catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

231: I Am Not a Salad Power User

TV calibration, 1Password subscription rumblings, Overcast UI debates, and Casey’s latest impulse buy.

Episode Description:

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

Chapters

  1. Intro
  2. Follow-up: TV calibration
  3. Sponsor: Fracture
  4. Follow-up: TV calibration (cont’d.)
  5. Follow-up: Small speaker amps
  6. Follow-up: Type-C Personality
  7. OLED image retention?
  8. Apple silence on net neutrality
  9. Sponsor: AfterShokz
  10. #askatp
  11. 1Password kerfuffle
  12. Sponsor: Hover (code ATP10)
  13. Overcast UI dilemma
  14. Ending theme
  15. Post-show: Neutral 🖼️

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m never buying a car ever again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet that’s not true. That’s like me saying, I’m perfectly happy with my computer setup. I’m never changing anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, we know each other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and we know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ourselves.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is entirely accurate. Well done, sir.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re traveling and well, two thirds of us are traveling over the next

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three or four weeks. As it turns out, as with all things,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we accidentally scheduled our vacations in a not terribly convenient way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Basically in sequence. Yeah, basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are doing vacationing in serial and not parallel. This is a single core, single

⏹️ ▶️ Casey threaded vacation operation here at the Accidental Tech Podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we’re going to have to squeeze in like 17 weeks worth of shows in the span of like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three weeks. Not literally of course, but that’s what it feels like. And because of Gary the privacy clown,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not gonna disclose any more than that, but suffice to say, yeah, we did not plan well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoops.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost like Adobe wrote our schedule. How do you figure that? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because nothing Adobe writes is parallel. Hey-o!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll be here all week, except not really, because like I just said, we’re going on vacation. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how are you guys? Totally fine. How’s the dog, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Hanging in there, doing dog

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. How much of your house remains both intact and not covered in pee?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s entirely covered in pee. It’s mostly intact. It mostly goes for

⏹️ ▶️ John the soft items. I mean, just a little bit of chewing on the stairs and

⏹️ ▶️ John cabinets and furniture, but really mostly goes for the toilet paper and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John High value targets? Soft targets. You shred that toilet paper, make a giant mess in a matter of

⏹️ ▶️ John seconds. You almost want to take some pictures or video, but then you do have to actually clean up

⏹️ ▶️ John and not encourage the dog to do this, but it was kind of cute. So that’s the thing that puppies

⏹️ ▶️ John have puppies and babies. Their cuteness is their defense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s absolutely accurate.

Follow-up: TV calibration

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up. And it starts with Andrew Burwell, who writes in to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found this website to be particularly good for best TV settings.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is artings.com slash TV. We’ll put a link in the show notes. They use calibration

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools on the TV and adjust each brand and model of TV to its best settings possible. Given that they’re all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey manufactured the same way, you can expect reasonable calibration using this method. They give you screenshots of your particular TV menus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the settings you need to use. I have an ancient TV that is 1080, but it is ancient,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have never bothered, I’m sorry Todd and John, I’ve never bothered setting it up properly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I need to dig into this website and see if they have settings for my TV because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never cared enough to really make it work as we discussed last episode and this sounds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty great that I need to check this out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, actually, so after last episode and after John scolded me into thinking I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed to calibrate my TV, the first thing I did was not to download an app to try to do it. The first thing I did was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco search the web for other people’s calibration settings for this TV because it’s a current model TV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a lot of nerds out there who would do this kind of stuff and publish their results. This was the first thing that came up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so a few hours before the whole world started telling me to go to this site, I had actually already done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and had tried their settings with very minor modifications. All I did was make get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit brighter and make it slightly closer to neutral white balance. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. And so I haven’t changed it since. It’s been wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s better than nothing. But I would still encourage people to actually use the calibration app because they say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, yeah, all TVs, they’re all the same. Like, you know, there’s not there’s no variance in manufacturing or

⏹️ ▶️ John age or anything or something like it’s just not true. Like this will get you in the ballpark to actually

⏹️ ▶️ John find out if your TV is calibrated, right? You have to go through calibration of some kind. And these probably get really, really

⏹️ ▶️ John close, right? But even just based on like how bright your room is

⏹️ ▶️ John and where the windows are, and if you mostly watch TV during the day or the night, whether you want to have one sort of in the middle setting

⏹️ ▶️ John or have a daytime and a nighttime setting. And by the way, look at this website is way better than things used to be

⏹️ ▶️ John when I calibrate. Well, I calibrated my TV. It was still more of the wild west. This is so nice with like, like the pictures

⏹️ ▶️ John of the menus and easy to find your TV. You don’t have to go through forums and download these

⏹️ ▶️ John text files with the listings of all the settings and stuff like that, but looking at the settings for Marcos TV

⏹️ ▶️ John on this website, it shows the TVs still suck, where it’s like, well, if you put this setting

⏹️ ▶️ John on, these settings go from a menu to a slider, and you can’t use this setting with that thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John and again, the words don’t make any sense in the menus, and I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John why they have, like these smart TVs have little computers in there, right? They’re running entire operating systems,

⏹️ ▶️ John and yet the settings are all like, well, only the setting called PC can have these settings, And when you put on game

⏹️ ▶️ John mode, only these things are available. And like, I mean, sometimes it makes sense where they’re turning things off, but

⏹️ ▶️ John this should all be downloadable, standardized, like even just

⏹️ ▶️ John not across all manufacturers, obviously, but just like there shouldn’t be no dumb limitations that don’t like only the PC

⏹️ ▶️ John input can support a particular color space or stuff like that. And nothing should have weird code words. Everything should be

⏹️ ▶️ John in like normal tech terms, not branding terms.

⏹️ ▶️ John It shouldn’t be like warm

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey warm three, size one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because it doesn’t help anybody. And the weird limitations of like, oh, only in the ISF expert mode can you change

⏹️ ▶️ John this setting but if you do the standard setting, these three things aren’t available. But in this one, you don’t get to pick the gamma. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John just make them all the same. And you only have like five different settings. Like, oh, I’ve used up all my settings. And actually,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you only get one setting that lets you change everything. But that one setting doesn’t let you enable game mode. It’s like, there

⏹️ ▶️ John should be an unlimited number of settings. It’s not like a game where you’re trying to make it so

⏹️ ▶️ John they can only have two save slots to make the game harder. Like, how is it that we have these complete web OS

⏹️ ▶️ John operating system on there, and yet you still only have five sets of settings, and they’re all slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John different from each other?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me provide a counterpoint here. Have you ever gone to one of these places, like Chopped? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like a salad assembly thing, like it’s like Subway for salads. I have not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew Casey would’ve, I knew John would’ve. Not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John surprisingly. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never even heard of this thing. Okay, so basically, so when I go to a place like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do the thing where you just create your own salad from bare parts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can have one of the preset salads that’s on the wall. If the only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco option was, here is an array of 40 different ingredients, and you tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me what kind of salad you want and I make it for you, if I went into that restaurant,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have no idea what to make, I would make a crap salad. it would just be terrible, it would be bland or uncreative

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or would have weird ratios or whatever else. I always order off the presets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I might adjust things slightly within one of the presets. I like some guidance because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not a solid power user. And so I don’t really, I need some starting points, some presets.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not what I’m asking for at all though. I’m not asking for there not to be presets. I’m asking for there to

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, say there’s like a thousand things you could change in the TV. By all means, ship 17 presets. In fact, I would like an app

⏹️ ▶️ John store for presets even. like where

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these websites wouldn’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ John exist and you could just upload stuff. But the whole point is, if you decide, hey, I wanna make a new setting called,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Marco’s setting. There should be no limitations, like, oh, sorry, you only get five settings and they’re the presets,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if you change one of them, then you change one of the presets, the only way to get it back is factory default. Should be like, new thing, and

⏹️ ▶️ John you could start, like, would you like this new setting to start from one of the standard ones? Sure, start from the whatever setting. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then when you go in there, all thousand switches should be available to you, preset to whatever they were from the

⏹️ ▶️ John setting you inherited from. There should be no limitations, Oh, you have to name his input capital T and capital C

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the only one that can show the entire You know This is the old world like the only one that doesn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John over scan you have to call the input PC and you only get one Of those sorry and it has to be this particular input

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, right? They should be uniform and you should be able to make as

⏹️ ▶️ John many new ones as you want and you shouldn’t lose the presets And in fact, it’s such an easy

⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity to make presets something like downloadable syncable shareable with friends like

⏹️ ▶️ John they should cultivate these forums. Say if someone wants to run some fancy calibration app and make a branded setting

⏹️ ▶️ John and make it downloadable, you should be able to go to that URL and pull down the settings for it or whatever. There should be no dumb arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ John limitations that don’t make any sense. That’s what I’m saying. Not that you shouldn’t have presets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I respect the idea of what is exposed most of the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, the user, is here’s some presets, and if you go into them, there are a few,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even a lot, there are a few things you can tweak under each one. And then only in the expert ones,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buried like three levels deep even within those, are all the different options that you want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I actually don’t want most of them because I know that most of those options, I shouldn’t touch those,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because A, I don’t really care, and B, anything I would adjust there, I would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be making things worse, because I don’t know what I’m doing.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can hide them under an advanced option, just like they do in app preferences. You don’t expose all the preferences, like you have nitpicky settings. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not there, it’s just that you don’t see them unless you really dig for them, right? So you put the top and really honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ John the number of things you need to adjust on a television, aside from turning off stuff, which is kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of annoying that you would have to dig through it, right? I mean, if you just look at the setting preset that they recommend, it’s like, every

⏹️ ▶️ John single feature that television has, off, off, off, off, off. No sharpness enhancement, no vibrancy, no edge

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, no motion, anything, just off, off, off, everything, right? It’s annoying that you have to do that,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that aside, you really just need to change two or three settings, brightness,

⏹️ ▶️ John contrast, Different color balance things and that’s it. It’s not like there’s a hundred things you can do for picture quality

⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly you’re just turning crap off So yeah, by all means have a hierarchy of settings have here are the three

⏹️ ▶️ John or four things you probably might want to change and Advanced picture advanced motion advanced whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John when you dig down and down if you want to make it a hierarchy of menus That’s fine But I don’t like it when options aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John available to you or like well in this mode you get three settings For this thing, but in this mode you get

⏹️ ▶️ John a slider that has you know, 500 settings for it Why we just decided that’s what it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we got two other interesting pieces of feedback around this. Malcolm Hall wrote in to tell us that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some people have been buying, Samsung has a product called Smart Signage, which is basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a TV-sized monitor and that’s it. So the idea is you take a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor that’s 40, 50, 60, 70 inches, but it doesn’t have anything smart in it. Presumably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just has like HDMI or equivalent and nothing else. There’s no speakers. There’s no smartness.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just a dumb display. And if you’re hooking this up to like a soundbar or a stereo system,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I guess some of you could go crazy enough to do surround sound. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you hook it up to some other external speaker system, then you don’t have to fight all the silly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smartness, which isn’t exactly what you two were talking about, because you two were just talking about calibrating the screen. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s kind of neat. And additionally, Safe Khan wrote in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that Samsung is also trying to do a frame TV, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey designed to look like nothing at all, or not a TV at all, until you want it to be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV. And then it will go from a still picture to a regular traditional TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that probably isn’t the best word picture that I’ve just painted, but we’ll put links to both these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw that video, but like it’s so it’s hard to tell from video But like is it is it still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a light emitting display when it’s in like the frame mode

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that that’s entirely like a marketing BS because there’s no way you wouldn’t know that’s a TV

⏹️ ▶️ John like they always put it in lighting It’s like oh it looks just like the painting because they put it in like a picture frame like oh It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like a painting right, but you know it’s not especially if it’s an LCD TV with terrible black levels like there’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be no way Oh, here we go. Bright

