06: Marathon Episode

 We went and saw the Star Wars return of the no sorry the last Jedi. How was that? I haven't seen it yet Well, you know, I don't want to give any spoilers to any of our listeners. No spoilers Was it good was it uh Well, I'm not a I'm not a Star Wars geek so for me. I mean the action was cool and the visuals were cool But the story tends to be a little hoki for me. Okay a little predictable. Yep Yeah, well, I think I told you I haven't seen it before so I mean I've seen bits and pieces of all of them but I've not seen it like start to end or even you know as some as the purists you know would watch it or or even like in the the reverse order whatever the chronological order because what is it like one two three It's like four five six one two three or something like that. I don't know I have to get my buddies slayer playing that again I met Christina. I had to end up watching all of them because they started coming out with these new newest what three or four that they've done now, right and I'm not into the whole sci-fi fantasy stuff So I hadn't seen any of them actually. I totally have had avoided them until about maybe four or five years ago At least I might end up watching all of them actually I did watch one of them. I did see the one with Jar Jar Binks, which is apparently like the worst possible one you could ever watch for. I don't know. I can't comment. I still haven't seen all of them. He's a hated character as all I know. If you want to talk about back to the future, I'm your guy, but otherwise Star Wars, I'm not the guy to go to for that. Sorry. Yeah. Star Wars Star Trek, Battle Star Galactic, I don't know any of that crap. Nope. Nope. Which is sacrilege. You know, we're in the tech, we're in the tech industry. So that's right. I mean we're losing subscribers right now because we're begging on the sci-fi movies or in TV shows Are you to a live count just went down another couple points? I think a few we lost a few people (laughs) [Music] I'll be interested to hear if you can hear any bleeding coming through from the open nature of your headphones or not. Yeah, I was wondering about that too, but interesting thing about that when I'm playing music, I'm jamming out my my phone You know, I'm rocking the pixel tube My phone will detect the songs if I have the phone just laying out on my desk It'll pick up like the sound coming out of the headphones and tell me what song is playing. Oh, wow That's crazy and it's probably not even very loud really, right? Yeah, not very loud So I think it's a sensitive microphone, you know for all the government surveillance that's going on They need to have some sensitive equipment in there I Think the Snowden was you know Snowden released that new security app. It's like a tampering app you know, someone's messed with your hotel room or your computer. Did you hear about that? I saw the headline, but I didn't really read into what exactly it was. Yeah, well, I mean, that's not the interesting thing was that he had been tearing apart a lot of the phones over the last year or two, whatever he'd been tearing open hardware and kind of examining chips. And I guess the newest phones, I don't know, Pixel 2 or the iPhone, but newer phones, he said have three three microphones built into them. - So more like Farfield, Mike's kind of like a what Alexa has or something like that. Is that what he's thinking or is he thinking the big companies are always watching? - And say what it was. I'm just wondering, it could just be about noise reduction. That sort of thing too. You know, it's probably something innocent like that. Sure, it comes in handy for spying, but it sounded like it was just a, I'm guessing it's probably something to do with just a better quality Audio stream or something like that. Maybe it uses triangulation to filter out background noise or something like that Makes sense You got you nursing a cold or something? No, I'm doing pretty good. Do I sound you bad? You just don't sound quite as low as you normally do I didn't do my breathing exercises before this thing so Yeah, there we go. I think I just knocked it down half an octave right there. Yeah, I think that did it. Dude, it's going to be back at the desk. It's going to be recording some podcasts. Yeah, it's been, gosh, what a month. Maybe we took a month off. Yeah, we published something right around Thanksgiving. We dark Thanksgiving episode. Number five, what we're thankful for. And yeah, it's been kind of nice to have a little break and much needed, a little R&R, but I'm also really eager to get back into it. And I think we've got some really cool things that we want to talk about. And it's going to be a pretty rock-and-year for the coffee code cast. I think first we should probably say thanks to one of our listeners. Oh boy, I got a nice little care package in the mail earlier this week. Our good friend and our Long time listener Simon delivered on his coffee promise. I got a nice little package in the mail with a couple bags of beans. Sorry, I had him sent to the California office instead of the Seattle one there, KJ. Sorry, I got plenty of beans here. Yeah, Simon, shout out to Simon for hookin us up at the coffee and codecast with some quality Starbucks beans. We got a bag of the Sumatra, which I'm a big fan of the Sumatra beans and oh shoot I don't have the tag in front of me but it was a reserve blend Maybe the Nicaraghan blend or something but one of the reserves Anyway, I haven't cracked into it yet, but I'm excited to try it out. So I Told Simon well, we said that we said on air that if if he delivered then we would be delivering a t-shirt So we're gonna we're mocking up those designs right now Kyle has some graphics for me to look at and I'm gonna order up some shirts this week. So Simon we're gonna Hook you up with some coffee and codecast merch and stay tuned for that Maybe if we're gonna be putting out some you know free some marketing materials Maybe we should have the website running to maybe Yeah, I'm gonna work on that too. I've got a good list of resolutions getting the website up as one of them So let's let's talk about that good deal. Yes Maybe we haven't confirmed this is being something we're actually gonna do, but there was some talk that maybe Myself or Maybe you'd be involved too. I'm not sure but maybe doing a full marathon. I've done about three half marathons at this point all the rock and roll Seattle marathon half but on my to-do list has been the full marathon for quite a long time probably for I don't know damn near decade probably and I just have never gotten it done and I've kind of gotten away from running here in the past Six or seven years. I've been primarily focused on biking so I kind of wanted to get back into running and I Thought maybe this might be the year to actually kick off a full marathon and I Talked to you a little bit about it and you sounded like you might be interested in it, too I may have committed to that in a moment of