208: Your Face Is Your Face

09 Feb 2017

The long-term future of the Mac, and the near-term future of Casey’s garage.

Episode Description:

• Follow up:
  • What could ARM coprocessors in Macs do?
  • Windows Hello face recognition
• More on iPads vs. Macs
  • Upgrade #127
  • Connected #128
  • Marco's blog post
  • David Sparks on iPad hardware longevity
• Crazy locked-down ARM-Mac rumor
• Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
• Post-show: Casey learns the fine art of waffling

Sponsored by:

• Setapp: The best collection of Mac software at your fingertips for one low monthly price.
• Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
• Betterment: Investing made better.

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Follow-up: ARM coprocessors
2. Face recognition
3. Sponsor: Setapp
4. iPad arguments
5. Sponsor: Betterment
6. iPad replacement cycle
7. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
8. macOS thought experiment 🖼️
9. Ending theme
10. Post-show: Casey’s car waffling 🖼️

Follow-up: ARM coprocessors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is going to make an awesome after show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s not really, because it’s going to be just a white dude bickering and moaning about his expensive car. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to be a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after show. And we’re going to keep it in, and people are going to like it. And the one or two people that don’t like it have long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco since stopped listening. Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so people have suggested that this Phantom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version of the Mac, which includes an ARM coprocessor, if you will,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe that’s used for PowerNAP. I still am skeptical that would be a reasonable use case, but be that as it may,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people have used an example of, apparently there’s something in the PlayStation 4, which apparently is a console

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that people apparently play video games with. I didn’t realize that was still a thing. But anyway, it has a rest mode that I guess works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey similarly, right, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so the last show we were talking about, the ARM CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually being able to function and do useful work when the Intel CPU is off, which would mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the ARM CPU would need access to all the same stuff, you know, all the I O and networking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all the other stuff, regardless of what software it runs, whether it runs just, you know, a bunch of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software that Apple supplies as part of the OS or whether third parties can ship ARM compiled binaries to it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it would be a full-fledged CPU able to do useful work. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying how that is pretty complicated if the only benefit you’re getting out of it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we can do PowerMAN app on the ARM CPU instead of the Intel CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it remains to be seen if the next item in follow-up we have some more suggestions of things this thing could do to justify that complexity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the PS4 is actually an example of this actual thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in practice, because the PS4 is an x86 CPU, and when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put it into rest mode it’s basically like the thing is turned off. The fans are off and everything. It doesn’t make any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noise, it just sits there, but it’s not completely off off and what it does in this mode is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it will like download update giant updates to your games it will charge your controllers it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know do other sort of background tasks that don’t require it to be on but still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean that it’s doing useful work it will do it obviously with downloading is using stuff over the network and in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rest mode it’s according to this feedback we’ve gotten which I’m perfectly willing to believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all I haven’t looked into it Extensively it’s not using the Intel CPU. It is using a separate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arm chip just to do this stuff and That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an example of an x86 and an arm CPU in a box and when the the x86 CPU is turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off The arm CPU is able to do all that stuff. It’s able to do, you know manipulate stuff on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard drive It’s able to use networking. It’s able to do all the you know the things and that is an additional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complexity That is worth it for the ps4 because it is fixing all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sins of the ps3 Every time you wanted to turn the thing on and play a game you had to download 50 updates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like why didn’t you do that for the 12 hours? I wasn’t home ps3 it wouldn’t even charge your controllers when it was turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off the ps3

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you plug them in you know like I’m playing the game. I’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the worst so the ps4 fixes all this and so it’s an obvious win on the console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s you know it’s down to the instruction set exactly what? They were talking about for this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumored Apple laptop question remains is that additional complexity And I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s additional complexity Worthwhile for a Mac and so we had one of the suggestion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for something that the arm CPU could do that is useful That doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John require third-party developers to make extensions that with arm code compiled to it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and ship it off there and do all sorts of stuff like that. David Boroditsky suggested good old photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and face recognition. You know, like when you first get your Mac or at any point like wandering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over your photos finding all the faces and doing the image recognition nowadays. Like figuring out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything that’s a house or whatever so you can do searches later. That would be a perfect thing to do when your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac is in rest mode or asleep or whatever and it would require

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe networking access depending on how much cloud stuff they do for the image recognition but certainly would require our disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access. Is that worth the added complexity of making a Mac that can run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either on an x86 CPU or on an ARM CPU depending on what mode it’s in?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. First of all, like the photo recognition thing, like I hope they fix that in this fall’s software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco updates. Like make that sync already. Everything else about photo syncs, like the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every device has to do that is not only a terrible hack with awkward results sometimes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it just destroys the battery life and performance of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers and iOS devices for the first three days that you get them. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s just a bad initial user experience for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But somebody’s got to do it. I know people might have multiple devices, but one of the devices has to do it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that device is the victim. It’s great that it’ll be shared, but I would imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a lot of people, the phone would be the victim because that’s where they take the pictures and who knows if people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even have photos syncing on their Mac I feel bad that any device has to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John subject to this I mean the only they could change change the policy by saying we won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do image recognition unless nobody’s using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the computer nobody’s using the device and it’s plugged in like basically only do it when you’re sleeping and it’s plugged in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well they already attempt to do that like it does it does stop when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are unplugged on the laptops most of the time. However, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco takes forever to the point where you never know when you plug it in. Is it about to spin the fan up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then when you unplug it, how long will it take before it pauses? It uses the discrete GPU, which exacerbates any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of GPU sticking on bugs. It’s just kind of a mess. On iOS, it’s even worse, because then your phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets really hot for the first while that you have it. You’re like, why is my phone so hot? Is something wrong with it? Is it to catch fire.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, it’s just really inelegant and really sets up very bad user

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco experiences for anybody who’s setting up an iOS or Mac device that isn’t their first one ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s, they really, really need to address that in this year’s updates like that cannot wait.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so I’m not sure it would be better if instead it did it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John while it while it was asleep, because obviously, it will take way longer to do it while it’s asleep. Really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only Apple knows for sure but like what are the usage patterns for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices that are plugged in not iOS devices because they’re they’re never asleep awake

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like when the screens off basically that’s a you know asleep like when they’re plugged in overnight and charging that’s when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they should be doing their photo stuff if that’s the only device but for Macs I don’t know what the defaults are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I imagine if you walk away from your Mac it’ll be on for some period of time and then I think the default is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go to sleep after like not that long of a time And if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t do any photo recognition stuff in the background in sleep mode normally like a power nap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t do any of it now That’s all the wasted time So all the only time your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has to do photos is When it’s unintended is like the one hour between when you stop using it and when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it goes to sleep according to The default energy saver settings or whatever whereas it could have had 12 hours just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plinking away with this little arm CPU So maybe that would help a little bit but Again, I have to you know the complexity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of having a second full-fledged CPU with access to all the same things as the Intel CPU Is significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’m still so far. I’m still on the page that It’s much smarter to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use that CPU for Auxiliary functions that have to do with the hardware. I guess the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time a proximity sensor camera microphone You know sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a glorified M was m1 or m7 What was that the original motion detecting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John step counting thing on the iPhone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Was it the M8?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re getting a BMW on the brain M7 M7 there you go. It’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 1M because the M1 was a totally different car anyway. Yeah Yeah, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having dedicated hardware for functions related to the hardware And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perfect for a little CPU and again And the only reason we’re talking about this at all is it’s already there to run the touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like it’s already there and so you’re just saying how can I get more bang for my buck from this thing that I already have to put in it’s not like we’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to throw a bunch of new chips into the thing it’s already in these these laptops so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I believe that a next version or a version after that of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll find new things to do with ship they should because they’re paying for the chip and it’s there and when it’s not doing anything fancy on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen give it something else to do they have they have they have good arm chips and they have a good OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to run on them So why waste it?

Face recognition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Speaking of face recognition, Windows Hello, whatever that may be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does some really weird and fancy stuff with their face recognition.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I made a joke about face recognition not being good for security because someone just prints out a picture of your face and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holds it up and then they unlock your laptop. Didn’t specifically say that that was a vulnerability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Windows Hello because they didn’t know much about it, but many people wrote in to say that Windows Hello actually uses depth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maps so that you can’t just hold up a picture because it wants something that not only looks like your face, but is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John contoured and shaped like your face. So people would have to make basically a mannequin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your face instead of just a picture, which is harder. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the faces versus fingerprints thing, because a lot of people bring up like, well, it’s just like fingerprints. Like people can lift your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fingerprints pretty easily. I feel like it’s still, the apt comparison is local versus remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exploit. Local exploits, like there’s a million of them. Basically, if someone has physical access to your computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in most cases game over as far as security for a variety of reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For fingerprints, they need to have physical access to either you or something you’ve touched to lift your fingerprints. And there’s been many demonstrations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the web like, oh, you can lift someone’s fingerprint and you can unlock their iPhone because fingerprints are just a series of ridges and we can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get them out and make a little plastic mold of it and you’re gone. Right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usually you can’t get fingerprints from a normal photo of people. Like if you’re walking down the street and someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John snaps a picture of you, they can’t lift your fingerprints from that picture, or if they Google you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they probably won’t find closeup pictures of your fingerprints or anything you’ve touched at a resolution where they can lift your fingerprints.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But for most people, you can find plenty of pictures of their face.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you could fairly, not easily, but much more easily, remotely, without ever being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anywhere near that person or anything that they’ve touched, reproduce their face in a 3D manner from a series

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of photos that are taken at a whole bunch of different angles, and use a 3D printer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make a little mold and then print out a picture of their face and slap it onto the mannequin and it fools

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the depth sensors and it fools the camera and you’ve unlocked their thing with their face.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, this is kind of like Mission Impossible, whatever stuff, if someone is this determined to attack you, it’s probably much better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just to call you and tell you they’re from Microsoft and they wanna reset your password because that’s a much easier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to get into your stuff. But thinking about this and how easy it is to pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your fingerprints versus make a 3D model of your face versus whatever, has reminded me once again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the trouble with all biometric security, which we all see in the future

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sci-fi movies. They’re always putting their hands on things or doing retina scans or we’re living in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John future now with fingerprints. I use my fingerprint to unlock my phone all the time. I love it. It’s awesome. But the trouble

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with all biometrics is if they are compromised in any way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if people have your fingerprints or have a nice 3D mold of your face, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t change those things. You can’t say, well, I’m gonna use a new set of fingerprints. Always rotate your fingerprints. Don’t use the same fingerprints

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in multiple sites, guys. Your fingerprints are your fingerprints. And for the most part, your face is your face.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So once compromised, they are compromised forever. You can’t use your fingerprint. If the whole world has high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John res images of your fingerprints, your fingerprints are useless. Nevermind that in this country anyway, law enforcement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can make you put your stupid finger on the thing anyway. Just in general biometrics They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unlike passwords that you can change and rotate or whatever You can’t change them even your retinas if you do a retina scan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and someone has like a detailed map of your retina It makes a little fake eyeball with your retina scan it. You can’t use retina scans anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s bad And if it became commonplace It’s the definition of repeating your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John password. You only have ten fingers, right? Then you have a different finger on each secure thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so in general biometrics are a great convenience, but if we in in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sci-fi movies of our youth anyway They were always presented as a much more secure way like ha ha you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get in because you don’t have my eyeball or my Finger and then didn’t take long for the movies to to shift

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into gouging people’s eyeballs out and cutting off their hands to get their Fingerprints, there’s another downside of biometrics, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in general I think biometrics are settling in to be the casual Convenience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature like it’s the reason I unlock my phone with it because who wants to type in some big long password every time you Unlock your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but not for increased security For increased security.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re still stuck with for now big giant passwords in multiple factors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I Love that ripping out somebody’s eyes and cutting off their fingers is described by you John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as a downside. I Mean it is it’s a pretty significant downside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my book, though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No one’s gonna do that unless you’re in a you’re in a you know a sci-fi movie like because no one cares that much about your crap and again it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are much easier ways to get at your crap like just forcing you to put your finger on it because you’re not a big tough guy but in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movies

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} to get into the evil villains

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lair that you know you cut off the guy’s hand cut off the henchman’s hand and you just shove it on the panel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t uh tom cruise’s character do that minority report

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you got new eyes

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so So many times so many times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are brought to you this week by Setapp.

