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Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
I just got a notification that my Mac Mini's offline in the garage. That might be because I might have sprayed some snow on it today.
The snowblower, thrower, whatever? Yes.
We've been complaining that the laptop should be waterproof, but I don't think anyone has really thought about the Mac Mini being waterproof, right?
So, I mean, you know, so me using the snow thrower, snowblower, I know snowblowing is a dirty thing somewhere, but that's what they call them here, so I'm going to keep calling it that.
Do they not call them that somewhere else? I understand snow thrower being the more technically common term, but I thought it was nationwide. Snowblower is the common term.
Some population is giggling, and I just don't know which one. Look, I know about it. I just don't care. Anyway, I bought this thing five years ago at least. I've only used it a handful of times. I'm not good at it because it doesn't snow that crazily that often.
I thought you meant the Mac Mini for a second. I was like, what are you talking about?
I don't know.
no that one i use a lot actually which i'll get to another time but um but yeah so and it's it has snowed so much in the last few days like me trying to use this thing has been comical everything is a mess and i'm you know trying to clear the driveway and like i get about five minutes in and i'm and it just stops now this is a two-stage snowblower it's hundreds of pounds and it normally two cycle you mean two cycle engine
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Chapter 2: What are the challenges of using a snowblower?
They don't sell these anymore because they're too polluting and terrible. I think it has burned maybe a total of four gallons of gasoline in the 25 years that I've used it. But I can tell you that if you leave gas in your garage for multiple years in a plastic container and put it into your two cycle snowblower, the stupid thing will keep running.
Yeah. And I'm sure you aren't doing it any favors, but like it sounds like you are trying to kill it so you can get a better one.
And maybe I've been trying to kill it by doing zero maintenance on it. It just will not die.
Yeah. So anyway, so I'm so bad at using snowblowers that like because like I also like I gave up lawn mowing years ago. I have literally never used a gas powered lawnmower. Growing up, we had one of those like spinning push manual ones. Oh, my word. And I hated it so much.
And so when I finally like, you know, went through apartments as a young adult and like when we finally got a house, I told Tiff, I'm like, listen, I'm not mowing the lawn because I always hated doing it. I will buy a lawn service from day one. And she's like, no, I want to try one of those push mower things. And I'm like, OK, but I'm telling you, I will never use that thing.
She wanted to use the little thing with the blades? Yeah, like the thing I grew up with hating. Well, I can tell you, you grew up hating that and it is fairly inefficient, but it could have been worse because the thing I grew up using was a gas-powered lawnmower that was way heavier than the spinny blade thing.
And I had to push it myself because it was not, as they said back in the days, self-propelled. How did it move? You moved it. And it is so much heavier than this mini blade thing.
Let me tell you. Oh, yeah. I mean, for sure. Anyway, so all this is to say I have no experience operating like these heavy gas powered things that at least now they are self-propelled. You know, you hold down the right handle and it turns, you know. But as a result, you know, and you have all these different controls in a snowblower.
You have, you know, the forward and back thing, the engaged and disengaged thing, and then also how to aim the chute that you're throwing snow out of. And sure enough, I, you know, back into my garage in one of the maneuvers that I'm like clumsily, clunkily executing.
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Chapter 3: How does the new macOS document model work?
So as you're scrolling this list, all you see is the different workout types, right? And then what will happen if you're anything like me is you'll see the workout type you want appear at the bottom of the like three different positions that they sort of kind of show on this list. And so what you'll do is let's say I'm about to do a HIIT workout, you know, an H-I-I-T workout.
I'll see that appear on the bottom. And I'll mash the icon. But in the time of stop scrolling on the digital scroll or digital crown and go to tap that bottom most icon that to be fair is ever so slightly off the screen, then magically a play button appears. But Marco, is that the play button for the high intensity interval training workout? Oh, no, my friend.
That's the play button for the one above the hit workout because it's in... I don't want to use the I word, but it is bananas. It is utterly bananas that you have to wait for this animation to appear before you can hit the play button. And by the way... Why is there a f***ing play button in the first place? Just let me hit the damn workout type in the first place.
Which is how it used to... Oh, and by the way, I just opened up the workout app on my watch to review this interface so I could comment more intelligently on it. And I was interrupted on launch. Welcome to workout. New navigation. I launched this app this morning. And it's given me the first run welcome screen a second time now. This is so bad.
