561: Market Your Bug

37:57But outside of the file copy to or from a fast or Thunderbolt external SSD, they just didn't see significant impact in real-world workflows. So all of us were getting our junk in a wad for no good reason. Well, anyway, this is an explanation of the bad ones on the M2, right? So why did Apple do that with the M2 ones? There was internal debate about it, and this is what they came up with. Like, okay, well, yes, it's half speed when you run a benchmark, but, like, who's running benchmarks? like where does it impact real thing and so the uh the little part here at the end here is outside a file copy to from a fast external ssd i think when people are waiting on disk io it's probably because they're doing a big copy so that's a pretty big exception to say oh it doesn't in fact affect real world scenarios except for when you're really waiting for a gigantic copy now obviously copies to itself on the internal drive don't count because apfs has those constant time you know instant clone copy and write magic things or whatever but if you're trying to pull something from a very fast ssd that's connected with thunderbolt or copy something to one that's when you're going to hit this bottleneck so the bottleneck was there but if you're doing pretty much anything other than that what this anonymous source from inside apple is saying is in our testing if you're doing like a real world task that is not a big file copy to an external drive you know again if you the diminishing returns and i still think it wasn't a good choice and whether apple revisited that decision which is why we don't have the problem on the m3 or whether we don't have the problem that empty merely because they bumped the base config to 512 either way the problem doesn't exist anymore so it's kind of a moot point but this just goes to show when apple does something like this they do debate it internally uh they may not come to the decision that we on the outside agree with but they they always do have their reasons.

39:41Let's talk about SSD prices. CG writes, I thought of this graph when Marco was talking about how cheap SSDs have gotten. If this trend continues, I'm hoping to go all SSD on my NAS in a few years. So this is from the Reddit community Data Hoarder, and they show a graph of SSD prices as compared to regular spinning platter hard disks. And back in the ye olden times of 2013, a spinning platter hard drive was about$36 a terabyte and a SSD was$625 a terabyte. However, here in 2023, we're down to, according to this chart, about$35 a terabyte for an SSD and$13 a terabyte for platters. And if you chart these lines out, somewhere around 2030-ish, SSDs could feasibly be even cheaper than spinning platters.

40:33I'll believe it when I see it, But if you follow the trend line, that's what the graph would indicate. And that's fascinating and certainly does not match what Apple is charging people like Marco for their SSD size increases. The SSD line is pretty steep. Like, we'll put a link in the notes so you can look at what the graph is. The reason they're going to meet is because the SSD line is going down faster than the hard drive line. I'm amazed at how linear both of them are. They're very, well, I guess this is a logarithmic graph. I think it is. But anyway. Yes. yeah yeah having them across in 2030 uh tune in in 2030 to see if that has actually happened but boy won't that be a glorious moment i mean even even just the ratio between them like you know back 10 years ago the ssd was almost 20 times more expensive per byte than the than the hard drive now it's like three times like it's it's still that's still a large multiple and if you're looking at a huge amount of storage but there's also a huge number of advantages for ssds and so So that actually might, now that it's, you know, quote, only three times the price per gig or whatever, that makes it a lot more compelling in a lot more situations.

41:34So this is great news. As long as you're buying anybody except Apple's SSDs, everyone else's SSDs in the market are getting remarkably affordable. Indeed. David Schaub writes, It's hard to believe that consumer Mac laptops have had the same base RAM since 2017. And the base RAM has only increased one time since 2011. So in the last 12 years, we've gotten one bump. And there is a logarithmic chart that we will put in the show notes that displays this. It's sad times, y 'all. Not good times. Yeah, if you look at this graph, like kind of the point of this graph is like, the graph kind of divided it down the middle the left half and the right half of the graph and the left half of the graph seems like we had pretty regular bumps the slope looks pretty good it's going up up up and then in the right half of the graph it's like a knee in the curve and it just levels off and it becomes like asymptotically approaching eight gigs or 8.1 gigs or whatever and david chop continues with the future one where he color codes the graph he says i don't think it's quite this simple but the graph has the left side colored in with green it says steve jobs because it goes from 1999 to 2011 when jobs died and then the right side is tim cook and in the tim cook era there has been one bump in base ram on consumer laptops and the steve jobs era of the same length of time there were one two three four uh now it doesn't mean that does that mean that tim cook uh unlike steve jobs keeps products around longer we know he does that but there are other things that may be factors here maybe it is the case that this this is just a natural curve of ram prices in general and they just you know the the graph of ram prices also takes a curve like this i think that's really true someone sent us a thing of ram uh prices but one thing about the ram price chart is it is not as smooth as the ssd and hard drive chart that we had previously there are there is actually a lot of volatility in ram prices and as the person who sent us the chart pointed out uh apple doesn't sort of buy the the ram prices at instant time they have to sort of lock in a order of however huge quantity and whatever the price is at that time which is sometimes advantageous to apple hey we just ordered you know 10 billion sticks of this kind of ram back when there were sticks uh at this price and that's great because now it's gone up since then but sometimes they lock in the price at a higher price and that's bad for them but either way what this graph shows it doesn't it doesn't really allow you to assign blame or say someone was doing something wrong or whatever, but it does show you that the feeling you have that RAM has not been going up as quickly in the past decade or so, that is a real feeling when it comes to Apple consumer laptop-based RAM.

44:16So hopefully we'll get that next bump soon. And by the way, the one bump that we had since 2011 was from four to eight. So I would love for the next bump to be from eight to 16, but we'll see how that goes. We are brought to you this week by notion notion combines your notes docs and projects all together in one beautiful space and now when you use notion ai it's even easier to do your most meaningful work notion ai can now give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your wiki projects docs and meeting notes notion's new ai feature called q a this is an assistant that can answer questions for instance what's what about next quarter's roadmap or you can find that marketing campaign proposal you're looking for.

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45:56Marco you and I both have received uh some new treats and I feel like we should talk about them so Marco tell me what you got and I don't know if you want to round robin it if you just want to start talking and I'll interrupt when necessary but tell me about what you bought I got the big one it's awesome I'm so happy with it it's so good talk I I did get the black um as mentioned last episode when I had it sitting next to me on my desk, but I had not yet actually moved into it yet. It is great. I've been doing a lot of overcast work the last couple of days, a lot of having to do clean builds to work around bugs in Xcode.

46:34So I've been doing a lot of clean builds during regular development that wouldn't be necessary in the Objective-C days, but they're certainly necessary now. But my computer is now much faster at doing those clean builds. I measured it. A clean build of Overcast went from about 19 seconds to about 11 seconds. So it's almost twice as fast at doing this surprisingly common and increasingly common task that makes me stop and wait. That's a pretty big gain for me. I'm very happy for that. The build time reduction alone would make this worthwhile to me at this point in my development life. Because, again, just how many times per day I'm having to do not only incremental builds, but especially clean builds, which are so time consuming.

47:15you know as i can as i push more and more of my code base into swift and swift ui it it just increases how much of that and how much stress is being put on the development process because you know for those of you who don't know like swift and swift ui are extremely complex languages at the compile side part of the reason why is that they are doing huge amounts of complexity at compilation time to save you from yourself, basically, to save you from different classes of bugs, to enforce different features and protections within the Swift type system. And the Swift language itself is also extremely complicated.

47:54And of course, SwiftUI really pushes everything to the limits with the way it abuses the language to achieve what it achieves, even if you're not using previews, which I actually am not using SwiftUI Live previews that much in my work so far. and if you do use SwiftUI previews it pushes it even harder whereas like you know if I compile Objective-C code today it builds in like a half a second and it's just done and you know if I make a mistake in Objective-C code it highlights it instantly it's so fast because Objective-C and C that it's based on are just much smaller and simpler languages to compile on modern hardware but as I'm pushing my code base into the more modern languages is it is costing me dearly in computing resources at development time of course that in the long run should should prove worthwhile in the sense that not only does it you know get my code into where it needs to be for the future but also it it should prevent and avoid a lot of bugs along the way that cost developer time which is much more precious than computing time but anyway all this is to say the more swift and swift ui i'm using and moving towards the greater my computing needs are and and the slower it is to build the app if i don't keep doing these upgrades every few years so that's that's the biggest justification i have for the upgrade and that again that alone cutting the build time almost in half after only two years like you know there's been a lot of talk about oh the m3 is only a little bit faster than the m2 which is actually not always the case we'll get to that but not always the case never the case yeah i don't yeah i've seen i've seen that same sentiment i do not understand it which is why i put these these graphs we'll put a link in the show notes to a video that you should watch but like when i was talking before about oh why should they compare it to the m2 because you want to know if like is this the year to buy the thing that got marco excited to buy uh this when he was not excited about the m2 is i mean i mean he just talked about it he's the main thing he does all day that he waits for is now twice as fast like if that's not enough you know forget about synthetic benchmarks or whatever that's like him doing real world stuff but if you care to look at the sympathetic benchmarks uh this max tech video has a whole bunch of them single core uh you'll see the m3 line the m2 line is barely past the m1 line uh the m3 line is significantly past multi-core the m3 is like double the m2 max the m3 max is like double the m2 max it's not even close like m1 to m2 tiny little increase m3 twice as fast right cinnabent score same thing the logic in the logic test it's like three times as fast as the m2 max in the logic test it's faster than the m1 ultra this is if you want is this the one to buy is this a good year yeah the m3 is a good if you're buying the highest of the high end uh like marco is the m3 is a good year to buy so i think marco was very wise and casey very wise to skip the m2 not because the m2 was bad the m2 was great it was the best that you could get but if you already have an m1 an m2 was a smaller upgrade the m3 depending on what you're doing could be a monstrous upgrade the m3 max by the way i'm talking about not just the plain m3 of the pro we take this for granted now because apple silicon era is is just so incredibly good like it's so bountiful with upgrades for us that that seem to have basically no downsides except SSD costs.

