50 ◼   ► that you're not sure exists at runtime, but they try to do it in an efficient way. And

01:55:54 ◼   ► maybe it's easier to be a fan when you're not forced to write programs in the language.

01:55:58 ◼   ► And maybe someday I'll write something significant at Swift and then come on the program and

01:56:01 ◼   ► complain about all the dickishness that I just described. But I feel like Swift is trying

01:56:06 ◼   ► to not annoy you with the type system, but it's never going to give up that type system.

01:56:09 ◼   ► It loves its types.

01:56:11 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think, again, I wish I had a more concrete example, just like you said, but

01:56:16 ◼   ► I feel like so much of the stuff I see in the newsletters that I read and stuff like

01:56:22 ◼   ► that, and I'm not deep into Swift evolution, so it very well could be that there's plenty

01:56:27 ◼   ► of pragmatic people arguing the way I would argue and I just don't see it. But so much

01:56:31 ◼   ► of the stuff I see flying around is like super esoteric, really weird stuff that I as a traditional

01:56:38 ◼   ► Swift user, a commoner, like the common folk like me, I don't think care about, will rarely

01:56:44 ◼   ► see, none of that stuff matters. And so that's the stuff that I think once ABI stability

01:56:49 ◼   ► came in, in Swift 5, I think it was, once the ABI stability train had reached the station,

01:56:57 ◼   ► I feel like all of Swift evolution just went to, all right, my one super nerdy language

01:57:02 ◼   ► thing that nobody else gives a flying fart about, that's what we need to perseverate

01:57:06 ◼   ► on right now. And some things have gotten better, like Codable and Decodable, or Codable,

01:57:12 ◼   ► Incodable, Decodable, I think that's right, it's been a while since I've written any of

01:57:15 ◼   ► that stuff, which is basically JSON encoding and decoding. That was an absolute win, and

01:57:19 ◼   ► that came in in the last couple of years. And everyone and their mother had written

01:57:24 ◼   ► a JSON parser in Swift, and some of them were good and a lot of them were crap. But with

01:57:29 ◼   ► Codable, a lot of that was brought into the language, and I, or into the framework anyway,

01:57:34 ◼   ► and I think that that works really, really well. And it was really well-abstracted in

01:57:38 ◼   ► the way that a lot of Objective-C shines. Like, there are things about Objective-C and

01:57:44 ◼   ► Foundation that bother me, and I've said this example before on the show, and I'll say it

01:57:49 ◼   ► again. Now coming from C# to Objective-C, there was, I believe, if memory serves, it's

01:57:54 ◼   ► been a long time now, there was one DateTime class in C#, and that did anything related

01:57:59 ◼   ► to dates. And then I get to Objective-C and there's Date, there's like NSDate and NSCalendar,

01:58:04 ◼   ► and some series of classes and objects with regard to time, and it all seemed friggin'

01:58:09 ◼   ► overkill. But as it turns out, it was really just that it was properly abstracted, and

01:58:14 ◼   ► that time is friggin' hard. Who knew? And I think that, you know, the Codable stuff in

01:58:22 ◼   ► Swift, I think that that's properly abstracted. And if you want to do something super basic,

01:58:27 ◼   ► it's actually very straightforward to do. And if you want to do something really esoteric

01:58:30 ◼   ► and weird, it's doable. I just wouldn't say it's straightforward. And that's a great example

01:58:35 ◼   ► of things going the right way. But so often I feel like there's just weird decisions with

01:58:40 ◼   ► regard to weird corners of the language that's oftentimes bubble into my world, either via

01:58:46 ◼   ► newsletters, or actually into my code, that I'm just like, "Come on, people. This is not

01:58:52 ◼   ► something we need to worry about." Like, a silly example of this was like the removal

01:58:56 ◼   ► of the pre-increment post-increment operators, plus plus.

01:59:00 ◼   ► Oh, you're going to bring that chestnut back.

01:59:01 ◼   ► I mean, it was years ago. It was years ago.

01:59:02 ◼   ► I don't think that's a good supporting example of what you were describing. That's more of

01:59:06 ◼   ► a bike shedding thing. I would say, like, a better example, and I think this is a beneficial

01:59:10 ◼   ► attribute to Swift, is they will take multiple runs of this stuff. Like, they -- how many

01:59:14 ◼   ► times have they changed strings? And they should, like, they tried it, they tried it

01:59:18 ◼   ► again, then they tried it again. But it's good. Like, they should not have stuck with

01:59:21 ◼   ► the first one the first time they didn't get it right.