In a recent member special, I told a story of when I left Windows because it just reached a point one day that I was just so irritated by how little it respected my time and my direction. And I felt like I was being taken on a ride by Microsoft as the experience of my computer. Apple is 1,000% there. Using Apple software now feels like you're being taken for a ride.
That it's not your watch, it's Apple's watch. And they want to show you some stuff. And they want to do what they want to do. And it used to be aligned with... Well, what will be best for users? How can we make this the best product for them? And we will benefit from selling good products because we will make the best products for the users. And today's Apple doesn't do that.
Today's Apple does, A, what they feel like, and B, what will be the best product for Apple? And whatever the users want is now a very, very distant third in that list. We used to always joke that Apple would do what was best for Apple, what was best for customers, and then distant third what was best for developers. But now, Apple does what it thinks is best for it.
And then users are their own very, very distant thing after that. Because the way Apple views us now is either as an audience for their wankery of what they're doing with their design, or more commonly, as a resource to be extracted for upsells.
Yeah, a mark.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Apple's US manufacturing plans?
What I was saying was that the Macs usually at least has the benefit of like if you need really big RAM or other very large resources, sometimes you have to go with the Pro or the Mac chip to do that. But neither of them in terms of like CPU performance per dollar, neither of them are good values compared to the base chip.
So I think like you know the max makes its case that like you know if you need the biggest of everything the max is it and you know if you need the best bang for your buck the base chip is it and the pro is it is between those two. My thinking was not fully considering the pricing aspect because, like, I didn't realize, like, because I haven't bought one in a couple years.
Like, I'm still using an M3 Max for my main Mac here. So I didn't realize, like, oh, the price difference is actually pretty big between them. So it is a middle step in terms of, like, you can pay some more and get some more. But in terms of, like, sheer computing power for the dollar, neither the Pro nor the Max are good values compared to the base chip, which is a very good value.
By the way, the biggest of everything is still the Ultra, even though it is still the M3 Ultra. It is definitely the biggest.
Well, I mean, yeah, but like almost no one should buy that. It's true, but it's the biggest.
All right. With regard to Tahoe window resizing, Nathan Manso Pano writes, on the topic of resizing windows in Tahoe, you can actually enlarge the exterior clickable area. Just run this command and then log out and back in. And we'll have it in the show notes. But it's defaults, right? Hyphen G, Apple Edge, resize exterior size, eight. The default seems to be four.
You can revert the change with such and such, which will again be in the show notes.
I haven't tried that, but I'm glad to know that these little undocumented plist things are still lurking in there for you to mess with the UI.
Indeed so. All right, let's talk macOS document model. First of all, apparently our timeline was a little bit wrong. The new document model was introduced in macOS 10.7 Lion. not 10.8 Mountain Lion, as we, I think, stated last episode.
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Chapter 5: What are the features of Apple's new server technology?
What is in an Apple server? Do they look like Apple hardware? And I have a bunch of images in the show notes, but just go watch the video. We're just going to link the video because these are all essentially screen captures from the video or the Wall Street Journal article.
john went full zapruder or however you pronounce it on this it's hilarious and by the way it looks like the answer is they have eight ultra chips in each one in about it looks like about a three or four you tall case uh to you maybe that might be too yeah and also the answer the question of whether this looks like uh an x serve no no it is not a beautiful apple piece of machinery
like I mean I maybe it's but you know what what's funny about it though is like it like have you seen other servers like if you compare this to like a super micro or whatever this is way prettier than those everything is symmetrical everything lines up everything is like centered and a lot it's like it's not it's
outside the realm but there are some i've seen servers that look equivalently good but the point is it is not the x serve the x serve was styled by apple's industrial design group to look nicer than any other server you've ever seen this looks like basically slightly better than average rack mount system so to give you an example oh this is way better than the ones i've seen
It has holes for ventilation on the front and the back, as servers do, because they bring in the cold air from one side and they shoot out hot air on the other side. You got the hot aisles and the cold aisles. And the holes are just... It's a flat piece of metal with holes in it. Apple doesn't do that anymore.
Every hole that Apple makes has to be... They're completely hidden, like it is on the studios or whatever, or carefully machined and made aesthetically. Nope, these are just the normal holes you would see. There's no real branding... or styling of it at all. It's just like bent pieces of metal, as it should, because it's a server.