51:18But it wasn't that long ago that, you know, back in the tail end of the Intel days, and not even just the tail end, like the whole rear third of the Intel days, getting almost 50 % improvement gain in two years, that doesn't happen anymore. Like, that hasn't happened in the PC chip world in a long time. For most of the last decade or more we'd be lucky to get maybe 15 of a gain over that same time span and in like sheer cpu performance during that time like again 15 between generations maybe and even then it was usually achieved only with like some real thermal uh you know aggression and to be clear on the for the single core that's kind of what the m3 max gets over it's like 17 faster in single core than the m2 max uh but again if you look at the difference between the m1 and the m2 max it was not 15 so 15 you know 17 single core for you know over a computer that came out in january and now we're getting into november is still pretty good but the big wins come from like okay but what about the multi-core and to a lesser extent some of the gpu stuff and that's what like you know you might think of like oh compiler isn't that a single core thing no there's plenty of things to be compiled and so you can use those cores because each core is compiling a different file and many files make up an application in case that's not clear if you're not a software developer that's why you know marco is not getting 15 faster compiles because it is a multi-core type of thing and we do pay a price for it like the like the prices of the m3 max can use at peak like 50 watts ish and the m2 max we're using maybe 35 37 watts there's a little bit more power being used a little bit more heat being generated but nothing that i think the cooling system can't handle yeah that is one area that it's a little too soon to say i mean i've never heard the fan so far in the week that I've had this.

53:11It's a little too soon to say whether that will be a noticeable difference here. Because I noticed the same thing. I believe it was an Antec who had the power consumption graphs of the various max chips over time. They are ramping up the power usage at peak. I got to say, I was not happy to see that in those graphs because I'm a little worried now. You can't get blood from a stone. If you want it to be faster and you want to have more performance cores doing all that extra work, they have to use more power. but like it's it we're not sure about the efficiency but that was the point that was made by someone whose name i forget and a past episode was that the m2 despite using more heat than the m1 was still more efficient because it would be done with the same amount of work faster and i would imagine that's also true of the m3 max i hope so and and probably um but but certainly um it remains to be seen like you know the m1 max was so glorious because that computer just never spun the fan up.

54:04And I still am so proud of the M1 Max MacBook Pro and so baffled by the M1 Max Max Studio because the Max Studio was frankly embarrassed by the MacBook Pro. That first gen Max Studio had that weird thermal design where the fan was audible at all times whereas the MacBook Pro had the same processor as the base Max Studio and was never audible in a laptop. the problem the problem with the the max studio was that even at max load the fans were the same speed as when it was idle and they were like the culling system was so over so like so over provisioned but then it never got quiet enough for my taste anyway right that the you know so like you'd run a benchmark and it'd be like how how fast are the fans going compared to when it was idle same speed like they just they didn't need to go any faster but it was still annoying Anyway, they fixed that in the M2 Mac Studio generation.

55:01So if you're worried about a Mac Studio, I'm assuming that it also won't be, that it'll be fine in the M3 generation as well. Yeah, I would assume so as well. But anyway, I mean, I am extremely happy with this so far. Even the black is nice. I've had it now in more varied lighting conditions. And. you know all the all like the youtubers they're still complaining like well it's not that dark honestly it's pretty dark like i maybe if you are in a video studio with spotlights pointing at it maybe it's not that dark it's pretty dark i'm very happy with it i um you know i don't think i will go black for all my computers in the future but i like this one being black as just like a different fresh new take on things um and yeah i was working earlier today like in laptop mode on a couch in the sun using the built-in speakers to play fish which are surprisingly decent like it it was great i was getting a lot of work done once again i am very very glad that i got the 16 inch just because i need as much screen space as possible also i you know based partially on my need for screen space but also on my preference for low noise it does i'm i'm a little concerned about fan noise on the 14-inch models.

56:19If you spec them up with the M1 Max chip, that's a lot of thermal load. Because, again, keep in mind, they've increased the thermal caps on these chips of how much power they use at peak. They've increased that from the M1 generation through the M2 and the M3 now. So if you're worried about fan noise, I might advise you to either not get one of the big CPUs or not get the 14-inch. Because I think the 16 can save you there a little bit. But also, the 16-inch has a much bigger battery, and so that's also nice if you're ever working on battery for a long time. But at the end of the day, no matter what the trade-offs were, I'd get the 16-inch for the screen size alone.

56:59It's a big, beautiful, awesome screen. All right, so I need to defend people who like laptops that are not aircraft carriers. I have. They're not that different in size. It's a difference. It's not like the 17 was back in the day. That thing was a monster, but it's different. That thing was awesome. It's close. I mean, 16-inch, like it's, you know, what happened to the 15? Well, the 17 had a lot more bezel to get, you know, around that 17. That's true. I think it weighed almost twice as much. Those things were seriously such beasts. I bought a 14-inch M1, excuse me, M3 Max. So the computer I just told everyone not to buy.

57:35Yeah, that's correct. I bought it with 64 gigs of RAM because I just didn't feel like I needed more than that. I'm sure it wouldn't have hurt, but I decided to spend that money elsewhere. And specifically, I decided to spend it on their 8-terabyte SSD because I keep my entire photo library on my Mac. And that's something like a terabyte and a half. And then you put in a few Xcodes and a few Xcode simulators or iOS simulators or what have you. And you start filling stuff up pretty quick. So that's what I got. And I got the Space Black because how could you not? And this thing is incredible. It just came in Monday afternoon, and I'd like to talk about in a moment what I did with it once it got here in terms of loading it up.

58:16But putting that aside for a moment, I haven't had the time to do very much coding work since it came in because I recorded analog yesterday morning and didn't have a whole lot of time after that. And then I was prepping for ATP today, didn't have a whole lot of time after that. and so I haven't done a lot of coding work but in general this thing is just like a faster peppier even better version of what I already had and I didn't have any complaints about what I already had it was already really freaking great and again I came from an m1 max 64 gigs four terabytes um I love this computer I have heard the fans the only time I have heard the fans would you you like to guess what i was doing running migration assistant i don't think i heard the fans then and you're spoiling my moment here in a minute but no that's not what i was doing what would i casey list be doing that would cause the fans there it is i was doing a transcode and ffmpeg and those fans got screaming but i mean whatever that's fine i don't mind if the fans scream when i'm doing a transcode and ffmpeg i forget exactly what i was doing but i think i taking something from um h.264 to h.a.vc you know h.265 and i was doing it at something like 15 frames a second oh what was it it was 15x not 15 frames a second 15x so 15 times normal speed it was bananas how fast this was was that using uh i don't know what the options are who does know what the options are but anyway were you using the ones that use the hardware encoders or were you not using the ones that use hardware encoders i understand the question i actually don't know the answer i was using lisa melton's scripts if memory serves and so i think those will try to use hardware encoders if possible i am very not confident that i'm telling i'm just wondering because like if the fans spin up like you think the fans wouldn't spin up if it's just using this tiny corner of the chip that is just the you know the fixed function h265 encoder or whatever yeah i honestly i again i understand the question i i don't know um you should just look up at your menu bar you have those eternal cpu usage bars and say hey are a bunch of cores lit up or is it just you know anyway um yeah in the benchmarking like you would see less of this back and when they were benchmarking the m1 max and the m2 max with uh but when they do the m2 max versus m3 max test you can see that you can get the fans spin up on both of them they're just laptops right you know they just they will spin their angry little fans and spew out hot air from their two little vents uh but most people are not doing things that will torture your uh your soc like that but if you do be aware that you are going to hear those fans when you're using 50 watts yeah but uh otherwise ignore marco's propaganda i was doing a little bit of xcode uh remotely this morning i went to uh my beloved wegmans to do you know my atp research then i had a little bit of time to do some xcode work no fans don't don't listen to his propaganda people the 14 spot i do i haven't yet seen a good 14 versus 16 but for the m1 generation 14 versus 16 the 16 did have better cooling capacity which doesn't make a lot of sense to me like because when you look at the teardowns you're like it looks like they have the same heat pipes the same fans the same like why should it make such a difference just because there's like a little bit more lateral room in the 16 inch but it did in the m1 generation so i haven't yet seen uh m3 test but yeah i don't i don't actually know if the 14 inch is going to have appreciably worse or noisier cooler than the 16, but it's a possibility.

1:01:39I mean, I'm guessing it's going to be worse, but not in a way that most people will typically run into. And that's probably fair as well. I'd like to spend at least a minute talking about what I did when the computer came in. In years past, I've always done a fresh install. Unlike Windows, which last I used Windows, which admittedly was like 10 plus years ago, every six months you needed to start from scratch. It's just the rule of Windows. Every six months, you start from scratch. You move everything somewhere else, you start anew. That's just the way it works. And I have not had that experience with the Mac.

1:02:14There have been some times where I feel like a reset in start anew has been necessary, but I can count those times on probably one hand, and I've been using a Mac for like 15 years now, something like that. I typically will do a fresh install, but this time I decided, you know what, I'm going to try migration assistant. And thankfully, I had my friend Marco here to run through the gauntlet of migration assistant first and instruct me on all the ways I need to save myself if things go wrong. That being said, I did, I think the same thing that Marco did, and it pretty much just worked. So what I did was I used, my cable is white and it's not braided, but I think sometimes it just happens to you.

1:02:56Yeah, sometimes it just happens. I used the, it's an Apple cable, and I think it is a Thunderbolt 4 cable. I looked to put a link in the show notes just a moment ago, and I couldn't find it, but I found what I think is the new version, which is the Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable. This is a one-meter-long cable, so about a three-foot-long cable. That is$70. $70. It's bananas expensive. But that being said, when I was doing this migration, it took a while for it to admit to me slash itself that it was connected via Thunderbolt. So I connected via Thunderbolt from one laptop to the other. And it really was not happy at first with doing that.