weakness, but I am interested in that Don't back out now Well, the whiskey may have been flowing that day. No, I'm just kidding. I think that was during work time. Well, that's been known to happen on occasion. No, actually, I've also... Well, I'm a former runner. I used to run competitively in college for D1 program. Not a great program, but it was D1 still. So I'll throw it out there. But... Yeah, I've come close in training. We used to get pretty close to marathon. I mean, I've done half marathons and I've come, the most I've done in the training session was 22. So I've been close to the to the edge, but not quite all the way there. So I'd love to do that. It's on my bucket list and I think it would be really fun to have an accountability partner to keep me in check and yeah, I think it would be fun to do it. Yeah, I was curious as to how far during cross-country you actually went. I wasn't I'm not familiar with cross-country So I didn't know what the total distances we were running in those kinds of events ended up being I figured you were probably somewhere in the ballpark But well the the races themselves You know it the college in college or 10k for Typically 8k or 10k for men's racing So, you know, nothing close to that. But in training, we would get close to that. So we'd go out, particularly in the off season, too. Like the off season was really just a lot of base training. And so we would go out and run, you know, I remember we would kind of flip a coin and we would do eight miles one day and 10 miles the next day. And that was kind of like a regular Monday through Friday regimen. And in the off season, in the brisk, no braska winters, running like on country roads and whatnot. But then we would do long runs on Sundays and so we would build those up over time. You know, you might do alternating eight and 10 mile days and then for a long run, maybe do a 12 mile or one week and then 14 mile or 16 mile or et cetera. And we keep jacking it up until we got a little bit over 20. And I think that's as far as we went was like 22, 22 miles. Just still a bit of a hull. So you'll have a good feel for it or at least a pretty good idea of what it's going to be like. whereas I've only gone, you know, 13 point, whatever, two. Yeah, you just double it. So everyone you feel like collapsing, you just say, Hey, I'm halfway. And I got to go back now. So we've kind of played around with the idea of, because this is a pretty major accomplishment for most people, making it kind of a destination type event. So we've told around with the idea of maybe even a foreign type marathon, but I think maybe just in the interest of the timing and our time and that sort of thing we've kind of settled on. Maybe we would do the Vegas rock and roll marathon, which looks kind of cool because you run the strip at night, which would be kind of a cool experience, I guess. That would be fun. Yeah, I haven't done that before. I haven't really done any running in Vegas, so a night run, that'd be motivating too. The energy there, I think, would be palpable and it would be motivating to keep going. That's the thing I appreciate about the rock and roll is that there's bands playing all over the place and there's usually people cheering all over the place and it kind of just makes you feel you know you don't I guess realize the work you're putting in you're kind of always looking around and checking out what's coming up in front of you and you just you kind of get lost in it all I think. That's the best way to run anyway is when you're in the zone and not really thinking about running and that's always was the key to my endurance training was finding something to focus on besides the run and when you can get us into that it's a pretty powerful feeling. That's kind of the high the runners higher the zone and yeah having some rock and roll music and people's screaming at you as always a fun way to get there. Over the break for whatever reason I got into looking into, I think I was looking at replacement MacBooks as well. And I was kind of getting turned off by the sheer cost of it. It's not something that I necessarily use for work or anything like that on a regular basis. It's more of a, you know, it's my machine for home. It's what I look around on the internet with. It's what I, you know, bring up recipes on when I cook, you know, that sort of thing. So I wanted to replace the one that I have. And the reason that I wanted to to replace the one that I have is that about two and a half years ago or so I had come home from the office kind of through my bag on top of the hood of the car and was kind of messing around with my bike and noticed that I was missing a valve stem cover. So one of those little five cent plastic covers that cover your tire valve stems. So in my book bag I happened to have one of those and so I unzipped the book bag and got it out of the top, pouch where it was located, turned around to put it on the bike. All of a sudden behind me I heard a big sliding sound and there goes my 15 inch MacBook Pro sliding off the hood of the car onto the ground and crashed into the cement. Oh shit. Banged up the corner of the case of the MacBook and cracked the screen of course. So MacBooks being what they are, you know, really expensive and impossible to repair. I just kind of figured it was screwed and you know, I basically made it a clamshell desktop computer at that point. Well, long story short, over the break I had found that you can buy a replacement screen for the MacBook. And not only is it the LCD screen, but it's also the aluminum panel. So like the entire, I guess hinged piece the lid I guess you might say is one piece that you can buy as a whole so it's not just a screen insert it's really the whole outfit that just on that side of the hinge. Exactly yep so it was the aluminum it's the screen and everything and it's all put together already. And so that comes as one piece what you can actually order on amazon for about three hundred and fifty bucks so. I went ahead and gave it a shot and I found a tutorial on how to tear down the MacBook Pro and replace the screen. It's a long story short. It worked like a champ and right now I'm actually looking at my MacBook with a brand new screen on it. screen on it and it's working great. The only concern or issue I might have with it is they're this screen as opposed to the other one does have a slight bit of ghosting or burn in which is kind of annoying but I did contact the seller about that this morning so we'll see if they get back to me. But overall I'm really happy it's way cheaper repair than I thought it was going to be. When I first bought this thing way back in 2013 it actually had a dead pixel in it pretty quickly and I brought it into the Mac store to get repaired. And I remember at that time they gave me, it was warranted, of course, the repair, but they gave me like a receipt at the end of the repair and they were like, it said something like this would cost a thousand