Sponsor: Setapp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The revolutionary new service for discovering and using the best apps for your Mac. What if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there was a way to know that every app you install was safe, always updated, and of the highest quality?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is what Setapp is here to do. Setapp is developed by Macpaw. They’ve actually been a previous sponsor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this show with the CleanMyMac line of products, and they’ve created many successful apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the Mac. They’ve been Mac developers themselves for years, and they know the market really well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They know what customers want, and they know what developers want. Customers want a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make consistent, stable revenue from their products without having to mess with the complexity of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like upgrade pricing and trials and everything else. And customers want to know that they can go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a storefront or a collection that has the best apps, they don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worry about looking through a million reviews and trying to figure out which apps have hidden in-app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purchases or ads or anything like that. They just want someone else to pick for them, to curate this collection for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them and to give them what’s best. MacPaw has done this with Setapp. Setapp gives you easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco access to their curated library of quality Mac apps like Ulysses, RapidWeaver,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CleanMyMac, Ultima Player, and many, many more. And you get all this as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco user for just a flat monthly subscription fee. You get access to the entire library

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no matter how many of those apps you use. You can use all of them if you want to. And you just pay this low

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monthly rate. It’s a huge library of prime Mac apps that you get for one fixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rate per month with no ads, no paid upgrades. When a new version comes out, you just get it. They just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give you the best collection of helpful, useful, high quality Mac software right at your fingertips.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Try it today at Setapp.com. Once again, that’s Setapp, S-E-T-A-P-P, Setapp.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to try out Setapp, see for yourself.

iPad arguments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thank you very much to Set App for sponsoring our show. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so there’s been a little bit of a sort of kind of back and forth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between our show and one host across two other shows,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is a friend of the show, Mike Hurley. He has talked on his two podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Upgrade and Connected, about some arguments or counter arguments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about whether or not the iPad is worth Apple’s attention. And you really should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listen to both Upgrade and Connected in general, but particularly the latest episodes. We’ll put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey links in the show notes. I’m going to try to unfairly summarize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mike’s points and then…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} wait to hear those.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, yeah. And then Marco can add his two cents about all this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What I got from what Mike said was, hey, if you look at modern iPads

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and modern Macs, where you define modern slightly arbitrarily,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but basically can run the most recent versions of iOS and macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t remember the exact numbers, but modern Macs by that definition go back between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey five and 10 years, and modern iPads go back, I think, around five years, something like that. The particular numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t really matter that much. The conclusion though that Mike came to was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hey, if you look at the sales and thus assumed install

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey base of modern Macs and modern iOS devices, or excuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me, iPads, there are like twice as many iPads as there are Macs. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if there’s that many iPads in the wild, shouldn’t that be where Apple puts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most of of its attention because presumably all of these iPads are still in use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and presumably at least a subset of these owners, the iPad owners are using them for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I’m doing scare quotes here, work stuff. So shouldn’t that be where Apple puts all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of its attention or maybe not all, but a lot of its attention? And that’s a super, super, super summarized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version. Again, listen to Connected and Upgrade, actually in the reverse order, listen to Upgrade first. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listen to them to get the longer versions. But that’s kind of what I got from it. Is that fair to say?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think so. And this was in response to what a lot of people were talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about after the earnings came out, what, two weeks ago now, about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how iPad sales continued to drop. And many people commented on this with theories, myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco included, both on my blog, and then we talked about it on the show last week. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many, many people, every time there’s quarterly earnings that come out and it shows that the iPad sales are going down, which has happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot in the last few years. Everyone has these theories about, well, here’s why the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has failed or is failing or you can’t get real work done on it or whatever else. And so if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are an iPad pro heavy user like Mike and Federico

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and some of our other friends are, then this makes sense to be defensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about because it’s very hard to separate out these arguments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into like individual things to talk about. A lot of times people are arguing past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco each other because they’re not quite hearing what the other argument was or they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco responding more to a general feeling or to a general kind of trend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of where the commentary is or has been rather than what somebody actually said or what people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are actually trying to figure out. And there’s nuance to all this stuff. So part of what Mike

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Jason on Upgrade responding to was not just what we said, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of it was based on us and what we said and what I wrote in my blog post about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if the iPad isn’t the future of computing. And so I did want to address this, hopefully briefly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. And I’m actually, I’m working with Mike, we actually might do a little special with just me and Mike arguing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it maybe next week sometime, but we’ll…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do I get not to get to participate in that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ooh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I’m right about everything and you guys just have to argue about which

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} one is going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} be more wrong? Ooh. I didn’t know that we listened

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to these episodes, but it seems like it was like Mike versus Marco but like I said stuff too. Didn’t anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disagree with stuff I said?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You got hit too, don’t worry. You and I were kind of lumped in together. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} so… Oh, that’s unfair. That’s ridiculous. I knew that would get you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, so here’s my actual position here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Obviously people are getting real worked on on iPads. Not every iPad owner, of course, but as Mike

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accurately pointed out, not every Mac is sold and used to do quote, real work, whatever that means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mike’s main point was also that the iPad, obviously, even with the downward

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slope of its sales curve, is still selling like two to two and a half times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unit sales of what Macs are selling. There are still way more iPads out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there than Macs, and so therefore, this really is a serious platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not arguing against any of that, actually. My main argument

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with my post, and hopefully if I express it properly last week, is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad is presented in so many views, both from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple and from analysts and fans, as quote the future of computing. And what I interpret

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that to mean is a replacement, ultimately, or largely a replacement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the PC and the Mac. What we’re mostly seeing is that you know PCs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have been a little bit contracting for a while But Mac sales have been pretty solid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the rise of the iPad over it’s been seven years now And it’s been popular the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole time so like it’s selling a lot the iPad selling a lot But during that entire rise sales of Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco haven’t gone down So if the iPad were really like the future of computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in quotes and I’m doing finger quotes here sorry in in the way that that means replacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PCs and Macs for a lot of people. I think the numbers are showing otherwise and I made the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last week that for a lot of people if you’re going to choose between only being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to afford or only wanting to own either an iPad or a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re still picking that computer. I think the sales show that and there’s lots of reasons as we got into last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco week about why that might be you know things about things like the limitations of doing things on the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and how many limitations you have there versus what limitations tend to be on PCs and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know differences in usability and everything. You know we argued about this so I’m not going to repeat the whole thing. All this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to say that you can’t get worked on an iPad or that iPads are only for consumption. I never said that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is also all not to say that nobody is replacing their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PC or Mac with an iPad. I didn’t say that either, but I think very clearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my argument here that I’m clarifying now again, my argument is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a large scale it doesn’t appear that tablets are replacing PCs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the Windows world is a little bit messier because they kind of have these combo things, but on the Apple side I think it’s very very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clear that the iPad is not replacing the Mac. It seems that most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who buy the iPad are buying it as the third device. However they order it in their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minds, they still have a phone and a computer and the iPad is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco added to that mix. Again, not everybody, not all iPads, but this is added to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the mix for so many people. And so while everyone can name someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who got an iPad and doesn’t use their computer anymore, a lot of people also use computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and don’t buy iPads. So I think the sales reflect the reality here. The iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like so many things in technology, has not destroyed what came before it, it has added to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so in a world where it is one of many devices that people use to get computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on, as opposed to the device that is replacing the computer, I worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the direction that Apple is taking between the Mac and the iPad. Because it sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks like, from Apple’s point of view, and we’ll get to this crazy slash it rumor in a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it sure looks like for the most part what we see from Apple is that the Mac is kind of like as I said last week, it’s kind of like in maintenance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mode. It seems that they’re not really putting a lot of like huge effort into like moving the Mac paradigm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forward. It seems like they’ve they consider the Mac basically done and they’re doing fairly minor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things to it. Touch bar hardware engineering aside, yes okay, but the software model seems like it’s been fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minor and not seeing a lot of meaningful changes or engineering your effort put into it could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be wrong, but this is what we’re seeing from the outside. Whereas the iPad, if that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were to be the future of computing, then that needs more investment. What we’re seeing instead is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that’s not the future of computing and Apple’s kind of neglecting both of these platforms, but that’s a story

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for another day I guess. But I just wanted to clarify my argument on this is not that the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is useless or dead or not possible to get worked on. Simply that it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco showing itself through sales to be in reality a third device for a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people and to not be replacing the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John While you were talking about that I was thinking about a fan comment I think it was the last show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple doesn’t make best best anymore and thinking about Mac sales

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that they’re declining but as as the Mac has become over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many years proportionally less of what Apple sells mostly because the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly you know because they sell a bazillion iPhones right but But even the iPad has pointed out that it sells

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as much or more than the Mac these days. To go back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our favorite well, the good old car analogy, in the car world, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell a small number of cars and you are a going concern in the car business, chances

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are good that the small number of cars you sell are extreme in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No one sells a small number of Toyota Camrys. can’t run a car business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by selling 5,000 Toyota Camrys a year. That’s not a thing, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can sell 5,000 Ferraris a year and be okay. You can sell 5,000 Humvees

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe and be okay, or that’s a bad example of this GM. But anyway, if you sell in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small volume, you specialize. And very often, you charge tons of money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like way out of proportion to the quality of the car that you’re selling, you know, Jaguar or whatever. Sorry, you know, that’s…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe that’s not not true these days I know they’re better anyway if the Mac again not low volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but proportionally lower volume if the Mac becomes the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minor player in the world of the iPhone which is the Toyota Camry right and maybe maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even the iPad is selling more than it you know on an ongoing basis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would be the perfect time for them to look at that line and say well who is still buying Macs why would someone want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac over an iPad oh they have more demand and need and more sophisticated tasks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Go back to the old world Apple, which was perfectly willing to have a machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that could be configured with an obscene amount of RAM, with a ridiculous number of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most expensive CPUs, with a very large hard drive and a very big,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hot, expensive GPU, and overcharge for all of it. That’s the old Apple way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Make a machine that I can configure to be as much as an Apple Watch Edition, right? Should be able to configure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you used to even with the old 2013 Mac Pro, a 15, $20,000 Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not worth that much money. It’s like it’s overpriced in the same way that a Ferrari is not worth that much more than a Corvette that has almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same performance. But for people in certain markets, whether it’s because you need the absolute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John biggest best and you’re willing to pay for it, like it’s a blip on your radar, or just because you want a Ferrari

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you think it’s cool, as your volumes get lower in proportion to the rest of your business, that becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a way to extract more money from this product line. And so it seems that they are losing interest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the Mac. I wish they would have enough interest to say, can’t we fleece those people? Because at this point, I’m begging to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be fleeced. Can’t we, you know, like how?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Have you priced out a Touch Bar MacBook Pro by any chance, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I know, I know. Like, I mean, that’s a thing too, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s still within the realm of reason. Like you can’t even get it with 32 gigs of RAM, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if there are people who have those demands, like there’s nowhere to go in the Mac world for them. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, regardless of where we want to draw the line between where is the line between people who really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need a personal computer style thing and people who need an iPad and people who just need a phone like there’s a continuum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there but at a certain point like we all agree that the Mac is at the one end of that spectrum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right it’s not no one’s arguing that like the Mac is in between the iPad or the phone or something it is one end of that spectrum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just need to extend that line out and make sure that if someone is forced into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac or has to use a Mac because of their work that that they can go all the way up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, you know, because it’s a low volume relative to the phone market, charge tons of money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get super high margins, maybe be less into the $500 increases

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your laptop model, which is more of a mainstream thing, and just put all that money into,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, like a Mac that’s for professionals, like you could shorten the name, but whatever. I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re in circles here, but I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just. The sad part is they have been doing that to the Mac Pro. Every Mac Pro generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is more expensive than the last one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, but then they didn’t give you one with two CPUs in it, right? And they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} stopped updating it through