1:03:38And I wonder if, Marco, you might have bailed a little too soon on getting that process to work. I wish I should have taken better notes. It's not that I was rushing. I just didn't think to take copious notes as to what I was doing. But as you're going through Migration Assistant, which if you're not familiar, it's an Apple thing where you start basically kind of sort of a server on the old computer and you start a client on the new computer, That's probably not strictly accurate, but you get the idea. And it'll transfer all your stuff from one to the other. And when you're doing it on the target computer, on the new computer, it really, really wants you to sign on to Wi-Fi or perhaps, you know, if you have an Ethernet connection, it really wants you to get on the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

1:04:20And I did neither. So I just kept saying like, no, thank you. No, thank you. No, uh-uh. Nope. Not now. Not going to do it. eventually it finally relented and then i saw that connection detail screen that you can pull up where it says okay here's all the ways i can connect from one from the source to the target mac and sure enough it says casey's macbook pro or max book pro is what i call the old one ethernet ethernet on this mac which by the way the only thing connected other than power to the new one was this thunderbolt cable so i guess it's some sort of like ethernet over thunderbolt or or what have you.

1:04:54Anyway, it's sampled at 37 megabytes a second. Peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, surprisingly sampled at 68 megabytes a second. Not sure how, but hey, that's what it says. The Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt on this Mac, 882 megabytes per second, which to be fair, as I watched on and off. Wait, that's all? Mine was 2000 when I got Thunderbolt working. Oh, really? Wow. Then maybe my cable should be updated to a Thunderbolt Pro cable. But yeah, that's all I saw. And I saw a max of around then, although it would definitely dip lower. It took, I would say, a couple of hours, two or three hours. And I think I had something to the order of two or three terabytes in use on the old machine.

1:05:32But once I finally convinced it to frickin' use Thunderbolt, it flew. Like, it went real fast. And apparently it would have gone faster if I had a better cable. I didn't even realize. But it was fast. I mean, it might have picked up speed as it was going, too. Like, here's the thing about those rated speeds. It's not just copying one giant media file, right? So you're not going to see those speeds because what it's doing is making literally millions of tiny files and directories. And that I know there's not a read head moving back and forth. And I know random access is, you know, not that much slower on an SSD than sort of sequential access.

1:06:08But there is more stuff for it to do in terms of I have to read all these different files and all the metadata about the files and all their different attributes. And then I have to write that out. And then the other thing has to receive that and get that information and write it out. And so basically the rule of thumb, which was way more true with spinning disks than it is with SSDs, but it is still true to some degree with SSDs, is that doing tons and tons of little files is way, way, way, way slower than doing one gigantic file. And doing migration assistance is going to let you copy tons and tons of little files.

1:06:37So you're not going to get the full rated speed, but it will go a lot faster if you have a Thunderbolt connection or something similar. Yeah. And like I said, I didn't sit there and watch the whole thing because it was literally hours. but I did take a couple of photographs because I don't think I could take screenshots because you can't really do anything while this is going on. But I have a photo that I took and I'm about two thirds of the transfer done. So there's about a third remaining. And at this point I had transferred four and a half million files. There was an hour and five minutes remaining at 551 megabytes a second.

1:07:07So yeah, it's a lot of stuff. But that being said, it seemed to work lickety split. I got, you know, I, it would said it was all done. I start the new machine. I had to do some stuff that it was fairly annoying. Like I had to redo the whole dance with the audio hijack audio capture engine and like get that to re-initialize itself. I did get all the prompts that Snell, that Jason has been understandably complaining about because he's right to complain about it. You know, oh, this wants to look at the desktop. Oh, now it wants to look at your downloads. Oh, now it wants to do this. Oh, this other thing wants to look at the desktop.

1:07:42Can you do that. Hey, well, this, what about this? What about this? What about this? And it was not quite to the level that Jason had, but it was not great. The only real problem I had, and perhaps this was my own lack of patience, I'm not sure, but I went to start grabbing GIFs to send in like messages, whatever. And I happened to use Alfred as my launcher. And Alfred lets you do very quick and easy file system searches. That's not unique to Alfred. And I would type in the name of a GIF that I knew I had, and I would get nothing. I was like, huh, that's weird. I wonder why. And I thought, well, maybe Alfred has, no.

1:08:20Alfred's just asking Spotlight. So what's going on with Spotlight? So then I tried Spotlight, and I tried typing in the same file name, and it's like, nope, I got nothing. I don't know what you're talking about. So I tried via the system preference or system setting or whatever to try to get it to re-index my home folder, and I couldn't get Spotlight or MDUtil. Why are you telling it to re-index? It has to index it first, once, right? I agree. So maybe it hadn't finished the first pass yet. Which is why I thought maybe this was user error, but I gave it about a day before I gave up on the fact that it hadn't indexed yet.

1:08:57And I tried doing this in system settings. It didn't get it to go. Eventually, I found the MDUtil or whatever it is where you tell it, all right, here's what I want you to do. Do it now. and sure enough within 20 minutes of me saying go ahead and doing whatever incantation i needed to with mdutil to get the re-index to happen then everything worked pretty much straight away you passed it util util he also said straight away we're gonna call him on his british as a man his pronunciation uh yeah at least hey at least you have a command my utility unlike face recognition and photos at least you can look up what the the mdutil uh incantation is to it's kind of weird that it didn't do it after a day but it does remind me of like the photo stuff where it's like hey laptop you've been here for a day when are you going to get around to that first spotlight pass and it's like oh my i don't feel like the time is right yet you can go to the command line and say no the time is right do it now exactly so that was the biggest one of my problems with spotlight not seeming to want to re-index but now that that's done pretty much everything has worked lickety-split i'm sure there's something i'm forgetting that that i needed to tweak or fiddle with.

1:10:02But almost everything worked. I'm sorry, not straight away, right away, John. Thank you. And it's been really great. And I think part of the reason I was willing to do Migration Assistant rather than start anew was that there was no nagging software issue that I've been too lazy to properly deal with on the old machine. Everything seemed fine. I had nothing I was running away from or anything like that. And so if you're in a situation where you don't have any complaints with your current system, Migration Assistant gets two thumbs up from me. Marco, do you want to talk at all about what you ran into, or do we just want to move along?

1:10:35I mean, so yeah, so I just had a bit of trouble getting Migration Assistant to use the Thunderbolt connection automatically. I was able to solve it within, you know, a half hour or 45 minutes of random troubleshooting and trying different things that people on the internet suggested. this was the first time migration assistant has ever not been just super easy and automatic for me usually I'm a migration assistant at Unicorn so I figure after all these years of using it one time I had to spend a half hour getting Thunderbolt to connect oh well, there are worse things, overall it has worked fine for me every other time I did learn that target disk mode is kind of gone I thought that might be easier to make the old Mac go in target disk mode and just plug Thunderbolt cable in that way.

1:11:24And that doesn't work anymore. There is, Apple Silicon Macs do have a like disk source mode. You gotta like reboot into that recovery environment and launch it from there. But the migration assistant process doesn't recognize those. So like not only does it not work over Thunderbolt, like it doesn't work at all. Migration assistant just, you cannot use it with target disk mode if the source Mac is an Apple Silicon Mac anymore. That's just unsupported now. So that was kind of a bummer. But otherwise, I did get it working through migration system on both computers eventually. And then it was very fast, and I ran it overnight when I went to bed.

1:12:01Did you have Ethernet, or did you get on the Wi-Fi at all during that process? So the first couple times I did it, where I wasn't using Thunderbolt correctly, I had told the computer during its little activation step, here's my wi-fi network yeah please proceed whenever i would start it that way it would it would never use thunderbolt i would even try like running ethernet between the two computers and that would work uh but it would never switch over to thunderbolt when that was an option what what i ended up having to do was on the source mac before i went into migration assistant set up a set up a thunderbolt bridge interface in the network settings give it a static ip address and then set up internet sharing to share my Wi-Fi to my house over the Thunderbolt bridge.

1:12:49Then with the new computer, have it reset itself back to its initial state, which it makes very easy, fortunately. When you do that, if you have the Thunderbolt bridge with internet sharing connecting to the new computer, the new computer won't ask you for your Wi-Fi information. It will activate using the shared internet connection over that Thunderbolt cable to the old computer. and so it bypasses wi-fi activation completely and then the only networking that computer knows at that point is thunderbolt and then it works that way every single time so if you happen to have trouble getting thunderbolt recognized um have it reset itself like there's the apple silicon max have this thing during setup where you can say f reset everything back to its initial state and so you do that like if it fails you do that and then it's uh it's a very simple process once you learn that thunderbolt bridge and internet sharing over thunderbolt bridge trick um there's probably a simpler way to get it to work i mean many people have reported that theirs worked just like yours just totally fine perfectly you just plug the cable in and it finds it and i was trying everything i tried i i found every thunderbolt cable in my house which i mean there's not that many of them there's like three but i tried them all i tried different configurations i tried different ports i tried like which computer do you plug into the cable first when do you plug it i tried everything before that could not get it to work how long did you wait to casey's point i had seen i know this is old data probably about intel max or whatever but like sometimes you'd plug in the faster thing and it wouldn't find the faster interface immediately but eventually it would find it so how long did you let it sit there to see if it's going to find it the longest i let it sit for was about five or ten minutes i like you know went to go brush my teeth and wash up and everything and then i can't and it hadn't found it by then so i figured it wasn't going to it and i wanted to go to bed so i i made it work so i'm like i'm not gonna say i'm not gonna let this go you know 75 hours or anything i'm gonna make this go quickly or not at all so anyway got it to work eventually it's now amazing and i'm very very happy yeah the only thing i would say is i did not give the computers any other mechanism to talk to each other other than the thunderbolt cable i guess they may have been able to like sort out and and it seems like they might they sort of did sort out a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi.