dollars or more to do any other time. So 300 dollars I was really, really happy with and I'm happy to have my Mac. It's a good deal. Good discount and a great savings on having to replace the whole thing because you know, not gonna get a good Mac book pro for $300 anywhere even used. - Yeah, even this model, which is already, what I say, 2013, so it's already plenty old, but it still performs. So I mean, I have no complaints with its performance at all. So, really, really happy with that. And kind of tying onto that, one of the things that I read or heard, I think on a podcast, maybe I was on a podcast, is that when it comes to battery on any kind of laptop, I guess actually, but the Chrome browser is a battery destroyer basically. So I went away from Chrome on the MacBook just to try it out. I had tried Safari once upon a time, long long time ago, and I just didn't get into it, I didn't like it. I didn't like that it didn't sync with all my other machines and so on and so forth. as far as bookmarks and history and all that sort of thing. But I've been running it for a while now. Basically, since I got it repaired, and I definitely can tell you the battery life is insanely better to the magnitude of, I could probably run this MacBook for eight hours on Safari versus probably maybe two on Chrome. - Are you saying that those Microsoft Edge and knowing little pop-ups actually might be speaking some truth? I can't speak to Edge because I'm off the IE train since what 2000? They don't have a Mac friendly version of Edge. Yeah, maybe I don't know. I should probably give it a try. I give it a good run, but I kind of like Safari. I just have shyed away from it. I've been pleasantly impressed. Even I migrated all my bookmarks and stuff like that from Chrome over to Safari. of the things that I do love from Safari is like the reading function. Yeah, converts everything to a different text friendly. Yep. And then it works on the iPhone as well. So now I get syncing between my iPhone and the Mac. And even it even has kind of a handoff function. So if I'm viewing a web page on the Mac when I open up Safari on the iPhone, it'll show me at the bottom that I can pick up that page where I left off on the Mac, which is pretty slick. So yeah, I mean it's been a pretty cool experience. I'm pretty happy with it. And like I said, the battery life is Is much much better. I'm actually kind of sad right now, but I can't run Safari on Windows, but I guess maybe I'll have to give edge a try Well, what happened to that they used to have Safari for Windows? Did they get rid of that? They did they dropped support for that I don't know four years ago or it's been a while. Oh boy. I'm a little out of the loop on the Apple Stack yeah, you're all Android now all Android all the time all Android all the time. Yep. I've been very happy with that Decision Used to be a big apple guy. I still like Apple. I don't have really a whole lot against Apple other than I Like my project fine. I like I've said you know, it's a pretty good deal kind of pretty good deal on the equipment though pixel 2's been great great phone So I just got we've been going back and forth. That's why we haven't had any episodes I've been going back and forth these fuckers over here at the you know customer service at Google man And they just Relented and actually sent me a email a couple days ago saying that the my trade-in kits are coming in the mail this week So oh excellent finally so they came through those guys those you know they're kind of firm at first But I think they had a lot of push back on it was confusing and for a lot of people who wanted to trade in a nexus or something for the new phone There's a hundred and fifty dollars off if you have one of the newer nexus 5x 32 gig phones So yeah, I'm expecting a three hundred dollar credit for the two phones that I am trading in That took what about two months at this point right? Two months. Yeah, it's been a process It's really just been sitting in their queue more than anything else we haven't had a ton of back and forth, but it just kind of went away for a while and then I followed up with them again and then Yeah, I did send out a link to a Google form to fill out if you had a screwed up order that didn't have the trade-in kit or whatever And they're responding to those people right now finally Good. I'm glad that that they realized they're wrong there and and made it right for you I think that's the right thing to do. Yeah, I do too. Thanks Google So the last piece of Excuse me the last piece to tag on to that whole MacBook story is That because of the broken screen I had been using the Mac as more or less a desktop kind of in clamshell mode so I had my plex server Running on there and and a whole bunch of other things so I've had to kind of reevaluate and Terrapart some of the things that I had set up in terms of Plex and some of the other services that the MacBook was running And so I went ahead and I purchased an actual desktop PC which I haven't had here in a long time so They still make those They do well and in this case I just got a kind of an i5 Used one you can get them refurbed on Amazon for I think this one cost me about 200 bucks Through a new video card in it, but other than that, it's been running like a champ and it acts as myplex server now and then I can use my MacBook as a regular You know notebook that I carry around every day and when I go Oh, you know out of country out of state, you know, whatever I'm traveling I can Take the MacBook with me, which is something that I've kind of been missing You know, I don't want to bring the work laptop with me or something like that. So I'm I'm pretty happy with that Plus the MacBook is a very expensive desktop machine, right? To your point you can get a desktop server for less than the cost of a replacement screen on a five-year-old MacBook. Yeah, that's very true All right, well, let's move on to some follow-up here or in the last episode I believe it was yes, it was because we were talking about things we were thankful for and I brought up the Sonos products and You had brought up a question about the play one Which is the number one versus the play one which is the number one written out, right? Like sonos one versus the play one the play Uno the play one. Oh, you're right. It is on us one. Yeah, you're right Sonos one versus the play one and There there is a difference between the two the difference the play one is the legacy device if you will It's what I have a couple of them So they're the same exact form factor. They're effectively the same exact hardware The difference is that the Sonos 1 is the Alexa enabled device and it has capacitive touch on the top whereas the play one has a physical set of volume buttons on the top and that's it. So other than that they're effectively the exact same devices Okay. They can be paired together so you can have two sonos play ones or two sonos ones paired together. I don't think you can cross the