⏹️ ▶️ John sunlight shining on your wall on an actual painting of a sailboat next to like

⏹️ ▶️ John a sailboat picture on your television. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling with that, but I mean, I guess it

⏹️ ▶️ John looks nice. If you have decor things, because a lot of televisions that you buy look like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. They look like technology products. They look like computer equipment or whatever. And if you don’t want that look, if you want

⏹️ ▶️ John it to look more like a piece of furniture that some people do, this is a good look for your television. But don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fool

⏹️ ▶️ John yourself into thinking that people are going to believe it’s a painting because they will not because it does not look like a TV. Maybe if it was

⏹️ ▶️ John color e-ink that would work, but we don’t have that tech.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like any technology that tries to hide a TV, that’s solving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wrong problem. Like, remember when computers first came out when we were all children, well, when Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I were children, and a lot of times our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco parents would make the computer live in some kind of giant cabinet that would close with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big door, like wooden doors. Sometimes they’d put TVs in there too, but usually the computer was what was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hidden in this giant wooden cabinet by the wall. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a certain generation, the default mode was to hide technology,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes our parent’s generation. And then now it’s like, well, no, you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use that. That’s just normal to see in a house. It would be weird if you saw a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco house that didn’t have a TV in it now. And so I feel like trying to hide a TV,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re just kind of fighting a losing battle. You’re going to either have a really strange looking picture on the wall,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you’re going to have some kind of crazy complex thing like one of those raising and lowering things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the TV slides up out of a dresser. That’s just doomed to break

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fail and that’s no good either. Just have a TV that you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind the look of. And if you don’t want a TV in a room, don’t put a TV in that room.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else besides just trying to own it is not going to go well for you. Same deal with baldness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ John People still hide TVs, but lest you think that’s an old thing, people still totally do that. And the most recent,

⏹️ ▶️ John this old house house I recall, they had a television that they were A, putting over their fireplace, which is way too high for a

⏹️ ▶️ John TV, and B, wanted to hide with a set of folding doors that had a painting integrated into

⏹️ ▶️ John them so when it was closed it just looked like a painting, like an actual painting or whatever. Eventually they just used wood panel doors because

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess someone talked them out of the painting idea. But yes, people still want to hide their televisions. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess people don’t like it, you know, like decor wise, it doesn’t look nice to have a big black rectangle.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think even these picture frame ones to have a big monitor turned on to a, you know, a picture of a sunset or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John We just don’t have the tech. It’s not gonna look right. People in the chat room are pointing me to color inks. Yes, we have color ink, not

⏹️ ▶️ John televisions. You can’t they don’t show motion. They did have that hybrid one. Remember that one that was like color

⏹️ ▶️ John ink, but also LCD for motion. So it was like this weird, I don’t know. Obviously it didn’t catch on. Eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John we could have some kind of display technology that does reflective sort of like in the off mode where

⏹️ ▶️ John you could put a picture on there that would look just like a, you know, a picture on the wall, or at least it would look like a poster at

⏹️ ▶️ John very least maybe, or a very large photograph. Uh, but they could also do the motion of television, but

⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have that yet, but people still want to hide their TVs and I totally agree with you, Margaret. I think it’s, it’s ridiculous to hide your

⏹️ ▶️ John television. Part of it is almost like, if it will,

⏹️ ▶️ John not just the decor of a big black rectangle, but also the idea that people don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John to think of their lives as centering around television. That’s somehow a shameful

⏹️ ▶️ John thing because of all the television shaming from I think both of our childhoods

⏹️ ▶️ John of like TV rots your brain and don’t watch TV and people, you don’t want people to know how much television

⏹️ ▶️ John you watch. But if you don’t watch that much television, maybe don’t have a 70 inch television. I mean, it seems like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the budget and wall space reflected by your television choices are not in line with the image you

⏹️ ▶️ John want to project to the outside world. Like, oh, we don’t even own a television. We don’t even watch television. We just have the 70

⏹️ ▶️ John inch rectangle here because we were forced to have it by the, uh, the, the neighbors. I don’t know. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would never want my television bin. And by the way, um, those little cabinets where you put your computers,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that I think helped kill those is the fact that our computers are so hot now that putting them

⏹️ ▶️ John inside an enclosed cabinet would destroy everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they were hotter then, because back then, they were CRTs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the computers themselves were cooler. I mean, some of them didn’t even have fans over the heat sinks

⏹️ ▶️ John for the CPUs back in the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco early days.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, CRTs are hot, too. But the entertainment centers for television used to be like that, too. Remember the entertainment centers were

⏹️ ▶️ John for your VCR and your game consoles? Those were entirely enclosed, too. Maybe they had holes punched

⏹️ ▶️ John out in the back for the wires to go through. And most things didn’t get that hot. Like you didn’t have your Xbox 360 in

⏹️ ▶️ John there. NES was not getting that hot compared to modern consoles. But those things

⏹️ ▶️ John were not a great environment for electronics. And today it’s mostly worse because our DVRs,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not our Blu-ray players, but certainly our game consoles are hotter. But the TVs like Margos

⏹️ ▶️ John are way cooler temperature-wise than a CRT or a plasma or anything like that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John those actually could go in cabinets. It’s just that now that they’re the thickness a piece of paper, cabinets don’t make any

⏹️ ▶️ John sense anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always love too, like the entertainment centers that our parents would have, that was mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the era of CRT TVs. So, like they were giant, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made the decision that this tremendous wooden monolith thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the living room, that was somehow better than just having a TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that was fooling nobody.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and they were huge, like they were often way bigger than the television, like they were big enough that you could like shelve rows

⏹️ ▶️ John and rows of VHS tapes and stuff. And then the other great thing, my parents did this too, they have one in their house right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John You would buy one and they’re expensive, like especially the ones that filled an entire wall, that’s a substantial piece of furniture.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you got a nice one, not an inexpensive piece of furniture, because it was literally massive, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you got one, you were deciding how big your television was going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John until, you know, unless you wanted to replace that huge expensive piece of furniture, or, you know, unless it was built into your

⏹️ ▶️ John house, right? And so if you bought one before HDTV, you had a four by three hole for television, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you had to put a 16 by nine TV in there, and so you got shrunk down. And if you bought before televisions got

⏹️ ▶️ John really big, and you could just barely fit like a 40 inch HDTV in there, now

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t get a good TV, or you feel like you can’t get a big TV. My parents have to buy based on which TV will fit inside

⏹️ ▶️ John their slightly dated piece of furniture where they fit their television. So

⏹️ ▶️ John putting your electronics inside a box of any kind It’s just not a particularly future-proof

⏹️ ▶️ John idea and not good for cooling.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. My brother-in-law has a house that was built probably in the late 90s, I think. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has, in his family room or living room or whatever, he has like, I guess you could call

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a built-in, but basically the wall is like sunk in. And it’s about the size of maybe a 40

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 50 inch TV these days. And I’m sure left to his own devices, he would have like a 9,000 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monstrosity. but because it’s in a built-in that’s in his wall, there’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really a lot he can do. Like to make it bigger, he would have to cut into his wall. Also, John, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are officially uninvited from ever coming to my house because I have a TV that is not calibrated, is mounted above the fireplace,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably, I don’t know, two or three feet off the ceiling, which is like a seven or eight foot ceiling, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess eight foot ceiling. I have 2.1 sound, I have a turntable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like this is pretty much your hell is my family room. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I like it quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot, but you’re never coming over. Cause I don’t want to, I don’t want to never hear the end of this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Too high. I just

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand people can have a television that high.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had no option. So, so our family room, I wasn’t trying to make this an actual conversation, but Hey, here we are,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, our family room and Marco can vouch for this. It’s very, very wide and very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shallow, if that makes sense. And so because of that, there’s no real convenient

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to have a TV in the room, unless you put it in the corner and like twist the furniture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the room to be in the corner, but it’s a very shallow room. So the best

⏹️ ▶️ Casey place for it in terms of room and furniture flow is above the fireplace and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s where it is. But, but I understand and I recognize that for the optimum

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV viewing experience, that is probably not the right place for it. It’s okay now.

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Follow-up: TV calibration (cont’d.)

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of calibration, which we were talking about about 45 minutes ago, THX has a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tune-up app. THX Tune-up that is, I guess, pretty well regarded. It’s for Android

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iOS. Unfortunately, not for the Apple TV, however.

⏹️ ▶️ John People were asking for calibration apps and I suggested this to Marco. I assumed like, oh, there must be a bunch of good

⏹️ ▶️ John ones for Apple TV. Turns out, no. There’s an Apple TV is the Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ John app store is not looking too good. If there’s a good one for Apple TV, I couldn’t find it. Put it that way. I think I downloaded

⏹️ ▶️ John or purchased every. Apple TV app that has anything to do with calibration, and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John all pretty terrible. THX tune up I used years ago and still

⏹️ ▶️ John out there. It’s not an Apple TV app, which bothers me

⏹️ ▶️ John in a couple of ways, because like, well, you know, what’s the point? Like why, why do I have to

⏹️ ▶️ John also have a, you know, a phone or an iPad and then somehow a way to project that to the TV,

⏹️ ▶️ John either a Chromecast or an Apple TV. But if you have, uh, the one combination I know

⏹️ ▶️ John works, you have an iOS device, like an iPad or an iPhone, and you also have an Apple TV, you run the THX

⏹️ ▶️ John tune up app on your iOS device in your hand, and then you airplay it to the TV. And the reason I don’t like that

⏹️ ▶️ John is because as far as I know, airplay is lossy compressed over the air.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that, is that correct? smartphone you might know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Video is lossy compressed, audio is lossless.

⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, so, but we care about video in this case. And so like, well, does, you really want

⏹️ ▶️ John to run a calibration app, compress the, I mean some parts of it work like the, you know, the geometry stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and the, you know, making sure you can see all the pixels and stuff like that. But, but anyway, the app itself

⏹️ ▶️ John is actually decent. It does the important things of saying, here’s a screen, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s supposed to look like in words, it until you can see all six boxes or until

⏹️ ▶️ John you can barely make out the number, you know, seven over here or like, they,

⏹️ ▶️ John they tell you what you’re looking for. And then you can then it’s up to you to mess with your television and do it. It’s a great way

⏹️ ▶️ John to test your calibration things because if you download the settings from that website, who knows, maybe it’s dead

⏹️ ▶️ John on for your TV, run through the calibration screens, and it’ll be like you should see six boxes, you’d be like, Yep, I see six boxes

⏹️ ▶️ John go to the next one, you should see the number nine faintly visible, and you shouldn’t see 10. Yep, I see it go to that you’ll it’ll It’ll take you 30

⏹️ ▶️ John seconds, right? But if you go through it and it’s off, then you get into the whole, it’s time

⏹️ ▶️ John to actually calibrate your TV or make a date time in a nighttime setting or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was going to bring up in Well Actually You and say, well actually, why don’t you use, all right, I guess, let

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me do this right. Well actually, you should use the Lightning Digital AV Adapter, but doesn’t that use

⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay behind the scenes anyway? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t it have like little H.264 decoder, encoder thing there and a tiny iOS device

⏹️ ▶️ John or something?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco panicked with the whole blog post about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously iOS is not the ideal thing. And this is the

⏹️ ▶️ John next bit of follow-up here from John Duffin. And a lot of people are giving us tips about this. I forget who it was. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John someone on Twitter was saying, I was saying Lucasfilm DVDs and Blu-rays have calibration things on them.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you go to their menus deep in the Extra section, someone was telling me that most Pixar

⏹️ ▶️ John Blu-rays and DVDs have calibration apps, again, somewhere buried in their Extras menu on