1:15:02But when I talked earlier about the Ethernet connection, there was no Ethernet connected to the target computer, the new computer. Granted, my old one was in my normal setup with two displays and Ethernet and so on and so forth. But the new computer literally only had power in the Thunderbolt cable. I never plugged in Wi-Fi information. I never plugged in an Ethernet adapter. It was just the Thunderbolt. And it took a lot of no reallys and no thank you, no, not Wi-Fi. No, yes, I'm sure. But eventually, I don't know if it just needed some time to John's point to do the handshake before it got satisfied and was happy with me or what the deal was.

1:15:37But eventually it did give up on having me do the more conventional approach. And once it did that, everything was golden. So yeah, these new computers, I love mine. I can't stress enough, I loved, but I still do. I say it as though it's dead. but I love my M1 Max MacBook Pro. It is such a phenomenal computer. It is so unreal to have the power of an iMac Pro in your bag. And as much as I'm snarking with Marco about, you know, 16 versus 14, ultimately either one is fine. Like it doesn't matter. These machines are so frigging good. The M1s were, and now you're just cranking it up even more. So now instead of an iMac, an old and busted, you know intel computer because who would want to use those now instead of that in my bag i've got a mac studio in my bag you know what i mean and and the screen is so good and i do feel like it's probably i'm probably you know incepting myself or i'm telling myself that it's true but i do feel like i noticed in in the brighter um area and wegmans today that it was that the standard def stuff was just a touch brighter than i'm used to that the screens are phenomenal the keyboards are great.

1:16:49It's got plenty of ports. Everything about these machines is so freaking great. I cannot stress enough. If you have the means, I highly suggest you picking one up. And honestly, even an M2 or M1 MacBook Pro, particularly an M2 or M1 Max MacBook Pro, they are so, so good. We are in such a golden time for the Mac, and I'm so thankful for it and so in love with it. This is such a great time. No matter what you get, even if you don't want a Pro, The M2 MacBook Air is great. Aaron has an M1 MacBook Air. Other than not having MagSafe, which bums me out a little bit, that's great. Like, all of these machines are so freaking good right now.

1:17:29If you're still on Intel, if you're still on Intel, for the love of all that's good and holy, treat yourself first to an ATP bit of merch. But after you buy your ATP merch, treat yourself to a computer because they are so, so good now. And if you can find like a used M1 Max MacBook Pro, that is probably a steal now. Because no, it's not going to be as fast as the M3 is going to be twice as fast or whatever. But like it's such a good computer and you're getting such a bargain. It's kind of like buying a very fancy car. They depreciate so fast. The higher ends ones depreciate so fast. So it may be hard to find like, you know, an M1 MacBook Air for one third of the price.

1:18:09But I bet you can find a well configured M1 Max for one third of what it was new. i know everyone's like the you know the black friday sales to find like oh i want an m3 max for 150 off look look at the m1 maxes macbook pro it's like they're such a good deal now because you know the m2 is here and the m3 is here but the m1 max to marco's point was such a great machine and if you can get it for a bargain especially one that's specced up because that's the whole thing like you know some someone paid an extra 800 for that ram you're not going to pay an extra 800 for that config when you buy it two years after it was introduced so hunt for those bargains yeah Yeah, that's a good point.

1:18:45Similar to cars, you pay a lot for those options at purchase, but at resale, they're worth a lot less. And so similar to that, as Norman was saying, when you buy a used computer or even just a closeout last year's model computer that's still technically new but just not the newest model, you pay a lot less for those RAM and SSD upgrades than they do when they're new. that could like i i personally i would rather have a used m1 max macbook pro than a brand new like you know low spec you know m m3 macbook air yeah like base model like where you get like if you could if you could get an m1 max with like you know four terabytes versus an m3 max with 512 go to the m1 max all day like you know you know the base the base config when you're especially on a laptop where you're constrained on ram or storage that's going to annoy you so much more than the speed will thrill you like so get bm1 max with with the the more ssd and the more ram yep yeah and i'm i'm just so happy again being in the laptop world like right now you know honestly i feel like if i was a big fan of apple's desktops right now i would feel a little left out and and i i was in the desktop world for so long i know what that's like um but you know the reality is apple's desktop market um it feels kind of like the the ipad multitasking market where it's like here's here's the thing that some people care a lot about and it seems like it seems like if you care a lot about apple desktops you care more about apple desktops than apple cares about apple desktops i don't think that's entirely true like we focus a lot about how they really screwed up with the mac pro and i kind of agree but the fact that the studio exists is such a great change from before it existed like because you're just saying desktops you're not saying mac pro right if the desktop i'm saying i'm saying including both because i think what i'm getting at is like right now like right now the mac pro or the macbook pro has all the best processors in the apple lineup for for for most metrics like the the 14 and 16 inch macbook pro like the m3 max is actually better in certain ways than the M2 Ultra.

1:21:01And so right now, if you want the fastest Mac at certain things, at many things, it's a laptop. And I feel like if you're in the desktop world, the Mac Studio is always kind of playing second fiddle to the MacBook Pro now. It's just a staggered release schedule. I mean, when the Ultra comes out, when the Ultra came out of the Mac Studio, it was twice as fast because it had two Macs in it. it was just straightforward and you got if you got the desktop you got to enjoy that twice as fastness until the m3 max comes out but guess what there's going to be two m2 m3 max is stuck together in an m3 ultra and then you'll be twice as fast again it's a staggered release and you're right right now m3 max is the fastest and for most things except for gpu stuff where the ultras tend to still win uh but that will change when they come out so yeah it would be great if they were all put out together especially since like they do sell max studios with the m3 max why don't we have that now oh i don't know they don't have enough of them to go around they sell more laptops or whatever but but i honestly don't feel like the mac desktop line is particularly neglected i feel like the mac pro is in a bad spot but the fact that there's the mini and the studio is an embarrassment of riches in recent decades when it comes to desktop macs that don't have a screen you know what i mean so i'm not i'm not super mad about it and you know i think an m3 max or an m3 ultra mac studio is going to be a pretty amazing desktop machine all things considered so uh yeah right now uh laptops laptops has always been in a great place and right now due to the staggered release schedule and the fact that they're not giving you a mac studio with the m3 max like i kind of understand because they want to roll out the max and ultra in the studio at the same time but i don't think the desktop line is is neglected the mac pro is kind of sad over there yeah no it's more it's more just like you know there is there's going to be you know if they if they continue this release pattern then there's always going to be this like six or eight month uh span where the mac where the macbook pro is in some ways better than the mac studio yeah but that conditional you put at the beginning there i think for the first three generations of apple silicon what we've learned is that it's very difficult to discern any kind of pattern is it because just well this you know stuff happens or whatever but boy the m1 to m2 to m3 has not been a regular predictable cadence of anything.

1:23:16It's been so weird. Like in the M1, like, okay, it's the first one. It's going to be weird, but then we'll, then we'll get a rhythm going. Nope. Just, you never know what's going to happen. The three nanometer thing threw everything off. The fact that we got M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max at the same time where we had never gotten that before. So who the heck knows what it's going to be like in M4, but I guess we'll find out. All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Richard Levitt writes, what exactly is a neural engine? I imagine it to be something akin to database search optimizations, but it seems it must be more than that.

1:23:46So what's going on there? Yeah, this is a good question. The short answer is, for me personally, I don't know. But the long answer is, I don't need to know specifics because I know what it is in general. We'll put a link in the show notes to, I thought we had a link to a video about this. Maybe we just have a link to the documentation on GitHub to Google's TPU tensor processing unit, which is a similar type of thing. here's what you need to know about the neural engine and lots of things that are on the soc that have names that are not like the cpu uh or gpu to a lesser extent um when you have something that you know you're going to need to do a lot of and it's very regular you could have the general purpose cpu do it because hey the general purpose cpu can do all the math it can do multiplication division addition and subtraction it can do bit shifts it can do masks it can do all of those things and it can do a bunch of them at the same time and it can reorder instructions so it can keep those execution units running it can do it's a general purpose processor but what if you know actually what i'm going to need to do is take this huge list of numbers and add every single one of them in a particular pattern to this other huge list of numbers and then put the result in another huge list and i'm going to need to do that just so many times you can't even imagine you could send all those numbers to the cpu here's not here's a number number one from the third set here's the first one from the second one please add them together take the result write it back into memory this location okay here's the next number and you can have five of them going at once because you have five execution units in the cpus and you're going through well we have vector instructions i mean we ever since mmx yeah so cpus also have a thing you know that's like simd a single instruction multiple data it's like do i need to add individual numbers what if i could add together five numbers at the same time i'll just pack all those five numbers into a single thing send it to the simdi engine here's five numbers and five other numbers in a single operation five those five numbers all get added to the other five numbers i take those five results and put them in a new location that's five times faster that's amazing simdi every cpu core has some kind of thing i forget what they call it for arm isn't like neon instructions or something it's not yeah um but that's still the general purpose cpu but you're like no you don't understand i don't have like five numbers to add together i have like 300 000 numbers to add together and you're going to be doing literally the same operation to all of them right let's say it's like matrix operations which you can look up on a wikipedia page whether there's various operations you can perform to matrices it's there's a rule book you take this from there and that from there and do that into this and put the results over there and you just do it over and over again so the neural engine a lot of the algorithms that you have to run for these you know machine learning neural processing inference whatever things are like that you're going to have to do something over and over again to just so many numbers and doing five of them at once or ten of them at once that's not really going to cut it the tpu i'll try to find the link of the video for the show notes but the tpu stuff here's some specs obviously the tpu is an entire gigantic thing that only does stuff kind of like the neural engine does but it's custom designed to just do this one thing so instead of having a one or two little adders and they pull from memory and they add the numbers together and write the result back into memory they sit there and say all right give me the first hundred thousand numbers and give me this give me the other group of hundred thousand numbers now i'm going to smush them all together and now i'll write the result and that's all they do they can't do any other they're not like general purpose processors they're like they're made to do this right so here's some numbers from the tpu thing uh which again is much bigger than neural engine but it gives you an idea of the scales here the tpu can do 250 000 operations per clock cycle so your general purpose cpu you turn the crank one clock cycle goes by it's like i added five numbers together good job general purpose ctu i added 250 000 numbers together in that same clock cycle cycle and the other thing is how many operations per instruction 256 million operations per instruction you can send it one instruction that says hey take these 256 million take these you know 175 million things and like such because they know it's like i'm not going to send you to these onesie twosie i'm not going to pack them into groups of five or ten to do simd i'm just going to tell you there's 100 million numbers over here and another 100 million numbers over here smush them together and write the new 100 million out in the other place ready go one instruction 250 ,000 operations per cycle that's what the neural engine does obviously not on that scale because it's a tiny little thing but it has functional units that are designed to do the specific thing that they know you need to do for various machine learning algorithms and those things need to do some brain dead simple thing over and over again on huge lists of number and They do not want to be fed those numbers onesie twosie.