01:59:23 ◼   ► No, no, it was garbage.

01:59:24 ◼   ► Right? So, like, they keep trying. Sometimes -- and even the codable stuff, I think it

01:59:27 ◼   ► took at least one other run at that type of thing. You know, or they keep changing equitable

01:59:31 ◼   ► and hashable stuff. Like, because they realize people use them, and there's some things that

01:59:35 ◼   ► are a little bit more annoying, where they add features like the, you know, default initializers,

01:59:38 ◼   ► and it becomes easier to write certain things, and they redo them. It's annoying for people

01:59:42 ◼   ► for source compatibility and so on and so forth, but I think it's the right call. Like,

01:59:45 ◼   ► if you didn't get strings right the first time, don't be like Java and be like, "Nope,

01:59:48 ◼   ► we did strings. That's it." I mean, that's unfair to Java, but other languages --

01:59:52 ◼   ► No, it's not.

01:59:53 ◼   ► Other languages evolve more slowly, let's say, than Swift, and I think one of Swift's

01:59:56 ◼   ► advantages is their willingness to rip everything up, and the fact that they implemented so

01:59:59 ◼   ► much in the standard library that it's not part of the quote-unquote "language." They

02:00:02 ◼   ► can say, "Hey, we're not changing the language that much. We're changing the standard library,"

02:00:06 ◼   ► which is mainly how people use the language. But no, I'm a fan of the process, and I think

02:00:12 ◼   ► they're headed in the right direction. They are the only criticism -- it's not a criticism,

02:00:16 ◼   ► but the thing that is not to my taste is they are doing this in a language that is pot-committed

02:00:21 ◼   ► to efficiency. That's how I always think about it. What I want -- if I ever have to deal

02:00:27 ◼   ► with bondage and discipline, you damn well better run fast. That is the only reason I

02:00:31 ◼   ► will tolerate this kind of garbage, because otherwise I'll just write it in JavaScript,

02:00:35 ◼   ► for crying out loud, because if you're going to run slow, no way I want to deal with your

02:00:39 ◼   ► types. But if you deal with types, this is all me, the programmer, doing work so that

02:00:43 ◼   ► you, the compiler, can make this thing run as if it was written in assembly. That's what

02:00:47 ◼   ► I want out of this language.

02:00:50 ◼   ► And then finally, Tom Bornholdt writes, "I had a dream that I was road tripping with

02:00:53 ◼   ► the ATP crew. To ensure the dream's accuracy, if the ATP crew took a road trip together,

02:00:59 ◼   ► who would be driving, who would be in shotgun, and who would be in the back seat?" Let's

02:01:03 ◼   ► have Marco start with this. I will go next, and Jon can finish this out.

02:01:08 ◼   ► Jon would be driving, because there is no way in hell that Casey or I would want to

02:01:14 ◼   ► drive with Jon as a passenger.

02:01:18 ◼   ► You have driven with me as a passenger, both of you, I think.

02:01:21 ◼   ► Yeah, but not for a long road trip.

02:01:22 ◼   ► All right, okay.

02:01:24 ◼   ► That's a lot of pressure, and you're going to have opinions, and it's not worth it.

02:01:29 ◼   ► It's like selling you an old computer, like, "No, bad idea."

02:01:32 ◼   ► You two would never have opinions about driving, I'm sure.

02:01:34 ◼   ► No, not a bit.

02:01:37 ◼   ► So Jon would be driving, and then the question of opinions would come up, and Casey would

02:01:42 ◼   ► have much more opinion than I would. And so Casey would be in the passenger seat, and

02:01:47 ◼   ► I would go in the back. Also, they're both taller than me, so I can fit in the back more

02:01:50 ◼   ► easily with my shorter legs. And so I would just go in the back and look out the window

02:01:56 ◼   ► or look around at my laptop or whatever, and they would talk cars, and I would zone out

02:02:03 ◼   ► probably, or fall asleep. And from the back, I can fall asleep without them noticing as

02:02:07 ◼   ► easily.

02:02:08 ◼   ► Well, that's an interesting point. Okay, so I started with, there was no way, there's

02:02:13 ◼   ► no way that Jon wouldn't let anyone else drive. But then I got to thinking, and I think Jon

02:02:19 ◼   ► would enjoy just spacing out, just like you were saying. I think Jon would enjoy just

02:02:24 ◼   ► spacing out. I don't know if Jon's capable of it, especially as we've heard him, his

02:02:28 ◼   ► airplane passenger tendencies, but I think he would enjoy it.

