241: Jazzercise Boot Camp
29 Sep 2017Our reviews of Apple Watch Series 3 and High Sierra, and a special Neutral post-show.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Jazzercise 1982 video compilation
- Follow up:
#askatp- Being good beta citizens and not making @tapbot_paul angry
- APFS and Fusion drives
- Apple Watch Series 3 review
- 👋🏻⛰️
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Casey is a car journalist
Sponsored by:
- Jamf Now: Set up and protect your Apple devices at work, from anywhere. First 3 devices are free.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
Chapters
- Intro
- St. Jude fundraiser update
- ATP-fan naming update
- Apple TV fan update
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Downloading 4K to Apple TV
- Follow-up: “AirPower”
- Follow-up: Acura TLX DCT
- #askatp: Beta bug etiquette
- #askatp: APFS on Fusion Drives
- Sponsor: Jamf Now
- Apple Watch Series 3 review
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- High Sierra “review”
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Neutral 🖼️
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite has to be Jazzercise Bootcamp.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna go with Aerobics Bootcamp, but I’m like, no, let me try something more relevant, and Jazzercise came out, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not… It’s the same era. That’s more relevant? Well, you know, like in the moment, I’ve come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with something better than aerobics. Aerobics is so 80s, and Jazzercise, like, nope, didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Is Jazzercise like a real thing that people do or have done? Oh, Jazzercise
⏹️ ▶️ John real as a heart attack. Yes. Is it still?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, it’s still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is it? Is it just exercising to jazz music? What actually is it? I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know it was still going on. I remember it in the 80s. I haven’t seen it in years and years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am almost sure there’s a Jazzercise clinic or whatever you would call it near us. A
⏹️ ▶️ John clinic. Well, it’s still real in the South, obviously, where they live decades behind us culturally
⏹️ ▶️ John and intellectually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goddammit, John. Why do you have to be such an asshole?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Original workout 80s video. Oh my god. Yeah. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow. Jazzercise.com is still a thing and I will add that there is a Jazzercise clinic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever you call it, in Richmond.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this like what Richard Simmons did basically?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, jazzercise is a specific thing. It involves jazz…er, size.
St. Jude fundraiser update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a St. Jude fundraiser update. At the time in which we recorded, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory serves, we were challenging everyone to see if we could get to $20,000, I believe was the total we wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was it currently at when we said that? It was like 16 or 17, something like that, right? Yeah, it was like between 17 and 19,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think. So 20 was, I think, closer to 17. And 20 was certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attainable, but I mean, $3,000 is a pretty fair bit of money. So we had challenged everyone, hey, can we get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 20? And within, I think, 24 hours, probably 12 hours of you releasing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey final version of the show, we blew past 20, which is an excellent problem to have. So then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got on Twitter, and I believe one or both of you had chimed in on this, and I said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s see if we can do 25. And I felt like 25 is a pretty good reach goal when you’re just now hitting 20.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we blew past 25. At this point, I felt like I didn’t want to be like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t want to be obnoxious about it. So I kind of cooled off on my solicitations. And it might have been for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best because without any solicitations on my part, as we record, $33,258. Holy monkey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am genuinely so proud and excited. Obviously this is not strictly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP listeners, not by a long shot, but there certainly seemed to be a pretty heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upswing in activity after the episode released. And that genuinely makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me extremely happy. The Hackett family is very dear friends of ours. And more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is going to help all kinds of kids with cancer. And you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop the donations at the end of the month. This episode should be released right at the end of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month. And that’s when Steven concentrates on it, but there is no reason you can’t donate again or more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if you haven’t donated yet, do a little now. So I would love to see this get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even higher. $33,258. That is not all ATP, but it is at least in part ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So thank you everyone who through a little bit of your money toward trying to get rid of childhood cancer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s super awesome.
