553: Cut the Bridges to the Mainland
23 Sep 2023A mountain of follow-up and new info on the iPhone 15 series, a bunch of USB-C nerdery, and some Rivian hacks with mixed results.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: John’s enhancement requests
- 🤬 cancer. Help sick kids. Donate to St. Jude now.
- ATP Top Four: Laptops. Join to listen!
- Follow-up:
- Apple-products-save-your-life video
- Apple Watch Ultra 2 naming
- Titanium watches
- Cost ∆s (via Dan Provost)
- Warranty (via Doug Miller)
- Hermès leather straps (via Gruber)
- Casey’s live adventure
- Apple Watch Assistive Touch is from 2021
- Apple “blue” over time
- iPhone 15 Pro & Pro Max repairability helps consumers too
- iPhone 14 Pro back glass: $499
- iPhone 15 Pro back glass: $169
- iPhone 15 & 15 Pro cameras
- 14 Pro 🤝 15 Pro (via Andreas Netzmann)
- PetaPixel was confused too
- The arrangement changed
- iPhone 15 != iPhone 14 Pro
- 5× Pro Max is 25% larger than the 3×
- 3× camera has not changed in three years 😱
- iPhone 14 Pro can also take 48 MP HEIF images
- PetaPixel camera review
- DPReview
- USB-C begets external display support
- USB-A ↔ C adapters are fire hazards‽ (via Praveen Kankanala)
- iPhone 15 Pro & diffusion bonding (via Robert Newman)
- iPhone 15/Pro/Max battery life & 3nm
- iPhone 15 Pro & Thread radio
- Close-up photos of a FineWoven case
- Similar to Peak Design case?
- Apple 2030
- Apple’s press release on “carbon neutral” (via Josh Angelsberg)
- Environment FAQ
- Tim Cook at Apple in 2030
- Gruber’s post
- Geekbench 6
- Single-core
- M2 Max:
2,803 - Intel Core i9-13900K 3 GHz:
4,220
- M2 Max:
- Multi-core
- M2 Ultra:
21,299 - Intel Core i9-13900KS 3.2GHz:
29,015
- M2 Ultra:
- Single-core
- Does Apple make the fastest laptops?
- Geekbench 6
#askatp:- How does mp3 chapter images work? (via Joel Labes)
- The “animated” chapter art was the ending theme song in ATP 244
- How does binning work with silicon chips? (via Ammar)
- Is USB-C’s successor on the horizon? (via Jason Falleiro)
- How does mp3 chapter images work? (via Joel Labes)
- Post-show: Rivian follow-up and some interesting hacks
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- John’s enhancement requests
- Donate to St. Jude
- New member special!
- Phones save people, too
- Ultra 2 is called… Ultra 2
- Titanium pricing mistake
- Hermes still sells leather
- FineWoven first impressions
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- “Blue” iPhones over time 🖼️
- 15 Pro vs. 14 Pro cameras
- New USB-C iPhone abilities
- Unsafe USB adapters
- Diffusion bonding
- 3nm payoff?
- Thread-radio potential
- Apple 2030
- Apple’s performance gap
- #askatp: Chapter images
- #askatp: Chip binning
- #askatp: What’s after USB-C?
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Rivian experiences 🖼️
John’s enhancement requests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to tell the listeners how John Syracuse makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enhancement requests for the ATP CMS. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John submitting code. The ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John CMS is a custom CMS that I wrote in PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against my custom PHP framework that I’ve been using for years and so but you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody can really use it that well. It’s not a common framework. It’s not documented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And so, you know, I basically just do it. And the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, John has wishlist items and I do too. You know, we have wishlist items.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the reality is this is kind of a busy time for both me and any iOS developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a busy time. And so, enhancement requests to the podcast CMS are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not super urgent usually. and so therefore not very high on the priority list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what John does to encourage me to do the request
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he has, which is surprisingly effective,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far the most effective method yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not doing it to encourage you to do them. I’m doing it to almost do all
⏹️ ▶️ John the work for you. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on. I think we need to explain to the listeners what’s going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve given Casey and John access to my GitHub repo. It’s a private repo otherwise, but they have access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it for the CMS in case they ever wanted to look at it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take some part in encoding it. And John has taken me up on that offer. John has started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco submitting pull requests for his feature wish list items
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me for the ATP CMS. The problem is, the CMS is written in PHP, as mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only does John not know PHP, John doesn’t have an installation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP. So when he submits these pull requests…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me read what was said in Slack. Hat Marco. I thought it would be good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a webpage that lists all the member specials. They won’t be accessible to non-members, but at least let them see what all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the specials are since they don’t have access to the special stuff. As usual, no code was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually run. Then there’s a link to a pull request.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So he submits a pull request in a language that he doesn’t know for an undocumented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework that has never been run. that not only has everyone, but he doesn’t even have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup to run it. And so what am I supposed to do with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, add the missing semicolons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because there’s a lot of syntax errors. There’s a lot of just like, you know, missing parentheses, missing semicolons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken things, you know, things that will never work, function calls that don’t work. So what I did for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, which we’ll talk about in a
⏹️ ▶️ John Function calls that don’t work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m better than that. How do you know? You’ve never run it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, PHP is not that hard, but it does take running it sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think most of the things I submit are really close to running. It’s like what you would type yourself, and then you would run it, and then you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, I forgot a semicolon. Oh, I missed a curly brace. And then you’d fix it, and then it would run and do something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I was pretty close with this most recent one. They’re small. These are small pull requests. They’re tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I have done, the first one was a new feed type that we’ll get to in a second. That required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent amount of change. John submitted this, I skimmed over the code, I saw that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically what I would need to do, but it was easier for me to just write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it myself than to try to figure out, like, is this exactly correct or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not? You know, PHP, obviously as everyone knows, I’m not a huge unit test writer, I don’t have a unit test for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, PHP is not a compiled language, And it isn’t especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strictly typed either. There’s some options for that in modern PHP, but this is all older code that doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use any of those things. So it would be hard to catch a subtle error. It is hard, I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from running this language for so long. So I just write my own and delete his pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco request, because it’s easier. It’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I looked at the diff
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last one, and some of the things were pretty much the same. I mean, you didn’t, like, there’s sort of one
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious place and way to do it in your code base, and we both basically did it the same way. The only difference is you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to run your code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of a big difference though. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that is kind of a big difference. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, I’m not not running it out of spite. I just have no way to run it. If Marco said, here’s a list of instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to bring up the environment to run this server on your local machine, I would follow them and do it. Or if he had a Docker container,
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact, I started trying to make a Docker container with what I thought were all the dependencies, but I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John PHP. And I thought he was using Apache or Nginx. Whichever one you’re using, I thought you were using
⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite one. So I was trying to build a Docker container with that. And I eventually gave up because it was taking me longer to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to build a Docker container to run the stuff than it would for me to just speculatively write it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speculatively write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m pretty close. Yeah, see, if only pretty close mattered in code. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John does. Like when I did the, my first one was a JavaScript pull request. And I think that one more or less worked, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it? It was like one or two syntax errors and then that’s running on the site, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, and that, I actually, the first one, the JavaScript one, I just approved that one because I didn’t touch it. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let it go because you actually know better JavaScript than I do. So I’m like, hey, I’ll just trust you on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at least that I could
⏹️ ▶️ John run. Well, anyway, the PHP, I think, is close. If you look at this one, I think it’s in the ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco free to. What you should do is you should accept the
⏹️ ▶️ John pull request and then fix it. No. I think that would take you less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I guarantee you it would not take me less time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would. It’s the same thing happening. People send me patches to my open source stuff. I always just accept their pull request and then I fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re very kind. Or then what I do is I add tests, because no one ever submits their pull request with tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t even run yours. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any tests. I would add tests that I also didn’t run.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a way to run it. Does everyone agree that Marco should provide us with a Docker container where we
⏹️ ▶️ John can just bring up this environment?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes, I do agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a shame that there’s no documentation anywhere on the internet on how to install PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ John I started down that path, but I don’t even know what the full stack is. Like I said, I don’t even know which web browser you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John web server you’re using. So anyway, we’ll work on this. You really shouldn’t spend your time making a Docker container because these are tiny changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, you know, 10 lines across three files. Like, it’s not a big deal. That’s why I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing it. This is 44 lines added to removed, according to GitHub.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, it’s not like I’m sending these giant pull requests to like, you can’t make sense of this and it broke the whole site.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, it is still September and that means it is Childhood Cancer Awareness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Month and that means we are trying our darndest to raise money for St. Jude Children’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Research Hospital. So here’s the thing, they have all sorts of different things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can choose to talk about, but I’m just going to do this off the cuff because that’s how I roll.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are sick kids all over the world and many of them have some flavor of cancer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is extremely crummy. Cancer in general, super crummy. Cancer in a kid, indescribably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy. And regardless of if you live in a civilized society or if you live in America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is very likely that if you know a sick kid who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been infected or who has cancer, then they probably have received some sort of indirect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not direct, treatment from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They are a research hospital. They treat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick kids. They do this without charging the families a dime. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is no charge to the families. In some cases, they will fly families from other places, including other countries,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Memphis where they will treat them. This is the real deal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they could use our help. Who doesn’t want to help sick kids? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you not want to help sick kids? What kind of a monster are you? Of course you do. So this is the time that you go to stjude.org.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stjude.org.atp and you kick in a little bit of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re gonna talk about the Marko offset, but before we get there, I should tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record it’s Thursday night, I know this is not a lot of warning, but tomorrow, which if you’re listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this right when the episode airs is probably today, from noon, one true time zone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until midnight, one true time zone, the folks at Relay, so this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Steven and Mike, And also, Jason and Kathy are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be doing a 12-hour podcast-a-thon, where they’re doing their darndest to raise money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to continue to raise money for St. Jude. It would be amazing if you could tune in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, there’s links all over the place. I think it’s Twitch. Uh, it’s the RelayFM account on Twitch, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory serves. I should have had the URL in front of me. I’m sorry. But anyways, uh, you can go tune in and watch the hijinks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will ensue. There will be many, many different flavors of shenanigans, I’m quite sure. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should definitely check that out. Also, we have a new top donor, which I am extremely excited about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have crossed into five digits. Anonymous donated $10,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done, Anonymous. Please feel free to reach out and collect your stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have earned them many times over. Reach out to me by whatever means necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one way or another, please, stjude.org.atp. Now, Marco, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us will be receiving our new telephones and watches either tomorrow as we record for today as you might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hearing this, if we have just received a new telephone or a new watch, what should we do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s actually really easy. First of all, thank you to 10,000 Anonymous. That’s amazing. That’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow. So anyway, it’s super easy for the rest of you to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what your donation minimum should be if you can swing it. It should be $10,001. No, I’m just kidding. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John If you can swing it, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so for most of our listeners, what I would challenge you to do is, again, the Markovov set. So, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone that you are getting today, slash yesterday, slash next week, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re getting an iPhone 15 series phone, subtract your receipt total,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtract $7.99 from it. If you’re getting an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtract $9.99 from your receipt total. Those are the base prices of that family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, whatever you have left, including AppleCare, if you multiply it out for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time you’re going to have it if you’re paying monthly. Whatever your sum or your difference is between that price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and $9.99 for Pro and Pro Max or $7.99 for iPhone 15 regular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should be your baseline minimum donation amount if you can swing it. And chances are if you just bought a brand new iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can probably swing a bit of a donation. So if you can, I challenge you to do that. If you can do more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. If you can’t swing it and you really can’t swing it, fine, I trust you. Do what you can if if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, but that’s my goal here is, so if you bought an iPhone Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your total was like $1,550, then subtract 999 and you get $551.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is your base amount if you can. So that’s what I urge you all to consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thank you very much. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is to offset your blatant consumerism of which I am also guilty. So you are putting good back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the world despite your blatant consumerism. Yes. There is a single-serving site
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of situation, themarcooffset.com. This gets my official okie-dokie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use Merlinism. And you can use that to figure out how much you, I won’t say oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much you have the opportunity to improve the world by donating to stjude at stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP. John, anything to add?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not, but I’m excited about the podcast-a-thon. There may be a series of guests that you
⏹️ ▶️ John might recognize, so tune in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, spoiler alert. All right.
New member special!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, another bit of pre-show announcement. We have a new member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We decided to do ATP top four laptops. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in true top four style, all three of us had our own opinions as to how to play this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when those three opinions met up, violence happened. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if you would like to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a listen, it was a lot. And I issued an apology to one of my co-hosts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I felt like I got a little over the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John You had nothing to apologize for,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Casey. You’ve listened to
⏹️ ▶️ John the top four. This is just how it goes sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so yeah. So nevertheless, things got a little heated at a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of times, but all in all, we are just as good friends, if not better friends, on the other side than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were before. So if you would like to, you can go to http.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can find a link to the member special. If you are not a member,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what should you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John you should go to ADP.fm slash join, where you can become a member and you listen to the member specials.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may be wondering, if I become a member and I listen to this top four thing, I know you’ve had a bunch of other member
⏹️ ▶️ John specials, how do I find them? Well, obviously they’re mixed in with all of the members feeds, because if you listen to the edited
⏹️ ▶️ John members feed that has no ads in it, the specials are just mixed in there chronologically with the rest of the shows. Or if you listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John bootleg, the specials are mixed in there chronologically with all the bootlegs. But you might not want to have to scroll through all
⏹️ ▶️ John those trying to find out which ones are the member specials. So we have created, through
⏹️ ▶️ John a wonderful pull request that I submitted and Marco ignored, a
⏹️ ▶️ John new feed for members. If you are an ATP member, you now have a third member feed. Remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the two you had before was the regular member feed, which is the edited version of the show, but with no ads
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. Then there’s the bootleg feed, which is the unedited live stream that you’re listening to, right? You may be listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to right now, if you’re listening live. And now there’s a third one that just has the specials. Specials are
⏹️ ▶️ John still in the other two feeds, but if you just want to become a member to check it out and you want to see what the specials are like, you can subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to the specials feed that only has our member specials in chronological order. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I believe, live right now. So that’s how you can catch up on the specials. And there’s a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John number of them. They just keep adding up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very long one, by the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way. I think this is our longest
⏹️ ▶️ John member special. When you listen to it, you’ll kind of see why. We tend to go on when we talk about Apple stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But honestly, it really is very good. I strongly recommend it. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like our show, you’re gonna like this. It’s really quite something, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was something, that is a good way to put it. And remember, you know, we don’t necessarily encourage this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you wanted to, you could join for just one month, you know, grab all the specials, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily cancel your membership, because we respect you as a user and as a listener, so we make it easy to cancel. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no hoops to jump through or anything like that. You can take that approach, but I think what’ll happen is, once you join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see how amazing these specials are and how amazing the other perks are, you’re gonna stick around. So, atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, I think we have enough member specials now that it might be a challenge to get through all of them in a month. You might
⏹️ ▶️ John just be sick of hearing us. I mean, the hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are building up. Indeed, indeed. So don’t snooze. ATP.FM. point.