1:28:20They want to get them all at once, smush them together through this gigantic, massively parallel machine, like in a single turn of the crank, and then do that over and over again. That's what the neural engine. Now, what are those operations? What is it doing? Is it doing multiply, accumulate? Is it doing matrix transformations? I don't actually know, right? But it doesn't matter. That's what this thing, that's what these functional units do. And it's even more kind of like, not brain dead, but like simple and parallelizable than things like the H.265 encoder, because that has a job to do, like encoding and decoding video, but that is a much more complicated job than what these things do.

1:28:53These are just like, think of them as just huge rows of these machines and the one big crank at the end and you turn it and it doesn't process five widgets, it processes hundreds or thousands of widgets all in each turn of the crank. That's where you get the bang for the buck for the neural engine. Mike Hoffman writes, with regard to Apple beta OSs, how often is it appropriate to report the same bug? Do you report it after every update or do you wait until the GM release and report it again if it still exists. Well, since Apple's feedback mechanism is totally fucking broken, then you should do it hourly because that's the only way you have a chance of them noticing it.

1:29:27So hourly is our answer. Moving on, Santiago writes. The answer, so here's the thing. It depends who you ask. It's difficult to know what the right thing to do is. I'll give you an example of my window dragging bug, which continues to drag on, ha ha. Ha ha. I'll tell you what I chose to do there and how that's working out for me. What I chose to do is what I usually choose to do is file a bug. And I've heard very often from people inside Apple that if some if the conditions change in some way, it might be a good idea to file a new report. Maybe the old one got chucked in the trash can. Maybe the old one didn't have enough information.

1:30:07Maybe the other one is caught in, you know, limbo somewhere or whatever. Like say something has changed. There's a new beta that comes out. or in my case you've learned new information about the bug oh i found a better isolation uh i was mistaken about what i thought caused it i've i filed the bug against the wrong component when you do a bug report it makes you pick like what is this bug about and it's a pop-up menu and there is an other choice but i always fear the other choice was now i'm like at the whims of whoever like like triages the others but then the other choices are like i don't know what is like window dragging needless to say there's no choice for window drag there's a system performance choice which is kind of good but like when i'm filing a bug against if you're filing a bug against an app there's probably a choice for like photos or whatever but anyway it's hard to know where you're filing it and so if you if you learn something new about this bug and you say like oh i thought it was a bug in x but it's really a bug in y file a new one if a new version of the os comes out and it's still happening in that new os file a new one partially because i imagine and that if there's a bug filed against the os that they just released those get more priority than bugs that you filed against the previous version because it's like ah that was the old version we're not looking at those bugs so much anymore but oh we just released a new version and there's a bug against that maybe that gets looked at more the downside of that approach is as i found out with my window dragging bug from what i have heard work is happening on my window dragging bug but it's happening attached to one of my older reports from an older version which is a shame because all my new good information is in the new reports like as i've learned more and i've refiled against new versions of the us but it happened to get picked up a while ago on one of the early versions so now i have my effort i was going to say the feedback scattered around but let's be honest there's no feedback right but there is a tiny bit apparently some metadata changed recently on one of them that said that a fix is coming or whatever but anyway um i haven't gotten any replies on any of them by filing multiple reports you're not sure which one of those if any is actually being worked on by apple so and if they are working on one maybe they're not working on the one that you're putting your effort into you keep adding new comments oh i've discovered new things here's a better sample project here's a new screen recording here's a new sys diagnose oh the new version came out and i retested and it's still there and i filed a new bug you may think you're doing important work but it could be that that bug is being worked on with by the like the second one you filed like a year ago so as with all things i don't know how best to handle this but i would say filing new bugs is probably a good idea because if you filed one two versions of mac os ago you know like i hope they get to that one eventually if it still exists refile against the new os if a new beta comes out and it's still there if you don't refile add a new comment that says hey just so you know i tested as the new beta and it's still there is that the right or best thing to do we do what we can out here we throw stuff over the wall and we hope it sticks but i think the only thing i can definitively say is the wrong thing to do is assume that the one bug you filed a while ago is sufficient because it almost certainly isn't yeah i mean this is just so a long time ago a deep cut on this show maybe um i discussed a a challenge that i had against one of apple's apis where my solution was to build an automatic kicking machine which is this was a terrible hack that like when you're exporting a share clip from overcast um sometimes the video encoding api that i'm using to generate the shared clip video files um you know some deep apple api Sometimes it just hangs.

1:33:30And the only solution is to just cancel it and restart it. And so I actually built this process in the clip sharing feature where it observes the progress. And if the progress stalls for too long, it just cancels and starts over. And I describe it on the show as an automatic kicking machine. This is kind of how we are treating Apple's bug reporting system. And how Apple employees tell us to treat it. The fundamental problem is the Apple bug reporting system is just hopelessly, deeply, massively broken and dysfunctional at every possible level. And it reflects a huge amount of problems that the company has internally managing itself.

1:34:11And then also the problems it has managing any kind of both feedback or communication or QA or prioritization from the outside world. every part of this system in the company is dysfunctional and inefficient at best and so we are told by many apple employees over and over again you got to file bugs often yes yes it helps file them often oh and every apple employees have told us every single beta refile your bugs that aren't fixed yet as new bugs new copies not even don't just go in and a comment on the old one refile them now what this does is it takes a massively broken system and just breaks it more the official word from apple you know not the not official the unofficial word from apple employees is always for us to dump more of our time and effort into this broken system wasting our time even more so that they can avoid fixing their problems on their end, their deep fundamental problems in this area.

1:35:19We should collectively all waste all of our time way more to make their dysfunctional system work slightly better for them. What I say is, F that, I'm going to just complain to the press. Because, as you know, running to the press never helps. Except it always does. Yeah, it always does. And so, yeah, maybe file a bug, but also talk about it as much as you possibly can talk about it on a mass that i make blog posts about it if you have a podcast make you know talk about on the podcast because really what helps with apple to get over their broken bug system um is public attention on something what helps is it's like many other parts of apple what helps is the right people seeing it and if you go through the the plain bug filtering system that you have you know that you get in the feedback assistant like to get through that the odds of anyone ever seeing that i'm convinced are very very low the odds of the right people seeing it like people who could actually maybe do anything about it are even lower than that and then the odds that those people will actually have time to fix your bug seem even lower than that and so you have to treat a bug that you care about like something that needs marketing you have to market your bug you can't just submit it in the background in feedback assistant and hope it will get fixed it won't you have to get in public and talk on twitter and talk on mass and talk on threads and whatever else get it out there and and market your bug if you want apple to have any chance of fixing it and no this system absolutely should not work this way there's so many problems with this but it's the truth if you don't market your bug it won't be fixed and you know we recognize it's kind of hard to market your bug when you don't have a tech podcast maybe you don't have a popular blog uh it's even difficult to say okay well i don't have a popular blog maybe a popular blog popular blog will pick it up like we recognize this is not this is not great advice for regular people no this is why it's so broken yeah exactly like but we're just saying you know and we're saying oh well you you think that works because that's worked for you and yes it has worked for us maybe there are other things that work for people without any kind of public platform but honestly there's so few things that we found to work that it's worth communicating this is one approach that has worked even though we recognize it is not a solution for pretty much anybody except for this tiny weird minority of people who do have an audience although i still even you know i think about the uh air network change thing which yes we did have something to follow up about it but got pushed next week don't worry it hasn't gone away um this is a bug that's been hanging around apparently since 2019 i only really heard about it when it started happening to me and that's a similar story to other people right you'll know when this bug is getting close to being fixed by whoever is responsible for fixing when there's like a verge story about it or network change change plaguing people who use chrome based things like that's when you like let's say it's not somebody's pet bug like my photos thing or my window dragging thing that i constantly talk about on my stupid podcast let's say it's something more general like our network change which is happening to lots of people what's going to cause that to get fixed no one who's working on chrome or has any control over this is probably listening to this podcast because that's really not our focus right but if there's a story on the verge about it or some popular tech website or like the big thing like with apples and keyboards there's a new york times story about our network changed or butterfly keyboards or whatever you can be sure that apple is paying attention now and it goes from the top down right it's not like the people in the rank file don't want to fix your bug they don't have time no one gives them the time to fix it if you this is if you're not a programmer you might not know this but most people who are programmers especially good programmers if you have responsibility for something whatever it is i work on the dns subsystem on the mac or i have the sound things or i work on these apis on ios or whatever the last thing you want is to know that there's some bug in the in the new version of the thing that you just released and not be allowed to fix it not be given time to fix it you want to fix it you don't want to put out code that it's like oh i made a dumb mistake oh i see what it is you want to get that fixed out as soon as possible but if you work in a big organization a getting a bug fix out quote as soon as possible could take weeks or months and b you might not even be allowed to do that because you've got a bunch of other stuff you're supposed to be doing you don't get to set your own priorities and it's only when some vice president sees a story on the verge that they talk to their person below them or talks to their person below them talks to the other person below them that finally they say hey that bug you've been wanting to fix for six months now you have two days to do it go that's how things work in big companies and it sounds dysfunctional but if it didn't work this way programmers would just spend their entire time uh gold plating the one corner of the functionality they're responsible for we never have any new features so you have to find a balance between those two ends of the spectrum obviously we often think apple is way too far in the direction of ignoring bugs but you can go too far in the other direction too i would love to see apple go too far in the other direction for a change of pace uh but i'm not holding my breath so right now the best we're doing is you know complaining on podcasts and trying to drag apple kicking and streaming a little bit more towards the gold plating angle which it's a it's a businessy phrase that maybe people haven't heard and maybe it's out of date or whatever but i can't think of a better name for the other one uh the other end of the spectrum but yeah they're way too far on the end of the spectrum where bugs just go unfixed for years and years unless they get a story in the verge unless they get a new york times story unless some senior vice president actually notices you know and with the air network change it has the great thing about it of like it's not even clear whose bug it is it is it apple force is chrome's fault is it both of them Is it neither?