ATP-fan naming update
⏹️ ▶️ John Are we not reminding people that if we said if they pass 20k we would try to come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John a word to describe ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fans? The best answer we got there was tabs because there are thousands of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. No. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey best answer? Definitely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not saying we should use it but it was definitely the funniest answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Better than ATPons and ATPeeps both of which are worse than tabs but tabs is also pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m still thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. I feel like we should fulfill this promise but I’m not going to settle. I’m not gonna be like, well, it’s the best we can come up with. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I are already prepared to settle. I don’t like tabs at all, but I could settle on ATPons
⏹️ ▶️ John no. ATPons is insulting and ATPeeps has too many gross things.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only one I’ve come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so far… Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like forced touch. Yeah, yeah. So here’s what I have come up with so far, and I’m not saying this is
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but this is the best I’ve got so far in my processing. Sheila’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? What? Is this a reference I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John missing? So sheila’s is the generic word I believe some Australian can tell me for for
⏹️ ▶️ John women in Australia for a woman in Australia a sheila a woman or a girl right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And sheila’s we could just oh well it doesn’t mean that you’re a female listener it’s just a generic
⏹️ ▶️ John term it’s gender neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also the tank in Red vs. Blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it? I don’t remember that series as long time ago. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not a great one, but it’s the best I’ve come up with so far. And it’s mostly just me
⏹️ ▶️ John being angry about Tim’s on Hello Internet. That’s 100% what it is. But I also think it’s a fun exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John to allow a group of what we consider to be almost entirely men who listen to the show just stew
⏹️ ▶️ John in the idea of being referred to by a word that implies
⏹️ ▶️ John a gender that doesn’t match yours, and that you’re just supposed to eat it and say, well, It’s a gender neutral term, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I respect the effort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, same here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I agree with you on principle. However, it’s also terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Agreed. It’s not a good name for listeners, unfortunately. So far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the options that we have seen so far are terrible. So I think it’s probably safe to say we probably just won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco naming our listeners anything generic like this, because every option people suggested was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John awful. I know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we come up with a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, we will. If we wanted a name that really is gender agnostic, we could call all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the listeners Casey’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true I know cases of both genders
⏹️ ▶️ John no because that case I think Casey has a connotation besides they’re not all cases then what if they identify as a Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John there what if they’re what if they’re not a Miranda what if they’re a Samantha
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he represents everybody Casey is okay we’ve been told a number of occasions that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey represents well they use a gender term usually for this but they say Casey represents the every man
⏹️ ▶️ John mm-hmm they usually say the every woman want that don’t they there’s a woman every woman is a gender neutral term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who knows but I understand the point you’re driving at Marco, which is that most people will say, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was Marco or I wish I was John, but in actuality, I’m Casey, which is both flattering and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of depressing all at
⏹️ ▶️ John People wish they were Casey now too, because he’s got a fancy SUV and a BMW that works sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey harsh. That is so harsh, John. It is too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco soon. Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently work? What’s the current state?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have driven it only once in the last week, and that is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, we have after show stuff to discuss about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Yes. There are some after show things to discuss.