⏹️ ▶️ John them. John Duffin wrote in to tell us that if you have a Sony Pictures Blu-ray and

⏹️ ▶️ John you type Sony on the title screen like 7669 like telephone dialing

⏹️ ▶️ John Sony I suppose it will open the calibration screen which seems pretty sneaky because who the heck knows how to do

⏹️ ▶️ John that they should actually put it in the menu these are all ways to get a better

⏹️ ▶️ John source for calibration especially from like a Blu-ray player because that’s that’s directly connected to your

⏹️ ▶️ John television and is not lossy compressed h.264 over the air through airplay

⏹️ ▶️ John the quality of these calibration apps varies, but at the very least you can do geometry and

⏹️ ▶️ John You know gray scale levels and brightness and stuff like that and do a reasonable job of it So

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s really really no excuse for people not to have access to a calibration thing

⏹️ ▶️ John of some kind It’s not you have to buy some expensive piece of hardware or software or

⏹️ ▶️ John you know do anything fancier. It just Surely everyone who’s listening

⏹️ ▶️ John to this who has a fancy television that’s worth calibrating has a DVD or a Blu-ray

⏹️ ▶️ John or access to the iOS app store to get a I think THX tune-up is free but if not you know it’s the price

⏹️ ▶️ John of a cup of coffee just download it and give it a go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Counter-argument the RTINGS ratings are pretty good and I nothing can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make me want to boot up the ps4 and play a Blu-ray disc somehow in that monstrosity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then get to the monstrosity that is his Blu-ray discs themselves and then navigate that and do all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this when the artings things were good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got an Apple TV, use THX Stimps, it’s fun. Calibrating your TV can be fun.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Or you can just not care. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an officially ATP blessed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John option. It’s just not there. We just

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna make sure that you’re, didn’t we go through this for you with the size? That’s all I care about on your TV is that it’s not in overscan mode.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh it is, it still is. No, it still is. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what, really?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want it to be. I’ve tried everything I knew how to do to fix it. I’m not proud

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of this. I mean, I just I sound proud. I’m not About

⏹️ ▶️ John the car buying

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey get rid of

⏹️ ▶️ John that TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But but the mount that we have in our wall, I think only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so

⏹️ ▶️ John You know pristine 1080 versions of a show and then it’s stretched to non-native res and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re that’s tripping all the edges when you watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely accurate absolutely. I’m not proud of this. I know I sound all smug and proud. I’m not it’s just I have spent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what I consider to be an inordinate amount of time trying to fix this, which is to say like five or 10 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure it out. And I was I just don’t care enough. I just don’t. I want it to be fixed. It’s not that I don’t want it to be fixed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t care enough. So I would invite you down john to fix it. But a you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would never travel that far unless under duress and be you would hate everything you saw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and potentially firebomb my house.

⏹️ ▶️ John If only Marco had had purchased his television two years earlier, because right

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey about now, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be buying another television you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s true one. That’s very true. I don’t think he’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John to need to replace this one anytime

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey soon. Hey

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you can get his old plasma. Did you offload that yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No it’s sitting behind my chair in my living room. You want it? Yeah it probably weighs a ton.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. Well yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean yeah Casey if you want to come pick it up you can have it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well we’ll talk about that later.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All right. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Follow-up: Small speaker amps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about your small speaker amp, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, a million people ask. I mentioned very quickly in passing last episode that my preferred setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just this tiny little class D amp that was like the size of a few packs of cards, driving just two speakers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without a subwoofer, without surround, anything like that. And a million people have asked me since then, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp it is. And the reason I didn’t say is because it is the NuForce Dia, or Dia,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, D-I-A. And it was discontinued like three years ago. and New

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Force, the entire company of New Force was bought by this other company that apparently all the fans of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco New Force hate and they say they’ve ruined all their products since then. So I didn’t feel comfortable recommending it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not only can you not get it anymore but the things that you can get now have pretty crappy reviews from people who used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like the old stuff. So there is now this, there’s this giant class

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of small like class D amplifiers and when I get into the details

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like what like class A and class AB and all these different amplifier topologies are,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Class D basically allows you to make an amp very, very small and low heat and low power.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And audiophiles don’t like it as much as the other kinds, but for the purposes of speakers on a TV, it’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And so Class D amps are great. There’s lots of them. If you search Amazon for a Class

⏹️ ▶️ Marco D amp, there’s a ton that are roughly between $100 and $400

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are approximately 25 to 50 watts per channel,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many of them support remote controls. And so for my little NuForce one, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a little generic remote, and I was very easily able to have the Apple TV learn that up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and down volume control, and that’s it. So that’s what I’m using now. If I had to buy new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, I would probably want a little bit more power for driving floor standards,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re just driving bookshelves, then those little 20 watt ones are fine. On Amazon,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, there’s a lot. So just look for Class D amps with remotes, and there’s a lot out there.

Follow-up: Type-C Personality

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now I didn’t get a chance to read this, but Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes in about Type-C

⏹️ ▶️ Casey personality. So can one of you take me through this, if you don’t mind?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it like a regular personality that you can insert either direction?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a post. It’s a title pun. So he’s been emailing

⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth with me about USB Type-C stuff since the show that we talked about it. And he had, you remember, we had the

⏹️ ▶️ John big long email that he read. He wrote an even longer email after and I’m like, you should make this a blog post because there’s no way

⏹️ ▶️ John we can even summarize a feedback email this complicated and you should just

⏹️ ▶️ John really make it a blog post like don’t just email your you know insights and ideas

⏹️ ▶️ John to a single or a couple of people put it up on the web for everybody to

⏹️ ▶️ John see because then we can just link to it in the show notes which we will do and then anyone who’s interested can read it so if you

⏹️ ▶️ John want to hear even more about the nitty-gritty details of USB type-c

⏹️ ▶️ John and all the different alternate modes and what you would take to get hubs of different kinds and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Take a look at this very long detailed post. I think the most salient point and a couple of other people have brought this up as

⏹️ ▶️ John well is the idea that it’s still early enough in the USB 3.1

⏹️ ▶️ John spec and the type C spec and all that other stuff that there aren’t a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John chipsets that support all the different protocols and are certified by all the standards bodies and

⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth. that most companies that make hubs just buy like

⏹️ ▶️ John chips from somebody else or like a reference design from somebody else that has already done all the work

⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure you know the thing actually works and is certified according to all the standards bodies or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever and they just package it in a box and slap on a crappy power supply is going to break in six months

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever but that’s what they do they don’t they don’t make the chips they want the chips to already be made

⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of companies are going to be making these types of chips for

⏹️ ▶️ John the new USB specs, and they’re just coming online now. So it could be that you wait another year, there

⏹️ ▶️ John could be many more options for USB Type-C hubs to do fan

⏹️ ▶️ John out on them and more complicated Thunderbolt hubs and stuff like that. So we’ll see. It could also

⏹️ ▶️ John end up being like FireWire where you end up even many, many years into it, then only a few companies make a set of chips

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything still costs a million dollars, and so we’ll see. But anyway, I recommend the post.

⏹️ ▶️ John He took the time to write a blog post, and so now the entire world

⏹️ ▶️ John can share in his knowledge.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent.

OLED image retention?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brian Rossi writes in to say, are the rumored OLED iPhones going to have issues with image

⏹️ ▶️ Casey retention? If so, what measures should we take to prevent it?

⏹️ ▶️ John The question is, are they going to have more issues with image retention than LCDs?

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know that your current iOS device, if it has image retention? Because I can tell you that many

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices over many, many years have had image retention issues. In fact, maybe yours does now. And

⏹️ ▶️ John me telling you this is going to make you look at it and realize, oh God, I have image retention on my iPad. you probably do.

⏹️ ▶️ John People don’t like to think about it, but it is there if you look for it. It can get

⏹️ ▶️ John really bad on some devices after some time, and other devices hardly show it at all. I suppose

⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted, like, ignorance is bliss, so you probably shouldn’t do this, kind of like in the old days when you’d look for dead pixels. But

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco has a handy web page that will put a checkerboard pattern on your screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll leave it there for a while, well. And then you go anywhere else. And if you can

⏹️ ▶️ John still see the checkerboard, guess what? You’ve got image retention to some degree.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, you don’t have to anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. It’ll switch over to gray for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right. You click and it switches to gray after you stare at it for a little bit. But the whole point is like to convince yourself that Marco’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John just trolling you. You just launch another app or go to springboard or whatever, and you’ll still see it there. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John never owned an OLED. I think the only OLED I have is my Apple Watch, right? Like that’s the only thing I have that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an old I have heard that all I have image retention issues and I’ve heard it talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like the successor to plasma like you know because LCD was never really the successor to plasma because the image quality

⏹️ ▶️ John was worse and I here’s old with image quality that’s actually better and the old slam against plasma in addition to

⏹️ ▶️ John all the heat and expense and power use and everything was that it had image retention

⏹️ ▶️ John and of course LCD has image retention as well but the whole idea is like yeah but plasma has bad image retention so all

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve heard talked about as if it’s almost as bad as plasma and so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John thinking that it’s worse than LCD in terms of your attention but having a never own one I have no idea I guess Marco will tell

⏹️ ▶️ John us if the menus are burned into his OLED TV so I would suspect

⏹️ ▶️ John that yes OLED iPhones are going to have image retention issues the same exact way as the LCD

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones at the very least you know I don’t see if all it had less image retention issues than LCD.

⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like something that you know you’d be hearing about instead but I hear the opposite that oh OLED

⏹️ ▶️ John watch out image retention so no matter how well that whoever manufactures these screens does

⏹️ ▶️ John surely it will have the same image retention on average as all the other iPhones. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know from year to year device to device manufacturer to manufacturer

⏹️ ▶️ John how the image retention has varied on iOS devices. I try not to look for it. I see

⏹️ ▶️ John it occasionally still, mostly on my iPad. I don’t know if that’s because I use my iPad more,

⏹️ ▶️ John or because the screen is bigger and it’s easier to pick up on these things. But I think most people

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know that LCDs have measured retention on their iOS devices, and so therefore probably won’t notice

⏹️ ▶️ John it on their OLEDs. Oh, and what measures should we take to prevent it? Don’t use your device.

⏹️ ▶️ John You won’t notice any of your retention. Wow. I mean, what can you do? What can you do to prevent it? If

⏹️ ▶️ John If you put an image on your screen and you leave it there for a long time, but like that’s often what we do with

⏹️ ▶️ John our phones is leave an image there for a long time, whether you’re reading a big page in an

⏹️ ▶️ John ebook and it takes you a certain amount of time to read a page or you’re looking at a video and

⏹️ ▶️ John like my children, you refuse to put the video in full screen, the surrounding frame of the YouTube that’s not video

⏹️ ▶️ John is static the whole time you’re watching a 20 minute video. Uh, I don’t know, like with

⏹️ ▶️ John my television, I could tell you as a long time plasma TV I don’t play video games

⏹️ ▶️ John with a static HUD if I can help it on my big television I don’t leave the television pause

⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t hit the pause button on a Tivo or whatever and then leave the room for five minutes If I’m going to leave like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV has a screensaver that will turn on which is actually a useful thing for me because it’s Actually saving my screen

⏹️ ▶️ John But if I’m gonna leave the room for more than you know Two minutes I turn off the television

⏹️ ▶️ John You know how to turn everything else off just turn the power off on the television and then turn it back on when you come in but that doesn’t apply

⏹️ ▶️ John to iOS devices because it’s not like you’re leaving it paused you’re leaving the room and the screen will turn off

⏹️ ▶️ John in a minute anyway to save your battery so I don’t think there’s anything anybody can do about it we just have

⏹️ ▶️ John to cross our fingers and hope that the first batch of these things don’t end up having weird discoloration or image retention

⏹️ ▶️ John issues and hope that you get the one but from the good screen manufacturer if there is such a thing this time around and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just deal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it.