02:02:31 ◼   ► So I think a happy medium for Jon would be riding in the passenger seat, and Aaron has

02:02:36 ◼   ► driven Jon semi, like a mini road trip. It was like half an hour, I think, each way,

02:02:41 ◼   ► something like that. I was not in the car at the time. And I don't remember her coming

02:02:44 ◼   ► back traumatized, so I consider that a good sign. I think I would want to drive, but in

02:02:53 ◼   ► all likelihood, I would have said, and so now I'm cheating because you've gone before

02:02:58 ◼   ► me, I would have said that, "Marco, you would have been more opinionated about being the

02:03:03 ◼   ► one in control, and I am a comparatively more passive person, and I would resign myself

02:03:08 ◼   ► to the back, and Marco, you would drive." Although hearing what you said a moment ago,

02:03:12 ◼   ► maybe I would switch you and me. I'm not sure. Jon—

02:03:14 ◼   ► Who's car are we driving? It's an indeterminate, some crummy rental

02:03:18 ◼   ► car. Oh, I'm definitely not driving that.

02:03:22 ◼   ► Remember gentlemen, the rental car is the fastest car in the world.

02:03:26 ◼   ► Unfortunately the rental car probably has a CPT, so Jon won't drive it either.

02:03:30 ◼   ► All right, Jon, what do you think? So when I see my interpretation of this question,

02:03:35 ◼   ► there's lots of things left unsaid, but road tripping, I think of that—if it's

02:03:41 ◼   ► a question worthy of considering who's going to do what and it's some rope trick, I'm

02:03:46 ◼   ► thinking of an epic road trip. And very long road trips, the dynamic, if you've ever

02:03:50 ◼   ► been on one of these, especially with people who aren't your family members and you haven't

02:03:54 ◼   ► been on road trips before, is such that a few things are true. One, it is basically

02:04:00 ◼   ► impossible and even if it is possible, it's a terrible idea to have a single person drive.

02:04:04 ◼   ► So I was assuming that we would all take turns driving, because if you're on a really long

02:04:08 ◼   ► road trip, it's dangerous for one person to drive for like 12 hours in a row. You have

02:04:14 ◼   ► three people in the car and three people who can drive. You should change drivers.

02:04:18 ◼   ► Second thing is that however you might start the road trip, when hour 27 rolls around,

02:04:24 ◼   ► it's a different vibe in the car. Everyone is comfortable with each other to the point

02:04:30 ◼   ► where even after 27 hours in the car, a thing that I would never even consider doing, I

02:04:36 ◼   ► would be open to it, which is sleeping in the backseat while someone else drives. Which,

02:04:39 ◼   ► you're right, normally if someone else was driving, I would have to be mentally backseat

02:04:45 ◼   ► driving the entire time to try to keep myself alive, but at a certain point, everyone's

02:04:49 ◼   ► exhausted. You need to sleep because it's going to be your shift to drive for another

02:04:52 ◼   ► four hours. So all of a sudden, I'm in the backseat and I'm asleep and Mark was in

02:04:59 ◼   ► the front, but he's asleep too. The person on the practice sheets should stay awake to

02:05:02 ◼   ► keep the other person awake and you're rotating drivers and you're stopping for food.

02:05:06 ◼   ► A different set of rules engages at a certain point in a road trip, in which case this question

02:05:10 ◼   ► takes on a whole new dynamic. I feel like that's how all road trips have to go. You

02:05:15 ◼   ► rotate drivers, you rotate seats, the person in the back is sleeping and the person in

02:05:20 ◼   ► the front is there to assist the person who's driving. That I feel like is how it would

02:05:24 ◼   ► have to go. For a shorter thing, obviously you're both

02:05:28 ◼   ► considering short, but for a shorter trip, I would probably want to drive. I don't

02:05:35 ◼   ► think I've ever driven with Casey. I don't know if he's a maniac. He might be. I've

02:05:42 ◼   ► driven with Marco and he drives fine. Obviously, I would be backseat driving from the front

02:05:47 ◼   ► seat like I do with literally anybody else, but I wouldn't have any particular objection

02:05:53 ◼   ► to Marco driving. I don't think he's a dangerous or reckless driver. Casey might

02:05:56 ◼   ► be. Dangerous or reckless driver, I don't know. Marco nailed it before. I would definitely

02:06:03 ◼   ► want to be in the passenger seat. It's a legroom issue. I feel like this is heightism,