two. Yeah, that's what I was wondering about there is cross. But that's okay. It doesn't matter because you can still have, if you wanted, you're talking about if you wanted to left and right in a room like your living room, you could pair two of the same branded ones together, the same series. You could still have some Sonos play ones in the kitchen and the Sonos won in the couple of those in the basement or the bedroom and it doesn't really play on all of them. Yeah, absolutely. They can continue to coexist on the same Sonos system. They just can't, I don't think they can be paired together as left and right channels in a stereo pair unless they're the same type. Okay. Well, that's not a deal breaker. That's okay. Nail and other difference between the two is I think the play one, they've down, decrease the price down to down to 150 bucks and the Sonos one is a $200 speaker now. So the play one used to be the $200 level and they've now brought that down. So those are the primary differences. They have both of them still in their lineup. So that answers that question. Thanks for clearing that up for us, KJ. No problem. Glad I could be a service. Moving right along is today's topics. Why don't I get us started? The first topic that I've been wanting to talk about this for a while for selfish reasons because I am in the market. So I was saying earlier for a new laptop. I have a ThinkPad T440. So that's a, I was gonna say 1940s model. It feels like a 1940s model. It was the 2014 model, whatever ThinkPad T440p. Anyway. So yeah, I want to talk about the battle of the Ultrabooks. been trying to make a decision on what platform to buy. Do I want to get a Mac book pro? Do I want to stick with PC? And if I do want PC, then do I want to go a Surface Pro? How about Chromebook? That's another platform that's evolving. There was a new pixel book that just came out within the last couple months that's pretty impressive in terms of hardware. It's right up there with these other guys in battery life is phenomenal. But that's an option. And then some of the other ultrabook PCs, PC options, such as the Dell XPS 13 or the Spectre X360 from HP. So I just wanted to kind of throw out some of my findings, just doing some research on those four, maybe help some people out that are trying to make some decisions on what to buy in this ultrabook space. Ultrabook really just kind of a fake term, but it's just a really lightweight laptop. I think Intel came up with the term ultrabook, but it's really kind of a nod towards the PC space after you know, you had MacBook Air, kind of like the equivalent of MacBook Air is on the PC side, very lightweight, less than an inch thick. In some cases, probably closer to half an inch thick or so plus or minus. It's a competitive space right now. There's a lot happening, a lot heating up over there and it can be quickly confusing, just trying to wade through all the different options that are out there. - I feel like before you start diving into the results of your findings, you should probably lay out what it is exactly that you're looking for in an ultrabook. Like what are its use cases? You know, what are you wanting to do with it? What are you wanting to get out of it? Is it a work machine? Is it a personal machine? Is it a video editing? You know, what are you gonna do with this thing? And how powerful does it need to be based on those criteria. - Yep, that's a good point. So I'm a little picky. I have a few different boxes that I want to check off on mine. So the machine that I have now, that kind of the paperweight that I was telling you about for my Lenovo ThinkPad is mainly a developer machine. So I'm using it to run Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio Pro. And I'm doing mostly development type tasks on it. not really doing a whole lot of video. I don't do any video for that matter, anything like that. So it's not terribly processor intensive. But what I would like to use it for is a developer machine. I'd like to also be able to, I travel a lot now. I'm traveling a lot more this year too. So what I'd like to have something was some pretty significant battery life, something that can get me through a, maybe not a long haul flight over to Europe or something like that. pretty darn close, at least anything in the United States. Like to have a good battery life. I want to be lightweight too. That's the other thing. This thing that I have now just takes up a lot of space. It's about an inch thick, probably about four and a half pounds. So it feels very heavy in my bag because I don't bring a lot with me. I travel pretty light and that's the heaviest thing that I have in my bag. So for me, the fact that it's ultra portable and that it's pretty fast. I want to be able to do things quickly with it. I don't need to do a ton of processor intensive stuff. I just want it to be zippy. I want to have good battery life and I want it to be lightweight. So those are kind of the three check boxes that I have for my new laptop. - So no, GPU is not important to you. You're not gaming, you're not doing video. You might want our decent resolution, but as far as GPU power, that's probably not a big concern for you. CPU and memory is gonna be your biggest concerns. CPU and memory exactly. - Storage. - Yeah, a lot of gamer. Storage as well, yeah. Especially because everything's solid state, you know, I wanna make sure that I, and some of these light ultra lights too, they don't have the ability to swap out components. So something that's really important there is to make sure it's kind of like a one and done decision. Once you do it, you're not gonna upgrade it. It's glued into the box. So it's not really gonna come out. So storage, making sure there's enough in there is important too. - Okay. - And so anyway, I guess those are the four, one, two, three, four, five options. I narrowed it down to five. MacBook Pro. - Let me ask one more question before we get too far down the rabbit hole. Like how much storage are you looking for in a box? 