Phones save people, too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a mountain to follow up and we are the three of us are Perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumb, but I’ll say optimistic that we have things that we would like to talk about other than just follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got a we got to move forward So let’s talk about the Apple event and let’s start with the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saves your Apple stuff saves your life video We apparently mentioned something that did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not make it through the edit. So John, can you tell us about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re talking about this video I was like, it’s so weird that they’re emphasizing the Apple watch and their intro video to what is the phone event?
⏹️ ▶️ John But then eventually, when we were discussing it on the show, we said, but they did have the phone in there, like a call,
⏹️ ▶️ John SOS with the satellite feature on the phone to save you, so on and so forth. Unfortunately, that got edited out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we had a week of people telling us, hey, you said they only mentioned the watch, but they mentioned the phone in that video too. We know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we got there eventually, it got edited
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out. I understand-
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I edit that out? Yeah, I understand why it got edited out, because we were kind of going in circles. And so like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense that that was trimmed because we were just repeating ourselves. But we did eventually figure out at the end of that segment
⏹️ ▶️ John that they did talk about the phone, it just got edited out. I double checked that you did edit it out, but it’s fine, Marco. I just wanted people to
⏹️ ▶️ John know if they just heard the edited version of the show and didn’t hear the bootleg, that that intro video did include the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone in it, not just a watch.
Ultra 2 is called… Ultra 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about the Apple Watch Ultra 2 product name. Is it not the Ultra 2?
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, but this was a question, I think Marco had this question when we were doing like the show before the event. Like, what are they gonna call it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they just gonna call it Apple Watch Ultra? Are they gonna call it Apple Watch Ultra Series 2 or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we didn’t really, you know, emphasize that the answer was that they’re gonna call it Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra numeral 2, space numeral 2. But apparently if you get one of these and look on the
⏹️ ▶️ John back of the watch, it just says Ultra. It doesn’t, like if you look at the back of a Series 9, It says series nine
⏹️ ▶️ John on it somewhere, I think, but the ultra just says ultra with no two. So that is interesting But anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they call it on there on their web page and everything. It’s called the Apple watch ultra 2 I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well There is some precedent for this in the sense that like Apple Apple’s products have names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that aren’t always emblazoned on them So for instance when the iPad 3 came out It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it was called officially the iPad 3 and the iPad 2 also the iPad 2 was officially called the iPad 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you flip it over the back it just said iPad it didn’t say iPad 2 you know it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engraved in the metal on the back So there is some precedent for this. I mean look the I mean I guess the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really say
⏹️ ▶️ John mean the watch is the exception because the watches Since that’s after the series zero essentially have always
⏹️ ▶️ John had their series name on the back of them Which seemed like a watch II kind of thing to do but not on the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah And you know iPhones also you know back when they did say iPhone on the back they don’t anymore but back when they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would just say iPhone it also it wouldn’t say like iPhone 7 you know so there is some precedent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this but it’s a little bit different with the Apple watch ultra because it looks exactly the same from from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exterior like I don’t I don’t I don’t know if you can tell the difference from the outside at all unless you power it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and like go to the about screen or something
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you like a way it because the s9 ways
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the different amount than the S8. I don’t know.
Titanium pricing mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were casting about with regard to the titanium watches of years past, trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out how much did they cost? What was the Delta, so on and so forth. A friend of the show, Dan Provost of Studio Neat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote to say the titanium Apple Watch was only $100 more than the steel. That’s important, not the sport,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the steel watch. And it came with an extra sport band. So if you accounted for that, it was $50 more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You might’ve been thinking of ceramic, which I think did start at around $1,200 or so, right, Stan? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that was totally my mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Doug Miller also wrote, the titanium edition watches also came with an extra year of warranty. So two years rather than one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and AppleCare Plus had three years of coverage rather than two years. So $100 more got you the extra year warranty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. Hermes, Hermes, I can never get it right, I’m sorry. Also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John get the extra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco years. Hermes, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hermes also get the extra year, stainless steel otherwise does not.
Hermes still sells leather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of the company whose name I cannot pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Killing all of France.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I know I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. They apparently still sell Oh, I already killed all them when I talked about Velveeta. So I mean, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just shooting a dead horse That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The that company still sells Apple watches with leather straps and the special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch face But only through their own store and so we’ll put a link to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah at first I thought the story was oh they still sell leather watch Well, of course, anyone can sell leather watch, you know, you can sell a watch
⏹️ ▶️ John strap that works with the Apple watch. Only Apple’s not making leather ones, but other people will continue to make leather ones, including Hermes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John Spanish accent for a French word. But they’re not just selling leather
⏹️ ▶️ John watch straps. They’re selling the Apple watch Hermes with leather straps
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Like it’s, they sell watches on this website, Apple watches. And I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they, Apple must bless this in some way, because I don’t, can you buy like a bare watch body? I guess they
⏹️ ▶️ John could be buying them and reselling them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, Apple’s obviously cooperating with this and supplying them, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it’s like Apple doesn’t sell leather watch straps, but they kind of do.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, whatever,
FineWoven first impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I’d like to take us on a slight tangent in or detour if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will I classically was a Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leather case person and That’s not an option anymore And I didn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like trying to find the new best leather case like John had done and I’m too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know stubborn ignorant choose your choose your adjective here to just ask John what he got and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought screw it I’ll get the fine woven case and I got one and Since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchasing it and then picking it up at the store on Wednesday I have read nothing but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaints about the fine woven case. So what I thought I would do is I have here I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have a fine woven case that I have not yet opened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could go on a little adventure together while I open this case So I did prime the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box because there was no you know how they have little tear sticker thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boxes. There’s nothing like that here. And so apparently brute force was the answer in order to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the damn thing open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also have a fine woven case and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John also had trouble getting
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we all have fine woven cases here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right, so I don’t remember, what color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even, it’s whatever the bluish one is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s something boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, fair enough. Because they’re all boring. That is, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John My wife’s got like the, like a mulberry colored one. I wish I knew what, is it actually mulberry? It might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, yeah. I have the blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I’ve opened this up. What the hell is this? The color is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I don’t have a problem with the color. Wait, what color did you get? The bluish one. I don’t have it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Yeah, me too, all right, yeah. This doesn’t feel woven.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like a- Does it feel fine? Yeah, it feels ultra fine is what it feels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It feels like a plasticky suede. I don’t know what to make of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the name is accurate because if you look real close, it looks like it’s made of a woven material, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the threads are very fine. Do you see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that when you look at it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s a bunch of sort of crosshatched threads that are very, very fine. And when I, this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is my wife’s case, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not mine, but when I saw it, I wasn’t gonna like mess with it or whatever, but anyway, when I took it out of the package and felt it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, this feels nice or whatever, but it does not feel
⏹️ ▶️ John or look durable because it’s a bunch of tiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John that form a pattern and that pattern is very, very tiny, but the look of the material
⏹️ ▶️ John is because of the regular intersection of these fibers. And I was like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, so if that regularity is disturbed in any way, it’s not going to be, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna look uniform anymore. And that’s why there’s a million YouTube videos of people like taking their fingernail and going, and that of course
⏹️ ▶️ John messes with the uniformity of the back of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On that point though, like, you know, I know the Verge had a problem with that as well, but like, if you take your fingernail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you scratch leather, it also mars it. I guess I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John difference is- I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got a leather case right here and I’m taking my finger nail to it right now and I’m going down it and it doesn’t really mar it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if I did it real hard it would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean leather is easily scratched. The difference is that if it’s not like a super deep scratch, over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time like the oils and stuff will kind of hide the look of it mostly. So it will kind of like blend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it back in to a degree. Whereas the people are saying that the fine woven doesn’t really do that because it doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, leather is a, you know, kind of a random, there’s a pattern on leather,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s usually random-ish, but it’s not made of a bunch of structures that crisscross each other that you can see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not made of individual threads of leather. It’s not fine woven leather, right? So if you mar the
⏹️ ▶️ John surface, it’s just a flat surface that you’re marring. You have to actually dig into the leather to do it. Whereas the fine
⏹️ ▶️ John woven thing, you just need to pull on one or two of those little threads and yank them out of position
⏹️ ▶️ John or break them. And that’s never going to self heal or fill with oil or anything if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John broken some of the threads or moved them out of alignment. But I mean, the question is, do you care?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, do you care if the back of the fine woven case eventually looks like your well-worn
⏹️ ▶️ John pair of jeans, let’s say, best case scenario? You know what I mean? Like you used to say this about the original iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I said it about the iPhone 5 case, which got nicked up a lot. And I said, best case scenario, it looks like the Millennium
⏹️ ▶️ John Falcon when you’re done with it. Worst case scenario, it looks like, I don’t know, like an iPhone 5 with scratches all over
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? So I don’t know how these are going to wear. Again, this is not my phone. My wife treats her phones
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly cavalierly, chucking them into a bag, usually with other iPhones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, she carries three phones with her, don’t ask. Pokemon, my word. Yes, Pokemon Go, it’s a big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this thing is gonna get a durability test. So I will give
⏹️ ▶️ John you some follow-up on this in a few months when I see, assuming she keeps this case on the phone, I’ll take a good picture of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Right now it’s perfect because she hasn’t gotten her phone yet. So I was just sitting in the case waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So another thing which I need to talk about in a second is that this is the first time I’ve felt the Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, because if you recall, I went to the big boy phone for the first time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s real light with no phone in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s super light with no phone in it. Uh, so the back, I actually, to be honest with you, I was coming into this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having been incepted, if you will, by all the bad press coverage, most especially. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who was it at the verge? It was, uh, Alison Johnson. But, um, I don’t think the back is that bad to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that feels fine. It’s not leathery. I wouldn’t even suede as a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fabric. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John the peak design case that Marco likes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually, so for reference, I ordered a peak design case and this, and I’m going to kind of spend some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time with both and kind of decide, because I think. What I loved about the peak design case last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was exactly that, that it was, it was not leather, it was fabric and plastic, and it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. It felt like a very high end fabric and plastic. And this year they come in more fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors than apples. There’s even a yellow one, which I ordered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, of course you did. All right, so. Sorry, Casey. This is a song about Casey, go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. So the thing that deeply bothers me about this case, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if I’m just being a turd or what, but the sides are like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird, like silicone almost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They look like plastic, don’t they? Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a hard plastic with a little bit of grippiness to it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I dig this at all. Because there’s a very, very sharp contrast, both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in color and especially material, between the sides and the back. And it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how, I don’t know, it was probably like 5, 10, maybe even 20 years ago now, like two-tone houses were like super popular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, where you’d have like a portion of the front of the house that was one color and then the rest of the house was a different color. I don’t know, maybe that was just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Virginia thing. But I never cared for it, and I don’t care for it here either. Like the back being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different color and texture than the sides, I really, really don’t care for that at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what I’ll do is I’ll use this for a few days and see what I think. And then I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, at first I wasn’t that, I wasn’t that turned off by it, but now the more I’m messing with it, the more I think maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that I like the two-tone look. To be clear, they’re not trying to make them the same. They’re intentionally different looking, kind of like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the, the sides and back of the, the M1 iMac are different than the front intentionally. It’s a look and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you either like it or you don’t, but the sides, I felt like at least felt a little more durable than the
⏹️ ▶️ John back because it didn’t have as as many sort of loose threads to
⏹️ ▶️ John things on, you know what I mean? But, and the buttons, I think the buttons are metal. Why don’t you check it with your teeth?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John metal. No, they feel plastic to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John it to your teeth. Do it, to front teeth. Oh my God. Well, I have fake
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but my incisors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, go get someone in your house who has real front teeth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, my incisors, I think they, maybe they are metal. Maybe you’re right, actually. I think they might be right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, big phone, it’s big. Not as dramatic as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected. like I’m not immediately turned off by it, which is probably me just trying to be positive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s not altogether awful. When I hold it in what I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be my comfort position with the load-bearing pinky, God, what episode was that from? That was forever ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get up to, which this isn’t perhaps the best metric, but I can get my thumb up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bottom of the camera mesa, plateau, whatever we’re calling it these days, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, what, three quarters of the way up the screen. That’s not altogether terrible, but I’m gonna have to really embrace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the use of reachability or whatever it’s called, where you slide down the home indicator and everything drops down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that still a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s still a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I forgot about that. Just gotta learn to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shimmy. Yeah, well, yeah, that’s exactly it. Or just be too, too handed. But no, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not as egregious as I expected, which, I’m sorry, the size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not as egregious as I expected. And actually, truth be told, the material on the back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I actually kind of like it where questions aside, I am really not digging this two-tone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, really, really not. So I’m gonna try it for a couple of days and maybe it’ll go back well within the two-week window, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t know what else to get if I don’t stick with this. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco now I’m- Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so for whatever it’s worth, I just pulled out my Peak Design case and I’m comparing it. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Peak Design case from the 14s, I don’t have the 15 one yet, but I think I’ll have it in a couple of days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 14 Pro Peak Design case, it actually compares, I think, very favorably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the fine woven in the sense that it, again, it has a plastic back, or I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, it has a fabric-y kind of back with plastic sides. And it also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say they feel of similar quality. The Peak Design one, though, the fabric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aged pretty well. Like I had this on my phone for most of the year and there’s a couple of little scuffs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff on the fabric, but not many. And it had, you know, I think it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect the Peak Design ones are going to be significantly more durable than fine woven.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, do you have, is it the Everyday Case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there more than one? Well, I’m not clear. I’m not as familiar with Peak Design’s lineup, but there seems to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nomad Times by Peak Design rugged case, but is the Everyday Case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems to have some sort of mounting apparatus on the back of it. Does that interfere with MagSafe then? No, no, no, it says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe compatible, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is fully MagSafe compatible. It actually, I think anecdotally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it might be a little bit stronger than MagSafe. Interesting. But that could just be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like the texture of the case being a little bit more grippy or something, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about the magnets in it are stronger than regular MagSafe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so, yeah. I mean, that’s, and in fact, I think it actually might even be MagSafe compatible. Let me see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It says a MagSafe compatible phone case with the perfect balance of slimness, smart aesthetics, and protection. Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it brilliantly connects into the entire Peak Design mobile ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I have, they sell like a bike handlebar mount and stuff that I’ve used with it, and they have some car mounts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So, yeah, their mounting system is fantastic. But even like most of the year, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just using it just as a regular case because it happens to be a very nice case. Like I had ignored it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years because I didn’t think I had a need for the mounting system. And then actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some ATP listeners wrote in to say, hey, this is actually a good quality regular case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you weren’t using the mount. So I decided to try it and I found that I agreed, that it actually, it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice feeling non-leather case. And it’s, in my opinion, it might’ve been the best feeling non-leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case that I had used. And it’s certainly the nicest feeling, like in the sense of how it kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels like it’s made of premium materials as opposed to feeling like a piece of plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting. We need to move on, but as a final note, it looks like the everyday case for the iPhone 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Max, at least, you have the option of one with a loop. And what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I might’ve shared on the program,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I might’ve shared on the program I actually purchased my first pop socket because I’m very scared about the size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this phone. And so, um, perhaps I’ll have to noodle on this. Maybe I’ll get the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the loop if, and maybe that would eliminate the need for like a pop socket or anything like that. Hmm. Interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things to think about. Oh, well thank you for going on this journey with me and let’s get back to our regularly scheduled followup. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple watch has had assistive touch since 20, 2021. I almost said 2011 since 2021. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a thing in the accessibility options, uh, to do what they’re, what are they calling it now the double
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, we mentioned this
⏹️ ▶️ John on the last show that the feature is existed for a while, but I pulled this out specifically because I thought, okay, so the
⏹️ ▶️ John feature has been around for a while, but surely this is an improved version. And they mentioned in the press release
⏹️ ▶️ John for you know, for this feature that it uses the heart rate sensor and everything in addition to the accelerometer
⏹️ ▶️ John and gyroscope. Well, so did the assistive touch feature from 2021. So you used all the same
⏹️ ▶️ John sensors. I don’t know if this is an official Apple statement but apparently the
⏹️ ▶️ John difference is that like whatever algorithm they use now is presumably better about detecting when you do the little finger
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy without you having to be so deliberate and without getting false positives and that it quote-unquote needs
⏹️ ▶️ John the s9’s double-sized neural engine to run the smarter detection algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t know if that’s actually true would it be too slow on the old one would it take too much power
⏹️ ▶️ John and can they really only run it on the s9 or is this just feature differentiation will it actually run on the
⏹️ ▶️ John older watches? I don’t even know if they because it’s not out yet right like the reviewers uh the reviewers have reviewed it but
⏹️ ▶️ John apple has had to send them a special watch with like beta software so they could try the double tap
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you get a series 9 or an ultra 2 right now it won’t have double tap it’s one of those coming later this this year features.