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} this. They still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John raised the price. I know, I know. But like, it just seems like it’s frustrating when at any price you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throw your money at Apple and say, just give me as much RAM as will physically fit in the machine because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m doing some weird application and I don’t care how much it costs. And it’s like, nope, not interested in selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you that. And you should be because it’s a good way to make money off suckers like us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And also to bring it back a little bit just to the iPad discussion, I did want to also mention a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco post that our friend David Sparks made over at Max Sparky about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his interpretation. He is also a very like iPad Pro user and his interpretation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically of trying to explain away the iPad sales dip is in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco short. I hope I’m summarizing this accurately in short that basically most people aren’t pushing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the their iPad hard like that’s why so many people are able

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even people who have decided to make the iPad a part of their life or a part of their workflow or both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re still perfectly okay using like a four-year-old iPad and the main reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it that he’s saying which I which I think is is right on is that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just not pushing it hard enough because the because what people do on iPads,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what the software does, what is possible to do well on it, is usually pretty light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco workload kind of stuff. It isn’t that the hardware is not getting better, the hardware is getting way better,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but just what most people are doing on the iPad doesn’t need better hardware. And the blame for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that and the duty to fix that or to try to push that forward mostly lands on Apple, because a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that has to do with the OS and the way it’s structured and various limitations. A lot of that has to do with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app ecosystem, which is much of that is on Apple to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to fix or to enable fixes to happen. We’ve seen this theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from a lot of iPad users’ responses over the last two weeks to this. People love the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad. People want to use it for more. They want to be able to do more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of their work on it if they can’t currently do all of it on it. But iOS needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to move forward in a way that lets people get more work done more efficiently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There are so many really basic things that we consider basic from the PC era

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of just things like managing multiple emails and attachments and moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photos around, moving documents around, things that are very hostile to doing on iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are very clunky or sometimes even just impossible without crazy, you know, hacks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or sometimes just outright impossible. Simple stuff like moving media

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around and dealing with people’s files. iOS really fights people a lot. Basic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco multitasking stuff, the multitasking implementation now is very limited and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could really use some enhancements and whether that’s coming down the road this year or not we’ll see. I hope it does. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the point is there’s still tons of room to improve iOS on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope Apple tries to do that in some way, because tons of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want that and it just seems like, regardless of which side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the future of computing you fall on, whether you think it’s the iPad or the Mac, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems like there’s plenty to complain about Apple neglecting your platform either way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope Apple cares enough about the actual future of computing to invest very heavily in at least one of these platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it seems right now that the Mac is in maintenance mode indefinitely and the iPad gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco occasional updates from iOS when it’s convenient for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Betterment.

Sponsor: Betterment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Betterment, investing made better. To learn more, visit Betterment.com.atp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and get up to six months of no fees. It is never too early to start saving for retirement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or your other financial goals. Betterment helps you manage your investments with the same strategies that financial advisors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use with clients who have millions of dollars, but brought to everybody at a much lower cost.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The financial services industry has embraced technology and innovation through the creation of automated investing. This means

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you keep more of your money with fees that are a fraction of what you could pay for traditional financial services. And Betterment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the largest independent automated investing service out there, managing more than $5.5 billion for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over 180,000 customers. You might have heard about them in the press. They’ve recently been talked about in the Wall Street

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Journal, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch. And with Betterment, excess cash your investments generate is automatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reinvested. So every dollar you invest is put to work and your portfolio is automatically rebalanced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as needed. Everything involves risk. To learn more, visit Betterment.com.atp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can get up to six months of no fees. Betterment.com.

iPad replacement cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Betterment, investing made better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John On the idea that the iPads, like people keep using them because it still does what they want it to do even though they could buy a much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better one, I think it’s another situation where Apple probably has data about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this. But trying to think about it anecdotally, there’s two things that make you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two things that come to mind immediately that make you buy a new whatever. One is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usual tractor of software. if you have a vibrant software ecosystem, eventually your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old phone doesn’t run the cool new app that all your friends are talking about. So the more vibrant the ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, the more apps take advantage of new hardware or are being dragged along by the platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by not supporting 32-bit apps anymore or whatever. The more that is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, it’ll make you say, oh, I don’t like my phone anymore because all my friends are using Apex

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I can’t use that because it says it doesn’t run on my phone or something, right? So software ecosystem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which again is lacking on the iPad, like there is more of that on the phone than there is on the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in terms of social pressure and software, you know, action

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the software market to pull it along. And the second one, and this is where Apple would have the data, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many people replace their phones because they break them. I see a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John broken phones. Um, and I see fewer broken iPads. I do see cracked iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You see them in airports and stuff, but I also see kids in airports with iPads dropping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them like they’re a juice box and then just bounce in the giant rubbery case they’re in. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna say probably percentage-wise, phones and their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lives, because they break more often than iPads, just based on my personal experience and anecdotally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But again, Apple would know, because they probably, in all these surveys, say, why are you buying a new phone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It seems to me that those two tractors are making the phone replacement cycle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notice I didn’t list as one of the things that’s making people replace their phones is that their phone feels slow. In general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think iPhones aren’t like Windows computers where you use them for two years and they’re so crapped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up that you just need to get a new one. Again, this is based on my experience and talking to other people. That doesn’t happen with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones as much. Not saying it doesn’t happen at all. Sometimes your phone does get slow and, yo, I upgraded the OS and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my phone feels slow and that is another factor in it, but I feel like it is far behind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software ecosystem pressuring you into upgrading your phone and just plain dropping it. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John none of those things are true for the iPad, then it is protected. And it kind of makes me fear for the day when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple makes an iPhone that you can drop all day long and it never breaks, will the phone suddenly become like the iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If again, if this theory is correct, that people aren’t buying new iPads because the one they have is working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just fine, I think people’s phones would be working just fine if there wasn’t some new app they wanted to play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they didn’t keep dropping them. Maybe I’m overestimating the dropping and maybe I notice cracks too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much because I’m always amazed at the vast percentage of people I see like on the train or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just swiping their thumbs along totally shattered phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, iOS or not. Because people drop them and they’re made of glass and it’s a problem. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. We really need to get product marketing from Apple on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show now that we’re mad with power and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} what are your percentages of, Why do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people replace their phones? Is it because they have an Android phone and it’s getting old and slow? Is it because they dropped their old one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or is it because they want to play a new game?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I, first of all, that’s okay. That’ll be question number one for when we get Phil. Well, question number two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Question number one will be about the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Oh, no, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have many other questions earlier in the queue. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} may never get to that one. Sorry, folks. That’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I do think you are underestimating how many people replace their phone because it’s old and slow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because… Do you think it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS upgrades? I brought that up and I have heard that from a lot of people and it is a real

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, but I was going to say no one’s forcing you to upgrade your phone, but Apple’s pretty pushy these days, aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, Apple really, really pushes the upgrade pretty hard and sometimes like an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app, a critical app for people will require it. So that kind of forces them

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} to. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they push you on the iPad too. Like I have had iPads that I regret upgrading the OS for because they’re just so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old and you upgrade to the very last and like, oh, I should have stayed one version back. So why wouldn’t that make people replace their iPads

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the same way?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well that’s a good question and worth thinking about. I think one of the reasons for that, maybe one of the biggest reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that, is the types of apps that you use on the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco versus the types of apps that you use on the phone. And like, is there an app that’s pushing you to upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or not? On the iPad, I think the data shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that despite the community of people who get a lot of work on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad, a lot of iPad users are using it mainly for video watching,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web browsing, and email, and Facebook. The basic email,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web, video kind of workflow. And for that, probably nothing’s really going to push

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you to really upgrade your OS. You can still use Apple’s Mail app in whatever OS you have. You can still use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the web browser. I would imagine Facebook and Netflix and stuff probably keep their minimum version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty low.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’ll upgrade the OS but you don’t doesn’t matter if you upgrade the arrest if you’re just using to play video It really doesn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly how clunky the animation is on springboard when you launch the Netflix app All you care about is once the video starts playing. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine. That’s fair. But anyway regardless I think The way most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPads are used it probably has a slower upgrade cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from this offer side simply because They’re not often using a lot of apps that require the newest version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the OS whereas on the phone phone, you have a lot more like you know new games that come out new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cutting-edge apps that come out usually come out on the phone first or only and you have more early adopters you know it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like there’s like more driving that, but also do you know just like there’s like this consistent narrative with the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that explains a lot of this that is probably correct and there is some data to back it up that basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while you can get work done on it a lot of people do use it for mostly consumption

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not a judgment that’s just what people do. That’s also true of computers. That’s also true of phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco However, that is true of iPads. And that people’s needs on iPads are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fairly simple most of the time. Whoever’s fault that is doesn’t really matter. The point is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people do pretty simple things on iPads most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steven

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Connelly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, it’s only one data point, but I feel like it’s relevant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The aforementioned iPad 3 that we had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after we stopped using it because we found it to be too old. It was collecting dust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for months. And then just a couple of months back, I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my, I, I, you know, reset it all. And I had my dad bring it to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey grandparents. They live in Pennsylvania. I’m in Virginia. And although they come down from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time to time we haven’t been up there in a long time and you know, they’re, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not that young at this point because I’m turning 35 pretty soon and these are my grandparents.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But, um, but we gave them this iPad three, mostly so they could FaceTime with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us and Declan and, you know, I guess my parents from time to time as well. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from what I understand, they were beyond overjoyed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have received it. Not only because of FaceTime, but because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a much easier device for them to use than their PC. And I think it’s a reasonably modern PC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but they were overjoyed to receive an iPad 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Late in 2016. What was the iPad 3 new like 2012 or something like that probably before that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually So 2012 it wasn’t 20. Okay So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so they were beyond excited to receive this old device which for them is more than enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now Obviously they have nothing to compare to obviously in a perfect world, I’m sure they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey prefer a brand new one, but But for someone who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hadn’t had one before, it was way more than enough. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not every iPad user is going to be like that. And I’m sure that there’s tons of iPad users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that upgrade regularly that are not using it for work. They just really love the iPad. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to speak of the longevity of the iPad, this is a device that’s nearly five years old now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that brought genuine joy to their household when they received it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s the thing, like, this is why old iPads are so useful and so many of them are still in use, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most people’s needs are pretty low-end. Most people just want a thing that they can browse the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web and send emails and see Facebook on. Like, that’s pretty much what most people do with any of their computing devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone, laptop, or tablet. And so this device is delightful for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Again, but I think that doesn’t preclude people doing real work on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. And also my theory that I’m putting forth with these sales graphs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that this is mostly just additive to the world of technology. I mean…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There aren’t any real answers here. The data that we have is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shallow and we have to extrapolate a lot from it. And so because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of that, there’s so much judgment involved and there’s no clear right or wrong. And I think that’s why we’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talk about it in bits across 17 different podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for a little while. But yeah. So let’s talk about something that’s indisputably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey awesome.

Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Start building your website today at squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off. Squarespace’s platform is incredibly powerful but it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easy to use. You can make a beautiful website with no time at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can take like less than an hour and see what everything it can do. You don’t even have to pay because you can start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a free trial and when you do want to pay use code ATP of course but you don’t even have to pay. You can see what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is without ever giving them a credit card. You can get a free trial site, you can build out what you want to see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can see for yourself how incredibly good it is. I’ll tell you what, once you’ve made a site with Squarespace,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you will wonder why anybody does it any other way. Because most other ways to make websites are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way more complicated, way more time consuming, much harder to support over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And people ask us to make websites all the time. People who listen to this show, probably a lot of you have people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in your life who ask you to make websites for them. You don’t want to support that. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to like patch that or upgrade that or deal with them whenever their server goes down or whatever else. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want someone else to take care of that and Squarespace can do that. Whether it’s for your site or for a site someone else wants

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you to help them set up, set it up on Squarespace because their platform takes care of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything. Hosting, you never even have to think about software updates or patches. Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco support, which is a huge thing. If you’re setting a website up for somebody else and they need help with something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they ask Squarespace, not you. You want to get yourself out of that business, let Squarespace take care of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And no matter what you’re making, whether it’s for you or somebody else, you’ll be surprised how fast it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make everything with Squarespace. You just put things up there and it’s just done. You can mess with the design if you want to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you don’t even have to. The stock stuff is beautiful. If you want to make little customizations, you can in like two seconds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Try it. Just try it. Next time you need to make anything, make your next move with Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco See for yourself. When you’re ready to check out, Use offer code ATP to get 10% off your purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Squarespace.

macOS thought experiment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Make your next move at Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey arm-powered laptops that are drifting around internally at Apple and this individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey claims to have seen several with my with their own eyes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they had a lot to say about it I don’t know the best way to summarize it partially because I read this days ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I haven’t looked back since which was in part because it seemed kind of bananas to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} right but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it seemed like the The short short version was, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s some apps that run on arm and the OS is really iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ish, even though it is an iOS, like the lot of things that, that we like to control

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as, as you even not even necessarily power users, but just users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Mac OS, not a lot of that is available on these supposed phantom arm max.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t think this. Something about this didn’t feel right to me. I’m not sure I can point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to a specific passage and say, yes, this is why it’s bananas. But a lot of it just didn’t feel right to me. And from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I gathered from people that I’ve spoken to, it didn’t feel right to a lot of them. But we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wanted to acknowledge its existence. And we will put a link to the show notes. And I’m sure that the two of you have some thoughts on it as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to do more than just acknowledge it. Yeah, I don’t want to entertain it as a as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John possibility, because it’s that, you know, this is not a credible source. But let’s just pretend And like, hypothetically, let’s talk about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing if it existed, right? Because again, I don’t think the sourcing is enough to say that this does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exist. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say, in fact, the incredible shadiness of this post and so many of the like weird things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t really sound very appley or don’t reflect how they actually work. I would say this is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unlikely to be true. But I but I the reason I want to talk about this too, I was very happy to see it in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notes is that this is an interesting idea for where the Mac could plausibly go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because while the details of this are very suspicious that make you discount the validity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this report, I do think the overall idea of such a product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is plausible. And the idea that Apple would take it in this direction is very plausible. It’s not just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plausible. This is like, this is the… As soon as iOS appeared, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically the exact, not exemplar, but like, this is the prototype of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumor. The very second the first person said iOS Mac merge like the very second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone said that many many years ago this is exactly what they were talking about is a Mac running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on ARM CPUs can only get apps from the App Store everything locked down all binary sign

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can restore from the internet like a phone like it there is nothing in this that is even outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the realm of the things that are material the only reason it is you know it’s interesting again it’s because it’s being presented as truth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s kind of the same way when you tell a joke you pretend it’s a real story that happened to you to make the joke funnier that’s That’s exactly how this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John working here. But because we haven’t had, like the reason it’s worth talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about again is because we haven’t revisited this idea of the iOS and Mac merge,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John totally locked down Mac thing again. And in light of the actual appearance of ARM CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside Macs with the Touch Bar Mac Pros, and in light of all the Intel stuff and so on and so forth, and our own revisiting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of when is it gonna be time to flip the Mac over to ARM, I think it’s worth revisiting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this old rumor of the merged iOS Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not so much the merging of the US’s interface-wise, but of literally buttoning down the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in all the same ways that iOS is buttoned down as an example of what we talked about last show, like either

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expanding the capabilities of iOS or making the Mac easier. This would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be an example of taking all of those sharp edges in the Mac and filing them down as much as possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make something that is hopefully almost as easy to use as an iPad, is still much more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco capable. Yeah, and so I think it’s worth going over some of the details because our chief summarizer and chief

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco failed to. It’s okay. You’ve had a long day. We’ll get to that in the after show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But yeah, sorry. But yeah, so basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the idea put forth by this comment basically is that it is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is like, you know, the next generation of laptop presumably or possibly of all Macs. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an arm processor all custom Apple arm hardware just like the iPads and phones. It only boots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the signed OS images that come over the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I assume not every time, not like a net boot, but it only boots similar to iPhones and iPads. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is no physical install media, there’s no downgrading. It just, here’s the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco update for you, here’s what you get. You can’t downgrade, you can’t choose what version you run, just here’s what you get, period.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They said a lot of the OS X legacy utilities and stuff are missing. There’s no more X11,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s no audio MIDI setup, you know, a lot of that stuff. No disk utility, no terminal, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is interesting. System preferences and a lot of functionality has been moved into a new app called Settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to match iOS. The App Store is mandatory, including even things that require

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware drivers. Sounds kind of similar to when you plug in, or when you connect like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Bluetooth or lightning device to a phone, and it can associate itself with an app on the App Store that lets it work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Similar to that, but for drivers on the Mac. So you get a new like, you know, scanner or something, you plug it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it downloads the, it launches you to the Mac app store to download the driver for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Uh, similarly, all drivers would be like, you know, kind of like iOS sandboxified where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something could install one of these drivers like at the deep level of system, but then you could just go into a system prep pane

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and like delete it and it’s gone. It doesn’t like leave files behind, you know, it’s very iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that way of like an eye with iOS you can delete an app and you know everything about that app is gone like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is there’s no there’s no like remnants of it left in your phone or anything and of course the Mac doesn’t work that way now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know the Macs get gummed up over time with all this crap and you have like all this junk in your library folder and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything else and so and then a couple of things but yeah basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s that’s oh and and the the file system is kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how do you pronounce chroot in Linux world is Is that true? I don’t know, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically the file system is like true rooted. So basically like you like what appears to be at root

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is your home directory and you don’t even see the system files. They’re just they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even there like they’re there. They exist in the file system, but you don’t see them from your point of view from your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco user space. You see at root your files and nobody else’s and they said there was like no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco concept seemingly of multi-use stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want to get too much into the specifics of this post because again I think the credibility of it is is pretty low

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but as a future direction of Mac OS and of the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware platform I do think this is worth talking about not only because it’s so plausible based on what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple seems to want to do but also I think I will have the seemingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this community very unpopular opinion that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this could be really good with a few minor exceptions. I think this could be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really good. The only things about this that give me a lot of pause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are that it said that everything has to come to the Mac App Store. That’s number one and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know the Mac has this wonderful gatekeeper system and has this this kind of like code signing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without app review system called developer ID. If that if the developer ID and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gatekeeper come forward into whatever this is again assume this is real even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though it probably isn’t thought experiment time. Okay, if this were if this were to have some kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like developer mode where you could build open source stuff and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco however, it’s containered if it’s in your own little to root of jail fine, but if you can build open source stuff, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can develop code, if you can like compile code with with your C compiler or whatever else and and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run it on this thing without the OS is code times of interfering badly with that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if that’s possible to do here and you know, and and if you can, if you can distribute software through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developer ID, which would bypass the Mac App Store, then I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is not only plausible and could be good, but it might be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great because a lot of this solves real problems with the Mac and with PC style

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OS’s. One of the biggest problems is like how apps spread themselves out all over the place,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all over the system. You know, they are like it isn’t as I said with iOS, you know, iOS you delete the app, it’s gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the Mac, you delete the app, and there’s garbage everywhere. And you have to use Mac cleanup utilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to clean all the garbage out sometimes. You have to go find these files that are spread all over your system, and you can’t be sure what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an app is doing when you install it and all this stuff. The PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Mac style of app security is outdated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’ve talked about this before, the Unix idea of anything you run just has access to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco entire user account and everything you’ve ever written, made on user account and all your files and it can delete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco files at will it can it can read everything of yours like that is an outdated model that that is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great for the future of computing and one of the things that makes iOS so appealing to a lot of people for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of reasons is the additional simplicity and security that the sandboxing model that it has enforces

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think there it is possible to do this well a lot of Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco diehards are really against this idea when they saw this comment and assuming it might be real

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I can see why that why you would be so against this but I think if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again which is like that’s a very slight tweak of like a developer mode and being able to distribute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco software with developer ID that’s pretty much all I would need for this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know it like it sounds like it would be really good in a lot of other ways either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mac is in maintenance mode as I keep saying it seems that way and and nothing ever changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s fine. Or, if it is going to change, if Apple really is working

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the next generation of OS, not just 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dot something else, the entire next generation, like when they went from Classic to OS X,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they are indeed working on such a thing for the Mac, which I would argue they should be because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would be ridiculous to continue a computing platform four with no plans to ever do that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then I think this is exactly the kind of thing they would do and we should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be prepared for it and we can see a preview of what it’s like by looking at iOS because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iOS is even more restrictive than this and so if if this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plausible and and if this happens and if it’s done well with with with those couple of little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco holes puncture the wall for developers and for distribution through developer ideas I said I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think this could be a great move forward this could be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco simplicity security of iOS but with windowing and file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco management and access to your files and it’s in a traditional paradigm and stuff like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and yes it would require a lot of apps to be rewritten some things that worked in the old system wouldn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anymore but a lot of this stuff is ancient like I don’t need x11 anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t like there’s a lot of this stuff is so ancient. Mac OS is very old. It has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accumulated cruft over time because everything does this new way of doing things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sounds like it could really be the actual future of computing that blends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco together the greatness of iOS with a PC style paradigm to allow more types of work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get done for more people. This sounds really good to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The actual future of computer. I spent all this time explaining myself and you just ignore me. It’s fine. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Last week, we talked about how the iPad was making progress in terms of expanding its capabilities with multitasking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the pen and the bigger size and stuff, but kind of slowly. The Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has been doing that same thing, but in the other direction, but even more slowly. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you think about the Mac trying to simplify itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to be friendlier, this has been a process. The process took a pretty big leap with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Classic to OS X, actually, because many things that were way more complicated in Classic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were massively simplified. The dock is the best example of that. All the ways that you could manage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same stuff that the dock is supposed to do on Classic Mac OS at the time we transitioned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dock was just like the most dumbed down version of all the other options we had, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even including third party things, of which there were many. This was this one first party thing. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t use the private APIs to make your own doc type thing. We will fight you on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it is way simpler. And don’t worry about it, because that’s all everybody needs, right? And sandboxing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another example, a long, slow, painful slog, trying to get some of the benefits that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get in iOS. All your crap in one place, protect the applications, protect it from each other, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s been slow going. We haven’t been able to get there because sandboxing is incompatible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with lots of cool things that Mac apps have done and still want to do. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s very difficult for Apple to ever get,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slowly, incrementally, get it to the point where Mac applications are sandboxed in the same way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as iOS applications. Instead, they’ve been saying, you can be a Mac app and your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff can still be in seven different places because it kind of has to be, but we’ll put some constraints on you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s this weird mismatch between having to do that, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having to be protected from yourself and isolated from other applications. Even so far as like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many Mac apps have struggled with the sandbox because the integration point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on PC-style operating systems is very often the file system. And that’s how applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John share things with each other is, I write a thing here and you open that same thing over there and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John user’s allowed to make little folders and put stuff in them. And you’re trying to sandbox things so each application only sees its own files,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like it’s been difficult. And so this description

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the iOS-ified Mac, which again has been in people’s minds and talked about for many, many years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now, the question is always, how do you get from where we are to there? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a big leap, and trying to do it incrementally has been very difficult. It’s been taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a long time. It hasn’t been particularly successful. A lot of things, efforts have stalled out despite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of effort put into it. It gets back to the question from the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John week’s show, Is it easier to make the iPad more capable or make the Mac friendlier and simpler?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And unquestionably, I think it’s still easier to make iOS more capable because if you try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make the Mac simpler, everything about the system and the users and the developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fights you at every step because there’s so much entrenched tradition in software and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conventions and capabilities and attitudes and just like, and cruft, like Marco said, just plain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old cruft. that it’s it’s difficult to get there. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this little host here is almost kind of like wishful thinking. Like wouldn’t it be great if we could snap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our fingers and be there and like Marco said one way you can do that is say okay well it’s not Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS anymore it’s a new OS called something else you know like people would have said Mac OS 11 back in the days before the 10 got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dropped right but this really it would be a leap of that size if it appeared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wholesale. You can still get there piecemeal it’s gonna take a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you might have to wait for some people to die and there may there are many places where this can go terribly wrong for example

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s obvious to us on this program as rabid Mac users that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course you’d have to have some mode that most people wouldn’t use but that would give you access to the terminal that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will let you build software because you were software developers and we know any software developer who uses a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no matter what kind of development you’re doing even if you’re doing everything in Xcode I would imagine but it’s definitely if you’re doing development

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for any kind of server-side software, you’re used to being able to install and run software like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is not signed with Apple’s developer ID thing. All that Unix open source stuff, that’s not signed with developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID. And if you literally can’t run binaries that are not signed, or if you don’t have that final