1:40:45It's just like a problem that users are encountering, and it's not severe enough to appear as a story at anywhere except for here, but maybe someday it will be. Santiago writes, I just noticed that when you geotag photos in the Mac Photos app, the location information is not added to the file metadata. It's probably kept somewhere in the library. Quick aside, I think this is true for music as well, which is frustrating, but nevertheless. Santiago continues, this means that when using some backup solutions, that data will be missing. Is there any way to take the location information from the photos library and add it to their respective photos?

1:41:16This is why I process all that junk before ingestion into photos. I don't know if there's a way where I'll ask my co-host here in a second. But I view photos as kind of a lens into my photo library rather than the bespoke or the one true version of the photo library. and that's that's probably dumb of me and i'm probably missing out on some things but that's the way i treat it because i just i want the files to stand on their own and have all that metadata just like santiago does so uh john is our in photos expert i guess uh is there a way to do this that you know of yeah so uh first thing there's that that feature that is described here the fact that like hey there's what's in the file but then there's also the separate stuff that's in the library and the library stuff takes precedence when you're viewing it through the lens of apple photos but then it's not written to the file and backup programs don't see that that is also kind of feature in certain scenarios one of the features i've talked about about apple photo library that i love is you can do all sorts of stuff to your photo knowing that the the original is still there crop it alter it do all this stuff none of it get none of that gets baked in so you always can say oh i've changed my mind oh i and i do it frequently i'll go back to a photo that i edited seven years ago and i'll be like you know what i'm better at photo editing now let me undo most of that and redo it better and there's no problem because this things that you the changes you made in photos were written to the photos library not to your file your files unmodified so that's great but in this case like well what about stuff that i really like it's not like edits or whatever i just would rather have the date in the photo the good thing about apple's photo library and i think also about their music library is it's one of the rare cases where apple has public open supported third party interfaces to the photo library.

1:43:01It doesn't help you as a user unless you can find an app that does it. But technically speaking, like, is there a way to take that location information from photos and add to their from the library and add to the photos? There is a way you'd have some code that you that someone wrote in an app, they would read the library and write that data out to the photos and modify them. Someone could 100 % write that program, maybe they already exist, maybe next week, 50 people will send us a bunch of app suggestions or whatever. But like, this is one of those cases where it's not like oh apple doesn't let you do that and there's no api for that there is there is an api for doing all of that you could do this one could do this if there are not lots of apps like this it may reflect the fact that most people like ah it's in the photo library it's fine i don't care like not everybody cares like casey does of having it baked into the file or like santiago does but i'm saying it's technically possible so i'm hoping somewhere out there is an app that you that could do this there's also command line tools and other the things that you could potentially do this for obviously casey does it like up front with his own tools before he goes to the photo library but if the dates are in the library yes there is a way for one to programmatically get that data out and there also is a way for one to programmatically write that to a photo file that is all technically possible and supported without any weird hacks or whatever it's just a question of whether somebody wrote that app thanks to our sponsor this week notion and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week.

1:44:26Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-R-C-O-R-C-O-S. Is it accidental. They did it mean to. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. Marco, I heard some rumblings that you had. Some sort of hardware-related... And I don't mean computing. I mean, hardware store related project, which means you presumably made something between five and 500 trips to Home Depot recently.

1:45:40Not Home Depot. Fortunately, this was with a local hardware store in town. So this was for the new house. The HVAC people had installed some dumb thermostats, even though I had requested smart thermostats. And in particular, I had requested Nest thermostats. now i had the very first generation nest thermostats a million years ago uh they they're in the house that we are selling i'm not taking my ancient nest thermostats with me they're they're staying with the house um they are they are quite old some of them have like you know lines through the screens and everything but they still work uh anyway at the beach when i smartified these thermostats.

1:46:25I tried Nest first and it gave me all sorts of problems with connectivity because the walls here are very thick and radio signals aren't very, you know, effective here. They get blocked really easily. Wi-Fi is very challenging here. I had constant problems with the modern Nest's and I ended up switching over to the Echo Bee HomeKit smart thermostats. The Echo Bee thermostats started out being a little more ugly and clunky than the Nest's. But at least they were HomeKit and at least I was done with the Nest hardware. And then they kept getting software updates that make them even worse somehow.

1:47:06Like, the Echobee recently redesigned their interface to do things like change the temperature of the thermostat on the thermostat, which you would think would be an action that they would optimize the design to do and this is always something that nest was fantastic at and now nest makes a whole bunch of thermostats some of which are like those really like they made like a really cheap version and by the way and i know upgrade plus listeners i know jason snell is literally just making the opposite move like right now so we'll see maybe maybe jason maybe i'll mail you a whole bunch of echo b someday but anyway echo b has worked fine with with my home kit setup it doesn't work exactly as well as i would want it to like when you look at home kit secure video cameras which again i've had my issues with my logitech circle views maybe i'll mail those jason too uh don't get circle views home kit secure video the way it works when you set up a device that uses it for for most things including logitech ones that's like all they do like they might have their own separate app but they're really first and foremost designed for home kit secure video that's not the way echo bees are with home kit thermostats it's more like okay yeah we'll talk to home kit but that's not what we're designed to do echo bee wants you to use their own app it's very similar to nest in in like the type of problems it tries to solve it tries to get you to do all these all these efficient things and be smart and automatically adjust your temperature and all this stuff most of which i disable because it doesn't really work very well for people who work at home uh the echo bees i i have had moderate mixed success with uh i don't hate them enough to replace them but i don't like them enough to buy any more of them um and the the the recent update to the to the ui and the echo bees makes it so that if you want to change the temperature on the thermostat it takes something like five or six taps and a decent amount of time as you have to wait for it to like wake up and then animate into a few different positions and then you can adjust it and it's so error prone it's i don't know what they were thinking with this update like it's bad um and the echo bees they don't look as good as the nest even to even to start with even when they're off they don't look as good so it's it's it's a downgrade anyway the new house that we're renovating is a is a much simpler more traditional layout the thermostats are just there's one upstairs one downstairs they're both in the middle of the hallway so they get great wi-fi coverage from anywhere so it's a much easier thing so i said you know what let me go back to nest because the echo bees are just so annoying to use i'll just do nest so get there the hvac people we have all new brand new hvac systems because this this house was it we're heavily renovating it because it was a very old house that was um really not kept up much it's kept up now we're renovating everything brand new hvac systems they install the wrong thermostats like all right let me just do this myself like we're trying to get everything done as quickly as possible so we can move in so i go there today first of all there was no one working today so there was no one around to like you know help out or borrow tools from and i look around the house and there are no tools anywhere like this is a construction site but they cleaned it up pretty well and so there's like you know buckets and nails and you know a dumpster full of drywall fragments but there's no tools there is one little area of the house where we were able to like shove a few of our things and not have them be touched and in that one little area i found a small battery powered drill that had one bit the phillips bit okay that's i can do something with that so i was able to take the old thermostats off um and and fortunately the you know once you get in there the wires are all these little press wires and what i learned when i opened up the nest nest actually comes with i oh and i got the nicer nest like the old kind with the turning knob because they're more pleasant to use and they let you change the temperature really easily on them a feature that echobee should learn anyway so nest actually comes with a little tiny screwdriver to uh to like take off the old thermostats wiring and you can pop in the new one so anyway so like all right i have basic tools a little little tiny flat screwdriver and a medium-sized flow screwdriver and this drill and i was able to get one of them installed just fine but i noticed when i when i did the wire like wow the the wire colors on this are not at all what i've seen on any other thermostat before now i've installed a decent number of smart thermostats i've never seen the the color scheme that the installers of the new system used i'm trying to figure out like what what the heck are these wires like where is the common wire what is this blue one why like there's all these color and i'm like looking up on my phone what the heck are these colors well i'm like you know if i had a multimeter i could just test them and see where you know where is the 24 volts ac like where is it between this and this or this and this and i didn't want to like you know start to shore them together to like see oh does if i short these two together does the heat turn on like i didn't want to start doing that um before i knew what i was shorting together so i'm like all right well let me let me if i just had that and then one of the wires they hadn't connected yet like the they hadn't connected the ac stuff they'd only connected heat because it was the bare minimum to like keep the work going through this cold month so i'm like let me connect the ac also i might as well and i'm gonna need a multimeter to figure out which of these wires has that and they're not even stripped so i'm like all right so let me just run to the harbor store real quick there's a harbor store right in town i'll get a cheap multimeter and a cheap wire stripper and i'll get this going and all of my other stuff at this point is a 45 minute or a half hour drive away like over the sand like i'm not going to go all the way back you know to get all my other stuff so i'm like all right let me just let me just go to the hardware store and right in town so trip number one multimeter and wire strippers great go back to the house figure it out okay i'm pretty sure i know what these wires do and just let me just test i i've measured the voltages they're all right let me just test i'm pretty sure this one's the air conditioning wire it's blue that seems like it would make sense it's not standard but it's at least something it's the only other wire here let me let me try i push i i connected that wire to the other one and uh a little spark formed between the two wires i'm like that's probably not good that's not good um and then stop working like then there was no voltage in any of the wires i'm like oh crap did i just break my brand new h vacuum you're gonna break somebody's thing breaking your own works out yeah so i'm like all right now what how do i solve this problem like all right i think i just broke something and at first i tried let me just go flip the breaker off wait a minute flip back on see if i can reset whatever needs to be reset did that no luck oh man you're getting to the point where now you realize you're gonna have to explain to the people you're paying to fix your house that you're like you know when you weren't there i decided i'm gonna i'm going to play contractor and pretend that i can fix the house but i broke it yes that's and that's what i was dreading i'm like oh man can i i gotta figure out how to fix this myself like i don't want to have to call the hr people back to like look hey i i tried to do this i just broke my slash your brand new system it's like if they came to you and said yeah we made a bunch of changes to the overcast code and now it doesn't compile anymore we're not sure what we did anyway we uploaded that we uploaded that bill to the app store just can you fix it yeah right like i'm like i i felt like such an idiot i'm like oh man like i i should not have done this so were you are you decided at this point uh to avoid that you're gonna dig further it sounds like you did considering you made more trips yes well it was time for lunch i go have lunch and as i'm as i'm you know eating my quick microwave whatever i'm looking up like youtube videos like you know what if a bosch air handler doesn't have any and and i i somehow found through through a web searches and and reddits and stuff like that an hvac installer saying hey these people keep uh blowing their control board fuse and somebody's like oh that's that's usually what happens when there's a short somewhere on the in the thermostat wiring it happens when homeowners start connecting wires they don't know what to do in the spark forms right and i'm like oh i shorted my my control wiring probably and then and i did did more research that and it's like oh yeah this this tends to happen especially if you short the common wire directly to the other side you know the other side of the transformer then it'll blow this fuse instantly great this is almost definitely what i just did like it everything lined up i definitely shorted the common wire to the r wire definitely okay so i go back to the house and i like go into the crawl space under the house find the new air handler i'm like all right where where where how can i get to this control board and it has really big flathead screws that hold the panel on on top of the control board and i don't have a flathead screwdriver you don't have a dime because you're not living in the 50s with change in your pockets i scoured the house no for anything that could yeah i didn't find i thought of coins i couldn't find anything that could be a big flathead screwdriver i tried the little one that i had it was way too small wouldn't turn it at all nothing i had anywhere in the house i'm looking around i'm like looking at the like the the strips of nail gun nails that look like ammo and i'm like maybe if i like use the side of one of those like yeah i feel like if you were like even just even just in our parents generation i know that my dad when i was growing up uh when he came home from work and he emptied out his pockets he was always emptying change out of one of the pockets like he had his wallet he had his keys but he always had like loose coins and that just is not the way i live my life as an adult at his age at the age he was like yeah having dads constantly having change in their pocket is not a thing anymore i feel like yeah and like and i'm not like a knife guy either so i don't have like a i don't have knives in my pockets or anything you know yeah you don't have your your your leatherman strapped to your belt for for 364 days so on the 365th you can unscrew these big screws yeah what i'm learning is you need to really refine your edc after this experience or you could just have a box of tools at the uh the house that's being worked on but yeah right just let the people who you're paying to work on it anyway there's many solutions here but continue what did you actually yeah so and i'm like i'm like i'm pretty sure it is this blown fuse i don't want to have to make two more trips?