Apple silence on net neutrality

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, and finally, tell me about Apple’s silence on net

⏹️ ▶️ Casey neutrality.

⏹️ ▶️ John The post on osnews.com asking, where’s

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple on this whole net neutrality thing? We talked about it, I think, last show. And unlike lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John other issues, Apple is not a particularly loud cheerleader in favor

⏹️ ▶️ John of net neutrality to the point where the, you know, the question was, so where does Apple stand on this?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ve never heard them say anything of substance about net neutrality at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, unlike many other issues. Then this post goes on to speculate why that might be.

⏹️ ▶️ John That Apple, as an incumbent with the potential, you know, lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of money and lots of digital goods that they want to send over the wires, the lack of neutrality would favor them because they do have the money

⏹️ ▶️ John to pay anybody and they can get an edge on their competitors and blah blah blah, all sorts of sort of conspiracy theories or whatever. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John as the biggest tech company in the world, I feel like they should be much more vocal than they are. I shouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ John here thinking, where does Apple stand in neutrality? I should already know because they should already have

⏹️ ▶️ John blacked out their web pages and done all the other things or whatever. Maybe they did that and I’m just missing it. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. Uh, did any of you guys recall anything from Apple about

⏹️ ▶️ John neutrality ever? No, no. Yeah, I don’t know. Um, that’s disappointing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t fault them for not making their pages black and stuff on certain days because Apple does not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco respond well to social pressure to make them change their stuff for the sake of someone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s terms. Apple’s not going to play a ball with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not someone else doing it. They changed the whole page when George Harrison died. It should

⏹️ ▶️ John be intrinsic, not extrinsic. It should be them deciding that net neutrality is important, therefore

⏹️ ▶️ John they are going to do this. peer pressure. Do they feel peer pressure to put George Harrison? No, it’s just something they decided

⏹️ ▶️ John to do as a company. And I hope that that still is within the company, that these important causes and important

⏹️ ▶️ John days make the token effort, express the values of your company. And Tim

⏹️ ▶️ John Cook’s Apple has been doing that. Again, we’ve talked about this more than Steve Jobs’ Apple, like expressing

⏹️ ▶️ John the values of the company externally in a more bold way. And it seemed to be more about Tim

⏹️ ▶️ John Cook’s values. Maybe Tim Cook doesn’t value net neutrality. I don’t know. If you’ve never never heard him talk about it it’s hard to say. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a quote from him in this article that just is a bunch of nothings that doesn’t tell you anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks bone conduction headphones. Go to ATP.Aftershocks.com

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco great in very loud surroundings, but they are awesome if you want to listen to a podcast or take a phone call while

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home or at work while you want to listen to a podcast, maybe while you’re taking a phone call.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe your kids are asleep upstairs and you want to hear if they need anything. Or maybe you’re expecting a package and you don’t want to miss

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#askatp

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we are recording on Monday the 17th, which is unusual. We usually record on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wednesdays and we’ll be recording again I think on Thursday, yes on Thursday the 20th.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is because of it’s some vacation stuff and since we have all these vacations that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are kind of inconvenient for the purposes of of recording the show, we thought we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would do our possibly annual, don’t really call it a tradition, but it’s sort of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey becoming a tradition, Ask ATP and do a Q&A with listeners. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than asking us or asking you guys rather to inundate us with email,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are taking a page out of the Mike Hurley playbook and instead we would like you to use Twitter if at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all possible, if you please, and tweet with the hashtag ask ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A-S-K-A-T-P. And if you tweet into the ether with hashtag

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask ATP, then it will be added to a nice little document and we will go through it and hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey read and answer your question sometime. Is it next episode that we’re doing this? Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we have planned it for next episode. However, I would like to say with all with the greatest apologies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Upgrade podcast for totally ripping them off, I would like to make this a regular segment that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ask ATP in every show. People ask us questions all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but isn’t the joy not having to answer them? I love when people

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ask us questions and I go, okay, archive that

⏹️ ▶️ John email. Okay. I mean, not to be mean or anything, but like, you’re right. People do ask us questions all the time, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t understand how often people ask us questions. It would be a full-time job for multiple people to try to answer

⏹️ ▶️ John all the questions that are asked of us. It’s just not possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we don’t have to answer all of them,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but- Right, right,

⏹️ ▶️ John right. So don’t think this is going to suddenly make it so that we’re going answer all your questions. But all that means is we’ll answer.001%

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of.000%. Right, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like every week we could answer one or two questions, depending on how long the answers are. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like that would help prevent us from getting too much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our own selves about our topic selection and would prevent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us from getting too far into just endless cycles of follow-up every episode. Like, just have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a segment that is guaranteed to be something fresh even in a very slow news period

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the summertime

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way this thing we’re not going to answer these shows in the next episode we’re actually gonna answer these show

⏹️ ▶️ John the answer these questions on August 4th the recording on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco August 4th come answer one next episode maybe no I don’t know I’m just gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John want to sure the whole point is you’ve got like

⏹️ ▶️ John three weeks to send questions. So go nuts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, the truth of the matter is whether uh, Marco or John wins this civil war

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as to whether or not this becomes a regular thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I’m totally

⏹️ ▶️ John for it being a regular segment. I’m just saying

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it don’t expect, I’m saying to the listeners don’t have unrealistic expectations that your questions are going to get answered

⏹️ ▶️ John because we get so many questions and it’s just not possible to answer them all or even, even any reasonable portion of

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. But uh, either way, we will We’ll have a Google document, a Google

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet, I guess I should say, that will track all of these for us. So please go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Twitter if at all possible and use the hashtag AskATP. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have access to Twitter, then now’s a good time to sign up. Follow KC List, C-A-S-C-Y-L-I-S-S,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also tweet hashtag AskATP. But really, if you can’t and won’t suffer through Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, you can email us, but now you are dodging the official list and it is extraordinarily unlikely,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless your question is perfect in every way that we will answer your questions. So the pressure’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. That’s cold, man. I just I don’t want to get a bazillion emails, please, no.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the great thing about restriction to Twitter is that it forces you to be brief, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t, like, we already have a segment of the show where we read multi-paragraph emails to you. We don’t need to add

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John more of that. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead, an ideal question should probably be about one sentence,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Twitter is great for that. So we look forward to your questions with all apologies to the upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast for ripping off the segment from them.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can use more than one tweet though because I feel like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco some tweet storms

⏹️ ▶️ John now. You don’t need a tweet storm but 140 is that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re taking away the hashtag

⏹️ ▶️ John already. Sometimes you just need you know last time we did Q&A I thought we had some really good questions

⏹️ ▶️ John that were like two sentences long that wouldn’t fit in a tweet and I don’t want to exclude those.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh John that’s the challenge that’s that’s the that’s the price you pay to getting your stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioned on air. So that’s the challenge listeners 140 characters minus seven.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is that 133 characters?

⏹️ ▶️ John You have to put a space for the hashtag. That’s true. 132

⏹️ ▶️ Casey characters, make it happen. Formatting counts. And make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure you get your casing right. Because let me tell you, you don’t want john Syracuse on your case about casing, especially if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John If you use the letter U instead of Y-O-U, forget it. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. out.

1Password kerfuffle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, let’s let’s talk briefly about one password because there seems to be a bit of a kerfuffle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s happened over the last week or two and I don’t get it and it kind of makes me angry. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding having not read deeply into this is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one passwords Windows version the latest Windows version no longer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey supports writing To local vaults and I should probably take a half step back actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one password is a password manager it’s the one that I use. It’s probably the one that my two co hosts use.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to say that for certainty. Oh, yeah, john, you’re using keychain like an animal, aren’t you?

⏹️ ▶️ John I declined to comment. Really? Whichever, whichever

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey second is Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gary, the privacy client clown is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so right. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right. Well, some of us on this show who will remain nameless, definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not Schmarco or schmacy. Definitely use one password. And, And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that 1Password has started offering, which I think we’ve talked about in the past, is family plans and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey business plans. And so the idea here is that the way 1Password works is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they call kind of a group of passwords and other things as well, a vault.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could think of that kind of like a database. And you can pay them money on a recurring basis

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a employer or as just a family member. And you can have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or more of these vaults or databases stored on 1Password servers, and then you can have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey users that are added to your account, and then you can share passwords. So as an example, Shmacy and Shmarin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might have a 1Password for family account where hypothetically they slash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we would have individual vaults for our own individual passwords that we don’t wish to share, and 1Family

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vault for passwords that we do wish to share. And in my opinion, it has worked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely well. I think the 1Password apps on all the platforms are very well designed. I think they’re super great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The AgileBits folks seem to be really good. I think they deserve recurring revenue from me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s why I am a paying subscriber to 1Password for Families. My employer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pays for 1Password for Teams basically on my recommendation. I really like it. I really think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s great. And among other things, and I don’t know the specifics about the mechanism

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, but one of the things they’ve said is that in broad strokes they use a very similar encryption scheme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as iCloud does. So even if 1Password as a company or AgileBits as a company wanted to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into your passwords that are stored on their servers, there’s nothing they can do to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that without your, guess what, 1Password. So they’ve come out with a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new version for Windows. They have stated publicly that this version will not let you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey write to vaults or databases that are stored locally. And you have to understand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that 1Password kind of came up by being able to store its password database, its vault in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox. So you could have your password synced everywhere, even without their services. So a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of angry nerds, some of whom are cheap and some of whom are not, are getting very angry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the fact that you can’t have local vaults on 1Password for Windows. And thus it’s clear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey without a shadow of a doubt that tomorrow or soon thereafter, you won’t be able to save to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey local vaults on any of the other platforms. Now, my read on this is that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, There will probably come a time that you will not be able to use local vaults on password because if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re agile bits, you probably want recurring revenue to continue to make really world-class apps and thus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re probably going to want to compel your users to pay you on a regular basis. And you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m cool with that because they do really great work. They take it very seriously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they deserve a little bit of my money every year as far as I’m concerned. But, oh man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the nerds are very upset. So, let me start with Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a hypothetical 1Password user. Gary, the privacy clown, I would never disclose whether or not Marco is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey publicly. Marco, what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, a similar issue came up when TextExpander went subscription, I believe, about a year ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was met with similar anger, and we talked about it on the show, too. But I think it’s increasingly clear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there are very few models for software to sustain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself economically. the reality is, we’ve talked about this before, so I’ll be brief, software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco requires ongoing maintenance. People have this idea that, I’m just going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy this app and I’ll pay you up front and I don’t want to pay a subscription, I want to just pay you once and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I own it. And that’s a wonderful idea and for a long time in computing that was somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable. But today, those same people who only want to pay once up front and then quote,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own it, also expect the manufacturer of said software to constantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue updates whenever the environment changes. So, a new OS version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out, they expect a free upgrade. New features come out,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they expect that on a regular basis. Any kind of service-based component that has to change with the times,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they expect all that to be built in. Ongoing bug fixes, of course. expect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing work for an upfront one-time price indefinitely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s just not sustainable. It’s simple as that. Like no matter what people say, they might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, I just want to buy it known at once. A lot of people do say that. But what they want, what they demand,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ongoing maintenance of that product. So the only way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this work really is either to just have so many paid installs and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrades that you can just last on that for a while and just accept that you’re gonna make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know 40 bucks from some customers up front and then they won’t bother you again and some customers will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be using your product for eight years and never give you another dime and expect constant free updates and you’ll just have to kind of average it out and hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the average works out. And that works more often than not in the growth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phase of a product. So in the beginning when like for for a new app or a or just a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very successful app that can work for a long time. Like when I had Instapaper,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that worked for a long time because it was just growing like crazy as the iOS platform was growing like crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the pay once and get free updates forever model worked for a long time. And 1Password