⏹️ ▶️ ^John option in Gatekeeper to launch applications with the right click in the open and all that, or just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John launching it from the command line, if that option literally does not exist as it doesn’t on iOS unless you jailbreak,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I really don’t want to be jailbreaking my Mac. That eliminates just so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John users. This is not even an edge case anymore. It’s like a large percentage of people who, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole professions who use Macs at their desks need the ability to do that type of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and are going to need it for the foreseeable future. So if you cut them off, then you’re just marginalizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac too much, I think, because it would be, they would be eaten up by iOS on one side and you abandon everybody else who’s using those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features on the Mac. So that’s a danger zone as well. Um, but the general idea of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let me just close my eyes and open them again. And the Mac at the very least

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solves one or two or three of the biggest problems. It still wouldn’t be solving the file system problem, even with the CH

⏹️ ▶️ ^John root stuff and everything. Um, but at least you’d solve app install management

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drivers. Regular users wouldn’t have to see disk images anymore. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John settings and preferences would be more coherent and familiar because they’re used to iOS, like just those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wins would be huge. And if you can get those wins while also allowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people to do their work in the old way, if they want to, like that’s talking about progressive disclosure, like no one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it’s a developer mode or whatever, like no one, believe me, people aren’t going to be like, I wish I want to have developer mode turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. No, nobody wants that. They want it to be simple and nice. It’s like Casey’s grandparents. They’re overjoyed when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, this is simple. I just do this to this and it all makes sense to me. There’s no place I can get into trouble. They’re not going to go looking for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing to turn on developer mode. That’s for power users, quote unquote. And yes, there is a class of person who will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go looking for it and turn it on and because they’re interested in that, they’re geeks, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nerds, that’s fine. But regular people, trust me, do not want the complexity. Like all of us, when we go into a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John preferences screen and we see an advanced button, we click it immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Other people don’t even want to go to the preference screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like they don’t even want to know the preference screen exists. They probably don’t know the preference screen exists. Like it doesn’t need to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They just want it to work and work fine. So I’m pretty much with Marco that I would love a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work like this as long as I had the option to to you know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developer mode or the way to do all that stuff. I just I’m not sure how long it will take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get there whether Apple has the will and wants to dedicate the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John resources to get there because it just seems like still a much more straightforward path

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to continue to enhance iOS. I feel like iOS is getting this rate iOS is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting more sophisticated at a faster rate than the Mac is getting simpler which is fine with me as an old Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John user, but if I start drawing lines on graphs and seeing how this ends up, it just seems to me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unless Apple has a massively renewed interest in the Mac, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS will eventually overtake it because for whatever their interest is in the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their interest in iOS seems much stronger on the phone and still even a little bit stronger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the iPad. And who knows what other weird devices they’re planning. I mean, you’ve got the watch store on the mix there too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IOS as a legacy free basis for innovation seems like a much easier path

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than continuing to bang their head against the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, the by and large, I agree with you guys, but I can’t help but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think a couple things. One, it almost sounds like you’re saying I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the good parts of IOS and none of the parts that bother me. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s okay. Like I mean, yeah, that does sound good in and of itself. But I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for for two people that really don’t seem to be too terribly interested in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad It’s interesting hearing you say oh, I’d love all that stuff from the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whose people are those I use the iPad every day

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use the iPad more than I use my Mac?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I can’t say that but I do use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a pad at home. I use definitely I obviously I work all day on a Mac So the that’s that’s the majority

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my time but in my house I use my iPad literally every day and many days go by when I don’t wake my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from sleep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but I think to clarify this, it’s not that all of iOS is bad. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tons of great stuff in iOS. There’s tons of advantages of iOS. Between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way iPads work and the way macOS works, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco huge difference in interaction paradigm, the file, you know, the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco difference between being, you know, macOS is very file-centric like most PC OSes, whereas iOS is app-centric.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These are massive differences in just the way these systems work. Of course you can take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of what’s good about one and apply it to the other. The only question is, where’s your starting point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and where are you going? As John said, it’s a lot easier to make iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more capable than to make macOS simpler. However, no matter what you do to iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s still going to feel like a big phone that’s app centric and not file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco centric and everything else because that’s just like the entire design of the system. Whereas on the Mac, if what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want is the PC style of computing, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally possible with something like this crazy scheme that this crazy comment that is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco BS, it is totally possible to take the best of PC style

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computing, make it still work the way that people who want that are accustomed to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but bring in the modern advantages of iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that that summary makes a lot more sense to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Imagine if you gave your grandparents this Mac described in here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think with the possible exception of the keyboard being intimidating, they could be just as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John delighted because from their perspective, if it’s simple and they can figure out how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use it like like if it was basically as simple as the only way you could launch applications is with launchpad launchpad was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always visible in the thing it would probably have to be touch which is another issue entirely in terms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of bridging that divide but like if they were never faced with the complexity of an open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John save dialog box or never had to look at a bunch of files or little documents on the desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or never even looked at the desktop and it was just basically had the simplicity of an iPad but happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be a Mac they would be just as delighted because they just want to accomplish a task the task is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video you know, a video conference with my family and be able to send emails or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you and I could say, oh, if you had a MacBook Adorable you could do it just fine, but the difference between a MacBook Adorable and an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to them is huge. So all you need to do to delight them with a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is make it so that when they use it, it is just as simple as an iPad, it can still have lurking under the covers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the other complexity. The file system stuff is a place where we continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to punt and Apple continues to punt. I hold out hope that there is still a better way to collaborate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on things than the completely app-centric island model of iOS and the complete file-centric

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world of the PC but considering no one has figured it out yet you know we’ll just leave that off to the future but again we are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about the future of computing not the present but anyway like that that’s why I think this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this Mac is a this type of Mac is appealing because it it will start to blur the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lines that we’re all thinking in terms of because once something like this appears on on the scene,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not, we can’t have the same conversation anymore. It’s a different conversation entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. The thing that, um, that I’m curious to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if this becomes real one day, and if the three of us are still blathering on, on, on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show is what are the restrictions and, and how egregious are they? And I mean, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talked about this some, but like the, you know, is if there’s a developer mode, what does that really give you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And do you have, do you have file system access just to your change rooted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey root area? Can you get all the way to the root root? Can I install a kernel extension? Would I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to? Um, I, I just, I can’t help but feel like let’s say this dropped on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our laps tomorrow. And you know, Marco or you or me or all three of us buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one. I think inevitably what would happen is it would put roadblocks in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our way in ways we find frustrating. And what I’m not sure about is, would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your average developer, when looking to his or her left in seeing the Touch Bar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBook Pro, and then looking to his or her right and seeing this Phantom ARM-based Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, certainly I would choose the Touch Bar MacBook Pro because it doesn’t limit me at all. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this hypothetical new Mac, while it does fix a lot of problems for people in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think it solves any problem that I’m seeing today. And so I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just see, I have visions of this being like a less extreme version of me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saying, well, I don’t like working on the iPad because I feel like it constrains me. And I feel like the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is freeing, because that is how I feel. And I think that this hypothetical new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ARM Mac would be a lot of the same in that regard, if perhaps a little bit less of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A lot of what we would want as developers could be accomplished through VMs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If it was still possible to have virtual machines running on this in some form, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of this could be solved by containering and by virtual machines of like, you know, right now, like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco geez, I just I lost a day this week on Monday, I spent a whole day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco finally fixing my local Apache and PHP, my SQL installations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between my my iMac and my laptop, both of which my laptop never had a working one, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did a clean install when I got it. I just never finished setting it up and fixing homebrew and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fixing PHP and fixing the built-in Apache to use the right version of PHP and all this crap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I tried MAMP and I didn’t like it so I stopped trying MAMP and like fiddling with all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff that’s like all over the file system, all the stuff that homebrew puts and different other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco package managers do it and then homebrew complains that other package managers exist and it’s like dealing with all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco crap all over the file system that gets upgraded when the system gets upgraded that I’m trying to put my own stuff into and edit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the config files and everything else like I during a lot of that I’m like you know why don’t I just install

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco VirtualBox and just make a Linux VM and just run all the stuff in there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine. Try Docker you’ve got a modern enough Mac that you can run Docker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know I should know about Docker I know nothing about Docker I know I know the the general

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high-level concept of what it is I’ve never seen it never use it no idea what how it how it works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway you should try it before you go the full VM route and in the meantime you should I think I’m gonna make a pile of everything, everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from source and install on user local like I do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well, and I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually, you know, I eventually moved to the full Homebrew setup. Took

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me a while to realize that Homebrew installs its own version of Apache. But it did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco finally do that, but it just, it was so much messing around and so much crap, and I know that future

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OS updates will probably break it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Never touch the system files. You can only mess in user local. Do not touch anything else. Pretend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I did eventually move to that system. But my point is, that is not that different from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what if on this hypothetical, you know, next generation Mac OS lockdown mode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which should be the only mode, what if in this OS, developer mode existed, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, again, I do think that developer mode needs to exist, where you can just compile stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you can run open source software that is compiled from source, or through package managers or whatever else. Somehow you can run open

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco source stuff, you can build it yourself and just run it. and somehow there needs to be a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to, you know, to to distribute software out of the app store with developer ID gatekeeper whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s so given those two exceptions suppose developer mode is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rooted in such a way that you know you you basically get your own version of user local in this little virtualized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco environment within your home directory that’s not that different what we have now and that’s totally fine we could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally work with that it would be fine as long as there’s still a way to have a terminal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a way to have to compile software you get from other places all of these workflows don’t break

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just the file paths might change slightly that’s it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah it could be done well like so that you don’t feel constrained Casey like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so you don’t feel like you’re suddenly trapped because it would just be a matter of coming on to the machine and flipping a few switches and be like ah back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John normal but really the the ultimate cure for this is the same thing that solves the exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same situation in the change from classic Mac OS to OS 10 which was a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know increase in simplicity and downgrade in customizability with the elimination of whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John categories of interfaces and ways of working and Lots of third-party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things being replaced by first party things that could not be enhanced or replaced in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supported manner The solution is guess what there is no more classic macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yeah like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} this that was the solution It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, you you know Go use Windows or Linux or this is the future of the Mac like I don’t envision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac described in this this comment here existing alongside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other Macs for any appreciable amount of time there would be a transition and you either you’re on board or you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take it like that’s exactly how it would have to work and especially if they go there by increments but again if you could blink

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know open your eyes and this thing was here they wouldn’t keep them both around the old thing would go away so that would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically solve the problem for you and hopefully like I said you wouldn’t feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} constricted like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tim Cook would keep selling the old thing for 10 more years after.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Well, you know, the software, they’re a little bit better about that. They do upgrade it. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wouldn’t, in the same way, I, you know, initially a lot of classic Mac users felt constrained in OS X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it was very young and slow and it was missing a lot of things. It was simpler. And in some respects, I still feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John constrained by some of the interface things in OS X, but you get used to it and eventually it becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new normal and you accept that it comes with many other benefits. So I would imagine that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of Mac, would be palatable to you, if not immediately, then in short order. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as long as they didn’t screw it up. Because I feel like one of the ways that Apple, especially today’s Apple, could massively screw this up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is by going too far and cutting off all those other avenues. Because if the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t support that type of user, like, why bother having the Mac? Now I’m not saying that’s the only reason for the Mac’s existence, but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, then what are you even doing? You’re just… You’re squeezing the Mac from both sides until it’s basically like…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Really weird iOS because there’s only iOS would still be advancing So it’s like this really weird iOS version that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t do the things that a Mac used to do But isn’t as simple as iOS and they put all these resources into morphing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac into this thing and it’s like What’s the point at that point you you have to concede that? Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had the right approach and that you’ve just been wasting your time with this dual OS strategy as you shave one of your OS’s For