Apple TV fan update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so we should continue with our follow-up. I am…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny, this show, this episode of the show is really a rollercoaster, kids, because I was on the highest of highs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the St. Jude donations. However, now I’m at the lowest of lows because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was hoping that nobody would discover, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John understand this is preposterous. Just hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was hoping no one would discover that the Apple TV 4K does indeed have a fan. And of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course it was going to be discovered. I understand that but like in my fantasy world I was hoping that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody would know or that John would never find out he would go on the Todd Vaziri full media blackout with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Apple TV Because I bet you it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn quiet that you’ll never hear it. But now that you know, it’s there Oh, you’re gonna hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Last week last week where I said the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k has no fan Why did I say that? Because I asked on the show
⏹️ ▶️ John before that I asked, Hey, is anybody can anybody answer these questions for him? Because I had asked around and no one had been able to answer me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the person who sent me this answer, claim to work at Apple. And I believe this person because
⏹️ ▶️ John we get a lot of email from people who work at Apple. And they said, I was the before K has no fan. They also
⏹️ ▶️ John said the stuff about 24 frames per second that happened to be correct. And so I wrote the person back. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, oops, looks like you’re wrong on that one. And this person
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t say hi, just kidding. I don’t really work at Apple I was just pulling your leg but they said and said was
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing that Marco and Jason Snell said when I asked them about it they both had
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV 4k is in their possession and asked them hey guys does it have a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this was also this was before I fix it to the teardown so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search online beat to try to answer your question just to make sure like has anyone done a tear down to just verify this and there hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been one yet so the best they could do is like I’m not gonna I’m not gonna open mine up so my Let me let me just guess let me look
⏹️ ▶️ John well, listen to it. Anyway, I was Casey to your point. I’ve been checking the I fix it site since like,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to right after it right after The keynote because I’m like, maybe someone got review units. Maybe I fix this tearing them apart, you know Because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John I was actually actively looking at ifx it like every day to see for a tear down But I knew two people
⏹️ ▶️ John who had this thing So I asked them to confirm and they both either said I
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so I can’t tell or it just doesn’t seem like there’s a fan And so when I had the Apple employees say definitively
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no fan, I believe and this Apple employees excuse was They couldn’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John that they couldn’t they they thought there was no fan because they couldn’t hear anything because it was totally silent So they’re like, yeah, my bad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So anyway, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s suspicious because when you look at the bottom of it, it has a round pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of air holes The previous one had a solid bottom. It seemed to have no ventilation
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why this came up by the way, because I was tipped off off either during or right after the keynote of a
⏹️ ▶️ John public document on Apple site that showed like the line art like view of the thing showing the measurements and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it showed the holes and it’s like, Oh, holes. What does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here I was like I was I was using the Apple TV like letting it play content and I lift it up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I hear nothing. I like I mean I muted the sound so I so it’d be a quiet room lifted up. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear nothing. I put my hand under the vents to try to see if I could feel air movement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I felt nothing. And I was like, well what are these holes for? Maybe it’s just passively cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by convection using these holes like with a big heat sink inside, who knows? But I’m like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t think there’s a fan here. But it is weird that there’s these holes in a circular pattern here that would be perfect if you had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan behind it. But I could feel or hear nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I’m not quite sure, even after seeing the teardown, like, you know, a convection Or passive
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling with holes like that makes perfect sense a lot of things we don’t like that But there’s no holes on the top of this right only holes on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like there’s no intake holes, but so my theory here like if you ever done any kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know PC building with heat sink design You know that or just if you have better grasp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on science than me you probably already know this as well But but you know that like you know a passive just a heat sink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no fan on it When you compare the cooling power of that to a heat sink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has even a little slight bit of air movement being pushed over it. It’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. Like, you can have a fan running at incredibly low speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that will make a big difference from having no fan at all. So I’m guessing this fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably dynamically controlled, first of all. So I bet when I felt nothing under there, I bet it actually wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spinning, or it was spinning at a ridiculously low speed. And maybe only if you’re like really pushing it hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like using 3D stuff in a game, maybe that’s when it spins up. But like playing 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video, it was not doing anything noticeable. So I’m guessing it’s just a very low speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan that might have even not been spinning at all during that, during video playback.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet it’s always spinning, but that’s just a guess. But anyway, when I get this thing, I will tell you if I can hear it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the reason you should believe me, that’ll be honest, is because- There’s no way you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna hear it. No, it’s because Marco sent me an airport router that he didn’t want anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John that has a fan in it. And I was like, oh, fan. I knew it had a fan in it. I’m like, I don’t know if I want this thing with the fan. And he sent it to
⏹️ ▶️ John me. And as I think I said on the show when I got it, it has a fan, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way I can hear it is if I literally shove my ear like so it is touching the bottom of the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the only, and I can hear it when I do that. I can hear that it’s turning, but in every other scenario, I
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot hear it. Not like, oh, I can hear it faintly. You can turn off every device in my house, close all the windows, make sure everything is dead
⏹️ ▶️ John silent, and I can be two feet away from it, and I can’t hear a damn thing. So if the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is even remotely as quiet because it is like 10 feet away from me, in my TV entertainment center,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be fine. That said, if I put it up to my ear and actually physically touch it to my ear, I expect
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to hear it if the fan is moving. So we’ll see, I’m gonna get mine, mine’s delivering next week. So next show
⏹️ ▶️ John I will be able to give you an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm, I’m skeptical, I feel like you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John skeptical. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is, what I’m getting at is, I won’t care if I can hear it when I put it up to my ear, because I can’t hear it, if I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hear it, the same thing I don’t care about my airport thing. I don’t care that I can, I don’t use it, shove that to my ear. It’s not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s not a communicator That’s I have to jam into my ear. It’s way over there. So I’m perfectly happy
⏹️ ▶️ John to have fans that I literally can’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see I expect the truth the whole truth and nothing but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John truth. I will give it to you I was suggesting to Jason
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco like stick a toothpick in there and if something hits it
⏹️ ▶️ John is before they had the tear down I’m like look is there a fan or is there no fan? Is there a fan that you can’t hear or is there literally no fan and
⏹️ ▶️ John now we know the answer there’s actually a fan there, we just don’t know whether it’s spinning all the time, yada yada.