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably has a similar curve here where, you know, for a while 1Password has been growing, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, because I just keep seeing it everywhere. So I assume it’s been doing really well for a few years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But these These markets are saturating. Mac sales are flat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS sales are leveling off pretty significantly over the last few years. These markets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are saturating. And so everyone who was depending on that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant growth of the platform to just drive new licenses for a pay-once business model,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of those companies are going to now face this problem of, hey, you know what? We’re seeing this curve flatten

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out now. income might be dropping or leveling off and we are still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to support this software with a staff and with costs and with ongoing maintenance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there has to be some way to fund that and if you’re not being able to fund it through the new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users coming in that you didn’t have before giving you this you know these 30 40 bucks at a time for the for the one-time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco license then subscriptions really are the best way to do it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now there is an alternative you can do paid upgrades which one password has done for a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of these companies that like on the Mac on iOS it’s less common but on the Mac that’s how things have worked for a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while but paid upgrades have their own problems too for instance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have this weird like feature batching incentive where you as the software developer are incentivized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to really improve the existing version of the app in meaningful ways if you can save

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those up for the next paid upgrade Then you have to like batch up your releases and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly not put out anything for like two years. Then all of a sudden have this boom big drop where you drop a whole bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features. Then you have other problems like feature bloat. Then you like what like you know look what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened with Microsoft and Adobe apps over the last 20 years. Like they lots of companies have gone through this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what you end up coming. Oh and also like users who hate subscriptions who say they never want to pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that users have similar problems with upgrade pricing because there’s problems with that too. Like neither

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things is perfect for what users expect. Upgrade pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the problem of what if you buy it and then the next version comes out six months later?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Should you get more of a discount than someone who bought it five years ago because you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just bought it? You might be really mad if the upgrade comes out soon after you bought it. You might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect that your ancient version running on OS X Tiger should still work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today on the newest version of OS X, but they might say, sorry, you have to pay an upgrade for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new one, like, sorry. There’s problems with that too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What it really boils down to is, when you make people pay, they’ll grumble about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No matter how you make people pay, they’re going to grumble about it. And the one thing they’ll grumble about the most,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get really mad about, is when you change the way you make them pay. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you can get past that problem of, hey, people are all mad right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now during this transition. Once you get past that, and you’re on the other side of the transition,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are moving to subscriptions, yeah, people will be mad. And some people will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never buy it again. They’ll be so mad, they’ll hold that grudge forever. I mean, look, Adobe has this problem, right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with creative cloud stuff. But Adobe’s doing great right now because they made this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition, they’re doing fantastically. They are better off on the other side of it, even though

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people are still mad and will be mad forever about subscriptions. Some people will never use it as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a result, but the people who are left, they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adobe more money and Adobe is in a healthier place now. Same thing with Microsoft, I think, with Office

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that kind of stuff. And so, honestly, I haven’t been paying attention

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this entire kerfuffle or to whatever happened with TextExpander. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if Smile ever released numbers or gave any indication on whether they’re doing better now with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new subscription model as they were before. But if One Password

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Smile, if these companies can get to the other side of this transition,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even if they lose customers along the way, they will probably be in a better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco place financially and they’ll be more stable than they were before with the old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay maybe every few years for a paid upgrade model. And so even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this loses them customers, it still might be the best approach to take. Now that being said, there are complicating factors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this particular arrangement. OnePassword, because of the nature of it, is dealing with this extremely sensitive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco data that a lot of customers have either requirements or requests

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the vault that is being, the database of your passwords,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not leave their network. And they’ve had forever this local vaults feature where you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally not use a sync service at all. you can have basically like your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync its local vault over the local Wi-Fi to your iOS devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can just not use sync at all and just not use it on iOS or whatever. And a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of companies, that’s the method they have to use. I’ve heard here and there that some groups within Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use 1Password, and they depend on that feature being there because they, you know, Apple I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would permit its employees to have passwords stored on some external service or synced via Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like that. So I do think one password

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving to a subscription pricing model is totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, people are gonna get mad, but it’s that’s probably fine. And by the way, they haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said they’re doing that. They basically just like laid some groundwork and some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco commentary that suggests that they’re considering that in the future. But they’re not, they They haven’t actually said that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. But anyway, I do think a move to subscription pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably fine and probably the right move for a lot of software companies that require

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing work for their products to work. And by the way, you might say, person listening who hates subscriptions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might say, well it’s just a password manager, why do I have to pay every month for this? Well, what happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the new version of Chrome comes out and their extension breaks? They have to fix their extension.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens when new when like people find websites the extension doesn’t work on and they have to fix

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that new versions of iOS come out and they have to update to 64-bit or whatever like there’s oh there’s constantly ongoing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work here one password is a very complicated app with lots of different components it runs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on many different operating systems and it runs in every web browser and it runs in iOS extensions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it like it’s it’s on all these different platforms and all these different parts of it that are all the interdependent and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to interact with the web, which is a constantly changing environment.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they have to put constant effort into that. Whether you realize it or not, if they stopped or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your version stopped getting updates, you’d be mad because it wouldn’t work as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription pricing, I’m on board with that. And by the way, I do pay for this subscription. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco started paying for it about six months ago when I started reducing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my dependence on Dropbox. I switched to their sync system and it’s been totally fine. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the removal of local vaults, if that is the plan, I think that’s a mistake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this app because that will probably cost them a lot of customers that can never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco come back, even if they change their mind about how they want to pay. So I do think they should probably,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they know better than I do what their customers want, but me sitting over here as an armchair

⏹️ ▶️ Marco observer, I think removing local vaults is probably a bad idea. But subscription

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the reason they might be tempted to entangle these two things, the subscription pricing and

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole cloud sync or whatever, is that companies still feel for a lot of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John that you just mentioned, that they want to have a story about why you’re paying every month

⏹️ ▶️ John and any kind of cloud sync thing where they store your data on their servers that they run

⏹️ ▶️ John is like, Oh, well, you’re paying us every month because we’re taking your data and we’re storing it on our servers and we have to pay money to run those servers.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like it’s something that you can explain to people, have a better chance of explaining to people like, why am I paying for this

⏹️ ▶️ John every month? Right. But in reality, the reason they need you to pay for every month is everything that Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John just said has nothing to do with, oh, we have to run servers. There’s no servers involved whatsoever. And it was entirely local

⏹️ ▶️ John vaults and direct device to device sync. And they didn’t run any servers. You should still pay

⏹️ ▶️ John the monthly like in the same way that you would for like Photoshop or whatever, because that’s the business model that allows them to

⏹️ ▶️ John continue to support their software. And it’s kind of one of the

⏹️ ▶️ John goals I feel like of modern software applications is to become valuable enough

⏹️ ▶️ John that people will pay you monthly. Obviously artists who make their living, you know, in Photoshop

⏹️ ▶️ John or Illustrator or whatever. It’s a no brainer as a business expense that they make more

⏹️ ▶️ John money, you know, if they’re experts in Photoshop, and they’re like, Well, I’m going to learn an entirely new graphics program or find

⏹️ ▶️ John something else that I can do my work in because I don’t want No, you’ll totally pay the monthly fee because that’s how valuable

⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop is for your work. And for things like password managers or I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, maybe text editors in some cases or whatever, some sort of integral tool that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not just a frivolous thing that you have on your Mac that you kind of like. It’s like, no, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get my work done without this. Even something like slack, where if your whole company starts using slack and like your

⏹️ ▶️ John company runs on slack, you realize is like valuable enough to our company for us to pay

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever slack is charging for it. Like, and there’s a limited number of those type of applications. You can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John look in your applications folder and say, Oh, I’m going to pay a subscription for every single one of those apps. You won’t. They’re not all that valuable

⏹️ ▶️ John to you. So if you’re making software, these days, it should be

⏹️ ▶️ John your goal to be one of those applications is valuable enough for people to pay a subscription

⏹️ ▶️ John fee for it. And a password manager, I think is definitely in that category of things because we

⏹️ ▶️ John all have lots of passwords. And we want to store them securely. And we want it to be convenient,

⏹️ ▶️ John but also, you know, not vulnerable. And like, don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ John have to think about the security, we want an application that has a long life, a company that has a reputation for security

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not owned by, you know, an advertising company or something like that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like one password will eventually do well, they can get through this transition, because

⏹️ ▶️ John people are motivated to pay them money on a recurring basis just so they don’t get bought

⏹️ ▶️ John out by some evil corporation or aren’t tempted to sell their personal information or do something dumb. And like a lot of the stuff with

⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud sync and I don’t wanna type my one password into a webpage because who knows what could be happening.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like in the end, you have to trust the company that makes one password because

⏹️ ▶️ John they control the field that you’re typing your one password into. And you don’t know what they’re doing with that. They could be grabbing

⏹️ ▶️ John all your keystrokes and sending it off to someone for, but they’re not. like that’s why you buy from them because you know this is a company

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good I trust their reputation right. So I think their customer base

⏹️ ▶️ John would be enough of their customer base would be willing to pay them a

⏹️ ▶️ John recurring subscription even if there was no server involved like you don’t need to convince them oh we’ll run servers

⏹️ ▶️ John for you and do it like local vault only in fact maybe they’re willing to pay more for the fun

⏹️ ▶️ John with fewer features so this is an interesting case because like Marco was saying they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John just any random application there a specific kind of application with specific privacy concerns

⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it so that like cloud sync or cloud storage is almost

⏹️ ▶️ John a demerit against them in terms of privacy and and it should not be tied in any

⏹️ ▶️ John way to their recurring revenue so yeah i don’t know it’s easy for us to say

⏹️ ▶️ John for computer nerds who like love to pay for software or software developers ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ John who, you know, make our livings from other people paying for our software. But,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when I talk to non-computer enthusiasts, like people who just, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, they’re not into computers at all, they have a phone, obviously, they have, you know, maybe they have a computer or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of paying anything at all ever for software still seems alien to a lot of people.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, again, the, you know, the strategy is to both become

⏹️ ▶️ John valuable enough that people are willing to pay and probably to make an application

⏹️ ▶️ John that appeals to people who are acquainted with the concept of paying money for software.

⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t make an application that appeals greatly to people who have never paid

⏹️ ▶️ John for software and think it’s ridiculous to do so because even if you make an application that they all love they’ll never pay you for

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s bad. Make an application for people who are are willing to pay for software

⏹️ ▶️ John and make it your application valuable enough for them that they’re willing to pay on a recurring basis. And it’s just a question

⏹️ ▶️ John of finding the right price. Obviously, they’re not going to pay $700 a month for a password manager unless

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s some super duper secure one that has some sort of legal

⏹️ ▶️ John indemnity that goes with it or something, although it probably costs more than $700 a month. But they’d pay $0.01 a month. So find the right number

⏹️ ▶️ John between $0.01 and $700, and you know, you’ll be happy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, like that’s part of how Adobe has managed their pricing where like, you know, Creative Suite is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like 50 bucks a month if you buy the whole thing and you know, it goes down from there if you only need parts of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you were buying it before, they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco priced it such that it actually is fairly comparable to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were actually just buying it every version or two before. Now, a lot of their customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t buying it at all. of them pirating it and a lot of them were also not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying every version. Like they would skip versions or they would buy one and use it for six years because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just didn’t care about the stuff in the new versions or they didn’t want to spend the money or they couldn’t spend the money or whatever else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, they set the pricing of the subscription such that if you were buying it already,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually is a sensible price. And that’s why I subscribed to Adobe Creative Suite because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was buying them already and And so it ends up like, yeah, this is actually totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, for them, I think they can set a price that makes sense here. I honestly don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even remember what I’m paying them because.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s too much for me to pay for, I can tell you that. Because I have CS6, the last non-cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John version.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, no, I’m talking about, sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one password is what I’m talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s $5 a month for the family plan, $3 a month for the individuals. That’s OK.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there might be a discount if you go a year at a time. I’m not positive about that, so I might be wrong. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, $5 a month, a soda at a regular restaurant, like when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John is feeling really, really saucy and wants to get himself a Sprite at a restaurant, that’s probably $2.50.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he’s literally pissing that away a few hours later. This is $5. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that isn’t how people think about it. Like, you know as well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey as I do. You’re an iOS developer now, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You know, like, that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how people think about this at all. But yeah, I mean, yeah, one password being three

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or five dollars a month, that’s totally fine because, you know, it is a power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user productivity security tool that is often used by businesses.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like all of those words are things that can make paying for software,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, valuable and reasonable. And yeah, this is a no-brainer to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To ensure that this app is financially healthy and here for the long haul, $3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month is Totally fine.