'Cause your storage need versus my storage need is probably quite different. - Yeah, it's gonna depend on a few factors, right? So being in development, sometimes, you know, we have virtual machines and that sort of thing can eat up space if you're going to be doing VM. I'm not doing a ton of that. The other area where storage could be coming issues if you have a lot of offline content, multimedia, multimedia, photos, because you're a big photographer. First, if you have gigs and gigs of photos on your drive or music and videos, those are some things that can eat up some storage. For me, it's more of just a precautionary thing. I just don't want to run out and I'm not sure what I'll have on there. I right now, I'll tell you this, I have a couple of desktops, one at the office and Seattle, one at home and my laptop. I'm running 256 gig solid state on all three of those. And I'm in a pretty healthy territory on all of those. I'm not running out of space yet. But I'm probably over, I'm easily over 50%. I'm usually using 128. And so, I wouldn't want to go any lower than 256. And if I can get up to 512 for a little bit more money, it's probably worth it just for some future proofing. - Yep, I would agree. Yeah, it feels like you're gonna be pushing that probably in the next few years, if not sooner. - Yeah, I've just noticed in some of the new updates that I'm doing, I think Windows is a little lighter, but some of these other packages, Office is a gig plus, couple gigs, Visual Studio, couple gigs. So it doesn't take much, some of those software programs out there getting bigger and it doesn't take much to suck up that space. And again, if you're doing virtual machines or anything like that, then you're going to take up a ton of space. It wouldn't take much to use that up either. So those are some of the criteria that I'm looking at. Ram, I'm thinking probably 16 gig just because I use 16 on my laptop right now. Actually my desktop's I have 24. And that I find to be more important just for speed and performance than anything else. Just eight gigs is just kind of the bare minimum. And if I'm running multiple apps and I've got, you know, 20 Chrome browser tabs open or whatever the hell then you kind of need to have more RAM because that thing's going to suck up some memory. Yeah, I think between Visual Studio and Chrome alone you could pretty easily suck up probably six to seven gigs just between those two. Doesn't take much for those guys. Those are pretty big memory hogs. So yeah, looking for 16 gigs, 512 would be nice. The other consideration to make too is processor and so there's been a big jump in performance. Just in the last few months, some of these machines are getting refreshed with the KB Lake update, which is the 8th gen Intel. So like your Mac book, for example, still rockin' i7, but some of these other guys are starting to come out with i8s now and big leaps in performance. you're going from dual core to quad core. So that's one big jump. So if any of them, kind of multi-threading applications, you get to see a big performance boost in the I8. And also, well, sorry, on the I7 8th generation versus the I7 7th gen. I'm going to make sure I don't get those confused. But the 8th gen, you've got quad core, Earth Gen also has improved battery life and overall performance is just rocks compared to the 7. So it's definitely worth that consideration too when you're looking at one of these machines. Have you had hands-on performance with these machines yet? Have you been able to test any of these in person? I don't have any. No, I haven't. This has all just been through research and looking online and different performance tests that are people, other benchmarks that have been published online, you know, all around the board, you know, whether it's video transcoding, spreadsheets, you know, load times for apps and even some graphic stuff all around the gay, just crushes the seventh gen chips. So, I know I'm familiar with Chromebook. We've got a Chromebook. We looked at a few of those together and I'm familiar with the XPS 13. I think I introduced you to that machine. I actually was interested in potentially looking at that prior to the MacBook getting fixed up. I'm curious to know how those stack up against some of these other ones. I'm not familiar with Spectre or. Yeah. Well, I think the one, let's see, we're to start here. I'll just go down the line. One thing that I would say is that Mac, we've been ragging on Apple a little bit lately, this is no difference here. The Macbook Pro's are little lagging in terms of updates. Maybe that's going to change here in the next three to six months, but right now they're all still rocking the seventh gen chips. Also too, you've got Dungle Hell and that sort of thing too. I like the durability of the Macbook Pro, but that's the other differentiator. between like a specter for example is going to be more of a you can it works as a tablet or a laptop. So that is one benefit of the specter whereas the MacBook and the you know, XPS 13 the Chromebook pixel book those guys are just laptops right they're not you're not going to be folding those over in tablet mode or anything like that. Yeah, I think the XPS 13 can come in a touch model but it's not yeah you're not folding it into tablet mode but it's touch enabled. Yep that's right so so that that's one of the differentiators another another one too is USB-C so that's an up and coming you know the phones now rock in USB-C some of the laptops are two and for charging specifically that's something I'm interested in is as I'd like to have something that doesn't have a brick for a power cord. And so I'd like to find USB-C charging where I could have a really small pocket size charger or even use a battery that's powerful enough to give that thing an extra charge. And it was extra batteries you can keep for the phones. I'd like to have that capability as well. And I think this is an area that the newer MacBooks win because I believe the Dongle hell that you referred to earlier, I think the singular port that is available on the Macbook, I believe, is a USB-C port. Yep. So you get that with Macbook. You do get that also with the Pixelbook has USB-C. The Surface Pro, now see, this is where I don't remember. I have to look at the Surface Pro to see if it does or not. The Surface Pro 4 is the newest version. It has full size USB 3, Surface Connect for charging, microSD slot, mini display port, headphone jack, and cover connectors. So yeah, so that was disappointing. The newest Surface Pro, you have a, what they call Surface Connect for charging. And you can get an adapter or a dongle to go to USB-C, but it doesn't have a USB-C port built into it. I would say another feature in terms of battery life is that they're all very competitive. The Pixelbook, the Surface Pro, MacBook, they're all pushing the XPS 13 can get up to like they claim 22 hours, but that's... Yeah, I remember it being pretty high when I was looking at the battery life. Although, you know, I'd be curious just to know what conditions that's taking into account. Well for one thing, it can do it, but it's going to do it on the 1080p model. If you're doing 4K or I don't think they do 4K. It's the 1,832 something by 1,800 resolution. It's going to use a little more juice. So it's not going to knock it down a few hours. Same with the Spectre. The Spectre has a 4K model and they have a 1080p model. And the 1080 model gets four extra hours. I think it's somewhere around 17 hours, 16 hours. No. No, the Spectre 360 gets 12 hours of battery life on 1080p and it gets about 8 hours on 4K. Up to 10 hours of wireless web, up to 10 hours I can play back, up to 30 days standby time. So that's the same as the Pixelbook. Pixelbook gets up to 10 hours as well. So in that category of battery life, MacBook, Pixelbook are kind of on the lower end. The XPS 13 is the winner of the 22 hours specter around 12 hours, so pretty close. But