I'm not saying it should be fancy looking, but it's fascinating to see that when Apple makes stuff for their own internal use, they don't necessarily deploy the full force of their hardware design group to make them beautiful for such a utilitarian thing. But then, yeah, as Marco pointed out, you get to see what's inside them. And there's very clearly eight
little things in there that look like presumably each one of those eight things is like a computer unit of some kind maybe each one they're they're eight giant heat sinks and it looks like heat sinks for ultra class chips yeah they look they're big like they're the heat sinks are large like if you look at the guts of a mac pro with the ultra chip in it like it's kind of kind of looks like that
I do wonder if it's not two chips under each one of them because they're kind of split in the middle. But yeah, it's weird that they allowed video crews. But you can see them assembling. You can see them sticking things into it.
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Chapter 6: How does the design of Apple's server compare to traditional servers?
You can see like the presumably redundant power supplies and like, you know, how large the things are and them sliding into the racks and all this other stuff. And, you know, of course, the Wall Street Journal people have no interest in this. This is totally only of interest to like, you know, hardware nerds who are interested, like, what kind of things is Apple making for itself?
Especially if you were like an XServe fan when Apple stopped making, for people who don't remember this long ago, Apple used to sell rack-mount server hardware that they made themselves and advertised on their website. And they stopped. They got out of that business. But now they're back into making hardware just for their own. Because you can't buy these. No one is buying these.
I mean, they're just Apple manufactures them for itself to put it in its own data centers. And as Marco talked about in an earlier episode, we'll see how long that lasts with the Google deal and them running on Google's TPUs and everything like that. But here they are in the flesh running off the assembly line. And Apple says it's expanding this manufacturing.
So for right now, anyway, they're building more and more of these things. I think they're fascinating, especially since, like, if you got one of these, if it really has eight Ultras inside it, first of all, it's an expensive computer, obviously. And second of all, how do you address those eight Ultras? Does it present as eight individual addressable, like, is it running eight copies of the OS?
Or is there one copy of some OS that's running, that's powering all, like, I just would love to know everything about these. Are they running Linux against the Ultras?
Oh, I bet that's all right. my best guess is that each one of these eight units is basically like a Mac studio with an ultra like re re-engineered to fit into this enclosure. And they're just eight individual computers.
And they're just an addressable, like how, like how are they addressed? Like what is the KVM like interface into situation? Like, are they, are they completely controlled from the command line? Is there a virtual display thing running on them?
Like, like, because you know, as Marco will talk about in some future episode, I'm sure like, even though Apple makes lots of things that people like put in racks, like the little Mac,
minis and everything they're not really designed to be headless computers there's lots of affordances to make you be able to use them that way but when you have like a rack mount linux server like at no point are you bringing up like a virtual screen on the thing to do anything like you don't even bring up the console these days unless you're like really in deep doo-doo trying to debug something in the data center um so i've just loved how i know how they manage fleets of these things when every like what is this like a
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Chapter 7: What are the pros and cons of the latest electric car models discussed?
Was there a BMW i4?
Not only was there an i4, but there was an i4 M52 of them, in fact.
Oh, the fast one. Really, the faster one.
Indeed. Uh, so I went down there and I was very clear about my intentions and the gentleman I was working with was very, very nice and very patient with me. And we took like, I don't know, a 15, 20 minute test drive. And let me tell you, I so desperately wanted to get rid of my beloved three 35 when I got rid of it in 2018, it was a 2011 three 35. I X drive M sport and, Uh, six speed.
And I loved that car for the 10 minutes it was working, but it was constantly broken. Go back to like six years of ATP to hear my sob stories about this car. Um, I loved that car though, when it did work. And even though BMW has changed quite a bit since 2011, and particularly the front of modern BMWs is, generally speaking, pretty homely. Like, the kidneys are just obscenely, just too big.
Too much. It's too much. This is not a good era for the front of most car designs, honestly. Yeah.
No. Uh, but nevertheless, I sat in that car and a little part of me was like, you're home. This is where you were supposed to be. And then I drove the car and it got worse because, oh my God, that thing is so nice.
It's
so nice i told you i've never even been in one but i'm like obviously this is the right car for you it's so nice and so fast it's ridiculous oh my word like i've been in fast electric cars i've driven fast electric cars one of the things that i personally love about rivians particularly the the launch edition ones whatever it was that had the three motors set up is that they're stunningly fast and
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