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Overcast UI dilemma

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover domain names for your ideas. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Marco, tell me about what’s going on with Overcast these days, because I feel like I haven’t heard much, which means either you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not working or more likely you’re working a lot and you’re just keeping it all quiet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m mostly not working, because, you know, summer. However, when I am working,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a dilemma, and I talked about it on Under the Radar recently, but in case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the listener base of that is not the listener base of this, so There are people who haven’t heard it, and I haven’t heard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you, who probably won’t care, and especially what John, who probably has an opinion about this, think about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my main dilemma with updating Overcast to iOS 11

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is iOS 11 adds drag-and-drop stuff to the standard system widgets.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I have opinions about this. I definitely have opinions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can now full-time reorder table views and collection views in iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the app supports and supporting it is very easy. I already built my own full-time reordering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system to reorder items in playlists and overcast so you can drag around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes and you can reorder them right there with little drag handles on the right side. Doing this in my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way was an incredibly complex pile of hacks that works most of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time but has a few weird little random bugs that I just cannot solve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and will probably never solve. But for the most part it does work and it’s fast and it’s very clear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and discoverable right there. I also have a problem with Overcast 3.0.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The method that I chose of tapping the episode cells to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expand a little menu like, you know, Tweetbot style, and that the play button is one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the items in that menu as opposed to the previous behavior where just tapping on an episode row would just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately start playing it no matter what. A lot of people still do not like this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the user base seems… this seems like a very polarizing decision among the user base and it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not stopped being polarizing. People have not gotten used to it. I am used to it and I like it but a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people still don’t. And they seem to not be changing. So it doesn’t seem like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing where you’ll just get used to having to tap twice to play. A lot of people really hate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to tap twice to play. So my idea is what if I replace the drag

⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle on the right side of the cells with a one tap play button, move the info button that’s there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in selection mode down to where the play button was in the middle of that little bar menu that comes up and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the system’s full-time drag, rotary control replacing my giant pile of hacks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is a good idea there’s lots of advantages of doing this however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the big disadvantages of doing this, first of all it’s another change people hate change so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m now moving the play button again which will, even though people have been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screaming their heads off for one tap play to come back, if I give that to them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different group of people will scream their heads off that I moved it. And then the other problem is that the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drag and drop implementation has a small delay where you have to hold the cell down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it pops up to be draggable. And mine, before, my hack job

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was instant. You can just immediately drag that handle and you wouldn’t have to wait. So the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of it is a little bit slower to activate However, the system version will also allow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to put the play button on the side of the cell So it’s so I would bring back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One tap playing at least in like the right quarter of the cell It wouldn’t be the full width of the cell because I’d still have the little pop-up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco menu if you tap the rest of the cell But if you tap the little right side thing that could be a play button

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can make the touch target You know pretty pretty tall and wide on that so people could get their one touch playback

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I could get rid of my giant hack, which barely works now and is likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to break in future OS updates. So I think I should do this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But how big of a problem is it that the new standard reordering method

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a small delay before you activate it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not a question. And I really, really love

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Under the Radar. But there are episodes where I switch from loving and listening to Under the Radar to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate listening to Under the Radar because I so deeply disagree with one or both of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I started this particular episode, which I believe is number 87. I’ll have a link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s never longer than 30 minutes, so let’s get started. Anyway, this episode, I started

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate listening and then ended up just listening and enjoying because my opinion,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoiler alert, is that you talked yourself into implementing this the new APIs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the end of the episode. Now, it sounds like maybe that isn’t quite so cut and dry since you’re talking about it with us now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to me, this is not even a question. This is absolutely use new API,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of meeting. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. Number one, it may feel weird now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have a little bit of a delay and whatnot, but I don’t think it will feel weird soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, in your defense, drag and drop, I suspect is going to be a lot less prevalent on the iPhone than it is on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. So those of us who perhaps only use Overcast on the iPhone and maybe don’t use iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that often, it may feel a little weird at first. And like you said, moving the UI around is always going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tick somebody off.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey More than somebody. You know what I mean. Many somebody’s off. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who really, really, really dislikes third-party libraries because you feel like you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no control over them, and oftentimes they are pile of hacks. And really, it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dangerous position to put yourself in to have a third-party library, especially one that’s like really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, I can’t think of the way to phrase it, but like it’s wide-reaching and it’s taking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a system thing and it’s totally rejiggering it and you are like wed to this library.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have created your own first-party equivalent of that and you must burn it with fire as soon as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you possibly can. This is not a question you must get rid of it you must use new apis end

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a meeting john what do you think

⏹️ ▶️ John i have a question and if you use the native uh dragging thing can you do a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where you like whatever tap and hold so like it pops up and now you’ve you’ve grabbed it

⏹️ ▶️ John can you with another finger flick scroll the stuff behind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it yes and it’s amazing so it solves your problem of like this of the bump bump

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bump bump bump scrolling speed yes you have to do it then and you can pick pick up multiple items.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, I don’t think I’d be doing that too much, but maybe on the iPad. But yeah, no, you totally need to do the native thing. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John the native native dragging. Yes. All right. The second question

⏹️ ▶️ John is, okay, so I do native drag. Now I have these options. I don’t need the drag handles anymore, or whatever. What do I do with that

⏹️ ▶️ John space? And for that, I think I’ll have to use it to see what it’s like. I understood what you’re getting at. Well, the pay button play

⏹️ ▶️ John button will be over here. The info button will be in a little, you know, expand the bar thing. Maybe that’ll be fine. Maybe it’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ John weird. I don’t know. I think it’s worth separating like determining determining like exactly what to do with this

⏹️ ▶️ John newfound space and freedom and gesture freedom because I’m not entirely sure but native

⏹️ ▶️ John Dragon Drop, you know, seems like a no brainer. Like I said, you get rid of your hacks. It’s a better

⏹️ ▶️ John interface. And as Dragon Drop in theory becomes more prevalent. It’s what people will expect. So just do

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and I also forgot to mention that I am one of those people who is still grumbly about the fact that there’s a two-tap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey play scheme. And so bringing back the play button on the right will make me very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy. And we all know that Overcast is written specifically to make Casey happy. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re going to have to do it, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I do that, can you stop asking me for a Mac app?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When’s the last time I’ve asked you for one? Because I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco tell you, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last time I asked for a Mac app was probably about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day or two before I got my AirPods. Because now, The reason I wanted a Mac app so badly was because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Bluetooth headphones that I was using previously were such a pain to switch between my Mac and my iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now with the AirPods, it takes two seconds to switch between them. So when I’m listening to Overcast, I’m connected to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone. And when I’m listening to anything else in the world, I’m connected to my Mac. And it’s no

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John worries.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of apps that Marco doesn’t want to develop and or maintain, I have a feature request

⏹️ ▶️ John slash bug report for the Mac version. Or not the Mac, the web version of Overcast. Oh, God.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so frequently people will tweet overcast links with offsets, which is cool. It’s like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what you want. I’m going to tap this link and it’s going to take me right to the second in the podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re trying to refer me to, right? As long

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco as it isn’t a major

⏹️ ▶️ John NPR podcast. Yes. Yeah. But if it is a podcast that

⏹️ ▶️ John I subscribe to and I’m in the middle of listening to, is it just my imagination

⏹️ ▶️ John or does that throw off my offset? I’m logged into my Overcast account and it sent me to an offset

⏹️ ▶️ John and I play it. It syncs that offset and now I’ve lost where I was because I was earlier or later in

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. Is that a thing or is just my imagination?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is indeed what happens and I’ve thought about this before like whether that should be what happens or not and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s hard because it’s like if you when you put it this way yeah that shouldn’t happen you’re right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what would the alternative be and it once you say something okay well what should happen like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re if you’re logged in and if you have this podcast in your list so it so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not unplayed or rather it’s not played like it’s it’s an active item in your list and you have a position

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it then you get sent a timestamp link for a different time in that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then should it play that but then not ever update your synced position what if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you play past your synced position should it update it then like it’s it’s fairly complex

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as to what it should do and so I haven’t really addressed it yet what do you think it should do

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it should pretty sure it should just not update the the syncs position

⏹️ ▶️ John only if you go to a link with an offset in it but I can’t think of a scenario where I would I would the play

⏹️ ▶️ John head would be at some non zero position in the podcast right I

⏹️ ▶️ John think the is the tricky bit that you’re talking about is like I haven’t started playing it then I’m not quite sure what to do

⏹️ ▶️ John but if I have started to play it I I think it’s pretty clear that

⏹️ ▶️ John you and I go to an offset I Want to play from that offset in the web player

⏹️ ▶️ John and have it not affect my other offset because I can’t think of a scenario Where I would want it to affect it Why would why would I

⏹️ ▶️ John formulate an overcast web link for myself to jump to an offset? With the intention

⏹️ ▶️ John of me going fair now if the thing is at the zero position I haven’t started playing it and I go to an offset

⏹️ ▶️ John to listen to a thing I personally would also like it not to update the thing because very often Often what happens

⏹️ ▶️ John is it does update it and then I will go to that episode and it’ll start playing and I’ll be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I listened to the beginning of this one, huh? Because here I am in the middle of it. Like I’ll forget. I don’t realize,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, I just missed the entire beginning because of that offset link that I followed like, you know, three days ago or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ John my solution obviously is just, if you just run your web browser in incognito mode or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John when you tap that link, you know, you won’t be logged into Overcast or log yourself out of Overcast or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a terrible solution. I know. But anyway, if you’re just looking for the quick

⏹️ ▶️ John fix, quick fixes, offset in URL equals never sync play head position,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then just make a different set of people angry.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think that’s right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, that that actually sounds like a really good solution that, yeah, because if if there’s an offset

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the your because the regular web interface does not put those those office there. So if there’s an offset in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco URL, just don’t touch the sync position at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that makes sense to me, too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So you’re just like it’s kind of like the one tap to play like you for a few years make one

⏹️ ▶️ John set of people angry and then you switch it back and then for a few more years make those that people angry and then

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see how it goes

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah tell me I think you

⏹️ ▶️ John know really how many people use the web interface right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly very few it’s it’s a very like

⏹️ ▶️ John just get all of us in the chat room will vote all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven that actually might be possible like it’s it’s very few people like and every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time somebody tweets a web link with overcast there are responses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are like, Oh my God, I didn’t know it had a web interface. Like, no one knows it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even the people who do know it’s there, no one uses it. And yes, that part of that is because it’s pretty bare bones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I could make it a lot better or more or more full featured if I put a lot of work into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing. Like part of the reason I don’t put a lot of work into it is that nobody uses it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m also glad you don’t chuck me into the app, because that’s the other option that most people would