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Downloading 4K to Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, backblaze.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me about downloading movies from iTunes. Is that a thing on this box?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not 4K ones apparently. This is from Apple support document. You can download a local copy of an HD movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, I hate the fact that HD doesn’t refer to 4K because what is 4K if not high definition or even
⏹️ ▶️ John higher definition anyway? What is hi-fi? Yeah, yeah. And you might be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to download this is this is the direct quote, you can download a local copy of HD movie. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John might be able to download HDR and Dolby Vision versions. What do you mean I might like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you’ll let me maybe you won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s from Apple support document. It says you might be able to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, some maybe some are download right and it says then finally the last clause, but you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John download a 4k version. Now why can’t I download a 4k version? I have some theories in this. The
⏹️ ▶️ John one theory that people forward is like, Oh, the 4k versions are too big. And the as previously discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John and lamented theoretical fixed size, where you can download stuff is not big enough to fit a single 4k
⏹️ ▶️ John movie or it would take up all the space, right? It’s like, Oh, there’s too big to download. I don’t think that’s the case, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re they’re at VC, they shouldn’t be that much, you know, they shouldn’t be like 50 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John versus five, they should be bigger than the HD ones, but not like so big that you can’t download a
⏹️ ▶️ John single one of them. Although maybe they just say, Look, one of them is so big, it would take up all your space. And don’t want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that right another possibility is that as always you always have
⏹️ ▶️ John this as a possibility is that content owners are stupid and like you know we can’t let them download the 4k
⏹️ ▶️ John version because then people might be able to pirate our movies and as long as we stop them from downloading the 4k DRM
⏹️ ▶️ John encumbered version of our movies to their Apple TVs there’s no way anyone will ever pirate this movie and we’ll be safe from piracy
⏹️ ▶️ John so please don’t let anybody download like that’s definitely it that’s definitely the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John like It’s such a dumb thing. Like, I still, in this day and age where people, you know, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know why, but the bottom line is, if you were thinking that you were going to be able to get, to buy the big Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John so that you could download a 4K movie and then watch it offline on your Apple TV, you will not be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to because the Apple TV will not download the 4K versions of movies to local storage, it will only
⏹️ ▶️ John stream it. That’s dumb, I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So once again, why is the 64 gig version there? What?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know, games.
⏹️ ▶️ John They upped the limits by the way on games. It used to be like you could download like 200 megabytes and then you could
⏹️ ▶️ John download chunks of on-demand content. They upped it way more so then you can download like a gigabyte or more or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, in theory you could make very large games in Apple’s fantasy world of the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV as an actual gaming console. You could fill the whole thing with games.