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both sides until all that’s left is this little skinny spindle that just topples over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over. Well, and if they did this, again, like I said earlier, we haven’t had a major OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco transition in a while from Apple, not since 99 or whenever it was. John, I’m sure, has some idea of when that was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 2001 was 10.1? There you go. Or 10.0?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s my guess. Yeah, so we haven’t had a transition since then. In the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Windows world, they have them a little more often, but it still doesn’t come that often. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you have a major transition like that. One of the luxuries of this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean it’s painful, no question, it’s painful, it’s time consuming. For a while there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a transition period that just sucks for everybody. However, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an opportunity to modernize app frameworks, to add new capabilities,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do things, to basically take the opportunity that you have that you’re kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of forcing app makers to do something new to do like a major update or to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to even do a rewrite to take the opportunity to to make it better for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So for instance some of the things they could do with the Mac if they did this and if they presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco broke a lot of old apps the fight they could finally make like a more unified UI framework

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for one like make UI kit for the Mac and I don’t mean make everything look like navigation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco controllers and make it all function the same way in the UI but you know There’s some of the simple low-hanging fruit, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unify the way table views load their data and make it so we don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco NSColor and UIColor anymore and stuff like that. There’s a lot of stuff they could do to unify those two frameworks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They could do things like, as I mentioned previously, cellular MACs because they could implement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better control over networking and do all this stuff. It would give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them the opportunity to, it would force us to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco live for a while with incompatible software, with oh, well we can’t do this in the new OS yet because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this app hasn’t been updated or whatever, we have to drag along Microsoft and Adobe or whatever else. But then when we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got there, it could be so much better because app makers have been forced to update. Right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mac software ecosystem is, you know, there are some bright spots, but a lot of it’s just a graveyard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because most people who make Mac apps, it’s a low priority for them because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can keep making the same old app over and over again and it’s fine and they can focus their efforts on iOS and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If the Mac changes, yes some of them will get lost, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones that want to stay on the Mac will have to put effort into it and that will make their apps better and that’ll make it better for all of us. So like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there would be a substantial silver lining, not to mention all the all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefits of the OS itself as a set of things like the better security, the better sandboxing of the apps, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not having their crap go all over the system. This could be really good on a number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of ways if something like this were to happen. It would definitely be painful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And some stuff that you could do now on Mac OS, you’d never be able to do on this. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at, tying it back together, look at how many people do everything they need to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on phones and iPads. This can do more than that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who says like they can’t do stuff on iOS sometimes it’s because of a capability that iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just will never be able to do because of because of its security model but sometimes it’s just because it doesn’t have a very good multi-tasking model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a very good file system model or very you know things that this would actually have so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it would be a painful transition to go to something like this but it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be impossible we would all grumble we’d all complain but then we’d get on board a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few things wouldn’t be possible anymore forever and we deal and we deal with it. We’d find new solutions. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I couldn’t use Audio Hijack anymore to record this phone call from Skype,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then we’d probably either stop using Skype or we would, you know, we could switch to one of those like web-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco podcast recorder things. There’s already like five of those and there’s only gonna be more by the time this thing ever exists. So like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it like there’s always workarounds. There’s always things like time will… time would solve any pain that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be there. So I think even though this was probably all wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And based on this one weird post on slash dot, that’s probably BS. This kind of sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool. And if it happened, assuming it had those the those two exceptions of developer mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and developer ID distribution, I think they’d be really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have to throw cold water on this, we have to bring back to our old refrain, anytime we discuss anything radical happening to the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time and resources. And does Apple want to put that much money into its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legacy platform or however you want to describe the Mac because sales volume wise you can justify

⏹️ ▶️ ^John almost any investment in iOS. Can you justify that same? And the iPad is along for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ride because even though the iPad’s volume is similar to the Mac, guess what, it’s got the same OS as the phone so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John congratulations you get a lot of development stuff quote-unquote for free. But this would be a hell of an investment to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac. It would be on the scale of the classic to OS X transition or at least close maybe not that big but it be close

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it would be the biggest investment in the Mac software wise in many many many years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so um i think it could you know i’m not saying it couldn’t be the right people pitch it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um it could be sold within the company but it would be a departure from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the historic investment in the Mac which has been good and it’s you know it hasn’t been as high since the transition from OS’s as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know as is appropriate or even the transition for CPU architecture but this would be an architecture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transition and an OS transition that is the second biggest one that Apple has ever done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know, we’re all on board for it and would be ready for it, but I’m not entirely sure that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is ready to put that money into the Mac, which, now that that is the most dubious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing about this random slash dot com, but again, like I wouldn’t characterize it as novel or interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing I would characterize it as a re- reiteration of the prototypical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea of a Mac merged with iOS resurfacing now in a new context. And that new context

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the new Apple and the new state of Intel versus ARM and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new sales figures for iPad and all of us new people being older and wiser and having seen more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the tech world reconsidering the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well in that case I will put it in terms they will understand. You can sell iPad hardware for $1,500. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already do. That’s not including all the cases.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s our end. Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Squarespace and Setapp.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I bet hardback for MacBook Pro prices. 2,600. There you go.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey notes at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Accidental, tech podcast so long.

Post-show: Casey’s car waffling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Casey, I hear you’re having some car trouble.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, indeed. So I brought my car in to get the oil changed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t care that you think that’s preposterous. Don’t care. I don’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} time to change my own oil. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why is that preposterous?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Are you talking to us or the audience who’s scolding you? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} audience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} preventing all people. No one in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audience is scolding you about not changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your own oil. Oh, OK. You can send a tweet to at Syracuse about how angry you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I’m not changing my own oil.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even people who change their own oil, I feel like now realize that they are outliers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Probably. So I had a coupon. I was very excited. I had a coupon, so my BMW

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oil change was supposed to be $90, which I understand is expensive. Wait. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it at the dealership.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now it’s time for me to scold you. Yeah. I was going to the dealership.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Now you’re going to hear from them. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, okay, I understand I am not innocent and I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey made mistakes. Mistakes have been made.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, you don’t get your oil changed anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} But anyway. I did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you’re going to the dealership anyway, okay. But if you’re going to the dealership to get your oil changed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, don’t do that. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t, I don’t trust like a Jiffy Lube or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh, geez.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I get it. You don’t have a Ferrari. We have to go to this special little Italian

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} person. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey requires synthetic. It doesn’t matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} The point is, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think it might be covered when you have a lease. I’m not sure, but just for the record there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} If it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John free, then yes, yes, by all means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I believe they are. And it was free for me when I first owned the car, because I still had some of the maintenance program.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah, it was like five

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years, right? I forget. It was four, I think. It doesn’t really matter. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I had my $90 coupon. I’m all excited with myself. The wherewithal to ask for a loaner,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I was very glad for, and we’ll see why in a moment. But here’s my $90 coupon. I should expect to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see you later today. I probably didn’t even need to bother getting a loaner. I’m going to drive it the handful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of miles to work and then probably immediately later, you know, a handful of miles back and that’ll be that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I get a call as I’m out to lunch and they say, in so many words, Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things relating to the drive train in the front. I have an all wheel drive BMW before you get all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey angry. Uh, things related to the drive train in the front, like tie rods and bushings and things of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nature. And the adjustment screw that you use in order to do an alignment has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seized. Things are breaking. That’ll be a thousand dollars, please. Oh, and you’ll get your car back tomorrow because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we don’t have all the parts. Fine. So in and of itself, okay, fine. The car has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey almost 70,000 miles on it, if I remember correctly. Um, it is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unreasonable that things would be going wrong, but in the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey year and change. I had a five or six thousand dollar repair

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the Vano system. I had a thousand dollar water pump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey issue that was almost last month. It was just barely in December

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and now I have this thousand dollar issue. And I think this is the universe giving me a sign that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car is not long for this world. So I’m getting some pressure from Aaron and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s completely justified to unload the thing because it’s just I can’t keep the damn thing on the road.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And at first I was resisting, but now I’m to the point that I’m like, screw it. This thing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not worth my time anymore. I want to get rid of it. Now on paper, the right answer is get a brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new 3 Series, maybe an M3 if I want to spend too much money. Maintenance will be covered, at least in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the beginning. It’ll have a nice big fat warranty. Problem solved. Except I feel like like I’ve been burned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by BMW. I think new ones are, as I think we talked about recently, new ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are just unaffordable. So, and then that becomes, okay, well, the fine get a pre-owned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one. Well, I just did that. And yes, this one, the, this hypothetical new pre-owned one would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with a, with the CPO warranty, which goes to like a hundred thousand miles and yes, that’s possible, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even if I’m not paying out of pocket constantly for my car to be in the shop, my car still in the damn shop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all the time. And I feel like the moment a BMW gets past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like lease time, things start falling apart.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friends that have had similar experiences. I just don’t want to be bothered by it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have many options in front of me. If you recall my requirements,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which are somewhat loose are, I don’t want front wheel drive. I want it to get to 60 in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey under six seconds. I don’t care that that’s not necessary on regular roads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s what I want. I want three pedals and that’s mostly it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what are my options? I’m only thinking about new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right now. And then I’m going to start trying to rack my brain for used because I’m not opposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to going used. But looking at it, I think every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey single one of my options has problems. A friend of mine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually just written in Cadillac ATS, great call, but the infotainment is from everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve ever understood, unusable, just utterly unusable. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know if it has car play. I’d have to check that out. So that is a potential.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} If I’m willing to- It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} also hideous. Yeah, it’s too ugly to be seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Great car, too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ugly. Fairly hideous. I’m not arguing. Fairly hideous. It sounds like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey brain trust has eliminated that. So if I’m willing to have wrong wheel drive, focus ST.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The problem with that other than it being a Ford, which in and of itself is fine, but it’s front wheel drive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I don’t particularly care for. And then the RS is also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is it the RS? Whatever the super hot roddy one is. That one is just too 18

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey year old for me. I’m turning 35 next month. Just no way. a reasonable compromise, but wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wheel drive. If I’m willing to go back to Deutschland, I have the Volkswagen GTI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Golf R, which is the thing that I think I’m most interested in, the A4, and the S3, which is basically a Golf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey R, but in sedan form, if I’m not mistaken. What? Come on. What’s what? What

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} are you wussing over? You listed a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John series of little Euro hatchbacks, and then you lump the A4 and the S3 in them. Like, oh, it’s the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, the A4 is wildly different. The S3, I thought, was basically a drivetrain of the Golf R. I am on

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} day one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Under the cover, sure, but it’s a whole, like, from the outside. It’s the difference between driving around in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a rabbit and driving around in a regular car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’re dating yourself, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} calling it a rabbit. Here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, I mean, I could rule out all four of these right now for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Because… Aw, the A4 is a good car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a little boring, but I think Asia should try it before he decides it’s too boring. Because it’s nice looking, it has the features he wants,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s reasonably nice inside and out. The main slam against it is that it’s more boring than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John BMWs, but I think he should test drive it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is the A4 even available in stick? Yes. Oh, it is? Okay, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} thought it wasn’t. Yes. Anyway. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, it is. All right, so the A4 is basically a 3-series

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s slightly worse. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} depends on what you want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you want it smoother, kind of nicer, even keel

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you want a crappier interior and higher prices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Crappier interior? No, I would disagree with you there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They look nice, they don’t feel nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sure I agree with you there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iDrive is way better than their Weirdo system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iDrive is light years better than MMI, at least as of about a year ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} forget if the A4 has the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updated one or if it’s still on the old one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know either. I thought it had the new hotness one, which I have yet to try.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But the A4 supports CarPlay. I don’t think it’s wireless CarPlay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s CarPlay. The S3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is basically a Golf R, although a buddy of mine is saying it might be DSG only, which might eliminate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it from contention. Then the Golf R, obviously. All of these are appealing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because they are not front-wheel drive, but that’s going back to Germany,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I can’t tell if this is a German car problem or if it’s a BMW problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an expensive car problem. Because every car around 60,000 miles, especially if you live in the Northeast, which you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really, but if you did, like around 60 or 70,000, crap starts falling apart and breaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. The problem is that when crap falls apart and breaks on a BMW, it costs a bazillion dollars to fix. That’s where your problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. Like any car you keep for that number of miles, you’re gonna have, like, if you have a car for 100,000 miles and you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to replace the water pump, it’s not a surprise. Like it’s a thing that happens, right? But if the water pump costs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you 1,500 bucks, then you’re driving a BMW. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s the thing, is that in and of itself, any one of these repairs, fine, whatever. Well, maybe not the van I was exploding, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} generally speaking, like-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Engine stuff, I feel like if you had a Honda, it would still be fine. You would not need to put that much money into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} engine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The entire body would rust off the car before the engine would need any work on a Honda.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So yeah, so I could go back to Germany, Golf R, A4, S3 apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is definitely DSG only from what I’m being told. So that’s eliminated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from contention. It’s also really overpriced for what you’re buying. That’s probably true. I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to mention the GTI. Well, I think I mentioned the GTI. I’ve heard the Performance Pack is phenomenal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The GTI Performance Pack. However, that is also wrong wheel drive. So, so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still in contention, Focus ST, wrong wheel drive, DTI, Performance Pack, wrong wheel drive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey R, German, A4, German, a little bit boring. And then now I get into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like the real slim pickings. If I’m willing to go extremely slowly, I could get an Accord,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I cannot option the way I want, or a Mazda 6, which I cannot option the way I want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then if I’m willing to live inside of my car because I will be divorced and never get to see my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wife or child again, I could get a Tesla.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here’s one of the one of the big questions here is do you want this to be a car that can comfortably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hold your kid?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sitting here now. Yes, that’s probably ruining everything But yeah We’re gonna go with yes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on this one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because then your only options on this list that can go fast or the Model S That’s it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s about the same speed as my car it’s a little slower, but not too much slower