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, that’s Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a web interface, but it immediately knows whether you have the app installed and Chuck to the app because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John I certainly don’t want you to go into the app again if you’re playing if it’s an episode that I haven’t started playing it or

⏹️ ▶️ John one that I’m in the middle of I don’t want it to go into my app and change my play head position like inside the app if

⏹️ ▶️ John you if you did send to the app I would say go to the app but open a totally alternate

⏹️ ▶️ John one time like you just saw it an offset link player interface that is disconnected entirely with the

⏹️ ▶️ John actual listening interface because when you follow a link with an offset, someone’s trying to show you something

⏹️ ▶️ John in an episode, it is clearly not the same as I am listening to the episode. They’re trying to say, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John this little snippet right here, listen to this bit, right? And that I feel like is a different activity, then

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to now listen to the next episode of my favorite podcast. All

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, thanks to our three sponsors this week, hover fracture and aftershocks, and we will see you next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm, And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, tech podcast so long

Post-show: Neutral

Chapter Post-show: Neutral image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I uh, I felt left out with you having your impulse purchases.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh oh. And so, and so Aaron and I bought a car tonight.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whoa! Wait, like during the show?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, not a car, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, so I would call it a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John truck,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Aaron would correct me and say, no it’s not a truck, it’s an SUV. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like a big sneaker,

⏹️ ▶️ John really. Sorry, tennis

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey shoes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s so cruel.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really get why people- Boot? Army boot? who call SUVs trucks, I feel like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unearned. A truck is a truck. If it doesn’t have a bed on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s not a truck.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cullen Roche Yeah, and that’s exactly what Aaron would say, probably verbatim. To me, anything that is taller than a car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a truck. I’m not saying I’m right. I’m not trying to convince the listeners or anyone or you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two. I’m not saying I’m right. It’s just the way I’ve always thought of it, which is probably bananas. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, we, a few hours ago, bought Erin a brand new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Volvo XC90, and it’s very nice. And we’re very happy, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin is sad that she’s left her Mazda 6 behind. We bought her

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mazda 6 a couple months after we got married.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that car has been in the family from new, the Mazda 6 that is, for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost exactly 10 years. We brought it home at the end of August of 2007, and we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let it go today, and it’s sad. It’s weird, right, because a car’s just a thing, right? It’s just a machine,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s, kind of makes you sad when you see one go, especially, well, Marco, you wouldn’t know about this because you don’t keep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars for more than two minutes, but for those of us who keep cars for a while, like John and me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s sad to see one go because it’s been a part of the family for so darn long.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I totally get it. I have felt that as well, and yeah, I mean, I almost cried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I gave up the M5. Like, I liked it so much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and you had a very unique experience. We actually had a very unique experience in that car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, I mean, she was weepy. I was on the verge of weepy. And it’s funny, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I liked her Mazda. Don’t get me wrong. It was a very nice car. And more than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else, it has given us, or had, it had given us no problems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in its 10 years. I mean, I think we had to do an alternator once.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But everything else was routine maintenance. I mean, it was bulletproof, which is probably a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Japanese thing in that, you know, most Hondas I’ve heard about are bulletproof. Most, uh, Toyotas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to be bulletproof. And this Mazda is, was certainly bulletproof. This one individual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mazda six was bulletproof. And so, um, so yeah, so I was sad to see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it go, but we’re really excited to have the new car. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only have one question and you know what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco white.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Is it white? It is not white.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a brief window of time where, as I’ve described and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you do not like to agree, but I was backed into white on my most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Not the prior

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones. The prior ones were more deliberate than not. But really, it was only the Subaru that was deliberate. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go listen to Neutral and you’ll get the story. It happens to be white.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The BMW happened to be white. And a couple of the other cars happened to be white. The Subaru was a deliberate choice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, this one is silver. We wanted, well, maybe more me than her. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she cared that much. I wanted a deeper gray, which happens to be what her Mazda was.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for this one, we ended up, can I complain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a moment?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Please.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I whine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco about- That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is about. Can I, yeah, really. Can I whine for a minute about how awful it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy a car? Although I hear Tesla, it’s just you go online and you price and you pick it out and that’s that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t wanna hear about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it because it just makes me- Ordering from Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like ordering from Amazon. It’s literally like add to cart, buy. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me so sad. It makes me so sad. So when we bought Aaron’s Mazda, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey started the process in, I think it was like August of 2016, give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or take a month, and we bought in August of 2017. And we literally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey haggled with the dealer for a year to get her car because we just refused to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey budge on the price that we wanted. So we walked into the local Volvo dealer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the end of December last year. I can’t recall an exact day. It doesn’t really matter. But at the very end of December, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe it was between Christmas and New Year’s, I think. And today on the 17th of July,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we brought the car home. I have spent the last, since

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thursday or Friday, I have spent all day, every f***ing day,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey emailing every dealer between Philadelphia and Greensboro, North Carolina,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to get a good deal on this car. Now, before anyone complains, yes, I did this to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, but what ended up happening was I emailed all these dealers saying, look,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s your best out the door price? I don’t, I don’t, don’t even worry about a trade in. Just tell me with tax,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with everything, what is your best out the door price? And you would think that that would be easy, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course it’s not because their job is to not give me their best out-the-door price. Their job

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to give me their crappiest out-the-door price and hope that I agree

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it. So what ended up happening, long story short, is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got our Richmond dealer in a bidding war with a couple other dealers and we were mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the victors, and so eventually we got this car at an extreme, well, I think of, an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extreme discount, and I’m really pleased with that. Additionally, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to understand that Erin has never been a particular fan of my car. She thinks it’s fine, but she hates BMW drivers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, well, we’re all jerks. And so she’s never really been a tremendous fan of my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. Guess what car saved her several thousand dollars because of a Volvo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey promotion that’s going on right now? My BMW. If you happen to own a BMW, Lexus,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Audi, et cetera, you can get a multi-thousand dollar discount on a brand new Volvo. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hmm, how about them apples?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, do you have to trade it in? Or just by you owning it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just by owning it, because they’re trying to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey owners of other luxury marquees, Marx, Marquis, whatever, those things, get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey luxury owners to come to Volvo. And so just by having one in the family, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got, I think it was $3,000 off, which is pretty awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was pretty cool. But yeah, buying a car is terrible. It’s terrible. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a frigging nightmare from start to finish. I mean, if I didn’t care about the cost of the car, it’d

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be great. No worries, but it’s terrible because not unlike buying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a house, the dealer’s one and only job is to get as to extract all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the money from you. And your one and only position is to try to extract as little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as possible from, from, from your own wallet. So, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey miss the Baron in the chat is saying, well, could I have just paid MSRP? Sure, I could have, but that would have been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost $10,000 more than we paid. Like, no, that’s no, I’m not made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of money. So no, I’m not going to do that. Oh my God, I hate, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate buying a car. I just, I don’t want to do it for a long time. And that’s why I think that in part

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the reason, I mean, Erin loved her Mazda, as I said, but part of the reason that she didn’t want a new car was because she didn’t want to go through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. And it’s just, it’s a fricking nightmare. I hate it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what color silver did you get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s just silver silver. I forget that what the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John official

⏹️ ▶️ John silver metallic osmium gray metallic

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the osmium gray is what I really thought would be good Oh that the color options on this car friggin terrible unless

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get into like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John super grey metallic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I believe it was just silver. The osmium is what I thought looked the best of the available

⏹️ ▶️ Casey options So it’s a XC 90 momentum, which is the cheapest XC 90 they make however However,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey within XC90 Momentums, you can get five seat or seven seat, and we got the seven seat one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the bright silver metallic. Like I was starting to say, I thought the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey osmium gray actually looked better, but we ended up with silver because that’s the one that the dealer could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get their hands on and make a good deal on.

⏹️ ▶️ John What engine did it get? Did you get T5 or T6?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s a T6, which is because as soon as you go third row, that means you’re getting a T6. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a T6 all-wheel drive. So it’s both. You had to get the fast engine. Well, not exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s the thing. The XC90 ranges from $40,000 or $45,000 to $110,000 or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. I saw that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s like a Porsche.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could just double the price of the car with options. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a hell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a thing. Yeah, because what it is is they make a version. I forget the name of it. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a hybrid thing, yeah. Well, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only is it a V8 hybrid, but beyond that, it’s actually a four-seater. So the back is just blocked off.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s clearly like an executive’s, I’m going to be chauffeured in the SUV sort of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, so yeah, so ours was, ours, we started as cheap as you could go in terms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the trim and then made it seven seats. So that makes it slightly fancier.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it’s actually pretty darn well optioned, which is great. So it has pretty much all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the bits and bobs that we could possibly want. But it’s pretty cool. I mean, I haven’t driven

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one yet. We did do an overnight test drive several months ago of a less loaded

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And it does have CarPlay, which I played with very briefly when we test drove

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and it was really nice. There are definitely problems with it, but it was really nice. It has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bird’s eye view. It has a heads up display. So a lot of it is very similar to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5, actually, or reminds me of the M5. But I’m really looking forward to it. It has a heated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey steering wheel, which we’ve never had before. It parks itself, which is something we’ve never had before.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got an automatic just like the new M5. That’s true. It certainly does. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John haven’t been watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but that makes me sad. What they’ve done to the M5 is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sad. Indeed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and it’s both supercharged and turbocharged. How about that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s possible?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I haven’t read into this much, but I think the idea is that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey supercharger, which is belt-driven, is good for low RPM, like when you’re just taking off, and then the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turbocharger is better once you’ve got some motion going and once you have some RPMs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do both because turbocharger is exhaust driven, so

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you have

⏹️ ▶️ John no competition for things that are driving the things that are blowing air into your engine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. But Aaron and I, we got next to each other. So I drove to the Volvo dealer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and she drove separately to the Volvo dealer, and then we were going to grab a late dinner afterwards.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got next to her at a stoplight and she took off with not any particular quickness, I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear that supercharger whine coming from a Volvo. Again, I would call it a truck. I know it’s not a truck,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but coming from a Volvo SUV and it’s just like, what, why is that noise coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a Volvo? It’s just, that’s so weird. Um, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so yeah, so, so far so good. I mean, we didn’t really get a chance to play with it. Um, since we, you know, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got home, we got home, put Declan to bed. I had to do a little homework for analog, which we’re recording tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I played in the car for two minutes, realized they screwed up the registration on the car, which is gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful to work out, and then came upstairs to record this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, at a glance, super nice, we’re really excited, but I hate,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate buying cars, you guys, it’s the worst.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think what you have to come to peace with in order to buy cars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having this just massive anxiety and negativity about the whole thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there’s no way to buy a car and not lose a bunch of money. Like, you’re losing it somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow, you’re losing a bunch of money because a car is not an investment. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant, depreciating, usable, disposable, eventually, asset. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way to own a car and have it not cost you a lot of money in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, all the different ways you can buy it, different financing options, leasing versus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying, they’re all just, you’re gonna lose a lot of money somewhere. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you go into the dealer, you know that for a dealer that has negotiable prices, which is most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them, you know that they’re gonna make a profit somewhere off of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can look at it two ways. You can look at it as well, you know that they gotta make money too, they have people to pay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else. You can also look at it as every cent I give them is me losing money unnecessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t care about them, I just want this vehicle.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I feel both of those things, as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it turns out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you’re talking about large amounts of money, like you are with car margins,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for the person that you spent 15 minutes talking to, to think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they suddenly deserve $6,000. You know, actually, no, I think I’ll give you $100 of this margin, and I want the car

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for invoice. Yeah, that’s… And so you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this constant pressure between like what you want and what they want but I feel like at some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point in order to go through this and not feel horrible like you do right now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you just bought a new car well your wife just bought a new car and so you have a new car in the family