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“Blue” iPhones over time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Somebody who’s at Holger Eilhard put together, this is so brilliant and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so mad I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think of it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if this is the person that put it together, but I tried to source it back to the beginning, but you know how these images go on the internet. So if someone else made
⏹️ ▶️ John this, write in and tell us and we’ll give you credit, but this is as far back as I could trace it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a mechanism on Apple’s website where you can compare different versions of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Holger or whomever put together a screenshot of the iPhone 12, 13, 14, and 15. These are non-pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you. And Holger selected blue, whatever the closest thing to blue was. Oh, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John On Apple’s website, you can pick which color you want them to be, and they all just say blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you look at the 12, it’s a pretty deep blue. The 13 is, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an average-ish blue. Then the 14 is a sky blue, and the 15 is freaking white. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as somebody else quipped, Apple needs to replace the toner in their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ink cartridge in their printer, because my word, this is one heck of a transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Apple’s press videos, like the event video that we all watched, and their website,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the press photos and everything, don’t really show just how
⏹️ ▶️ John not colored these phones are. Because you’d be like, oh, the blue one looks blue, the pink one looks pink, the yellow one looks yellow,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in all Apple’s things. But then I started watching YouTube reviewers and stuff showing the phones
⏹️ ▶️ John in their videos. I’m like, wow, did they send this person five white phones? They all
⏹️ ▶️ John look white. It is an incredible challenge of like color balance. I was watching the MKBHD thing. He’s got a bazillion
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars worth of camera equipment. I’m like, you could not find a camera that can show this phone as yellow. If he
⏹️ ▶️ John held up the blue one and the yellow one and said, which one is blue and which one is yellow? Like those are two white phones, right? Obviously the sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s easier to tell from the sides, but his fancy 8K red camera stuff and studio
⏹️ ▶️ John lighting was not able to discern anything but white on the back of these phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, yeah, like not a saturated year for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, definitely not. With regard to repairability, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max are reaping the dividends of the 14 non-Pro of last year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in embracing that design. This is an article in Ars Technica, which says fixing damaged rear glass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an iPhone 14 Pro or an iPhone 14 Pro Max cost you 500 or $550 respectively if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t buy AppleCare+. That’s half of what those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models cost to buy brand new. For an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge falls dramatically down to $169, or excuse me, basically $170 or $200, depending on if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro or Pro Max. That is way better. And as someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has broken the back glass on I think it was a 12 Pro, thank goodness I had AppleCare because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise that would have been ugly. So this is great news.
15 Pro vs. 14 Pro cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro cameras, there was some confusion amongst everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, and so our friend Andreas Netzmann writes, the iPhone 14 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 15 Pro have identical main and ultra-wide cameras, same focal length, pixel or sensor size, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aperture. If you listen closely in the event video, when Apple compares the 15 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey main camera to the one in the iPhone 15, they’re doing that comparison, I’m sorry, to the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 15, not the 14 Pro, because the 14 Pro and the 15 Pro main cameras appear to be identical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was kind of a bummer. I mean, I got it wrong. I think a lot of people got it wrong because Apple said, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they talked about how it has the, you know, it has a bigger sensor. And yeah, it turns out it was a bigger sensor than the non-Pro 15.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is, you know, we should have caught that. That’s on us,
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, it is very sort of, they didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s on the screen if you see it. Like they’re not lying, but I feel like they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they do these comparisons, it’s kind of like when they do the comparisons, like look how much faster our computer is than the
⏹️ ▶️ John last Intel one we shipped three years ago. We see that and we go, that’s a dumb comparison, but you know, so they can show
⏹️ ▶️ John a chart that shows something dramatic, but we’re not fooled by it. We see the chart and it’s like Intel and
⏹️ ▶️ John M2, it’s like, yeah, I hope you’re better, right? But here it got past a lot of people. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John have in the show notes here also Petapixel had to, Petapixel is where a lot of the people, the two big
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTubers that I used to watch from DPReview went. So they’re, you know, no joke website and they just do camera
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. They also got confused and had to put an update on their article that said, update the original story said the main camera sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John was the same, but it was bigger, but actually it’s not, it’s just bigger than the 15. So Apple pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John one past a lot of people, including us, but just to clarify, it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John main camera as the 14 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which is kind of a bummer to be honest. I mean, the big camera upgrade this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the main camera, I was hoping it was both hardware and software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like it’s really software. And the software upgrade from the earlier reviews where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s using the 24 megapixel combo images, which is kind of this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these more advanced processing modes that kind of use interpolation and multiple exposures as the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step as well, not just the exposure step it seems. And that seems like, I don’t have it yet, that seems like it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a substantial improvement, but it is kind of disappointing that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of made it sound like they had improved the sensor from last year and really, no, the sensor’s the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so here’s the thing. I’m going to continue with this, but Andreas continues to say that one thing they did
⏹️ ▶️ John change is they changed the arrangement of the cameras because they wanted to put the two ones for spatial video next to each other, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the arrangement of where the little circles is, usually people don’t even know which circle is which on which is your
⏹️ ▶️ John 1X, 2X, but anyway, they changed the arrangement around a little bit, right? But What this means, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the camera, like the actual camera hardware in the 14 Pro and 15 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the Max with the 5X, but plain old 14 Pro versus plain old 15 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera hardware is in the little lenses and the sensors that are behind them seem to be essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John identical. Am I missing anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s correct. Leaving aside the 5X difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so here it is, and by the way, the 3X camera sensor has not changed in three
⏹️ ▶️ John years. The ones on the pro, that’s been the same thing for the past three iPhones. So here we have a
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPhone with essentially the same cameras as last year’s iPhone. And you’re just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I’m gonna buy the new iPhone because it’ll have better cameras. As Marco said, this year it does have better
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras because the camera is more than just the piece of hardware that’s in that little circular thing. There’s more to it than that. There’s the image
⏹️ ▶️ John processor. There’s the fact that it combines the 48 and 12. Like it is a better camera. So it’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Apple made an iPhone The camera’s not even better.
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. It’s just not better in the way we’re used to it being better, which is they actually put a different camera module,
⏹️ ▶️ John different lenses, different sensors, both, right? And on the 15 Pro, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the case. Obviously the 15 Pro Max has the 5X camera, which is totally new. Has not appeared in any previous
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. It has the longest zoom, you know, so on and so forth. So that’s a clear bump. But I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the first year I can remember where every single camera on the back of the thing did not change
⏹️ ▶️ John from the X Pro to the X Plus One Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to get ahead of the well actually is I thought they said that they put a different coating on it or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that. Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re right. Yeah, they did have the glare, although the people who have tested it said, if you were wondering if you’re still going to eat ghosts
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, you still will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. The Petapixel video review actually did a good job with that. Um, no, I, I think the spirit of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said that was completely accurate. I’m just trying to get ahead of the, uh, well actually crowd.
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, there may be other subtle changes because we don’t, it’s not like they give us every technical detail. The only thing we have to do is what
⏹️ ▶️ John Andreas did, which is like, okay, It’s got the same aperture the same sensor size like the same zoom range the same like
⏹️ ▶️ John like every spec that they give us about it That’s all we can compare with for all we know they did make improvements. Maybe the sensor reads
⏹️ ▶️ John out faster, right? Maybe it’s actually the same size sensor, but it’s better in some other way. We don’t know those details
⏹️ ▶️ John But usually when there’s a camera update There’s something that Apple talks about when they
⏹️ ▶️ John introduce the product to say this is better for these reasons like say it has a bigger sensor a better light gathering ability
⏹️ ▶️ John and just like you know They did actually brag about the coating saying we have a better coating that helps with flaring and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that And I think it is an improvement, but it doesn’t entirely get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then it’s worth noting as well while we’re in this kind of section of the follow-up, the 5x camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Pro Max, the sensor is larger than the 3x camera sensor by about 25%. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco which is not a small difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it is kind of unfortunate that the 3x camera, you know, it’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly mediocre and after three years, it’s still the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not loving that. I mean, and the 5X, I think like, you know, again, it’s probably choking out more light
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the longer zoom range and everything, but it has a bigger sensor to compensate for that. So I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5X is going to be at least as good as the 3X. And from the preliminary photos I’ve seen of people taking 5X pictures on their Pro Max’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in their reviews, it looks pretty much as good or better than the 3X, but of course you get more zoom. So that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. With iOS 17, the iPhone 14 Pro can also take the 48 megapixel Heath
⏹️ ▶️ Casey images, which are approximately five megabytes versus 75 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per image for the 48 megapixel raw files. So
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to figure out if I have a 14 pro, I tried to figure out, can I take 24 megapixel
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures with the 14 pro? It’s got all the same camera hardware. It doesn’t seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So, yeah, you can take it once you up your Dio 17, you can take 48 megapixel heat, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like now in the little control on the camera lets you say, Do you want to take a 48 megapixel raw tap it again?
⏹️ ▶️ John 48 megapixel heath I just wish there was a 24 megapixel option like obviously this
⏹️ ▶️ John not obviously I feel like the hardware in this phone could do it It would probably be slower
⏹️ ▶️ John because the it’s doing more processing and it doesn’t have the you know The a 17 pro in there which
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably has extra stuff to do this So this could be market segmentation or they could just
⏹️ ▶️ John decided the performance wasn’t adequate I quit to do 24 megapixel on the 14 Pro. But when you say like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the 15 Pro, the camera is better, the camera system, the overall thing is better. A
⏹️ ▶️ John big part of that is the 24 megapixel thing. And if they backported that to the 14 Pro, now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be like, well, what is better about the 15 Pro camera versus the 14 Pro? It’s a little bit faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s less processing time. It’s tough to say. So I feel like this differentiation
⏹️ ▶️ John of keeping the 24 megapixel on the 15 Pro, whether legitimate or not, does really put, is
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest separation between the two, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but keep in mind also, the non-Pro 15 has the A16 chip from the 14 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t have the same camera. That’s the whole thing. When they were comparing it, they were comparing it to the 15. So the main
⏹️ ▶️ John camera on the 14 Pro is not on the 15 today. What the 15 has is, in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sensor is better than the 14 Pro from the reviews I’ve seen, but it’s also smaller. So presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John less expensive. So it’s a confusing camera year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think ultimately what we’re seeing here is that most of the camera advancement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is software that is being fairly artificially locked to the new phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, I mean, look, Apple has done this before. Like this is totally, and it’s look, it’s their prerogative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it if they want to. I don’t love it, but they’ve done it before, and you know, oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so we’ll put some links in the show notes to some more reviews of the cameras. We’ll put the Petapixel review from the
⏹️ ▶️ John two guys from the DP review, who did the DP review YouTube videos or real like
⏹️ ▶️ John and DB review itself still alive. They have a written review about the cameras.