that's, I really, I have to say that the Dell is the standout for me. I like the look of the specter. I think the specter has a better aesthetic. Even then the XPS, I thought the XPS was a pretty sexy look in the little box. It is, but compared to the specter, I think it's not as flashy. Now I'll say this, the XPS 13, I'm waiting to buy because they did do a sneak peek of the new version in 2018 and they're going to be presenting it to CES in Vegas first week in January, the second week in January. And they've done some really cool things with it. That look is about three years old and so it's due for a refresh and it looks like they're refreshing it. It's going to be thinner. It has a carbon fiber base and an aluminum body and it looks pretty cool. So it'll be a real sturdy like good piece of feeling hardware like Macbook I mean it was already a pretty good feeling piece like I felt like it was very lightweight but durable Yeah, so it'd be cool to even see that go step further And then what about what about wait? Who's the winner here for wait? So far or at least who's in the running? The specter is gonna be on the lighter under that the pixel book probably close XPS is a little heavier and I think the refresh that they're doing in the 2018 model might actually bring it back in line, but it's a little on the heavier side. It is just a laptop and so it has a little more beef to it. Don't know about the MacBook and Surface Pro. The MacBook weight is 3.2 pounds. The Spectre is coming in around four. for the 13 inch it's going to be a little lighter than that. 13 is going to be 2.78 pounds. So it's pretty close to the light on the light side there. It's one of the lighter ones. 2.78. The XPS is somewhere in the three range, three and a half maybe. Okay, so they're all pretty close within a pound of each other, even probably, or less. Yeah, I will say this too, the Pixelbook doesn't have the 8th Gen processor yet, so that is one. And I think I like what they're doing with the Pixelbook. I'll just say that right now. If you have a Pixel device that automatically pairs with your phone, so you don't have to worry about internet connectivity, you'll just sync up with your phone for Wi-Fi. The fact that it's before a lot of the Chromebooks were just kind of Seluron kind of crappy processors. Well now you're seeing them have put in some better hardware, but not quite As advanced yet and you still have the problem of just running Chrome apps And so I think even though you're gonna get good performance out of this even having the seventh gen processor in 16 gigs of RAM That's a lot of power for a Unix Linux machine But I think you're still gonna have some trouble just with interop Where ability there are just certain apps that you can't run not be able to install programs you want to use and it's heavily reliant on internet and for that reason I couldn't do it because with all the plane travel I want to be able to do coding and work offline and it would be really hard to do that with the pixel book. Yeah, I feel even just because of the way that you work, unless you're going to continue to remote into a machine somewhere. I feel just by that that factor on the pixel book is kind of out or it should be anyway. Yep, yeah, that was tough call because I really like what they're doing and I want to support that project and it could be. Maybe just another year or two away from prime time, but it's just not quite ready yet. The MacBook kind of falls somewhat into that same realm. I mean, you can run Visual Studio and you can run Visual Studio code. The Visual Studio version for Mac unfortunately, well, not unfortunately, but it's dotnet core only so you can't. >> Well, that's not even true either. You can modify that net apps. It's just not as easy to do or not as friendly to do. >> Yeah. >> That's somewhat takes the Mac out of the running unless you're developing brand new applications. >> I would say also too, the Surface Pro, I didn't speak to it a whole lot. I like the Surface Pro. I like it's very lightweight. I mean, we should just look at that really quick. >> The Surface Pros are impressive. They've, you know, especially given that this is what basically the second generation of Microsoft's hardware. And it's pretty sexy and it's pretty powerful stuff. I'm impressed with what they're doing. Super light. So it's actually the Surface Pro 2017. Wow. Surface Pro two, right? Well, the Surface Pro four is the latest. What am I thinking of? I'm thinking of Surface Book two, maybe? I don't know. There's something to that just came out. You're thinking of the Surface Book probably. Surface Book. - I am, yep. - Yeah, no, this is impressive. So the Surface Pro for 1.69 pounds. So it's definitely the wins the lightweight competition. I think what I have a problem with though is the keyboard. I don't like the cloth keyboard or I want something that's a little more rigid. - But I mean, you can always plug one in or use a USB keyboard. I mean, there's lots of options. I mean, that's really just your travel keyboard. Yeah, that's true. I'm just thinking if I'm on a couch, I don't know how it would feel. Have you ever tried sitting on a couch with one or? No, I've never had one of these types of tablets. I mean, the closest I had was the iPad, which had kind of that flexible. Very similar to this, it had the flexible cover, but it didn't have a keyboard on it. So I've never attempted that. Well, if the check with Doug, Doug has one of these and it has a keyboard. Yeah, I'd like to know from Doug or anybody that's used a Surface Pro, what the experience is. I've kind of heard anecdotally of it just having the cover the way it is. It's a little more difficult to use. It doesn't have the same rigidity that you would get from a laptop, where it'd be tough to be laying down with it or you could probably get it to work on an airplane folding tray or whatever, but it might be a little more challenging than just having the laptop. So it feels like there's probably three contenders here. It seems to me like the Surface Pro, the SPS 13 and the Spectre are probably the top dogs in the race. Yeah, I think so. I think those are the top three. I think for me, just because I'm a little questionable about the keyboard, that might rule that one out. The Surface Pro out for me. I just would feel better having a more conventional laptop. I love the look of the Spectre 360. I love the power and the battery life of the XPS 13. Really, what I came down to is just trying to figure out what I value more. The Spectre has a higher resolution. It can go 4K. It also has that tent mode. So it would be ideal if you wanted to watch movies or something like that. you could put it into a tent mode. The downside is though is because it's a little lighter and it has the 4K display, you do lose the battery life. And so really those perks come in and expense which is not having as much battery. So then it knocks it down to eight hours, which from what I've seen