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s really cool for both of you and yeah and and this should be an unquestioned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco celebration especially given how rarely you guys buy new cars and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much you love cars this should be a celebration time, and instead you’re being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mad about this part of it, or you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John grumbly about it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know that somewhere you probably got screwed for some amount of money along

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least a lot of time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what I was going to say.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you can also think of it this way, that dealerships don’t necessarily make all or even

⏹️ ▶️ John most of their money from selling you cars. So it could be that you happened upon a dealership in a situation

⏹️ ▶️ John in a particular car where the dealership didn’t make any money off the sale or even lost money and

⏹️ ▶️ John they hope to make it up in the service department or, you know, on, they screwed you on your trade in or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they have ways to make money other than just raising, other than just profit margins

⏹️ ▶️ John on cars that they sell you. And in certain situations you can get a car where the dealer gets

⏹️ ▶️ John little or no profit from the car, but they will find some other way that they hope to get the money from you. And so if

⏹️ ▶️ John you can convince yourself that you were in one of those situations that they they let this go out the door for no

⏹️ ▶️ John profit in the hopes of making it up by charging you an arm and a leg for service,

⏹️ ▶️ John then maybe you’ll feel better about the purchase.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But I think the reality is you got a new car,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it costs a lot of money, but you have a new car. Enjoy it. And no matter how you did this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was going to cost you a lot of money. Whether it cost you, I don’t know what this cost. Let’s say, whether it cost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you $45,000 or $46,000, that’s not going to…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at it in absolute terms, I might have been able to save $1,000. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of money. But if you look at it in relative terms of what you’re paying for this car, it’s like, okay, that’s a small difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not going to make me angry for a month over this. Let’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy it. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the only emotionally healthy way to look at car purchases. And believe me, I’ve been on both sides of this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a lot of angry car investments over time, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly before this show happened. I’ve had a lot of cars and they’ve not always gone well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have been financially prudent. But the enjoyment

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get out of this, that should be untarnished as much as possible. And it’s hard when it’s this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much money, because it’s hard to spend this much money and just be flipping about it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you love cars, you’ve been waiting for a long time and talking and debating about which car to get for this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco role for Aaron for a very long time. Enjoy it. Just enjoy it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like the same philosophy of John. Was it you, John, or Merlin, talking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about when you go to Disney to just kind of know that it’s going to cost you a fortune and just plan for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ahead of time and then when you’re there just enjoy it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That was me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I figured it was you. See, you kind of have to do that, Casey, with car purchases.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know it’s gonna cost you a fortune somehow. At the end of it, you’re gonna have something that you love, it’s gonna be really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. So just accept it, know you’re gonna get screwed somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then try to move on from that, or don’t let it get to you so much, and just enjoy the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s funny you say that because, so the process started with me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to the dealer just cold and being like, okay, what do you have? Roughly, what does that cost? Blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was way out of our price range. So then we tried the Costco thing because Costco supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, okay, we have pre-negotiated certain cars with certain options.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I did that the past two cars I bought too. Was not impressed with their price both times.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, same. So when we went to the local dealer and said, oh, by the way, we didn’t tell you before, we’re Costco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people. And they basically said, okay, whatever. That means you get a couple hundred dollars off, woo. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we tried Truecar and all that did, all that is, in my experience, I shouldn’t say this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as though it’s factual, but in my experience, all Truecar is, is a sales funnel for a car dealership. So then you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get blown up via email and phone with people who are not interested in making a deal. They’re just interested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in having somebody new to chase, whatever. So what I ended up doing, like I think I said earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I just had, you know, two or three dealers bidding against each other, but it got to the point that once

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got Richmond to a price point that I thought was fair, which only happened

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I had gotten other dealers to make pretty aggressive opening offers. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point, I’m like going back and forth about a hundred dollars here, $200 there, a hundred dollars, a hundred dollars here, $200 there,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it occurred to me to your point, Marco, what am I doing here? Like at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this point I’m there, right? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco uh, I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to talk about exactly how much the car was, but you know, 100 or $200 in the grand scheme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things on a car that’s, you know, of this price is nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s how they get you though. That’s how they get you when you start talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey things that cost,

⏹️ ▶️ John they cost thousands and thousands of dollars. You’re like, well, when I’m spending these 10s of thousands, but I’m spending five

⏹️ ▶️ John figures anyway, couple hundred bucks is nothing. Whereas if you are spending

⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred bucks, a couple hundred bucks on top of that, you’d be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Whoa, I’m not exactly right. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the same amount of money in both cases,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to be really careful with large purchases that you don’t slip into that. Sure, I’ll get the body

⏹️ ▶️ John colored key fob for 500 bucks. It’s nothing compared to the price and payments like don’t do it just

⏹️ ▶️ John like you were doing the right thing. Although did you write you sent us a link to a picture? Is this your actual car?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the link I put in the in the chat, which I will not be putting in the show notes is the actual car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John so it looks white. That’s all I’m gonna say about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does look white.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a very light silver.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It is. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like you bought a really big white tennis shoe or sneaker.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, you’re so mean. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it looks bad. I mean, I don’t know anything about SUVs, really. Like, they don’t appeal to me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have a hard time judging them. But as they go, this looks pretty nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, I mean, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco forward to it. It does look white in the pictures. That’s a very light silver.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Without question, without question. Maybe, I mean, you know what I’ll do is I’ll put one of the pictures in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to put the link to like the listing and it’s probably going to disappear any minute anyway, but I’ll put a link to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco picture.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reverse image structure, it’s not going to do what you want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, don’t worry.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it might just be overexposed. There are a couple of angles where it starts to look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco silver. It does look that way, yeah. But follow John’s advice of that. I love after telling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to try to reduce anxiety about this purchase, the fact that John led with, that’s how they get you is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a TM

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end of that phrase. But I feel like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they get you rationale is good when considering extras and options. options. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when just agonizing over the bulk of this price, and the purchase price,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the asking price, the profit margin, the invoice price, all this stuff, this is where it’s a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to just say, you know what? I’m going to be spending a lot of money on this. I’ll try to be responsible,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not worth agonizing about it forever. Because keep in mind, too, and this is one area where a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get caught up, There is a value that it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be hard to quantify, but there is a value to your own mental

⏹️ ▶️ Marco health regarding the surrounding. So you are not only spending a lot of time trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to extract negotiations out of the dealers. So the first half of the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you spend on that is probably worth it, but then you get diminishing returns after that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s that issue of just the time spent that it’s worth keeping that in check. And then also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re gonna get all mad about something that’s $100, it’s like, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that gonna ruin an evening for you? Is it gonna ruin a few evenings? Is it gonna ruin a week for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? Are you gonna be mad for a week over $100? Is that worth it to you? Are you gonna get mad in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of your kid about something like this? How is that gonna make him feel? Is that worth $100 to you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cost to you and to your health and to your family

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to the mood around you, the people around you, when things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother you too much. And so sometimes it’s actually worth just saying, you know what, fine, I’ll get screwed for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hundred bucks because I don’t want to deal with it for the next week. And so I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if you did any of that because I wasn’t there, which is probably good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of people have trouble seeing the perspective on that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and finding that balance. I’ve had trouble with this a lot before, too. This is something I’ve only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more recently started thinking more about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of value to yourself being able to just move on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from something.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I oftentimes think that you can be a little cavalier about,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe a little fast and loose about how you spend your money, given that you impulse bought this really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive TV and all that jazz. But I absolutely 100% agree with you that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey key here is to get the purchase down to a place

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you think you’re not getting screwed, to where you think you’re doing okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then at that point, when you’re nickel and diming the dealer or yourself,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it really, really worth it anymore? You know, it got to the point that I was just stressing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself out over, you know, this little bit of money that, yes, $100, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean to say that $100 isn’t a lot of money. I’m not trying to say that at all. $100 is absolutely a lot of money.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I’m saying is there comes a time where you have to say to yourself, you know what, this shit just ain’t worth it. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not worth continuing to do this to yourself. And that’s where I eventually got,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just it’s not worth it for me to continue to stress about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so in the end, I am super happy about the purchase. I think it’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really great for the family. I think I’m really looking forward to the car. We’ve never had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Volvo. I don’t think anyone in our extended families have had a Volvo. I’ve certainly been around them in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really looking forward to it and at a glance it seems super nice. It has so many bits and bobs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the technology point of view. I mean it’s its own, it apparently like one of the things we did unbeknownst

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us was the dealer signed us up for like a three-month trial on AT&T because the thing is its own Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotspot. Like yeah it’s got CarPlay as I mentioned before, it’s got the I think I said it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the bird’s-eye view so when you park you know it although I don’t think it’s quite as good as the M5

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was but anyway as you park it’ll show you everything around you and has of course a backup camera and all that jazz. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has the three-row seating, which to answer somebody in the chat, the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got the third row seating is because we want the option of putting like friends or many adults

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or really in a lot of cases just having plenty of storage space in the back. Because you look at your average

⏹️ ▶️ Casey X5’s trunk and it’s not that big given how big the car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. problem here is that Erin’s Mazda

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not a terribly large car, but had a cavern of a trunk. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just preposterously large. And so she didn’t really, if she’s going to get this big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SUV, she’s not going to want to give up on that tremendous trunk. And I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so it’s super nice. It theoretically will parallel park itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It theoretically will perpendicularly park itself, I think, by backing in, although I’m not 100% sure. Wow,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t even think about that. Man, if it doesn’t back in, I’m going to be furious. We’re going to have to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco return it. My car backs in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So, yeah, so it’s, I’m really looking forward to it. I say looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it only because I haven’t driven it yet and we haven’t really played with all the technology stuff yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s tough because here it is, it’s like such a monumental day and moment in our lives

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was slightly miserable because I was sad to see the Mazda go and Erin was devastated to see the Mazda go. She

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted the new car. It’s not like I’m compelling her to get a new car, but she was devastated to see that car go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know, it’s also, it’s all, it’s like that, oh, thank God that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over with. Cause I don’t want to ever want to do that crap again. You know, it’s that, that, that release that just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally. And so, um, yeah, I’m, I’m not sure if I’m going to do any sort of formal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey review for for either the website or my quote unquote YouTube channel. I mean, I have a channel that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a single video on it. You can just call it your vlog, it’s okay. Yeah, totally.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, so far so good. It seems really nice. And I’m really looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to spending more time in it and getting to check out all the bits and bobs and whatnot.

⏹️ ▶️ John Should have thought about moving to a different state so you wouldn’t have to have that stupid registration sticker in the middle of your windshield.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Here we go. Before you bought the new car.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Although I might want to

⏹️ ▶️ John point out that it’s not actually. is the one in Aaron’s off-center. Yeah, that’s what I’m gonna say.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is it a little bit? Yeah, it looks like it’s a little bit to the left.

⏹️ ▶️ John It almost doesn’t matter, because it being anywhere near the middle of your windshield is so awful that

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it’s off-center is like a secondary concern.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but if I was gonna move, I would probably move to like Pennsylvania or North Carolina where, I don’t recall where the stickers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are there, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at least you don’t need a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey front damn license plate. Drives me insane that we have to have those on our cars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco By the way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing this picture of your gloriously white car next to Aaron’s new allegedly silver car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is really light silver. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is, to be fair. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not very different looking cars.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now I miss Aaron’s car. Aaron’s car, look at that. What a great 90s car that was.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Look at that silly wing on the back. It’s a 2007. Silly wing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on the

⏹️ ▶️ John back. I know, it’s got a 90s styling.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 90s car. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not a,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was so happy, now I’m so angry at the two of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John who doesn’t like a good

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wing?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all car-shaped and everything yeah, it’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t look that different from my from my very well-loved 96 Maxima that I had Hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a 2007 monster to six you guys why you got to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t mean it was designed in 2007