New USB-C iPhone abilities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk about the USB C port and what that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lets you do Apparently Apple has put together a whole list of things you can do, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them is use a display which is super cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like who like this is one of the reasons why I’m I was I’ve been so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the rumors of moving to USB C and why I’m so happy that we are finally now having moved to USB C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that there are so many? many seemingly edge case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use cases that you’ll now be able to do either that you couldn’t do at all before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that would require some really ridiculous hardware adapters and stuff to do before. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things. Yeah, your iPhone can now just dump out video over USB-C. I, the Lightning Port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t do that. That’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s super cool. Yeah, the Lightning Port didn’t have some kind of weird video out capabilities, I forget, back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remember, wasn’t that the one that Panic had taken apart where it was doing like an AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing? I don’t think I’ll be able to find a link for the show notes but it was like AirPlaying or something like that. I think maybe even before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was such a thing as AirPlay into like some sort of server within the cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dongle itself, it was bananas. But anyway, yeah, so there’s a support document which we’ll link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charge and connect with the USB-C connector on your iPhone 15. You can charge your phone. You can connect your iPhone to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, Mac, and other computers. You can charge other devices with your iPhone 15, play audio, connect to displays, monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C displays, HDMI displays, connect to other devices, including CarPlay compatible cars, external storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a lot of people connecting their phones to the iPhone 15 or 15 Pro or Pro Max, two things to see
⏹️ ▶️ John which thing will charge which thing. And, you know, some of the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John are saying if you connect two USB-C iPhones, the one with more charge will charge the lesser one because they somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John negotiate this. Other people were confused because they said, when I tried this, the phone charged it. but when I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John that, the thing charged the phone and I couldn’t figure it out. I recall when we talked about this ages ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the order that you plug them in is potentially a factor. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco far I haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John any reviewer even mention that as a factor. So if you are testing it yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John consider testing whether the order that you plug the items in makes a difference. I don’t remember if it does or not, but it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if I recall correctly, keep in mind that the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro being USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They seem to be fairly standard USB-C PD compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices. And so I believe there is a protocol in USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power delivery that allows the devices to negotiate like who has more power here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who needs power here. And forgive me for those of you who know more about this than I do if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butchering it, but I believe there is some kind of protocol for that. So it would not surprise me if Apple implemented that protocol. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly, yes, the order that you plug things in from what we heard in the past is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things where like, you know, if you have like two USB-C batteries and you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to charge the other, typically I believe the protocol is you connect the source battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first and then next you connect the destination.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and by the way, all these features that we’re talking about, this is part of the benefit of going to USB-C. It’s not like something magical
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did. This is part of the spec for USB-C. All the USB-C devices we have and how they do charging and how
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C supports video out and how you connect monitors to Macs with USB-C. This is not, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of the spec. So they’re reaping the benefit of moving to a standard that already has
⏹️ ▶️ John these capabilities. And people are worried, oh, Apple’s gonna implement it. They’re just gonna have a USB-C shaped hole, but all you’re gonna be able to do is charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they implemented full USB-C compliant with the standard as you would expect they would, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they were one of the early adopters of USB-C. They’ve been selling USB-C devices for ages
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And when they brought it to the phone, they brought all the features with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is why I don’t care that the cameras are the same for the Pro. I just, I want USB-C and titanium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something I would like to talk to you folks about perhaps next year, I don’t think we have time for it today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but especially next year, for those of us who are idiots like us, I upgrade every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the best way to do a phone to phone transfer? Is it a Thunderbolt cable between them? Is it a couple of USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet adapters? I I think for this year, the best thing is probably just to do the wireless stance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that most of us have done in prior years because of the 14 Pro. But next year, I think all bets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are off. Like there may be all sorts of different approaches that might make this quite a bit faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am not looking forward to my multi-hour transfer from one phone to the other tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ll have to revisit this, you know, next September.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think some people did wired transfers this year, but obviously the source phone is going to be USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John USB 2 speeds, no matter what, because, you know what I mean? So it’s going to be slow, but I think it already
⏹️ ▶️ John does work over a wire. So I imagine it would continue to work over the wire and only it would go 10 gigabits instead of 480
⏹️ ▶️ John megabits. But yeah, we’ll find out next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I, it occurred to me just a little while ago that I should prepare myself for this. So I am currently attempting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to back up my phone to my computer because wait a second, I could put one of those high speed Thunderbolt cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between my computer and the new iPhone, and maybe I can do a restore from Finder in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the new phone set up in less than two
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I would trust the Finder with this, but good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know if I do either,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, you know, can’t hurt to have a backup just in case.
Unsafe USB adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alrighty, moving right along. Praveen Kankanala would like to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you could follow up, John, and elucidate why the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A to C adapters are fire hazards, which is what you said last episode. Praveen says, I tried looking this up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but couldn’t find a satisfying answer. I’ve used a ton of these over the past few years. Now I’m a bit worried. What’s going on here, man?
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people wrote in saying, I use these connectors. Should I be worried? And they would send me links to their connectors often,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not the connectors I was talking about. and it’s confusing to talk about but we will link in the show notes one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John types of adapters. It is basically a USB-A plug
⏹️ ▶️ John like the rectangular metal thing that can only go in one way but is externally symmetrical and then
⏹️ ▶️ John a USB-C shaped hole in the back of it. And most people were saying the reverse it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a USB-C plug with a USB-A shaped hole on it which are much more common. The reason I
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying they’re fire hazards I’m going on Amazon and reading the the reviews trying to find a reputable one. And every
⏹️ ▶️ John single one I went to had some fairly, I mean, significant amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of one star reviews that said melted, caught fire, never worked, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, surely there’s gonna be one of these that doesn’t have melted or caught fire in,
⏹️ ▶️ John melted or caught fire. But no, they all did. And that’s what I was saying is I couldn’t find one from like
⏹️ ▶️ John a reputable brand where I could, if there was even a melted or caught fire, I’d say, well, maybe they just got unlucky or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, when I was searching for this and trying to find ones to link to, we have some of these in the
⏹️ ▶️ John house already and our house doesn’t burn down. My wife bought them, I don’t remember, maybe when she got her USB-C iPad originally.
⏹️ ▶️ John She’s got one that looks similar to the one that we’re gonna link in the show notes and she’s used them and
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing terrible has happened. I was disappointed by the idea that seemingly no
⏹️ ▶️ John well-known reputable brand makes an adapter like this, which is why I was suggesting to people
⏹️ ▶️ John just buy a cable because you can buy a cable from a well-known brand that has the two ends that you want it to have
⏹️ ▶️ John and that will solve your problem. These tiny little adapters that just turn a USB-A shaped hole into a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped hole for you. That’s what they’re doing for you essentially. They’re conveniently sized and they just do the minimal job
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s something about, I don’t know, maybe they’re doing it in too small a space. Maybe they get hot, maybe they’re just made really
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaply. And they’re like $8. I was like sorting by price, highest to lowest, which I often do on Amazon to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John show me the one that’s not garbage. And then, you know, you find that $10,000 item at the top. Like, no, scroll,
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll, scroll. somewhere between $8 and $10,000 is the one I’m looking for and I just couldn’t find it. So I ordered cables. So anyway, I don’t need any
⏹️ ▶️ John of these. You don’t have to send me suggestions, but that’s why I was scared
⏹️ ▶️ John off of these tiny little connectors. They’re small, cheap, and plentiful, but they all have scary reviews. And I already own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can kind of figure out like, you know, maybe one of the issues, because, you know, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, the reason why reputable brands don’t sell those is probably because they’re out of the USB specs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re probably, it’s probably, you’re not allowed to make something that’s according to the spec.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe like, you know, if you’re a USB IF member or certified or something, maybe you actually aren’t allowed to make these, but at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least you probably wouldn’t want to at least. But think about some of the conditions you could create with that kind of thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, you could plug your Apple, you know, 100 watt USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power adapter into the wall, then use one of those adapters to feed that 100 watts of power into a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A port on something. That’s weird. And you know, that could be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you could figure like, it may be possible to create some weird scenario like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that could put a lot of voltage where it shouldn’t be or something like that. And I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different safety checks in place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do that with a USB-C to A cable as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, but anyway, so I’m sure it’s reasons like that, that probably prohibit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these things from being made by any reputable company.
Diffusion bonding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about material science, the iPhone 15 Pro, and diffusion bonding. Robert Newman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes in, During this week’s Apple event, it was explained that the titanium bands of the iPhone 15 Pro are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diffusion bonded to an aluminum substructure. As someone that has some professional hands-on experience with diffusion bonding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick aside, loving our coverage, the amount of different professions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco listeners are in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is astounding. It makes me so happy, it really does. Robert continues, I was astounded to hear this. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know there was a practical process for diffusion bonding titanium to aluminum. Diffusion bonding involves three variables,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pressure of the bond line, temperature, and time. The term welding is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually used for processes where metal is melted, but diffusion bonding is different because there’s no melting. When two materials
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are pressed tightly together, some atoms migrate out of one material and into the other. This can even happen at room temperature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey albeit very, very slowly. Raising the temperature greatly speeds up the diffusion process so that a strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bond can be formed relatively quickly. The diffusion bonding temperature is always below the melting points of the materials.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was all news to me and very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Robert had some other part that I cut out talking about ways that he thought diffusion bonding might be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John be done. Like part of the way they squish the materials together is using metals that expand
⏹️ ▶️ John and contract at different temperatures to sort of make like a vice where when you heat it up, one of the things expands or contracts
⏹️ ▶️ John faster or slower than the other, causing pressure. And so you could use the materials themselves to push themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John together while you’re heating it up to get the heat for the diffusion bonding, but the heat also
⏹️ ▶️ John expands and contracts things at different rates causing them to swish together. It was interesting speculation about how they might do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But yeah, diffusion bonding, of course we have an expert in the audience on it. And I do wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ John has Robert just not heard of diffusion bonding titanium to aluminum, or has Apple actually innovated in this
⏹️ ▶️ John area? It could be either way.
3nm payoff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about battery life and three nanometers and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of people have asked about this and I think Presumably John was you know having some thoughts about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems like we’re getting the same battery life claims as the predecessors as the 14 pro and pro max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s up with that and only a 10% CPU performance increase? So what’s up with that John? Tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us about three nanometers Is it already a disappointment? What’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so we’re talking about three nanometer like oh We’re talking about the phones or any of the stuff is coming us like well when
⏹️ ▶️ John three nanometer comes We will reap the benefits of a silicon shrink the features on the chip will be smaller the chips
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves will take Less power for the same number of transistors and obviously Apple will use that to put
⏹️ ▶️ John more transistors on which they can use those new transistors to add more powerful features
⏹️ ▶️ John and The same stuff we normally get from a silicon shrink But when the these new iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John came out Apple did not really spend any time saying they said oh look at our new three
⏹️ ▶️ John nanometer process but they didn’t say all right well what do you what do we get from that these phones use dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ John less power and therefore get longer battery life no their battery life claims for the same as everything else are they dramatically faster
⏹️ ▶️ John these are their Apple’s claims in the event they said 10% CPU performance increase and
⏹️ ▶️ John they put on the slide improved branch prediction and wider decode and execution engines
⏹️ ▶️ John those two things could account for a 10% CPU increase right and they said 20%
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU performance increase But of course they added 20% more GPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, yeah, okay, that makes sense and they added ray tracing features We’re just more things and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John There are improvements to the a 17 pro that you know I think the neural engine is once again faster and bigger and better
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever But the the sort of what we would expect from a shrink is like, okay We did all that but also
⏹️ ▶️ John like it either uses less power or you’ve clocked it higher With the power over your head and that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’d get a bigger performance increase There’s been some investigation of like, what is the A17 Pro? Revengeanus
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter said, matching the code names with the comments, he’s looking at source code, it appears that
⏹️ ▶️ John H14, that’s the code name, corresponds to the A15 chip, and H15 corresponds to the A16 chip. That’s not confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. However, instead of H16, there is a comment called H16
⏹️ ▶️ John call, C-O-L-L. Considering that call is the code name for A17, it is suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John Great passive voice that the a 17 pro might be essentially based on
⏹️ ▶️ John the a 16 architecture with cache optimization clock upgrades and additional GPU cords
⏹️ ▶️ John So what they’re trying to say is this is kind of a you know s6 s7 s8
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch chip situation obviously every a whatever chip is based on the previous one
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s some minimum amount of architectural change that we expect when they’re incrementing
⏹️ ▶️ John that number going from the a 14 to the a 15 to the A16, we expect these cores
⏹️ ▶️ John are a little bit better. They’re not exactly the same as the cores were on the other thing. The GPU cores are better than exactly the same. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John the A17 does that. The GPU cores are supposedly all new, right? They have ray tracing features. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy new GPU cores. So it definitely qualifies. But the CPU, the power cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and efficiency cores, those cores seem to be pretty much identical with the only things that Apple mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John being improved branch prediction, which is a thing, you know, so they’re not exactly identical. The branch predictor is a part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU. and wider decode and execution engines also important parts of the CPU but
⏹️ ▶️ John That the Apple itself is only saying 10% performance increase now people are benchmarking these and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John getting now They’re getting preliminary benchmarks sometimes getting better numbers than Apple promise So maybe Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is under promising on these but it doesn’t seem like a huge advantage and We don’t know because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mention whether the rumors about the support chips in the new iPhones using less power because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on and shrinks, we don’t know if that’s true. Apple didn’t say it, I haven’t seen a tear down, no one has confirmed or
⏹️ ▶️ John denied that. All we know is what Apple claimed, and they claimed pretty much the same battery life as you got before, 10% better
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, 20% better GPU, which is nothing to sneeze at, but this is supposed to be a year with a shrink.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s what I wanna throw out there for us to think about as the year winds on and as we go into next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC’s three nanometer process. Does it provide power
⏹️ ▶️ John savings? All right, I know that’s a dumb thing to say, Like of course when you do a shrink of price power
⏹️ ▶️ John say you have to be more precise basically like does it take? fewer watts per
⏹️ ▶️ John instruction Than five nanometer did because obviously you know usually what
⏹️ ▶️ John you you you use this benefit to your advantage you say okay? Well five nanometer we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do More instruction for the same number of watts of power and we’re going to use that to clock the
⏹️ ▶️ John chip higher Because the power usage increases there we’re gonna add more cores. We’re gonna like we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make the chip bigger We’re gonna use more transistors like I’m not saying they should just get you know lower and lower power over
⏹️ ▶️ John time But you get you should get a dividend from it, so they added 20% more GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s a dividend right that those GPU cores weren’t in the a16 and now that there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John more in the a17 and We get the same battery life so that could be them reaping
⏹️ ▶️ John this advantage but they spent very little time making any kind of claims about
⏹️ ▶️ John the the power saving advantage of three nanometer. And we read off of like TSMC’s own like marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John slides where they say like, whatever it was, 15% power reduction and 30% more speed or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the thing for us to watch. As Apple ships new three nanometer products, let’s see if we can discern,
⏹️ ▶️ John is three nanometer better than five nanometer in terms of power usage per instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John executed? And I’m not sure how we can determine that, but I figured as more and
⏹️ ▶️ John more three nanometer things come out, we’ll have more and more evidence either for or against the idea the 3nm
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be as big a leap over 5nm as we thought.