02:06:07 ◼   ► but yeah, you can get more legroom in the front. Marco, I feel like, would have a higher

02:06:11 ◼   ► chance of being, depending on the size of the backseat. If it's a tiny backseat, everyone

02:06:14 ◼   ► would be uncomfortable that you should rotate. I would like to be in the passenger seat or

02:06:18 ◼   ► the driver seat. Also, for car sickness, I need to look out the front window. You can

02:06:22 ◼   ► do that from the backseat, but it's harder. I would probably be driving. The longer the

02:06:28 ◼   ► trip gets, the more I would be very open to passaging because I would be tired of driving,

02:06:34 ◼   ► but then I would be backseat driving from the passenger seat. Then in a really long

02:06:37 ◼   ► trip, I'd be sleeping in the back. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace,

02:06:41 ◼   ► Linode and Collide, and we will see you next week.

02:07:11 ◼   ► Bye.

02:07:18 ◼   ► [music]

02:07:25 ◼   ► I forgot to mention that when I was trying out mice, I had occasion, the first ever occasion,

02:07:51 ◼   ► to go into a Microsoft store. It's right near the Apple store in my mall. There were

02:07:56 ◼   ► lots of people in there, surprisingly. Really?

02:07:59 ◼   ► Not as many as the Apple store, but there was at least one person per table display

02:08:04 ◼   ► area kiosk thing, which is way more than I'd heard stories of. Again, it wasn't packed

02:08:09 ◼   ► like the Apple store where every table had people around it shoulder to shoulder, but

02:08:12 ◼   ► there were people there. I went in to feel the mice, as you do. I think they had all

02:08:19 ◼   ► of them set up. It's just their current product line, but that's how I got to try them out.

02:08:24 ◼   ► One of them was actually connected to a computer, so I got to use it and mess with the tracking.

02:08:27 ◼   ► Obviously, the computer's running Windows, yada yada. The only thing I was disappointed

02:08:31 ◼   ► is they didn't have any Xbox Elite controllers out anywhere. I wanted to try one of those.

02:08:36 ◼   ► I'd never used one in person. I thought it would be cool to try. Maybe it's because the

02:08:39 ◼   ► things come off magnetically and people will steal them out of the store. I'm not sure.

02:08:42 ◼   ► Anyway, it was pretty nice. People there were nice and helpful. Two thumbs up for the Microsoft

02:08:47 ◼   ► store.

02:08:48 ◼   ► I have never seen the Microsoft store in my mall have more customers than employees there.

02:08:55 ◼   ► This definitely had more customers than employees.

02:08:58 ◼   ► Usually at least two or three of the employees at the Microsoft store are playing the Minecraft

02:09:04 ◼   ► booth that's set up because they don't have anything else to do.

02:09:07 ◼   ► This thing had a booth that was set up. It was a Disney+ booth. The one right next to

02:09:11 ◼   ► the hallway, the mall thoroughfare, was a bunch of seats that were previously used for

02:09:18 ◼   ► VR or something.

02:09:22 ◼   ► It had a big Disney+ thing and they were showing episodes of The Mandalorian. It was like,

02:09:26 ◼   ► "Is there some deal with Microsoft and Disney for them to sell Disney+ subscriptions?" I

02:09:30 ◼   ► don't understand what they were demoing, but that's what it was.

02:09:32 ◼   ► There were tons of Xboxes set up too and kids playing games. Maybe that's why. Maybe it's

02:09:36 ◼   ► kids who wanted to play games and their parents were just milling around. I don't know.

02:09:39 ◼   ► The Surface Studios were there. I still think that's really cool.

02:09:43 ◼   ► Has that gone anywhere? It's a cool idea, but I haven't heard a thing about it since

02:09:48 ◼   ► launch.

02:09:49 ◼   ► I would love it if Apple made an iMac like that. A gigantic touchscreen that can go down

02:09:54 ◼   ► to drafting table mode and up into regular 5K screen mode. If the hinge feels good, the

02:09:59 ◼   ► form factor was cool, it's underpowered. It's overpriced. We've talked about it.

02:10:03 ◼   ► That's an interesting idea.

02:10:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:10:04 ◼   ► I don't know. It runs on Windows, so there's that.

02:10:07 ◼   ► Other than that, I looked at that and I looked at the iMac and the iMac looks like a previous

02:10:11 ◼   ► gen product. It's like, "Oh yeah, I remember when computers used to be just like an L-shaped

02:10:14 ◼   ► foot and then a screen with no touchscreen on it."