1:57:19Because I don't know how big and what kind of fuse. So I can't just go buy a fuse and a screwdriver in the same trip. You've got to take the donkey across with the chicken. You don't want to bring the hay at the same time. So first I had to go buy a screwdriver then go back to the house take the cover off, find the fuse, pull it out. Sure enough it is very blown and then go back to the hardware store a third time saying I need this please. buy i bought a five packs i'm like you know first of all it's all they come in and second i'm like i'm probably gonna need this yeah anyway finally got it all back popped it in it worked perfectly sure enough that was that was indeed the common wire apparently they are sometimes blue now um and so now finally i have my nest thermostats in the house and now i have to just have them patch the giant space out holes they made with the wrong thermostats yeah think about the smart thermostats and the pressing connectors the thing that i was always fearing when i was messing with mine is that the the cable with all those various wires is just barely long enough to reach because you have to kind of connect it to the and i was like if i screw this up like if i like bend it back and forth too many times and like the stripped end breaks off or whatever like i don't have i'd have to like go to the basement and somehow free some slack somehow to go up through the walls and it's just so precarious with these tiny little wires and these little press connectors like for all the you know that we complained about like computer connectors the lack of connectors with just like house wiring is you know especially if you're in a very old house because the new house is like oh a good electrician will leave you lots of slack and the wires are very robust and they're sturdy and but if you have an old house i mean you don't have that excuse this is new construction but in my old house the wires are just barely long enough to reach and older than everybody in your family combined and so just ready to fall apart at the moment you like look at them funny so it's always uh a little bit scary to be messing with stuff but yeah i'm sure the people who are working in your house are glad that you have this little do-it-yourself project uh that you accomplished without them yeah i'm just not gonna tell them i mean they're gonna notice that the thermostat that they installed is no longer there and this new thing is well yeah i guess i guess they will they will eventually see that what did you do with the what did you do with the old thermostat that you paid for by the way i rested it on the floor below it and walked away i don't think they'd be like oh the thermostat fairy came in the night and just set this down yeah then you put out wooden shoes and it takes your old thermostat and puts them inside i don't know what they're gonna think you need to communicate i mean i do feel like you should own up and say yeah so i'm a little bit of a do-it-yourselfer and only took me three trips to the hardware store to uh and one blown fuse but uh i did it so uh let me know if you need my help later.

2:00:03I'm just glad that that was a fuse and that I didn't, like, fry the whole control board. That's what I was really afraid of. Yeah, well, that's what fuses are for, right? Yeah. But I believe, you know, you could have, if you had a coin, you could have bridged that fuse thing with a coin and then really blown the board. Oh, God. Because the old thing is like, yeah, you don't need a fuse, just, you know, take some foil off your pack of marblows and put it in there. Yeah, what do you need a fuse for? Just bypass it. I'm sure it's fine. Yeah. Fuses are pointless anyway, right? Speaking of microwaves, I think that's one of the few things that did go wrong with microwaves.

2:00:35I do believe I blew a fuse at one point, like those microwave fuses. And I don't know why, and I think I replaced it, and it hasn't blown since in years. I still can't believe you're using a screenless microwave for all this time. It's got a screen. Well. It doesn't work, but it's there. I mean, it might as well not be there. Yeah, well, no. It has become screenless. yeah i think it does i think one of these seven segments in one of the things lights up or something like just one like never changes but it's like always just anyway it doesn't like occasionally blink on like oh it's a multiple don't talk about it it's very sensitive about its screen but we consider it a whole microwave although the fan now that we did that episode i swear after we did that episode the fan is starting to sound make noises i'm like did you hear the podcast microwave what are you doing get the breville you gotta get the breville you're like oh it's just a vibration maybe if i touch it out it went away and i so i'm giving this thing side eye now and to be fair already like the door opening closing was being wonky which is why i had done that research that i referenced but now that we did that podcast it's like i heard you talking about me yeah hey look i i know i know your wife listens to this podcast i'm just saying you know both christmas and your birthday are coming up real soon she doesn't want a new microwave either when i was doing microwave research everyone i showed her she's like oh I don't like that.

2:01:52What's wrong with our microwave? I mean, you just named quite a few big things that are wrong with your microwave. Yeah, well, you know, we'll see. But I do have my eye on that. I'm asking for so much kitchen stuff for my Christmas stuff, but it doesn't currently include a microwave. Just eight cheese graters? No, it is similar stuff like that. It's way cheaper than a microwave. And a microwave on John's counter. That's the end of the song. I've got to say, I was so damn am proud of myself when I got the thing working. Like, I was so ashamed when I broke it. You had erased the memories of the previous failures.

2:02:30This is a pure victory. Yeah, this was totally worth like two hours. Slawless execution. Yeah. I actually, a few months ago, I told myself I was going to replace the train thermostats that came with our redone HVAC that we did in 2014. I told myself I was going to replace them with like an Ecobee or something equivalent. And I looked specifically at the Ecobee and I wussed out because even though I don't think my HVAC is actually that unique, I'm just so scared that I'm going to screw something up. You could totally do it. It'll be fine. I mean, all these thermostats, the Ecobee and I imagine the Nest ones, they come with just such extensive instructions and like wizards to guide you through.

2:03:07And if you do not have a weird house, you'll be on one of those happy paths. Yeah, I mean, the fact that I was able to do it with almost no tools and basically no relevant expertise except having done it a whole bunch in the past. Well, the important thing, and I think maybe this is where you went wrong, Marco, is assuming the installers had installed the one that they installed correctly, that is your key to understanding what all the wires do. Yes. Well, if they use the same letters. Yeah, yeah. But that's the thing about the guides. They sell you, like, this may be Y1 on your thing or maybe R2 on this thing.

2:03:38like they try to cover all the bases and i you know again the historical baggage of usb is nothing compared to the letters that they assigned to thermostat wires and the the decades of history behind that that only like these installers know and that they don't even need to know the history it's like you just suffice it to say you just have to know that r1 and r2 and y and g and p and q and the colors and you know it's just it's once you know it i'm sure it's it's fine but you don't have to know all like the history behind it but yeah for yours casey when you take the worst mistake you can do is take off your other one okay old thing take take take it off and then just be left with a bunch of wires in your face you made a big mistake there take a picture of the back of the old one first so hey worst case you can always put the old one back exactly the way it was because and then label the wires if you have two wires that are the same color label them put a little piece of tape around them label them you know they give you that with the kits if you buy one of these things like the eco thing comes with little tiny tags to put on the wires so you don't because they know you're going to lose track of the two you know both of the in my case all the wires are the color of ash right they're just all ash gray or they're space black apple would call it so you have to label them because they literally all look identical they all look like they've been in a fire and they all look identical so they give you they give you stickers with the thermostat to put on your little wires because they know you're gonna forget so i believe in you casey unlike the fiber optic thing i think you can do the oh you know the thermostat replacement i don't know i i'm again my system isn't that unique but it's like a heat pump you have nine connected wires here oh wait one of them's a loop what the heck is this i'm saying oh that's nothing it's fine look at how easy this is these are huge fat wires with plenty of slack and gigantic connectors this is like glory you should see the back of the ecobee thing is like doing micro surgery compared to this yeah no this this would be fine the bigger problem is you'd have to use one of those ugly big plate covers to cover up the oh no look at the size of it his hole is small there like he's just I guess he had the screws.