Thread-radio potential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing along, our friend Eric Wielander has a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pretty brief video with regard to the Thread Radio that is in the 15 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric talks about a few things that having a Thread Radio could make interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the thing that struck me the most was that apparently the way Thread works is some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device needs to act as what’s called a border router to bridge basically between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the IP network and the thread network. And the iPhone 15 could, or 15 Pro, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, could go kind of around that because it can act kind of as its own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey border router. I’m probably getting the details wrong on this, but the spirit of what I’m saying should be accurate. And so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check out Eric’s video, which we’ll link in the show notes, if you’re more interested in that. Eric has a really great channel on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home automation stuff.
Apple 2030
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple 2030, apparently it has always been a thing, well, maybe not always, but you know what I mean. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing for a long time and I just completely missed it. So it is not a new logo, it’s not a new brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Josh Engelsberg writes, I found this Apple press release from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent event that clarifies their carbon neutral goal, which reads by 2030, Apple has plans to be 100% carbon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neutral across its entire manufacturing supply chain and all product life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cycles. That means that every Apple device sold from component manufacturing, assembly, transport,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customer use and charging, all the way through recycling and material recovery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will have a net zero climate impact. And you can see more detail about this in question three of their environment FAQ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will link both of those things in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was dug out of, what is it? The AirPods 2 second generation press release, right? You would think it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be so easy to find, and I was searching for it, I was searching on the show last night, I was searching for it, like, there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John detail on like question three of their environment fact as well, But I would be shouting this from the rooftops
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is not what I expected. Last show I was like, are you sure they’re really accounted for customer use? Like I know
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing that for the watch. They said they’re doing it for the watch, but like for all their products, that’s what they mean by carbon neutral. And yes, that’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ John mean. They basically mean like from cradle to grave, everything needed to build it,
⏹️ ▶️ John to ship it to you, everything you do with it the whole time you own it, and then reclaiming
⏹️ ▶️ John it and recycling it. All of that carbon neutral for every single product is their goal. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t achieved their goal yet. They’re just barely getting some watches and some configurations as their first sort of products. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John touting like that, but that’s their goal. And that is definitely not obvious. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would suggest to them that they bold those things in their claims and make it easier to find in their FAC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because yeah, it’s not just about building them. It’s not just about having factories that run on solar panels. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire impact of this product they are trying to offset.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is incredible. And I definitely admire that. It’s a heck of a goal, and I hope they can reach it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Carlos writes, continuing the trend of having listeners with every single career, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me so happy, I can work at a large environmental NGO, what is that, non-government organization,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which implements some of those Apple-funded projects mentioned in the video that protect the world’s soil, plant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and trees. 2030 is a fairly standard goal for environmental commitments. Some examples, US government’s 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by 30 initiative to conserve 30% of the US’s land, oceans, and freshwater by 2030.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The US Inflation Reduction Act has been designed to meet 2030 emissions reductions targets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Paris Agreement has a goal of cutting 45% of the global emissions by 2030. And the UN Sustainable Development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goals is targeting 2030 for reaching all 17 goals. Tim Cook,
⏹️ ▶️ John MPH 2030 is going to be a hell of a year filled with disappointments about the Paris Agreement. But anyway, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will meet their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goal. You never know. And then finally, will Tim Cook still be at Apple in 2030? In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey April 5th of 2020, there was a New York Times interview wherein Kara Swisher said, are you going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be at Apple 10 more years? And Tim Cook said, 10 more years? I probably not. But I can tell you that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel great right now and the date’s not in sight. But 10 years is a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and probably not 10 more years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the last show when I made a joke about the 2030 thing of executives being long gone. I’m like, well, when
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2030 thing comes around, Tim Cook probably won’t be there. But I didn’t do the math in my head. I didn’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John when this interview was, so I looked it up. So it’s just on the border. Tim Cook might still be there. And in fact, it would be a great career
⏹️ ▶️ John topper for him to go out and say, hey, we’ve achieved our 2030 goal and I’m also retiring. So watch for that in 2030.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shall see. Alright, we actually made it through all the follow-ups!
Apple’s performance gap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s performance gap. Do you want me to intro this, John? How do you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me let me let me do this one. All right. So this was this is something that is not really related to the Apple event.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just related to my pet peeves, which you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. You. But I was
⏹️ ▶️ John I was reading. I was reading Gruber’s post on Daring Fireball about the Apple event. And I came across this passage,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again, is not particularly about the Apple event. It’s just an aside. He says he’s talking about the new GPUs and the Apple things
⏹️ ▶️ John and how Apple is emphasizing the GPUs and how they had a whole section with gaming or whatever. So here is quoting from Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ John While Apple Silicon GPUs are also undeniably market-leading for phones, they’re just as undeniably
⏹️ ▶️ John not market-leading in PCs where NVIDIA reigns supreme. And then he says, I firmly believe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants to do to NVIDIA with GPUs what they did to Intel with CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Match or surpass them in pure performance and utterly blow them away in performance per watt. So he’s saying, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did with Apple Silicon to the Intel CPUs? It just like smashed them. that’s what Apple’s gonna do or
⏹️ ▶️ John aiming to do with their GPUs, because right now they’re behind on GPUs. Nvidia is the king
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. And so, but see, so he describes what did Apple do to Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Apple Silicon stuff? And what he says is, “‘Match or surpass them in pure performance “‘and
⏹️ ▶️ John utterly blow them away in performance per watt.’” And I got hung up on the first part of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Match or surpass them in pure performance? I think a lot of people, especially if you listen to podcasts like this, where we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly going on and on about how amazing Apple Silicon is, and it is amazing, start
⏹️ ▶️ John to think Apple Silicon is better than Intel in every way. And the two ways that, you know, the one
⏹️ ▶️ John way we always talk about is all performance for watt, they’re great on low power, so on and so forth. But also, they’re the
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest, right? No. Apple Silicon does not
⏹️ ▶️ John match or surpass Intel CPUs in pure performance. Setting aside performance per watt,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ll get to in a second, they just don’t. If you look at Apple’s best
⏹️ ▶️ John single core score, which is apparently the M2 Max on Geekbench, which again, it’s just one benchmark, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not close. It’s 2,800 around for the M2 Max and Intel’s best at three gigahertz
⏹️ ▶️ John is 4,200. Multi-core, M2 Ultra is Apple’s best, 21,300. Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ John best, without getting into the ridiculous chips, 29,000, right? Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does not beat Intel in quote unquote per performance. I’m not jumping on Gruber about
⏹️ ▶️ John this because I think this is an important point with my whole hobby horse of the Mac Pro and everything. We all start to
⏹️ ▶️ John think that that’s true, that Apple Silicon is better than Intel in every
⏹️ ▶️ John front. And it just becomes sort of received wisdom, but they’re not, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John may be saying this, it’s like, okay, but I don’t care about pre-performance. Well, I’m saying it because Gruber specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out as in contrast to performance for Watt, but they just don’t. And it’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that they do, but they don’t. But then people are like, okay, but I don’t care about the Mac Pro. Apple still makes the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops, right? Apple’s laptops surpass Intel in pure performance, right? No, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. You can buy a faster Intel laptop, again, in pure performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, does Apple make the best laptop chips? Yeah, I think so. Because laptops are
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of supposed to be battery powered, and as soon as you unplug that fastest Intel laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m not plugged into the wall anymore. I can’t handle this. I’m gonna burn through my battery in five
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds, and it throttles way, way down, right? So if you want to make this statement that Guru made, you’d have to qualify
⏹️ ▶️ John it and you have to say, mattress surpass Intel in pure performance in laptops when they’re not plugged in.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t sound quite as impressive. And again, I think Apple does make the best laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John chips because it’s really important for a laptop chip not to use 150 Watts of power, but they don’t make the pure fastest. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, Intel has been behind in many reasons. One of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John is their inability to fab things at modern sizes. They’re doing a little bit better on that. link in the show at Sunar’s
⏹️ ▶️ John technical article about Intel’s upcoming laptop chips where they’re getting a little help from TSMC.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not getting in 3 nanometer because Apple bought all that up so all poor Intel but they’re getting a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is this is what I you know what I was talking about when Apple has seeded the high-end. I didn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John mean the Mac Pro. If it’s important to you like to go on you know to have like a mobile 3d
⏹️ ▶️ John rig where you take your laptop somewhere on-site and you plug it in you know you put it in your luggage you go
⏹️ ▶️ John you land there you open up your thing and you plug it in and you want the fastest possible laptop, Intel has that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel has the fastest possible laptop because they have the fastest possible chip. Yes, you have to keep it plugged in, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you care about the high end, Apple is just not competing there anymore, which may be fine
⏹️ ▶️ John because again, like if you think about, well, you know, I buy Volvos, Volvo doesn’t have the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John possible car. No, they don’t. Volvo has nothing that can compete with Ferrari. Like, but sometimes you want a Ferrari
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple doesn’t sell that anymore. And so it’s important to keep that in mind. I’m not saying that Apple is doing anything wrong, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes to laptops, because I think it’s the wrong trade-off to make on a laptop. Like, Apple’s making the right trade-offs. Again, I think they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the best laptop things. But if, you know, don’t be fooled into thinking that because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon is amazing, and especially amazing for laptops, it also means that Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fastest around. It’s not, and it’s important to keep that in mind.
#askatp: Chapter images
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Joel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey L. writes, all the pictures of Marco’s car is rapidly changing chapter art.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Made me wonder how those work. Are they embedded in the file or are they loaded on demand by a URL? I believe MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chapters don’t have much space allocated to them, so I can’t imagine that you can put the whole image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. But if they’re point just URLs, then they are basically the same as tracking pixels if someone wanted to generate an individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image URL for each person and or point in the episode. or excuse me, are they the same as tracking tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pixels? So Marco, what’d you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great question and exactly right on that concern about dynamically loaded images being potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking pixels and privacy invaders. So here’s how those work. So first of all, they are not dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco URLs. They are actually baked in as chapter images. Chapter images are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the ID three tag. And so they’re size limited only by the size of how big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ID three tag can be. And if you really stretch it, ID3 text can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very large, you know, many, many megabytes at least. I don’t have the exact number off the top of my head, but size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a problem there. It’s simply that you are therefore forcing everyone to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of those images as part of the MP3. So you don’t wanna spend a huge amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the file size as images when that’s really not what most people are there for. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can indeed put full size images in them and you can put many of them in there. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one episode where I put something like 70 images as chapter art to form an animation every couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of seconds during our theme song. So that was when we when we embedded Jonathan Mann’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butterfly keyboard song. Well, only to that somehow. So anyway, it is possible to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They all fit and it’s fine. They’re all part of the file. And in fact, oh, and the way I do it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just shrink them down to be maybe like a few hundred kilobytes each, because the thing is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork that you’re embedding in an mp3 for like chapter artwork or whatever is usually viewed at pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small sizes so if you just use JPEG with pretty low quality settings like 40%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality on JPEG you can usually get pretty much anything down to a few hundred kilobytes and in the sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at which they’re being viewed it’s totally fine like no one really notices a problem so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and interestingly but what I like about this question is that Joel correctly identify is like if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a spec that you’re trying to get past to have podcast players load images
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamically during playback that is absolutely a potential privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hole and you can absolutely bet that that would be abused by ad tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s why there are a few like proposed specs and alleged standards out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there standards nobody supports for things like loading images via URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon playback or during playback. And Overcast will not support those standards for exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this reason. Because right now, the way podcast ad privacy works is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they’ll get your IP when you download the file, because they have to, but after that, they’ll get nothing from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t know, did you play the episode? Where did you play the episode? How long after downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did you play the episode? How far into the episode did you get? They would love to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that information, And in an ideal world, that sounds reasonable, however we all know it would be abused like crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s what ad tech people do, and so I don’t want to do that. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast will not support any standard that loads stuff dynamically like that, unless I can do it in some kind of privacy-protecting way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and frankly I don’t see that really happening. So here we are.