Follow-up: “AirPower”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me about boot camp because Randy Garcia has written in to point out to us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that as we I guess was John I think brought up airpower as as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of military term that’s being Used by Apple as a product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name which by the way somebody did we talk about this last episode? Somebody said it should have been called Apple juice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody on Twitter said this like right when it was announced and I think that would have been a Terrible but much better name at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco same time. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have been hilarious. But anyway Okay, so Randy Garcia has written in to say that boot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camp is another military term that Apple has used and somebody, maybe Randy, has provided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deeply troubling video of Steve Jobs many years ago trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to act. Do you want to tell us about this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Yeah, well, so boot camp is the one I hadn’t thought of. It’s a good thing, a good call because I couldn’t recall a single
⏹️ ▶️ John other Apple product that had a military term in it. Although I would say that boot camp has got to have been co-opted
⏹️ ▶️ John and made secular, secular, of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco non-military not secular civilian sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of civilian yeah made civilian in a way that air power has not because now you have like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know uh they have jazzercise boot camps and programming boot camps and everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a boot camp like it’s basically just a training place and i guess they’re still riffing on the military one but anyway the
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing is i disqualify because it is internal
⏹️ ▶️ John only company communication and i don’t know if you’ve if you work at a big company, you’ve probably experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John communication targeted made by corporations targeted at their own employees.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re usually pretty awful. And you may think that Apple is an exception. But I can tell you that Apple in the 80s and 90s
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely was not an exception. There is a vast collection of internal audio
⏹️ ▶️ John and video content created by Apple for Apple’s employees only.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is cringe worthy and hilarious and some of its good fun to write. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John usually just a a bunch of engineers or a bunch of people in HR making a video with like 80s
⏹️ ▶️ John video technology like they didn’t they didn’t have an iMac with iMovie on it. They had like you know Betamax
⏹️ ▶️ John and VHS and probably fancier professional video stuff and they didn’t have actors.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had just like their employees and I think the one in question is Steve Jobs pretending
⏹️ ▶️ John to be who is it is it FDR or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right. I think it was FDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway you can watch me YouTube if you want to be sad about internal corporate communications but rest assured
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was no exception and probably continues to be no exception. They can make cool things externally
⏹️ ▶️ John but their internal facing corporate videos are not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite at the same standard.
Follow-up: Acura TLX DCT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our final piece of follow-up today is from a friend of the show, Sam Abuel-Samid, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is of the Wheel Bearings podcast. This is all going to come up again later in the after show. This was with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our comments about the Acura TLX that I had driven, or excuse me, had ridden in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He wrote to us to say, with regard to the comments about the DCT, the torque converters mounted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the flywheel and the dual clutch pack, and is intended to provide some torque multiplication and smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the shifts a bit. It’s work, but it’s nothing to get worked up about. and he provided a link to some more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey info. That strikes me as super freaking weird. Like the whole reason I tend to hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey automatics is because of that like that mushy feeling that a torque converter brings. And I understand the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motivation here. The motivation makes sense, but it’s just, you’re taking away the one thing I love about a DCT, which is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel it feels more direct to me than a traditional automatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one benefit I could see here is that when you’re driving a DCT, the shifting between like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first and second, like when you’re going at low speeds and you’re using first and second gear, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be very jerky, just like if you do it in a stick. You know, if you’re selling into a market that is accustomed to automatics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might feel too jerky to them. If you’re selling to stick people, it’s gonna feel perfectly awesome and normal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re selling to automatic people, I see why they would do that. I agree with you, though, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point, why not just use a really good eight or nine speed auto? And maybe that’s why their premium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option is just a nine or eight speed auto. But again, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefer a DCT that’s just a DCT without anything in front of it, but I do see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the market they’re selling, why they do that. But it just doesn’t make sense to me that they would bother with a DCT at all at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s a limitation of current DCTs that they can’t be that smooth down at low speeds,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because if someone using a manual can be, right? They just slip the clutch more. Like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John start and stop as smooth as you want, and apparently that’s not within the realm of, within