2:05:32I think we're zoomed in pretty far here. I think he could get away with... I think a Nest might span those two Phillips screws, right and left. No, and also the problem is Nest mounts on top and bottom. So you could use that bottom screw. You have to drill a new one in the top and you have to seal up the left and right ones. But yeah, you could do it. It's not any harder than changing a light switch. It's actually easier because you're dealing with low-voltage wiring. Yeah, look at yours. Yours are separate colors. You see the jumper between RH and RC with the red one going into RC. Like, that's the tricky stuff that would be a pain for you to figure it out on your own.

2:06:04But here it is. You got the key. Like, assuming these labels are correct, which they probably are. And you have a common wire. Yeah. Which is blue, just like my new one. So in theory, you know, even if I really hosed it up, we're friendly with our HVAC installer. Like, we talk to them periodically. Why don't you just have them do it? Well, I should, but I also want to be self-sufficient. You can do it yourself way cheaper. i think it's worth trying it yourself exactly then you can call him and say hey i tried to do it myself and i screwed it up save me which is the which is what i would do i gotta say like really like the the process of installing the nests and using the nests it's a lot nicer than the echo b like they're both easy but the nest is nicer now i know nest's whole backing service is you know slowly being neglected by google and i i know that it doesn't have home kit support google abandoning a product no but like the the actual experience of use of physically using it is so much nicer than echobee it's not even close so i i know it's annoying to have to go into the dumb nest app or have to run some kind of home bridge kind of thing why are you doing either one of those things like not that i'm i agree with you i think the echobee's interface is terrible but like once you get it set up like are you constantly like micromanaging it to tweak it up and down Up and down, not...

2:07:23Occasionally, yes. I also turn it on and off a lot. Especially in transitional seasons like this. Like earlier this week, it was super sunny and bright during the day and then freezing at night. So during the day, I actually wanted to open some of the windows upstairs because it was so warm and the sun was coming in. And so I turned all the heat off in the middle of the day. And then later on that night, turn it back on. Like that kind of stuff. But why do you need to turn it off? why don't you just like let the heat won't come on unless it needs to come on like you're you're going for a target temperature right you're not going for heat on or heat off that's what the thermostat yeah but i didn't want the situation where like i open the windows it goes one degree below my set point and then the heat's blasting with the windows open i wanted to avoid that but then it would stop as soon as it got like it's a thermostat that's what it does

2:08:12anyway also like you know i we you know we do workouts in the house we do facetime workouts with a trainer and so like i'll turn the heat way down you know a few hours ahead of that well you need you need focus modes for uh home kids like when i'm going to work out focus mode turn the temperature in the house down yeah but it has to be like earlier than that it's it's a whole thing we tweak it all the time we're like you know hey some nights you're a little cold and you want to turn you want to turn the bedroom like one or two degrees some nights you're really high you want to turn it down a few degrees like that's just that's just what happens you know so anyway i like having that's the whole point of thermostats you can adjust them and every smart thermostat i've ever seen that wasn't a nest was just a horrendous interface to actually just let me just raise raise lower the temperature one degree or so like that's oh god it's so hard on everything else and i don't know like echo b has blown it so hard they they are so they have some of the pieces in place to be really amazing and they're just they just blow it on minor design choices i think that some of that is i mean some of the like the lack of home kit integration the fact they want to use your own app i consider that a feature because i i enjoy my thermostat not being connected to that ecosystem which i have found not to be particularly reliable so i like that my ecobee has no idea about that other stuff i don't i disable the thing that lets it use siri or whatever like that's what what it kind of attracts me to the ecobee is that it is less smart and i don't want it to be particularly smart i want it to be straightforward and i set it and forget it and yeah that's it's basically and obviously my needs are less demanding how many thermostats do i announced just the one actually not true there's a thermostat in this room that controls only this room and then there's one for the whole rest of the house the thermostat uh for this room by the way it's one of those ones with the coil of metal wire you know like the old the old round ones that you would see like it's maybe in school when you guys were in school with the mercury blob inside no not the mercury blob but like the little it's not i actually don't i can't say that maybe it It does have the mercury in the capsules.

2:10:08I haven't looked inside it, but I think it's just got the bimetallic, strict, curly thing, but it's super old. It's not smart, in case you didn't know. But it's real easy to change the temperature. You just turn the dial. Yeah, see, that was what Nest did. For all of Google's mishandling of this company, their thermostat is very nice to use. It's nicer to look at, way nicer to look at than the Echo Bees. The Echo Bees is not ugly, but the Nest is just way nicer. and it's so much nicer to actually physically use. It's not even close. And it is kind of sad when you look around the thermostat industry how few nice options there are.

2:10:47There's just not anything nice except Nest and a little bit Echobee and everything else is crappy industrial garbage. Like I said, I've been flirting with the idea of Echobees. After my sales pitch here? I mean, honestly, I want nothing to do with Nest. Like everything I've understood is that everything around the physical, and I mean, this is a different. I think you mean Google Home. Well, that too. That stupid transition that I have like one Google Home camera and two Nest cameras and two different apps. It's not great over there. Anyway, yeah, but my understanding is exactly what Marco said.

2:11:23Like the physical interaction with Nest is great. Everything else is just utter shit. And I just, I don't know. No, thank you. And so what is the other choices? Ecobee. There's your other choice. Like that's all you got. that's the thing like how is how are there not more of these after all these years if you are a set it and forget there are more like you the traditional companies all have quote-unquote smarter thermostats now but i feel like they are less good than than the ecobee like ecobee is a nice medium between like ones that have just like a plain lcd screen with that isn't bitmap based like it's just you know again a bunch of like little things those ones uh there's ones with e-ink screens then there's the full-fledged nest ones ecobee is kind of in that middle spot which i think is kind of a good place to be but if you don't like that you can buy for basically the same amount of money or more than an ecobee one of the ones from traditional uh thermostat companies like honeywell and stuff that's what i've got look they look janky but they have all the same features as ecobee but their app is a hundred times worse but they'll probably also last longer like it's one of the things i did was i was justice to uh casey when you take out your old one the one that was over here save it oh yeah oh i absolutely would yeah yeah and put it somewhere and keep everything all the parts with it and labeled or whatever because like if you're a loophole if you had winter and then you lost heat in the middle of that winter because your stupid smart thing died or got bricked by a software update it's so handy to be able to just look at this picture bring out the old one bop bop bop uh now you're back up and running and those old ones just do not die like my one that i replaced it was it was powered by like a single double a battery that lasted like seven years like it just says it has an up and a down button a plus and a minus button in like a VCR type scheduler, they are just bulletproof.

2:13:02And, you know, so definitely save your old one. Well, I agree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, but I, this is not a joke. About a week ago, I had to kill the breaker to the thermostat downstairs because Erin does occasionally fiddle with them. I almost never touch them, but Erin will occasionally fiddle with them. And she was complaining, justifiably, she was complaining that it took her forever to change the temperature on this thing. And it's a touchscreen and so on and so forth. It's a touchscreen. That's pretty modern already. No, it's 2014. That's what I'm saying. That's what these all suck at, changing the temperature.

2:13:37What else are you doing with a thermostat? No, but it gets better because what I ended up doing was throwing the breaker to the thermostat, which of course killed the, or to the furnace, which killed the thermostat. Gave it a five count, turned it back on. And you know what? Suddenly was way more performant and was much faster because I guess whatever frigging memory leak had been cleaned, my thermostat. So yeah, it's great, except that it has a frigging memory leak that after a few weeks. Yeah, no, you don't have one of the old reliable ones. I was thinking you had something powered by a AA battery with rubbery buttons and no smarts, but now you've got it.

2:14:11Yeah, those things last forever. Yeah, this is not what I have. And I mean, the one that I have, you can control via a truly terrible app, which is nice, but it's a truly terrible app. There are like three of these apparently in the world, and so I haven't yet found a HomeBridge plugin for it. I actually have a search running periodically to see if eventually one pops up and it hasn't in the literally six years that I've had this search running or something like that. I want to get rid of it and I kind of want an Ecobee, but I'm scared of it and they're expensive and so that's why I haven't done it yet.

2:14:43Right. Oh, and this is 100 % got mercury in it, John. That's not the mine from the wall because I can't reach it with my headphones on, but that's more or less what it looks like. I'm pretty sure there's mercury inside. Yeah, the old round Honeywell with the heat on top and the cooling on the bottom or whatever. No, that's not cooling. That's just saying what the current temperature is. That's right. Heat and cool is a switch on the side usually. Well, you don't have cooling on your house. I don't have any cooling. Don't worry about it. My thermostats essentially connect one wire to the other.

2:15:09That is the sole function. Because there's only one thing you can do is either heat on or heat off. That's it. Yeah. This is exactly what we had in my house growing up, just with cooling also. Yeah. But you can change temperature real easy. You just turn that dial. That's it. Yeah, exactly. That's what the Nest was ripping off. Because literally, the Nest was designed after all the digital ones had come out that all had these complicated button things. And Tony Fidel was like, hey, what if we just made this a knob? It's nicer, like the old ones. Boop, you just turn it. And everyone's like, oh, my God, that's amazing.

2:15:42And look, you made a round screen somehow. Late 2023 is the year of the knob for Marco.