#askatp: Chip binning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, MR writes, can you explain how binning works with silicon chips? Do manufacturers count
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on X number of chips being defective? How do they count on the defect being the same? John, what’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they don’t count on the being defective, but they are like, they see the results of
⏹️ ▶️ John how good is our fabbing. If they could get a hundred percent of them not to be defective, they would, but they can’t. So there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John some percentage of defects and they want to drive that down to be lowest. Are they always, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John have defects in the same way? No, absolutely not. What they do is they partition off pieces of the chip so
⏹️ ▶️ John they can essentially say, hey, if anything is wrong in this whole GPU core, basically, like, cut its bridges
⏹️ ▶️ John to the mainland. I think they have, like, you know, I don’t know if they have, like, tiny little fuses that they blow in the thing or I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what the technology is, but essentially they separate it, they electrically separate it from the whole rest of the chip, and they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they just disable it entirely. But you don’t know where the error was in that GPU core. It could have been anywhere. They could have messed
⏹️ ▶️ John up all sorts of places. It’s just, look, if it doesn’t work, the whole GPU core gets cut off. but there could be
⏹️ ▶️ John problem defects with the chip that span regions or they go in areas that they can’t remove. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John essential parts of the chip that kind of have to be there and have to work. And if those are busted, the whole thing’s gone. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s how it works. Every chip that comes off, they will test to see which parts of it work and which
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it don’t. And sometimes if you’re lucky, one of the parts that doesn’t work is a part that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can separate off because you had decided ahead of time when you designed the chip, we’re able to disable the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores or this or that, the other thing. And if everything else works, that’s still a good chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you put that, you bin that one and say, not bin as in the UK thing of throwing it in
⏹️ ▶️ John the garbage can, but you say, if you separate them to different bins, here are the ones where everything works, here’s the one where everything works except
⏹️ ▶️ John for one of the GPU cores, here’s the one where everything works except for one of the CPU cores, or whatever part of the chip
⏹️ ▶️ John you have decided ahead of time that if we have a defect only in here, we can isolate
⏹️ ▶️ John that and still have a good chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s also, there’s different types of binning. So that’s like, you know, if you can disable a whole core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and separate out the defects and the rest of it still works. There’s also, Apple doesn’t really do this as far as I can tell anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequency binning, where, you know, this is still a thing I think in most other places,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially in the Intel world, certainly in the GPU world I assume, where you have the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you run this chip and it turns out this chip at the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power level and spec that you are selling this product line at, maybe it doesn’t pass the tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But maybe if you lower the clock speed down to, you know, 4.0 GHz instead of 4.2 GHz or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you lower the peak speed down, maybe it works at that speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s how they can sell slower speed chips, if they sell multiple speeds. Again, Apple doesn’t really do this with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips, but, you know, Intel sure does. So this is one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC CPUs are sold at different clock speeds. That way, you know, they can manufacture them and they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know, I don’t know if this is still the case today. This might be an overly simplistic view from the past, but they would try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make all of them meet all the highest specs. And then they would they would realize, OK, well, only 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them actually can perform at four point two gigahertz. So we’re going to have that be the high speed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we sell. We’ll sell that one for more money and all the ones that don’t pass that pass at four point. Oh, well, so that is the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed down. And then maybe we’ll sell three point six as the next speed down for those that didn’t even pass that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s part of the way we think about silicon chips in the whole world of computer as being like, you know, digital logic,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But in the end, these are analog devices. That’s why things like how good your cooling system is
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, how well manufactured the tiny little features on the chip are, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John how carefully arranged all the atoms are with all the pieces and traces on there. It’s an analog
⏹️ ▶️ John device in the end. There are little analog transistors in there and they’re manufactured
⏹️ ▶️ John in essentially an analog process. And each one is its own special little
⏹️ ▶️ John snowflake in many ways. And that’s why you have to test them and say, well, this one runs okay at this speed
⏹️ ▶️ John at this temperature. But if it goes, if it gets a little bit too hot, it crashes. So if we
⏹️ ▶️ John bring the speed down, like it’s very sort of that’s what the overclocking world is very much like doing like hot rodding cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Where you have an engine and you know, an internal combustion engine is clearly an analog device, how fast can I make it go?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we need to put new lighter pistons in stronger connecting rods, right? You know, bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John intake, like you’re trying to see how fast will it go before it blows up. And just like hot rodding, these overclockers,
⏹️ ▶️ John they run it until it doesn’t work anymore. Like, okay, let’s dial it back a little bit. And they just get just at the ragged
⏹️ ▶️ John edge of how fast can I make this go? And if I put liquid nitrogen on it and then, you know, super cool
⏹️ ▶️ John it and crank up the clock speed, how long does it work before the game crashes? Obviously, that’s not the way most of us want to live.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I imagine that’s part of the appeal to Apple of just saying, look, we don’t do clock speed bending. Like what that means
⏹️ ▶️ John is when we get these Apple Silicon chips, some of them could go much higher clock than others because
⏹️ ▶️ John that that variation still exists in the chips. They’re just not testing for it and selling
⏹️ ▶️ John based on it, but there is the same variety in clock speed variability. You know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John different chips have different ranges of where they’ll work, but if there was, I don’t think it’s a big Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John overclocking community, but hey, you could get one and you can get a lucky one if you could crank that clock speed up so that you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac laptop or Mac studio or whatever is actually stable at
⏹️ ▶️ John stock speed plus whatever gigahertz, right? Or you put a bigger cooler on it or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is interesting that Apple has chosen not to do that because back in the Intel days, they absolutely would. And in the PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ John days as well, because they were buying their chips from somebody else and Intel bins like that, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel charges more for the ones that go higher speeds. So Apple, hopefully pass that on to us with their own little markup
#askatp: What’s after USB-C?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Jason Follero writes with regard to our salute to lightning from a couple of weeks back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does the industry have something on the horizon that would eventually supersede USB-C’s form factor? It seems like a reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, dare I say, timeless design. If there would be a revision, what might that look like? I’m personally curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a water-resistant standpoint and connector design to make things difficult to snap off. Or do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys think that the slim oval form is here to stay and that pin designs and faster chipsets will allow for faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data or charging in the future? I don’t know. It’s a great question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get the vibe that we’re going to have this physical connector for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily five, probably 10 or 15 years. I mean, look at USB-A. It’s been around freaking forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing. USB-A, I think, is the biggest argument for why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think USB-C has a pretty long life ahead of it because USB-A came out 25
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, approximately, And it’s only in the last few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being really replaced in a widespread way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s still taking forever. Like I’ve just I before I came on I was watching another review of a you know
⏹️ ▶️ John 2024 model of car that has in it USB C and USB a ports because they know some people still have the a it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John taken so Long to get even though the successor has been here for years and years the transition is taking a really
⏹️ ▶️ John long time So people are still selling brand new cars with both a and C ports because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, some people still have A stuff. So is it gonna be 30 years before the A ports are finally gone? I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell you, it didn’t take that long for the 30 pin connectors to disappear. Although I know you still go to the hotels and see the 30 pin connector next
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing on the nightstand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope, we’ll really know the transition is done when no car is sold come with A ports anymore. But that day is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I think, of course, you know, this is the tech business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is very, very likely, very, very likely that USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be replaced down the road, but I really don’t think that’s any time that we need to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about now. It would not surprise me if we are happy with USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally speaking, for at least 15 years. You know, when you look at how USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced over time, and you can see some of this has already happened with USB-C, What do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You take the existing pin out and you make it run faster. You maybe adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some fine electrical properties of how we use the X number of pins that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are used for data. Or you introduce different protocols where you use the pins in entirely different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You kind of reconfigure them in logic to say, all right, well now we’re gonna use these three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires this way and these three wires this way. And using this protocol, we’ll speak at this bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate over these wires and using this error correction protocol, we can squeeze a bit more out of it. And you’ve already seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with USB-C so far. USB-C to its detriment has a billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different protocols and cable types and everything else as we talk about, but the connector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is largely the same. Now, over time, you can occasionally, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can add more pins if you’re really clever about it, but that gets a little bit tricky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s not commonly done. But, you know, USB-A did last a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was a- we were able to play those tricks. Look at Ethernet. Ethernet is also a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very old wiring standard, and we’ve- we’ve been able to play different tricks with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years to occasionally raise its data rate and- and make it last a long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s really nothing on the horizon to replace it at the moment either, because we still have- we still have decent headroom there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and, you know, similar- similar to that, you know, I think USB-C, We’ve already had multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data rate standards for it. We’ve already had multiple protocol and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mode standards for how the different wires could be used and at what speeds and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think we’re just going to see that progression over time. And down the road, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course it will be replaced by something else. The tech industry doesn’t stand around still forever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of headroom built into the USB-C spec. There’s a lot of power delivery possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of data delivery possible, there’s a lot of different modes those pins can be in, there’s a lot of pins to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, so, you know, we can have a wish list of, you know, things we might like to improve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. Yeah, it would be nice to have great water resistance, yeah, it would be nice to have a connector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be more difficult to snap off or whatever, like, that would be nice. It would be nice to have something that was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was maybe more contact-based and less, you know, plug-and-hole based like MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, who knows? But I think we’re gonna have USB-C for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most likely a pretty long time, simply because, again, look at USB-A and look at how long we’ve had that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and one of the answers to the connector question is always like, oh, this will be the last plug connector and everything will
⏹️ ▶️ John be wireless afterwards. Like wireless standards also continue to evolve and we’re already, you know, MagSafe is a big part of that and that
⏹️ ▶️ John will continue to get better and be supplanted by even better wireless ones, right? You know, Apple could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John accelerate this future by saying, well, we’re not gonna have USB-C ports anymore. somehow we’ll deal with the EU situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just go all wireless. But I think there will be a successor plug
⏹️ ▶️ John design type thing and you can just look at the USB-C connectors, how could it be improved? Well, it’s not as small as
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning was and it could be smaller still. Like USB-C will eventually, probably sometime
⏹️ ▶️ John in our lifetime, I would hope, become the limiting factor in the thickness of iPhones. And when that happens, Apple will be looking around
⏹️ ▶️ John for something to do different, either by getting rid of the port entirely or, you know, coming out with a new
⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary port because no one in the industry has made something that is smaller than USB-C. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there are actually rumors that like, I think Apple has some patents on this, but Apple patents everything they ever think
⏹️ ▶️ John of, like every company, like magnetic connectors. So Marko’s kind of alluding to it’s not like MagSafe, but for data, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you wouldn’t actually have to have a hole in the device to stick a plug into, just magnetically connect it. And there’s all sorts of problems with
⏹️ ▶️ John that or whatever. But anyway, I think there will be a successor design, but this USB-C design, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, has just as much likes as USB-A. USB-A is like one of the worst connectors of our entire lives because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco external symmetry
⏹️ ▶️ John and internal asymmetry. Just frustrating, just millions of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco person hours
⏹️ ▶️ John wasted putting the plug in twice or whatever. But it was still better than what came before
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And one of the things that unifies all these things, there was a, if we’re as old as the people doing this podcast at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John we live through the, essentially the parallel to serial transition, right? Used to be the computer connectors very
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily leaned on parallelism, which means having lots of wires going to lots of pins
⏹️ ▶️ John And you would, you know, the more wires you had, the more data you could send, cause you’d send them, send information along all those wires
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. And eventually the computing part at the either end of the devices
⏹️ ▶️ John got fast enough and good enough and cheap enough that you could do serial interfaces where pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much every bus since then has been like, we just need ground and power and data transfer lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll go faster by just shoving things through one at a time, single file, not really, but you know, single file
⏹️ ▶️ John send, single file receive with various signaling mechanisms to get more out of that. We’ll just go
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and faster serially. And we all like that because if you’ve ever dealt with a SCSI cable, they were huge
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did not bend easily and they were temperamental. And so yes, serial is better than parallel. But since then,
⏹️ ▶️ John USB was a big part of that universal serial bus. That’s what the S is there for. We’ve had skinnier
⏹️ ▶️ John wires that are easier to deal with. And all they’ve been doing is saying, you know, now that the wires are skinny, maybe the connector shouldn’t be gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John either. And that’s USB-C and that was Lightning before it. So I think serial connection
⏹️ ▶️ John protocols and methods are here to stay because it has proven that we can really scale that up real fast. And the convenience
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect of it is important. So I think, look for USB-C to be here
⏹️ ▶️ John until either we get rid of connectors or until devices require something smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is gonna be the forcing factor because if you don’t require something smaller and there’s not some kind of fatal flaw that
⏹️ ▶️ John we haven’t discovered yet in the USB-C connector, there’s not a lot of motivation to have a different
⏹️ ▶️ John physical connector than USB-C. The wire, the stuff we send over the wire will keep getting faster. We have a thing in the notes
⏹️ ▶️ John about Thunderbolt 5, which we’ll talk about in a future show. You know, Thunderbolt uses the same, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John connector standard or whatever. It’s gonna keep getting faster, but I think that connector is gonna be with us until either wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John takes over entirely, or essentially the iPhone can’t get any
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner because like, kind of like the RJ45 port on the side of a laptop, like the, you know, the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John port is the limiting factor in the thickness of the iPhone. And that’s not happening anytime soon because we need that big battery, but who knows. In
⏹️ ▶️ John a future with solid state batteries and wafer thin iPhones, we might need a new connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The real question is, what do you think we are totally rid of first? USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes me depressed to think about that. I think micro, I think micro, cause I think
⏹️ ▶️ John every device that I know of that I hate that has micro, I look at the modern version of that and they have USB-C, but
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-A is just hanging on everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I honestly, I was gonna ask John earlier, do you think which will happen first? The last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three pedal car is shipped or the last USB-A equipped car is shipped? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of them, they are imminently dying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the three pedal cars aren’t going away. They’ll just end up being like horses. You know, horses didn’t go away. It’s just that if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John one now, you’re probably rich and weird. Fair. I mean, Porsche, the
⏹️ ▶️ John latest 911 they came out with is like the super duper, the S slash T or or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John really expensive, fancy, whatever. It’s basically, I think it’s like a GT3 RS without the big wing on it, without
⏹️ ▶️ John the boy racer looks. Stick shift only, because they know. They know there’s an audience for this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John granted, that audience is going to get old and die. But I think it’ll just be like the weird watch thing where they fetishize having
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of little gears that aren’t as accurate as a $10 quartz crystal, right? Three pedal is going to be with us forever,
⏹️ ▶️ John just in increasingly small, narrow areas. One can dream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join us at atv.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Neutral: Rivian experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you have spent a little bit of time in your banana, in your Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so now that I’ve, I just took the Rivian on a long trip, so I have some follow up and I have a few little exciting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I’ve tried as well. So first of all, in the latest segment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of What Color is My Car?