online is still kind of optimistic, right? Depending on what you're doing, you're gonna suck a lot more juice out of it. So for me, I think where I've landed is I like the XPS 13. It gives me the lightweight factor that I want. It's light enough. It's a lot lighter than my current laptop is and it also does come with a higher res screen that 1800 pixels, like the 3200 by 1800. So I think that's good enough. It's not quite 4K, but that's okay. and it doesn't compromise too much of the battery life. Also too with the refresh that's coming out at CES, I think that's a compelling reason too. It's gonna look, you know, it's gonna be an updated look. And so it kinda gives me the best of both worlds. I get the best battery life and a pretty darn good look even though it's not quite the Spectre 360. - I think you should take a look at Surface Book 2 as well. It looks like it made some of your criteria other than the i8. So it has a Core i7, it's a 15 inch, well sorry they have a 13 inch model too. If the 15 inch can do 16 gig RAM, the 13 inch it looks like also can. Anywhere up to one terabyte of storage, 17 hour battery life, USB-C, as well as USB-A. I mean it looks, yeah, it looks like it weight wise. It's 3.6 pounds total, but in tablet mode only it's 1.5. So I mean it feels like that probably fits into your realm here probably even better than the Surface Pro does. I think it would be a better fit than the Surface Pro. You're right. We should have actually looked at this one too. A couple of things that ding it for me. I don't like the hinge. I just think it looks-- I don't have a ghetto. If you are into gaming though and or more processing power at the GPU level, one benefit of the service book is that you do have the option of getting a dedicated Nvidia GPU built into the base, which is pretty cool. Yep. Or if you're in Photoshop or you have video processing or anything that requires a powerful GPU. Yeah. The one I'm seeing here, the 13.5 pixel sense is an eighth gen Intel, which is great as well. I think I missed that before, so I kind of eliminated it because I wanted to donate things for me or to many things. The only downside would be here at price probably. I think these are probably out of my budget, just a little bit. - Yeah, they're pretty pricey for sure. - You know, I think the 13 and a half inch with the G-Force bases are starting at two grand, and so by the time you customize it a little bit, maybe put some more memory in there, bump the hard drive, you might be closer to a $3,000 machine. One thing I really liked about, you know, well, actually it's not that bad. 512 gig SSD and 16 gig RAM 2499. And that comes with a separate Nvidia GPU, kind of battery life is a bad boy. - It was up to 17 hours. - Wow, that's tough. Okay. Yeah, at the hinge, I don't like the hinge. That might be the deal break. - I agree, the design is pretty bad. The hinge is made that way because it can fold backwards as well, but it's the adds hideous. Yeah, I'm having a hard time with that. I just never really liked that part of it. We'll see, I should keep an eye on it. I do think though that after CES, we should have a little follow up and see what we learn, what comes out of that event because I know the XPS 13 refresh is happening. And if the price is right on that one, they haven't announced pricing for it yet, but I know that the current models are actually very affordable. that XPS 13, the current model, you can get that with 512 and 16 gigs of RAM. And that was sitting around $1,600 bucks with that, that, that promotion running. And so it was like $1,600 or $1,700, which I thought was a fantastic price for that kind of hardware. And CES is coming up here in early, well, early to mid-January. So you should have an answer on that pretty quick. Are you wanting to pull the trigger pretty quickly after that then? or what's your... - Yeah, I wanted to buy the damn thing, you know, this week, last week, but I think I would have regretted if I didn't wait till CES, just because if I was gonna go with the Spectre, I don't really have anything to wait on there. I think that that one's pretty good to go, but the XPS, I just don't want. The fact that it's a design that's three years old, I really wanna see what the new version looks like before I pull the trigger on it, 'cause I don't buy these things very often. So I'd have this thing for probably three to five years. - Yeah, no, you don't wanna rush into something that you're gonna be holding onto for a good amount of time and be using daily for all of that time pretty much. - Yeah, especially if I can wait a month, if they'll be selling these things in February or even in March, I can wait, but it's gonna be painful, but I can do it if I have to. - In the world of Amazon, I'll have it next day. I know it's pretty hard to wait for these things. It is so painful. I was ready to buy the Spectra. I'm telling you, man, I have my finger on the buy it now button. Against my, I decided to wait and see. The surface, I might have to look at the service book. Maybe they have a special thing that covers the hinge. If we can make it kind of disguise it. - There you go. Maybe you can just, yeah, like kind of like MacBooks. You can get the pre-formed covers. You know, you can get all kinds of different colors and configurations. Maybe they have the same type of thing. Maybe they have just a hinge cover. - Yeah, they could. A hinge cover, nice. Well, and there's something about it too. It's just maybe in my head, but there's a level of complexity there that I'm not really sure I wanna deal with. It's like sometimes I can cause more problems, but the laptop mode and the tablet mode sounds like they've ironed that thing out, but I know that there's kind of a thing where you have to wait for it to disengage it. And yeah, I just don't know how well that works in the real world. I can tell you even from the small amount of experience I've seen in the office with one of those kind of disconnecting and reconnecting the keyboard, it struggles sometimes to understand that the keyboard has been reconnected or stuff like that where you have to reboot it to get the keyboard to be identified. So I think there's definitely still some issues to be worked out. Yeah, that sort of thing turns me off to that idea. It's like, I'm gonna err on the side of simplicity there. I don't know how often I'd be switching modes. So that's kind of a gimmicky feature to begin with. But if I'd like to do it and it doesn't work, or it only works some of the time, then I'm just gonna be frustrated with the hardware. And so I think there, I like the idea of just a simple laptop, it's lightweight, it's fortified. It's not, you know, the battery life on that at Dell is just fantastic. So simple is better for me. Yeah, and I think you want reliability, right? That's one of the things we probably didn't talk about here, but reliability is incredibly important. And a machine that you're going to be using day to day for