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Don’t do the A4. If you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} get a- The R is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John best. I’m not against the A4. I think you need to go to a dealer, and Casey needs to go to a dealer and get an A4. Now you’re not buying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just go in there to look at it. Maybe take a test drive, poke around, you’re not even thinking of buying, just check it out. Because I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Marco’s anti-Audi bias is unwarranted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Audi is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} great, but BMW’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better. It’s simple as that. Audi makes great cars. Not the current ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not the current 3 Series with the weirdo electric steering and the ugly outsides and the bazillion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dollars worth of options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Well, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, talk about a billion dollars worth of options. Audi is also the same way about the option pricing and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} repair costs and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Basically in most of the downsides, they’re the same or roughly the same. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco BMW’s upsides are better, basically. I think Audis are, again, they’re nice cars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Some of them are really nice cars. But the interior, I’ve always thought, felt noticeably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cheaper than BMWs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I deeply disagree. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco media system is a major step backwards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. And and they I’m actually kind of surprised that they still offer a stick is I think most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of their cars they don’t even offer that as an option anymore. Although to be fair, BMW is not that different in that regard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can get you can get an a four premium plus with all wheel drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And actually the only available transmission is the six speed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It does have CarPlay by the way, I’ve just flipped through their website. They got a big screenshot of it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, it’s not wireless, but it is it is CarPlay nevertheless. So that would so if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we hold on the A4, which one the premium

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plus just a plain old day for I’m just swapping through the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} with front

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wheel drive or all wheel drive? No, all wheel drive. Okay, they have that in a stick. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh, it’s basically my car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, it’s a well it’s a four cylinder turbo. But otherwise, it’s basically my car six speed, all wheel drive, etc.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was not aware that they were still making all wheel drive with stick. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} pretty well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in I think this is new. I think they just added the manual transmission option like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey model year, even though I think the refresh happened months and months ago, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} even next model year. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the thing about the time to get ready for your car. It’s not so much whether your car is falling apart, it’s that the longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wait, the less chance you have to get any car with a stick.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very true. But I mean, you would have some warning when that was going to happen. But anyway, that is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in broad strokes, that is true. So I would say, for you, I’m telling you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a friend, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I’m not buying a damn Tesla model. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happening. No, no. This is my intervention here. I would rather you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an overpriced German hatchback than… Oh, not a hatchback, no. Listen, I would rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you buy an overpriced German hatchback than to have you compromise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on what’s really important to you and to have you get an Accord or a Mazda.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well that’s the thing, it’s like, the Accord is a nice car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what about versus the A4? Why don’t you just eliminate that one? I can understand what you’re saying, like I’d rather have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get a sporty hatchback than a boring sedan. Fine, right? I’d rather have you get a sporty hatchback than a sporty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sedan like the A4? No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The A4 is fine. You know, you’ve driven one before, Casey. You know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} are. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I haven’t driven one of the new ones. The last one I drove was the pre-refresh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version. And my understanding is a lot changed with this refresh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} for the better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Then it’s definitely worth seeing because as we know, BMW has had some shortcomings with the new 3 Series.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I completely agree with you guys. The A4, absolutely, absolutely worth a look. I think the Golf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey R would probably be a more exciting car. And certainly, I’m pretty sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’d be considerably quicker. But the A4, I think, would be sufficient in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every metric that I can think to throw at it. Also expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to repair and maintain, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Well, and that’s the thing. You’re still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shopping in German luxury sedans and so. But especially if you got it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} new, you’d have a good. So here’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco question. would you consider either new financing or leasing, which would then take care of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the maintenance issue for the most part, if not entirely?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, see, I mean, financing, whatever, that’s, whatever, but- Lease

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it, do it, just lease it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, but I don’t wanna lease a car, like I don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Because then when the lease

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is up, you can get a Model 3 if you’re lucky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, that’s true. So the thing with leasing is, is that in a perfect world, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I want is the situation we have with Aaron’s car. Aaron’s car has been in the shop for repairs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fewer times in the 10 years we’ve owned it, well nine and a half at this point, than my car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has in the last 10 months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it? A boring, reliable Japanese

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} car. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey boring, reliable Japanese

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} car. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boring, slow, and reliable. You don’t want that. That would crush your soul.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I want something, but it will crush my soul, but I want something that’ll last more than 10 fricking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} minutes. You have it. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco called Aaron’s car. Ugh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s called all my Honda Accords.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, no look, if you want to have a boring, reliable car, There’s lots of great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options. Pretty much everything from Honda, Toyota, there’s lots of good options. Hondas aren’t boring, Toyota’s boring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Honda is as exciting as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} can be given the horsepower. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right, I’m not saying this is, I’ve got a powerful engine in it, but it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But, it’s a thinking man’s BMW, Rave’s car and driver. Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Okay, but anyway. Just test drive one of those anyway. You won’t be able to find a stick to test drive, but you should, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. Maybe next time you visit, you can test drive mine and see what it’s like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, the thought has crossed my mind that maybe it is worth testing it because, oh my God, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bananas. Okay, I understand that what I’m about to say is a bit preposterous,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but all I want is a six-speed, not front-wheel drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car with four doors that gets to 60 in less than six seconds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that will last for more than 60,000 miles. Is that so much to ask? How fast is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A4? I think five and a half ish something like that. It’s actually much quicker than one would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean you can go to the S4 if you want more out of it. It’s a lot more money though

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wouldn’t I certainly wouldn’t be doing that new for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So here’s the thing look I mean this is one of those like you know project management triangle situations like it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for what you want there’s basically you have to either pick like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fast but crappy or like you know slow but nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or used and expensive to maintain. It’s like you have to pick one of these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you raise the budget and you get divorced. I mean one of those like one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these things has to budge or you have to be willing to tolerate something that you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to tolerate right now. So whether that is the shame of driving an Audi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shameful whether it’s spending more than you wanted to spend or whether it’s having more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high-price maintenance down the road or giving up your entire soul and driving an Accord.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I say this as somebody who bought an Accord at one time and enjoyed it for a couple years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Opportunity costs. Think about how much what you could buy with the money you save buying the Accord and how much happier that would make you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is there anything that would make Casey happier than a fast car, John? Come

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} on. Yeah, that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing. I understand what you’re driving at, but… This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Casey we’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about. How about college

⏹️ ▶️ ^John education

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for your children? Just saying. This is not going to make or break Declan’s college education for 26.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. So therefore, I think basically you have a tough decision to make.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John will push you towards the Accord.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I’m pushing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John him towards the Audi. I’m just saying the Accord isn’t as bad as you make it out to be. But he

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wants something faster, so the Accord isn’t it. So try the Audi.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah. Basically, since none of the three of us have driven the current generation, apparently the newest A4. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess I’ve come around. I think you should try that because I do find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco F generation of BMWs, the F30 generation of BMWs to be pretty underwhelming in a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways. And as you mentioned, quite expensive for what you get. That being said, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the Audi. However, I think it’s certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} worth trying. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but let’s go build one. We can keep talking, but let’s build an Audi. I started down that path and I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} sidetracked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It looks like there is currently no s4 is it is like between update update generations like just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the a4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s correct. What color would I get let me turn off flux and line myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I don’t know what color you would get I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Be a very jerk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I don’t know how to even consider picking a color for you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got to get with the program. It’s it’s a year of the red car, so you got this what you got to do, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, is it okay? We can go red. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} got a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John red car. I got a red car come on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not sure how this looks in red. It looks okay, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I wonder if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I see what else Audi Audi historically makes a very good Premium black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that is a nice black actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I can’t do a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey black car stop stop. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} can’t do a black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco car

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I mean look they have like four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different shades of white this Literally they have let’s see there’s there’s glacier white metallic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s floret silver, which is so light It’s basically Matt is basically white. There’s Coovie silver, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of champagne, but almost white There’s Ibis white, which is another white, and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Monsoon gray, which is a pretty light gray, almost white. So this is, maybe this actually is your brand. Maybe all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these years talking about BMWs that we’ve been wrong all this time, and you actually wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a brand that has five different shades of white on every new car to choose from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The 19 inch wheels, because I’m an

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} idiot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no, no, you gotta pick the Sport Plus package. Go with 18, because the 19s don’t look that much better than 18s, and the ride will be better in 18s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re such an old man. No, I’m just serious. He’s right. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like, well, what are you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s one inch difference? You’re not going to be able to eyeball it. It’s not like, you’ll just have to deal with the fact that your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheels are smaller than mine, but it’ll be fine. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listen to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guy. But see, and here’s the thing, though. Performance-wise, you’re roughly in the 328 category

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of performance here, but you’re spending like $45,000 at least. $47,875. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the thing. Price-wise, it’s not, I think it’s pretty much the same as BMW. Once you option it up the way you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, they’re both very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expensive for what you’re getting. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. As you know, I often argue on the other side of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I’m just pointing out that this is not a great value compared to BMW. It’s going to be about the same,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the same ballpark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Muckerman Of course it doesn’t mention the zero to 60 time. Why would it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I could swear I read it. 5.7 seconds. It’s in the technical specifications. Oh, there you go. I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to say. Okay. I thought it was around 5.5. I mean, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. But is that $50,000 in 2017 good? Yeah, see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now I’m coming back to the Golf R. Let’s see, where is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re too old for this car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} No, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not. The Golf R? Yeah, you’re too old for this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I’m not. Brad, our friend Brad has one and it’s not, he’s not too old for it. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all the same age,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} but he’s not too old for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey He pulls it off. We wouldn’t pull it off. You make a good point, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He’s also a lot cooler than us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} He lives in California.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, he can pull that off. We can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, if you want to go to doors, speaking of jamming your