⏹️ ▶️ John That should be the name of a book, like what color is your crystal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What color is your car? I have found the perfect color reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My car is exactly the color of Jake the dog from Adventure Time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the color of that Jake the dog figurine because on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not that color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, no, my car is Jake the dog color. It’s exactly, and my family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve all watched Adventure Time, we love it, and they all, as soon as we came upon this realization, We were all like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God, that’s exactly it. It’s perfect. And now my family calls my car Jake. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Tiff wants to like somehow style the headlights so it looks more like his eyes. I don’t know how, I’m a little scared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about it. But anyway, so yeah, the Rivian yellow is basically Jake color.
⏹️ ▶️ John very close. In some lighting anyway, because I think Jake does not change color as much as your car does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it depends on how your TV settings are adjusted probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that, I don’t know if there’s like an official reference Pantone Jake color but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have a few other little tidbits of feedback from various follow-up and driving it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last time I talked about it I was complaining that there was no like button that you could hold down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something to trigger Siri because most cars if they have like a steering wheel button for voice control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually if you have a Bluetooth phone connected usually like holding that down might trigger Siri over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Bluetooth connection or something. A few people wrote in to say hey why don’t you just say hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know assistant instead of trying to push the button and so I started trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying hey assistant and yeah actually it works really well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works fantastically when my phone is on a mount in front of me like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know next to the vents or whatever like that’s right where I prefer to have it like in non carplay equipped cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where my phone is on the amount using Hey Dingus for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked fantastically. It woke the phone up for any, it got the phone’s attention, but then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used the car’s microphone and speaker for the Siri session. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I think the phone’s microphone is the one that’s listening for the command,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for the wake up word, but then once it is woken up, it uses the audio devices in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car. So it actually is pretty reliable. The only little weird thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a little impatient. Like if I talk too slowly, it’ll stop listening. And then I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to playing fish. I’m like, okay, wait, hold on, I wasn’t done yet. And I go back and correct it. But for the most part, that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works pretty well. So thank you listeners who pointed out that I can just say, hey, thing. Sunglasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage. This didn’t help at all. Nobody helped us whatsoever. One person or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people wrote in to tell me I can store my sunglasses in. they have this weird little like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip down compartment between your legs on the front ridge of the driver’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seat. So like, you know, the seat curves down like between your knees and down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, like between that lip of the seat and the floor on the front wall of the seat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a little flip down sunglasses compartment. Now they tell you, oh, you can put, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdly there’s no glove box in the Rivian. I don’t know why, there’s no good reason, but so they’re like, oh, you can put like your, know your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car insurance and registration paperwork for cops and stuff put it in there and as soon as I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reach that when sitting in the seat I realized that would look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a cop exactly like I was pulling a gun from under the seat so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to do that that’s terrible and so somebody suggested oh you can put sunglasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there the problem is putting sunglasses between your legs down by the floor there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no good way to reach that while you are driving like it is just it is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cumbersome so that’s a no-go I still have not found a place to put sunglasses in this car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the windshield wiper controls I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if it rains in California I guess not
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about these controls on a past episode do you remember?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do and I had forgotten when I bought the car that we because so here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s how the Rivian windshield wiper controls work fortunately you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like tap but not hold the washer fluid firing button and it will do a single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wipe for it took me a long time to figure that out so there is a way to do a single wipe on press but if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change the mode the wipers are in either turn them on or speed them up or slow them down or whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like a little like up down rocker on the stock and you twist it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to move it up twist it down to move down but the first input is ignored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the first input when you when you twist it up once it doesn’t increase the speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it starts showing the menu on the screen like it shows you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the the main cluster you don’t have to look like on the main screen in the middle it shows like on the drivers cluster but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit that up and it then starts showing on the driver cluster the levels of the windshield wiper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you have to hit it up again to actually change the setting. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really stupid. I like I am loving this car so far. I think the windshield
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiper controls might be the single worst thing about it. Like I am shocked that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they haven’t changed this behavior in a software update yet. It’s already not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great control the way they’ve done it but it would be a substantially better or control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the first input actually changed the position of the setting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the first push up or push down actually move the setting up and down rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just wake up the menu because that is ridiculous. It would
⏹️ ▶️ John be substantially better if the reason we talk about this is because when you press the thing up it returns
⏹️ ▶️ John to its center position like a joystick that you shove in one direction it springs back to the middle. It would be better control if it worked like
⏹️ ▶️ John every other car’s wipers where you actually turn something or move something into a position
⏹️ ▶️ John where it stays. You know what I mean? Because then you could look at it and see where it is and you’d know you go down a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more for faster wipers, up one more, push up once for a swipe, and then it will spring back to position. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s software integrated, they can’t do that because then there would be a conflict. But anyway, see past episodes where we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. So on top of that, this is a double whammy on top of that. Yes, that’s how the control works so it can
⏹️ ▶️ John integrate with the touchscreen. But also, they’ve decided that this is just now an affordance for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the touchscreen controls or something like and then it’s like, oh, it’s not even a touch screen. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you actually want it. So it doesn’t just show the current level, but does it bring up the controls where you could use the touch screen to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s accessible on the touch screen. It’s only,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s only, it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco displayed in the driver cluster.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, if it’s not accessible on touch screen, they should just use a normal Wipo control. Cause the whole point of having the, having a little
⏹️ ▶️ John toggle that springs back to the middle is because it’s never in a position that could be in conflict with the, the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the touch screen because it never changes position.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know everything of the rest of the car is so well designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways it’s baffling how badly designed the wiper controls
⏹️ ▶️ John the lack of glove box and the lack of a glasses holder in a gigantic car with the huge amount of space
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of it was just no
⏹️ ▶️ John room for her sunglasses holder in the headliner sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so yeah please fix the wipers also the automatic wipers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are continuing in In the series of cars that I have had, nobody can make automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wipers worth a damn as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nor should they! Just put a wiper control, we can do it ourselves!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you have to do it yourselves because the automatic sucks so bad. At least you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it yourself, at least you actually have stocks. Count your blessings. You could have a Tesla with no stocks. True, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, I’m very happy with most of the setup of the stocks and the controls and everything. That’s why this is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, like, they just totally blew windshield wipers and sunglasses, that’s really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, all right. Now that I’ve had the car for a few weeks, I can tell you with certainty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the most attention and questions I’ve gotten from strangers with any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car I’ve ever had.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it is yellow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John loudest car that’s ever been made.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is huge and it’s yellow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, let’s be honest. You’re the only human I know that bought an electric car that is is louder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than a BMW M5 because that car is so loud, visually loud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It is, it’s literally a banana. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally Jake, first of all. So anyway, bananas are different. Plus bananas are, talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about color variation. I considered using a banana as a color reference object, but there are just so many different colors of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, it’s not, that was a harder reference object to use. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first got the first Tesla, probably what was that, seven years ago or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did get a decent number of strangers saying, hey, how is that? Or, hey, how is it on long trips?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a few of those. The Rivian gets so many more now, and it is staggering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many questions I get from strangers or people saying, hey, nice, I’m waiting for one myself, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so many questions. And I’ll answer them, because people tend to ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively the same handful of questions over and over again and I consider it an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maybe, the future cause this person to buy an electric car if they were a little bit hesitant before they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always ask two things they ask about the range and they ask if the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get wet which is funny like what interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yes if you are it’s a car
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t use in the rain it’s a real California vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well you got to figure out how to use the wipers that’s pretty challenging but you know it’s funny when you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from a nerd perspective because we’re like of course it can get wet but it actually like it’s a huge battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s It’s electric, and people are trained to think you can’t get electric things wet. So I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they’re asking that question. It’s kind of adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, regular cars have batteries in them with exposed terminals. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, seriously. But that is the question. Those two, people ask you, how far can you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go on a charge? And the number two question I get is, can you get it wet? That’s absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John love for you, I swear, if I had an electric car and someone asked me that, eventually I would, curiosity would get the better of me
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’d be like, why do you ask that? Just to make them do a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco introspection,
⏹️ ▶️ John like think about it for two seconds, because under even a few seconds of examination,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes no sense. But like, because it’s because the lecture vehicles are weird, like all their preconceived
⏹️ ▶️ John assumptions about everything goes out the window because this is an exotic, strange beast to them. So they have questions
⏹️ ▶️ John that if they thought about, I’m like, hmm. But anyway, yes, please tell them this. It’s It’s okay to get wet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have been. It’s been in the rain and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting like rain, especially because like, you know, I’m driving at the beach, which you know, the last part of the trip at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beach is down these little tiny local roads that are, you know, that are just these little wide sidewalks basically. So if I have to pass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a person, you know, we got to kind of like squeak, you know, one of us had, we kind of like scoot over, I kind of scoot onto the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny berm and they kind of scoot over and I’m basically driving like right past them and so they’re at my window level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just leave the windows open at this point because people keep like, you know, waving me to ask questions and like I’m getting stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by everybody like the cops like random strangers like everyone’s like hey what’s hey how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it how does it work on the beach like everyone everyone is stopping me I I had pulled over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to the next to the the federal gate to get into the island I pulled over they have like a little parking lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to air down my tires somebody who was driving by saw my car after he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had passed the lot stopped backed all the way up back to the driveway and turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in just to ask me questions that’s bananas. People love the idea of Rivians. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, they, young people are like, it’s a Rivian! Americans love trucks. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now that the car, the car is now, you know, when I’m at the beach, the car is parked next to my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s still early enough in the season that like drunk people still walk by at night on the weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. And like, Tiff and I will be lying in bed and we’ll hear, we heard this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like group of teenagers the the other night, dude, let’s meet by the Rivian. Oh yeah, OK, it’s right over here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my word. Rivian’s the new Tesla. The chat room points out that maybe people are asking about the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in like taking like an off-roader, like fording a river in your car, that type of thing. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they mean, not going in the rain, but like actually taking your truck into deep water. And to that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say, don’t bring any kind of car into deep water. I know they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the Land Rovers with the snorkel on top so the intake doesn’t get filled with water, But like, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you own a car, don’t put it in water ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And some of them have explicitly asked about that, but that is not the common case. And yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Rivian, it seems like it does no worse than most cars at being submerged. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s generally a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in general, yeah, it’s saltwater just as bad as it is on an internal contravention. Do not put your car
⏹️ ▶️ John into saltwater under any circumstances. I’ll end up seeing it on a YouTube rebuild channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, so that’s that’s it for the for the car impressions. Now I do have two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little fun updates, having just taken it on a long trip. One, on this long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip I finally had a chance to try the Tesla Magic Dock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is something that briefly blew through the news a few months back. Tesla has started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modifying some of its superchargers to have what they call the Magic Dock, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an adapter that dynamically attaches by the supercharger. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept internal to the supercharger, And if you pull up to it with a CCS-equipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, you know, the other connector in North America, if you come up with a CCS-equipped car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you open the Tesla app, and you, like, unlock the port in the Tesla app by saying, hey, I met
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this supercharger, unlock, you know, charger number 2D for use with my non-Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vehicle, it’ll unlock it and kind of pre-install onto the supercharger plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fixed blocky adapter that converts the supercharger into a CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug. So it’s a way that CCS cars can use Tesla superchargers without having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other kind of adapters that you brought with you that technically don’t really exist yet, to use a Tesla supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your CCS car. So I got to actually use a Tesla charger on this trip. And it was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird and the app was pretty buggy, but it worked. It was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked to charge my car. It It wasn’t super fast. I think I got about 75 kilowatts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of it So not as fast like on the same trip the Electrify America chargers that I was usually stopping at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going like 155 160 kilowatts so that you know it was not as fast as them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s that will vary per supercharger I’m sure it is able to be faster. You know it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different equipment. Maybe or different conditions But anyway it worked it cost about the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Electrify America’s like non-member pricing and Tesla will also sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, so for those of you who don’t know, Electrify America and Tesla, both for this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of arrangement, you pay a certain number, a certain price per kilowatt hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Around here it’s about 42 cents per kilowatt hour. Or if you pay like 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or eight bucks a month, you can get a lower rate for like, you know, 32 or 36