everything. Yep, exactly. That's one of the probably the most important factor next to it. Well, it's not the most. It's pretty darn close though. I want something light, but I also want it to be reliable too, because if it is crappy, then who really cares how light it is or how good the battery is, right? It's pretty darn good. Yeah, that brings us kind of up to the end of our show here. And so I just want to take a minute to talk about the next episode. Something we haven't done before, but I think it might be a nice little hook to keep you guys coming back. We've got a lot of good stuff coming up on the next episode here in the news. We didn't really get into the news today. So coming up next time, some new legislation that's been passed around net neutrality. I'd like to have a good conversation with you about that, Kyle, and talk about what the implications are for all of us with the new Net Nutrality laws. Also, I've been excited about this feature. I don't know if you heard about this one, but Windows 10 sets or tabs. I think that's just kind of their code name. I don't know if they're actually going to call this thing, but it's kind of the Chrome browser idea where you've got tabs, but it's going to be for Windows Windows. Does that make sense? Yeah, watch the video on that and that looks really interesting. I'm excited to to chat a little bit more about that. It's a cool idea. Yeah, so you can, you know, if you have your word document open and you want to have some research tabs in there, you can have a browser window and a couple other things. So yeah, we'll dive into that next time. We got a little Firefox news here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, we were gonna, in the news recently, hear Firefox got dinged up a little bit with their new browser that they went ahead and did a auto installation of an extension across everybody in their user base without notifying them. So got them into a little kerfuffle there and we'll talk about that a little bit. This last one, oh boy, we could talk about this for a whole episode probably because this has been a conspiracy theory that we've been behind for years, right? We've all known Apple here coming out with some big admissions of intentionally slowing down the devices. For your benefit though, I mean they're looking out for you, those good guys at Apple, right? Why make sure that? Well that's the claims. So we'll look into that a little bit more and yeah we'll talk about that. We'll get into the conspiracy a little bit next episode. I can't wait to do that. It might be a complete in the news episode. I mean those are pretty four pretty good topics there that we could talk a while on. I like it. Yeah there's plenty of meat to chew on there. So, anything you wanted to say about you had mentioned a topic that we didn't get to cover today, is there anything there you want to elaborate on maybe for next time? Yeah, so the other topic that we were going to talk about today, but kind of just ran out of time, was that I've had a couple of instances here recently where some people that I look up to or that are big names in the industry or you know that sort of thing, I guess in my mind you know, you kind of hear these people and you see them talk with a ton of authority, a lot of people will follow them. A lot of people are interested in what they say and listen to what they say. Suddenly, you run into a scenario where you find out that they're not all that they're cracked up to be, that they're maybe no better than you or maybe their skills are worse than you are. That sort of thing. I've had that happen a couple of times and it's been eye-opening and it's been interesting and it's kind of brought me around to the idea that to speak on a subject you don't really have to always be a subject matter expert, you just have to be able to speak with it authoritatively and sound like, you know what the hell you're talking about. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Well, that's very interesting too, because I know that we all, well, I know at least for me and we've talked about this before, just this idea of imposter syndrome. And so maybe that's the other side of it is always just thinking that, in addition a feeling like we're imposters in what we do, sometimes thinking that other people we look up to are infallible or can do no wrong or we have probably visions of grandeur of these people that are just as out of whack as our own feelings of being imposters are on the other end of things, right? Yeah, there you go. That's exactly right. Yeah, or maybe they're the imposters, right? I mean, you're, I'm looking at them and saying they're effectively, I'm saying they're an posture because they are speaking on subjects that I would expect them to know better or, you know, in my opinion, they should know better than what they're saying and, you know, they spio out things that in my opinion, it would be complete falsities. So I'm excited to dig into that one. Like that's something for me that's kind of haunted me through a big part of my career. I think I've made a lot of progress on that in recent years, but I definitely have struggle with my identity as a programmer and how I stack up to other people. So it doesn't have to be like that. It doesn't be a competition, it's just, but it's interesting like how easily intimidated I can become just a larger group of developers in a room or just assume that I'm, you know, I rank myself at the bottom of that list. So interested to dig into that one next time too. That'd be fun. I agree with that. 100%. You know, the podcast kind of has helped in that respect a little bit. to make me feel like I can speak out as a, maybe not a subject matter expert, but that I can speak out on things, you know, with some sort of authority, even though maybe I'm not the best, you know, strongest developer in that area or something like that out there. So it's been eye opening and it's, this is the second time this has probably happened to me and since I've moved to Seattle, people that I really, really look up to and, yeah, finding out that, you know, maybe there are shit stinks a little bit. And on that note of sneaky shit, wrap up this coffee and codecast here episode number six. Contact us at Twitter on our handle at coffee codecast. Use the hashtag pound ask three seat. You can email us at coffeecodecast@gmail.com. And our temporary website, which should be temporary, not for much longer, temporarily temporary is HTTP colon slash slash coffeecodecast outlipson.com subscriptions you can find us on soundcloud once we renew the pro account here hopefully in the next few days soundcloud stitcher Google play music iTunes and tune in please don't hesitate to rate us like a sheriff leave comment good or bad Any kind of feedback is good feedback so I would love to hear from you. Thanks again for tuning in and until next time time, this is Mike and my cohort over here, KJ Kyle Johnson, with Coffee Code Cast. [Music]