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} kid in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} back, the accord coop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does 060 and 5.6 seconds. I do not want to go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey door. Volkswagen state not working for you or my bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Volkswagen doesn’t work for me. Come out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. What about the last item on this list? Which one is that? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} divorce option? Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s just not. It’s $100,000. Marco, I could buy two a fours.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How about use the model s you You’re gonna use Model S for 50K? That’s where things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Buy it from MKBHD, I don’t think he wants this anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When you talk about maintenance costs, I would definitely not wanna keep a Model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S past the big battery power train warranty, but I think that’s 100,000 miles. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you get one that’s right off lease, it’s like 30-ish K miles, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would probably need almost no work for the next five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until the mileage started getting really high, and then you would probably trade it in for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something else at that point. There are used Model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S’s. There aren’t a lot of them because three years ago they weren’t selling that many. So there aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many of them to choose from, but they do come in. They are usually like, you have to call the dealer sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} usually going to be like… Okay, there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I put it in the chat, but the problem is, there’s no 90Ds, which is what you and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Underscore have, and I think would be a perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 90s only existed for like a year and a half. Okay, well there you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} So, what you’d be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looking at maybe would be the 85D, but all of the Ds, all the dual motor ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have only existed for, I think, about two years or so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, the problem is, I would want the dual motor for the acceleration, not because I necessarily need all-wheel drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better, I mean, just in general. the dual motor was a substantial improvement to the car. So you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} do want that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So P85D, the cheapest one they have is 80 grand. So I could buy-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the P model. That’s the one that’s new for like $130,000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the first entry they have that has dual motor is the P85D for 80 grand with 15,000 miles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s kind of awesome. What do you mean that’s kind of awesome? $80,000. Do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know how fast that is?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the one that I test drove and I felt like it was getting smacked in the face and I said, no, this is too fast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Like that’s, it was a P85D. You’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about, I could almost buy an A4 and a Gulf R for one of these. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can’t justify it. Or five Accords. Or five Accords. I can’t justify it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I’m not saying you’re wrong, but. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 70D on here for 67,000. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could drive a different Accord on every day of the week. Pfft.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh my God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that 70D is a hideous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco color though. Yes it is, that weird champagne-y, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you spilled some champagne into some snow slush.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve seen more of the little mustache monolasses and they’ve really grown on me and now I like it better than the fish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Get out of here. They look less hideous to me now but they still look weird. Like, I’m sure by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the time it’s time for me to renew my lease I’ll be okay with it, but it’s still weird right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean it’s worse than white obviously, right? But, or in lighter colors, but it’s turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me around having seen them. Now when I see one of the old ones, I go, ugh. I mean, I never really liked the big ball gag,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the pinch nose looks better in real life than it does in photos. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John man, I disagree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve seen it a couple times. It is not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco point is, this is a lot to choose from already, and because the dual model versions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have only existed for like a year and a half or two years, there’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about to be lots of them coming in like in inventory over the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year. It is certainly worth considering heavily. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not gonna necessarily say that you should definitely do this, but it solves a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of problems. It solves a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is faster than everything else you’re looking at, first of all. It is way lower maintenance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in all likelihood, especially like the newer you go, like once you’re into the D generation, they ironed out a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the early problems. And when you’re still covered under the warranty, you know, that solves everything right there. You pay something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I think it’s like 500 bucks a year for like this giant big inspection they do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every year, but that’s it, that’s your entire total maintenance cost.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Until I need to spend $20,000 to replace all the batteries because whatever one I’m hypothetically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey buying has between 15 and 30,000 miles on it. I think it’s like 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s really far into it. Basically, you don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep the car that long. That’s the answer to that question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You remember that I’m telling you that Aaron’s car is nine and a half years old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Almost everything you’re looking at, all these pics, you’re not gonna keep those pics for 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years. None of them. You will own none of those when they are 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years old. Except for the Accord, obviously. You will own none of those when they’re eight years old. How old is your car now? Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six or something? It’s not even that old, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was delivered to the original owner in December of 2010, if I remember right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so it’s six. And it’s already so expensive to maintain that you’re trying to get rid of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, but that’s because I didn’t buy a boring Japanese car. That’s the problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and so my point is, you’re gonna have high maintenance costs on all of the cars in this list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Any car that you’re gonna be happy driving, that is not gonna crush your soul and ruin you as a person, you are going to have high maintenance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco costs if you wanna keep it past year like, you know, six or seven, basically. is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about as far as you can go without things getting a little too crazy. You’re gonna have to pay a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for every car. None of them are particularly good investments or values.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No matter how you own a car, you’re gonna pay a lot. Because you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a fast car, you’re gonna pay more. Simple as that. No matter how you slice it, no matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how you arrange it, no matter whether you buy new or used or lease, whether you get bitten by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad maintenance luck like you did with this one, or whether you don’t, no matter what there is no way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to to continuously drive fast cars without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spending a ton of money on them. This is this is a place you have chosen to spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your money. You are an adult. You are a good person. You make a decent living.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can do that. It’s totally fine. You don’t indulge yourself in very many other things. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is what you do. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay. This is the sound of the devil that’s on Margo’s shoulder

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} all the time. I know, right? You are the best worst influence. It’s on both of his shoulders. He doesn’t have an angel on one. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just too little devil saying this to Margo constantly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} but seriously. You are the best worst

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} influence in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, this matters a lot to you. You get a lot of joy out of this. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take a lot of your life happiness from driving a nice fast car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which actually maybe makes me wonder if my priorities are screwed up, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} understand what you’re saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No. Look, everyone has something like this, you know? happy that yours is something relatively harmless like this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not like drugs or you know like a lot of people’s devices are way worse than this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Drugs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are Mac Pros. Yeah, God forbid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean on the plus side I don’t like expensive watches yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, don’t yeah exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} way worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Seriously, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could be so much worse. Just look at Marco. Exactly, it could be way worse. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} saying basically is like…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or look at Seth Penn’s for crying out loud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So basically like what I’m saying is don’t don’t feel guilty that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you like nice fast cars and don’t try to talk yourself down from what you really want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because a car it’s a long-term and it’s a long-term choice you have to make this decision and you have to be driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever you pick that’s gonna be your car for the next at least few years and so it matters a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You shouldn’t talk yourself down out of, like, you know, Casey’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco self-doubt. Like let your friends encourage you, at least this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, don’t listen to that one talking about something foreign Japanese. Listen to this friend

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} encourage you. I told

⏹️ ▶️ ^John him to go test

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drive an A4. That’s what I told him to do. I think that’s fair. I think test driving an A4 is reasonable. I think if I were a betting man

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d probably get the Golf R because it’s the least amount of compromise all in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all. the only thing I’m compromising on is I don’t really want a hatchback, although there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is some convenience that comes from

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it. That’s a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Interior

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to be worse than the A4 by a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think it’ll be a lot. Now, I have not sat in a Golf in a long time, but people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that are friends of mine that are also car nuts swear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by Volkswagen interiors and by by proxy Audi as well. I happen to like BMW interiors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I happen to like the way BMWs think because I think the same way. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trying to figure out what a specific thing I can cite. I don’t have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off the top of my head. But iDrive has always made sense to me, stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But everything I’ve understood is that Volkswagen gets interiors right. You can debate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the exteriors, you can debate a lot of things. You can debate whether or not they make diesels that get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more than four miles a gallon, but they do interiors right, from what I’m told.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I mean, I think the plan is, if I’m really serious about this, which I think I am, the plan is first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get Erin a car because she needs one worse and she’s next in line. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after that, test drive a Golf R, test drive an A4, and that’s probably the entire, may I probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey test drive a Focus ST just to see, but it’s probably one of these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So may I suggest an alternative? Mm-hmm. So you are prepared

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to spend probably $50,000 on a nice A4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Potentially, yes, potentially. Okay, the A4 is pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much what you have now. It’s moving you to the newest version of what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already driving with a different shape logo on the front. It is not an upgrade,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is not probably a downgrade in any meaningful

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Slightly it’s gonna be a little bit slower if that’s where I end up

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so we actually getting slower, okay, right, okay? You’re losing a couple cylinders, etc. Okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s about $50,000 to do that for 55 You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could have a brand new fully loaded m2 stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Stop with that noise the problem is the waiting list for an m2 is the waiting list for an m2 is like two years My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car will be exploded by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then then get the m2 35i close enough look Look, BMWs are really nice cars when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t have to pay to maintain them. Well, that’s true. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all I’m doing is punting my problem down the road. I’m kicking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} the can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so look, I mean, I know you. As much as I want you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco drive a Tesla, I know that your left foot would fall off and you’d be upset. As

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much as I want you to have something nice and fast that is a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice and fast in in other ways, like your little GTI and R and Focus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options, I can’t let you do that. I just can’t let you drive a hatchback. You’re too old for that. That’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re dumb for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You realize all of Europe, any age group,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} drive a hatchback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s different. Europe is different, California’s different. We live here on the East Coast and we are boring geeks in our 30s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can’t drive a hatchback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I can drive a hatchback. You have a kid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Christ’s sake, you can’t, no. All right, so that’s out. The A4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a great car, I’m sure. It doesn’t, does it not have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a six-cylinder option anymore? Is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} not a thing? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it does not. Okay, maybe when the S4 comes back, presumably. Probably. But that would then be more money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than this, I bet. What you really want, deep down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in your heart, what you really want is a six-speed rear-wheel drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco BMW.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s, well, I want it until the moment that the warranty runs out, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I need to get something different again. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only there was a way to have a car

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} where you were always under warranty. Stop, stop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey God, the white M2 is hideous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You get the blue one, right? I think you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} have to get the blue one. Oh, absolutely. You absolutely get on each blue. When I priced yours out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here just now, I picked the blue one for you, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I also, surprisingly, I also think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the white is hideous. And I think black is a little bit boring for that car. So yeah, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blue is the only option for that car. You could also do the M240i, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very good in itself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey driven the M235. A friend at work has one, and it was phenomenal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Rear-wheel drive M235 or M240i is only 46. It’s like 10,000 less. That is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interesting. That’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a pretty good compromise if I don’t mind never being able to put Declan in the car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, you could.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} It’s a two-door.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It would suck. You could, but you wouldn’t want this if you were going to do that a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But, really, what you would be happiest with is probably something like this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s probably not settling for a Volkswagen Group made hatchback,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the A4 would be fine, except it’s pretty much a sideways step.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re getting what you already had, and actually slightly slower, because you’re losing a couple cylinders.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco BMW makes good cars that you like a lot, that you just suck to maintain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, the thing that pisses me off, So I just priced my M2 and I came up with 55,202.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But the thing that really pisses me off about it in the summary page says, you’re M2 coupe. And there’s a panoramic view

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you can, well, a quasi panoramic view of the car. And man, does it look good. But right under

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, estimated lease $829, MSRP is built 55,202. The next item on the list, 060, 4.1 seconds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You get me BMW, you really get me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t do another BMW. I’m so angry about it right now. I just can’t. I’m over it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait, cool off, run some numbers, and consider all your options really. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t rule anything out unless it wouldn’t make you happy to drive. Then rule it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So goodbye Accord, goodbye Mazda, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Truth. I’m not sure the A4 would make me terribly happy, but it’s worth a shot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, exactly. You’re actually getting slower than your current car. Like, this is what I’m saying. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean, when you’ve, during the good days, when you’ve been owning your wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco white BMW, during these good days, were you ever thinking that your next car would be slower?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, certainly not. Right, exactly. You were thinking, man, this is a great car, and my next one’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be even faster. You were thinking about getting an M3 next. And I totally agree with you, that the current M3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is ridiculously expensive, and is probably not the right move. But, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also it sounds just disgusting. It’s, I’ve, there’s now finally enough of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the world that I’m starting to like see and hear more of them in real life. My goodness, is that a hideous sounding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco car? But the M2 isn’t, the M2 sounds nice and is kind of like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the M3 should be, but isn’t. The M2 is a good car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really think that you should consider it. And if not the M2, then the M240, which is very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s also very good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna get a coupe. It’s not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, it’s kind of like a sedan, just with the doors removed. But you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco riding at sedan height, you’re not on the floor like you are in an S2000. Like you’re riding at sedan height, you’re roughly sedan shaped,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have similar sedan weight distributions. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say, screw it and get an M3 and just be done with it and just never drive it near my house so I don’t have to hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow. There’s no way I’d get an M3. No fricking way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Not a chance. I’m pretty much telling myself I will not buy another BMW if ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at least next i’m just not going to do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you can get a worse car for you that’s fine but until what is worse about a golf car what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is worse uh… this the size the refinement the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interior

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the only thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s worse about that uh… the golfers the for people who hate hatchbacks but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} which i don’t know if he doesn’t and i don’t think that i’m but i don’t have any tax

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so that eliminates my My main objection to the Golf is that it’s a hatchback. Every other aspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it sounds like Casey would have fun with it and he’s somehow not bothered by driving around in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rabbit so that’s fine. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey such a jerk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, Casey, look, you need to forgive yourself. Let yourself get something nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We need to forgive him for getting a hatchback. That’s what we need to do. He needs to forgive himself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for getting a hatchback. $40,472 for a brand new Golf R. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could also, although if you do get that we’ll have to have like a seminar on how to pronounce the name of the car. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you, are you a Gulf person? What do you mean? No, he keeps saying like the of Mexico, blank of Mexico.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what he keeps saying but that’s not the name of the car it’s an o