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents per kilowatt hour. And so, you know, this is obviously like a customer loyalty kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program for both brands. And it seems like pricing wise, I checked in with a couple of friends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like the member price of Tesla superchargers seems to be in line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with whatever Tesla owners pay just regularly. So if you’re a non Tesla owner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can pay a little bit of a premium or pay Tesla 12 bucks a month or whatever to have the owner pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either way, they’re about the same as Electrify America in most places, but it varies. It varies by location and time. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it worked. Very few of the Tesla superchargers have the magic dock around here, but I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward to more of them adding it. I hope they do because it was a nice option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with regard to the Electrify America ones, the going wisdom, if you listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the media, is that it is impossible to get an Electrify America charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that works without trying four times. How bad was it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to two different EA chargers on this trip, and there’s one nearby on Long Island that I’ve used a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. The one on Long Island, there’s I think six chargers there, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually two of them are down. You can tell as soon as you pull in because the screen is off. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very obvious, and you can just quickly change parking spots. And that sucks, but it hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a problem necessarily yet it just makes them less nice. The ones that I went to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this trip, the two different ones in various parts of upstate New York, they were both totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, and this one that was at a random Walmart in the Albany region was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fastest charge I’ve ever gotten like having it sustain at like 155 kilowatts. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never gotten a charge that fast, including my Tesla previous lives. I’ve never seen a charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fast that was actually sustained at that rate. So, so far the Electrify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microchargers are the best option I have found for CCS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some cases, And they are the fastest option I found period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. But again, like this varies by region so much. That’s why it’s a little hard to really compare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so that’s the Magic Dock. And then finally, I have a bit of a surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took this trip with CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? You put a CarPlay head unit in your review?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh God, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is so bad. Just add more screens until it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seriously. Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so bad. I have a bit to report on this experience. So there have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, over the last few years, because I’ve developed a CarPlay compatible app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but did not own a CarPlay car, and of course my office is not a CarPlay car, I had a need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a CarPlay test device. And in the past, what I’ve done here is I have bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a CarPlay aftermarket head unit that’s made to go into cars that don’t have CarPlay, but that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the double-DIN stereo holes. I’ve bought one of those and just put it in like a plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case with a 12 volt power supply and have all this wiring and everything. It’s been a huge pain in the butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It ended up making this huge project box size thing like the size of a lunchbox, just to have a CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing head unit in my office for development. And then what happened a few years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco random manufacturers started selling what are effectively Android tablets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are made for cars that can somehow, I don’t know how this works like with Apple certification or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, Somehow, they can run CarPlay and Android Auto on effectively a 7-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android tablet, or a 9-inch, or whatever, in that size range. Those were not only much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller, but also much simpler and much cheaper. So I switched my testing rigs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use those, and they also support wireless CarPlay, which is fantastic. And those used to cost about $300, now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only cost about $100. Like, they’re really inexpensive. So, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to add CarPlay to a car, the least invasive and least expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to do it seems to be these hundred-ish dollar, 7-inch Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets that are made for this purpose in cars. I got one for the Rivian because they keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting smaller and cheaper, and this one, the one that I got was actually powered by USB-C, instead of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of weird custom 12-volt thing that has to plug into the cigarette lighter. And with the Rivian, USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much easier to get power to the front because new Rivians no longer have a 12-volt socket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere in the front of the car. The only ones in the trunk, which is annoying. The other way to get 12 volts in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front, there’s these adapters that tap the OBD port, the diagnostic port, in the driver’s footwell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap that and that supplies a decent amount of 12-volt power. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are adapters that will convert OBD2 ports to USB or 12-volt sockets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is interesting and useful here. So that’s how I did this trip. I got one of those adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I got this, you know, $100 Android tablet thing, 7-inch Android tablet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually had CarPlay here and I can report it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you play audio from it? That’s a fantastic question, let me tell you!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it Bluetoothing to the car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good question. Obviously, there’s a problem there. Your phone connects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this thing via Bluetooth. Your phone also connects to your car via Bluetooth. How does that work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happens to like the steering wheel audio controls on your car? What does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that send to? So the most recent, as far as I can tell, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most recent of these weird Android tablet CarPlay things have a capability,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and including this one, where the phone and the CarPlay tablet negotiate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start, because I’m pretty sure CarPlay works over like a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they negotiate over Wi-Fi, they use Bluetooth to negotiate the Wi-Fi connection and then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is able to remain connected to Bluetooth with the car. That’s bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This and this is the best setup that I’ve seen of these things. So they have different options. Some of them, they have like built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FM transmitters, they have line out jacks, so if your car has a line in somehow or if you want to use the FM transmitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get the audio out that way. Or you can use the feature of these where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically tells the phone somehow over some part of the CarPlay protocol, it tells the phone, hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you keep playing audio through your other connection, don’t play audio through me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in this case it was extremely responsive. The phone was playing audio directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the car via Bluetooth and was not involved with the Bluetooth audio stack of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird Android tablet thing. So the latency was the same as if I was playing just Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, which is not great latency, but way better than most wireless CarPlay. Most wireless CarPlay, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two seconds of latency. This was, you know, the Rivian standard, maybe one to three quarters of a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this was much, much nicer. It is the best audio setup that I found for these things, and only the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest ones seem to do it. Um… There are some downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, wait. So I understand that your car is playing audio to the Bluetooth thing, but all the controls are still appearing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the CarPlay interface, and those controls are controlling the audio, and so it’s like, the controller
⏹️ ▶️ John is wireless CarPlay, but the transmission of audio is to the car itself?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so, you know, CarPlay is merely a video signal that’s sent to the car, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of, like, touch input protocol that the car would normally send back. So that’s what this unit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing. This unit is showing the video stream, which is basically an AirPlay video stream as far as I know, showing the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stream from CarPlay, and then sending input back and letting the phone deal with it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no audio transmission happening between the phone and the CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unit. So, phone is playing audio directly to the car and the car’s audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, remote control buttons all work normally. Because as far as the car is concerned, this is just Bluetooth audio.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you hit next track on your steering wheel, that goes to your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John through Bluetooth and goes to next track and then the CarPlay display reflects that fact fact because it’s just displaying what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah think of the carplay as simply a Wi-Fi connected monitor of your phone so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some downsides and ultimately I will say I drove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there with this carplay unit but ended up driving back without it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here are some of the downsides so first of all my method of powering it through the OBD2 port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not ideal because the OBD2 port does not power down for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few minutes after you leave the car and if the car is plugged in and charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it never powers down. So this unit was just like on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, glowing with its empty interface and occasionally if I got too close to the car having my phone connect to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when I was not in the car. Like if I was just walking around where the car was parked, if I walked near the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone would connect to this thing. And so to actually use this well in a lot of situations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would want to have some kind of physical power switch and that’s annoying. Let’s be honest, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoying. Also it does not boot at the same speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the car boots. If it is powered off you get into the car and then maybe you know 15-20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds later then you hear this very loud boot chime noise from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing that as far as I can tell you can’t turn off. It also see you can see in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this picture below my phone icon it has this assistive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch like overlay that is like the home button of the unit that you can drag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around anywhere in the screen but you can’t turn it off you have to like you have to leave this blob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere on the screen at all times now this is actually not necessary carplay has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a has a feature where the car can provide like a like an icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to CarPlay that says kick out of CarPlay and go back to me. Like on your CarPlay home screen one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the quote apps there might be the car and you tap that and it kicks you out of CarPlay. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button is not necessary in CarPlay mode but they have it here anyway and you cannot turn it off. So it’s just kind of blocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen annoyingly and again I’ve had now three of these like Android tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay style units and this is the only one that has this. The rest dealt without it just fine. I don’t know why it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It doesn’t need it and you you can’t turn it off, that’s annoying. You know, I’ve heard even just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this week’s upgrade, they talked about this, and I’ve even said this before, wouldn’t it be nice if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added a mode for iPhones that maybe you just mount your iPhone in landscape mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a car, and it shows the CarPlay interface? It turns out, after using this, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they don’t do that. Because this device has a seven inch screen, that’s way bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the iPhones. It’s too small. 7 inches is not big enough for CarPlay’s interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The touch targets are very small. It is easy to miss them. It is tricky to hit them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a result, first of all, I think you’re losing some of the safety benefits of CarPlay when it’s a little bit tricky to hit things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it also is just kind of annoying and error prone. So 7 inches, too small for this. I think if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get one of these style units for your car, I would suggest going for one of the 9-inch class devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead. There are a bunch out there. Most of them are 7, some of them are 9, go for 9. if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit it. I mean, and that’s its own question. Like, where does it fit in your car? Can you see over it? Like, does it block any part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your view? Obviously you don’t want that. In this case, you know, my hood covered all the view of this, so it didn’t matter. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, use caution when placing it and sizing it. But seven inches is too small for CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why the iPhones don’t have this mode as far as I know. Or at least that’s a good reason why they don’t have them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, this being a hundred dollar Android tablet, it has a really crappy screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the screen quality, You don’t realize how nice iPhone screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are and how nice car, like built-in car display screens have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you put a cheap screen next to them and try to use them in the same conditions. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bright. The alignment of the polarizer is like slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong for sunglasses, so it’s a little bit dimmer even still than it needs to be because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite align right with sunglasses. And I even found like the touch input is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as forgiving and fast. So it almost felt like you had to apply pressure, like an old resistive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. It’s not, but it’s just that crappy of a tuck screen that you have to kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it a lot of input for it to actually register. So it’s not great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an input device, and I found it kind of frustrating to use from that point of view. And then finally, the reason why I took it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off before driving home today is, after a few days, I couldn’t get it to reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect to my phone anymore. Like it just stopped. Like it just, I couldn’t get it into CarPlay mode no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what. I rebooted everything. Couldn’t get it into CarPlay mode. But it was somehow partially connected because then I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get my phone to play audio through the car anymore for a little while. Had to reboot things again. It was a whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was super unreliable after only a few days. So I took it off and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put my MagSafe mount back up there and I just drove with my phone in the MagSafe mount using Waze on the phone screen as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did in the Tesla for its entire lifetime. And it was fine. So I can say this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a method that you can add carplay to a car. It is incredibly surprising how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inexpensive and easy it is to do, but the experience you get what you pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for and Rivian should just fricking add carplay like everybody else already. Like it’s cause it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out it is way nicer for all these reasons to have it just built into the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for most cars, you don’t have to worry about that because most cars have it now. Um, But if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have either a Tesla or a Rivian or an older car before CarPlay was around, this is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option you might want to consider that you might have known about. But keep in mind, it is kind of mediocre.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many screens in these cars, geez, the car has so many screens in it and you had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Yeah. Tell me if believe me, I think it’s stupid, too. They should just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add it like just add CarPlay. You look Rivian. If you’re if anybody from Rivian is listening, let me just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say The Rivian philosophy of like, we don’t need to do this, whatever. Like, Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes really nice TUX UI. I’m very happy with it overall. They still need to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, their navigation system is not good. It is not. I want to use Waze.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The best three navigation systems in the universe right now are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waze, Apple Maps, and Google Maps. They are never going to be as good as even the worst of those three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ll let listeners decide which one that is. I think they’re all pretty good now. now but it’s like for instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place names in New York I don’t know I have I haven’t driven out of the state of New York I don’t know if it’s this bad everywhere else in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York typically you have in most plays in most places that have people in them you have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a village then outside of that you have a town outside of that you have a county and outside of that you have the state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot get the Rivian navigation system to display village or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco town names correctly so for instance suppose you live in Bayshore is where ferries are it won’t say Bayshore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bayshore is the village it’ll say I slip which is the surrounding town so the addresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will say like now that I Maple Avenue I slip New York that’s not what anything else calls this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you have to keep double-checking is that the right one is that the correct place that it’s sending me
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just looking at there was someone but did he Jocko put a link to historical maps so of course I
⏹️ ▶️ John like that the historical max of a long island and they had one that was showing things divided up and it was like, why is Islip
⏹️ ▶️ John so huge? It’s like, oh, I see. It’s, you know, they only, they didn’t show like, you know, Bayshore or
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. They would show just, just the, because there was nobody on the island. It was like from the, you know, 1700s or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, so yeah, that’s it. I did the same thing when I was, I was zooming in on the, the thing. It’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to, a lot of the map programs, the thing that bothers me, how far do I have to zoom in before you show me the words Bayshore? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Cause like, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a pretty important thing. Cause you think you’re in Bayshore and no one says they’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John Ice Slip, right? Because Ice Slip is a different place. Are you in CI? Are you in Big Short? Like, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah. Right, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even like, you know, if you type in the address, like, the way you would send mail to these places would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the local village name instead of, instead of like the surrounding town or county name. But they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Rivian maps don’t even list things the way anyone, including the post office, would list them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it makes it hard to know even if you’re looking at the right thing. So yeah, there’s little things like that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like look, and of course the Rivian music player is very, very limited, because it’s only going over Bluetooth, and it has this built-in app for other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, but it’s terrible. Like, look, Rivian is fantastic at the UI design of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the instrument panels. Like, besides the windshield wiper thing, which I already, you know, ranted about, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is terrible. But like, the temperature controls, the various, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car controls of different features or modes or settings for the car. Those are all great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The typography is great, the graphic design is great, things are easy to see, easy to read, easy to find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You still need CarPlay. You still do, because you’re never gonna match
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigation and audio apps in phones. You can’t. That’s not what anybody even wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to do, don’t even try, you won’t succeed, and no one wants it. Just use CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re never gonna be better than Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze. You’re just not. Don’t bet against the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smartphone, work with it. That’s how everyone else has gone. There’s a reason for that. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add CarPlay. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe add Glovebox first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you know what? I can work around that. I can put a bag on the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John the dashboard is so huge. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like an aircraft
⏹️ ▶️ John carrier, and there’s no Glovebox. It’s insulting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really is. But still, I’d rather have CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would be such a differentiator, because if you think about the cool kid, like Silicon Valley,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, fancy electric car, you got Rivian, and you got Tesla. This could be a differentiator.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, put CarPlay in there. And then suddenly, if you’re an Apple person that wants a car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s actually put together properly, that’s not, you know, that the company isn’t run by a lunatic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then all good reasons to buy Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And like, look, Rivian, it’s so good in every other way I’ve found so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far. I freaking love this car. It’s really, really good. For God’s sakes, give me CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I still, It’s so frustrating it doesn’t have it. You don’t need to overthink it. Make it a window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make it one of the main apps, the five or six main apps you have, just make it one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have it in a window, and your other controls, the climate bar, the top bar, those are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around it. It’s fine. That’s totally fine. You don’t need to make it fancy. You don’t need to rethink. You don’t need to reinvent