02:10:18 ◼   ► That's how, when I was in the Microsoft store looking at laptops last year, that's

02:10:21 ◼   ► how I felt with laptops too. You saw the super skinny bezel laptops with that one with the

02:10:27 ◼   ► pop-up camera and the F and keys. It really does make a lot of Apple designs look very

02:10:34 ◼   ► dated by comparison. Which is funny because it used to be the opposite.

02:10:36 ◼   ► Or at least less daring. It makes them look more conservative. You look at anything in

02:10:41 ◼   ► the Microsoft store and you see Apple's design from three years ago. The reason all

02:10:45 ◼   ► their keyboards look like they do, they borrow so much from Apple's design aesthetic, but

02:10:50 ◼   ► they're so much more daring.

02:10:52 ◼   ► Unfortunately it's more than three years ago though. It used to be that PC designers

02:10:58 ◼   ► looked, it looked like PC designs looked like Apple products from two or three years ago.

02:11:04 ◼   ► Now it looks like PC designs looked like Apple products ten years ago.

02:11:08 ◼   ► In two or three years?

02:11:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:11:10 ◼   ► Oh.

02:11:11 ◼   ► Or no, yeah, I guess in, yeah, you're right, it's like the other direction.

02:11:13 ◼   ► The keyboard aesthetic of this current keyboard, like that it's sitting in front of me now,

02:11:17 ◼   ► the flat keys on the thin key frame thing with the very squared off edges and like whatever,

02:11:23 ◼   ► Apple pioneered that aesthetic in their laptops and it spread through Microsoft's products.

02:11:27 ◼   ► And the aesthetic Microsoft has of like the gray on gray rectilinear brushed aluminum

02:11:33 ◼   ► thing owes a lot to Apple. But then Microsoft takes that ball and runs with it. Like the

02:11:37 ◼   ► Surface Studio, I mean the fact that it just looks like a big screen, like what do you

02:11:41 ◼   ► expect screens to look like? The fact that it has a black bezel around it, it looks a

02:11:45 ◼   ► little bit iMac-y, but that chrome hinge is like a remix of the arm on the, you know,

02:11:50 ◼   ► the flower iMac thing. And then the little case is like an oversized Mac mini in a different

02:11:56 ◼   ► color of beige. Like you see how it's a kind of a mishmash, but then the Surface stuff

02:12:01 ◼   ► is Microsoft's own thing that if anything Apple has followed along a little bit in sort

02:12:06 ◼   ► of squaring off the edges on the iPads and stuff. I don't know, it's a good mix. And

02:12:09 ◼   ► I think Microsoft, Microsoft like has taken up residence as a semi-premium PC vendor.

02:12:18 ◼   ► I'm not going to say the most premium PC vendor because there are fancy PCs and there are

02:12:22 ◼   ► ones with different aesthetics like the, you know, Alienware, Origin or whatever all these

02:12:26 ◼   ► gaming PC makers are. And some of that stuff is really cool too. But that's one of the

02:12:30 ◼   ► reasons I'm ordering this Microsoft mouse. I tried it and I'm like, you know what? These

02:12:33 ◼   ► buttons feel good. This wheel feels solid. This mode switch feels satisfying. Seemed

02:12:39 ◼   ► like a quality-made peripheral and it was priced like one. Like it's not a $30 mouse.

02:12:44 ◼   ► So I'm optimistic that I will actually like that product when I get it.

02:12:48 ◼   ► Yeah, Microsoft has always been really good about input devices. Like their keyboards

02:12:53 ◼   ► and mice have always been really rock solid.

02:12:57 ◼   ► I mean I hated the, you know, the beginning, the Microsoft's first peripherals, their

02:13:02 ◼   ► first mouse and their first keyboards, I hated those with a fiery passion. They felt cheap.

02:13:06 ◼   ► They weren't shaped the way I wanted them. But the new ones are more premium. They feel

02:13:11 ◼   ► solid or they cost five times as much, right? Like they've done, they've amplified themselves.

02:13:17 ◼   ► But those old peripherals had a particular style and tons of people love them. Like how

02:13:22 ◼   ► many people have Microsoft mice on their PCs for years and years? It was like defacto,

02:13:27 ◼   ► you know, the standard mouse that you would see on anyone who cared anything about mice,

02:13:31 ◼   ► you'd get the Microsoft one. PC vendors ship them. So, you know, they've just sort

02:13:35 ◼   ► of moved up market a little bit.

02:13:37 ◼   ► [BEEPING]