⏹️ ▶️ John the functional envelope of modern DCTs, most of which are tuned to shift very fast, like at the, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ John at the higher speeds, like not so much tuned for creeping out of a parking lot and rounding the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John on a residential road and you get a little bit of a bump and the TLX again trying to split the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John the TSX and the TL and erring on the side of being boring as always, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John went for the went for like the most important thing is not to jostle the occupants. So they took
⏹️ ▶️ John a sporty transmission and put a little bit of slush in between it and the wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John to smooth things out at low speeds. Maybe it would be better if that, if the torque converter wasn’t a factor
⏹️ ▶️ John at higher speeds or anything, but either way, like it’s such a sort of Frankenstein setup
⏹️ ▶️ John that, yeah, it is, it does seem much cleaner to either have, look, you either got an automatic or you got a stick
⏹️ ▶️ John or a DCT and they all have their their own behaviors and trying to combine them into sort of a hybrid suspension with
⏹️ ▶️ John the best of all worlds is just kind of papering over the flaws. Like it used to be when we had single clutch automated
⏹️ ▶️ John manuals that they were super rough, right? And there was slow shifting and very jerky and a dual
⏹️ ▶️ John clutch really helped because you could have the other gear set ready to go and swap very quickly without the
⏹️ ▶️ John harshness, right? But apparently there’s still problems at low speed. And so I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John in, you know, another five, 10 years, they work out the details and the Um, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they won’t need a hack like this. But anyway, TLX is not a great car anyway. You should, there, there are a lot of better choices in that price range. Fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. We’ve now lost all of the listeners, uh, who don’t really care about cars. So sorry, everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can come back now. We’re back and we’re going to talk Ask ATP.
#askatp: Beta bug etiquette
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s begin with Colin Weir, who writes, John’s rant about tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people forgetting betas, forgetting that betas are betas, reminded me of a question I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have. A lot of the times on iOS betas, I will find bugs and apps that I report to developers to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, this doesn’t work on the iOS 11 beta. I usually get a response along the lines of, yes, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a beta, betas aren’t supported. And then I’ll often see rants from people like TapBots Paul complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about people saying things are broken on betas. But an inherent part of the beta experience is reporting bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, that’s the reason betas exist. So if I want to be a good citizen and beta user and report issues I find,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how can I do it without annoying developers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is pretty simple, really. So when you’re on a beta, keep in mind that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some cases the developer has not had time to fix the bug that you are reporting because the beta just came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and they got it the same time you did. In a lot of cases, the developer can’t fix the bug that you’re reporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the GM SDK comes out, which could be months later, right before the version is released to the public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So mainly because we can’t submit builds to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store that use the beta SDK until the GM is out. The App Store won’t accept them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re telling someone that this is broken in the form of a complaint,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I demand that you fix this quickly, damn it, that’s really frustrating for developers to here because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably know about that already and they probably can’t fix it yet or haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a chance to fix it yet and it doesn’t really matter because it’s still a beta. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are trying to leave a nasty review in some ways, fortunately iOS has prevented this in recent versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually you aren’t able to leave reviews from betas anymore, from beta OS anymore, which is nice. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would also be a thing not to do. But if you’re just telling somebody in a civil way, like, hey, there’s this bug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought you might want to know about it. totally fine. And we as developers need that and appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That’s good. So as long as it’s not a one star review, or using the tone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or phrasing of like a complaint that you expect it to be fixed, all of a sudden, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the key part here is like, how do I be a good beta user? And what are you a beta user of? If you’re a beta
⏹️ ▶️ John user of the operating system, you should report it be reporting bugs to Apple, not to third party developers. The only way
⏹️ ▶️ John you should be reporting books, a third party developers is if you are on like the overcast beta, and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to know, here’s a beta of overcast, how does it work? And in that case, Marco would probably tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to test this beta on a released version of the operating system, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no third party developers are going to support their applications on unreleased versions of the operating system, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna, they may ask, they may use it themselves and ask their beta testers use it, but they inevitably want to know,
⏹️ ▶️ John how’s is gonna work on the real release version. So if you’re not a beta tester of the application you’re reporting
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs on, you don’t have to feel like you have to be a good beta citizen because you’re not on that beta.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re beta testing iOS, the way to be a good citizen is report bugs you find in the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. Now, does Apple wanna know that some third-party application you have
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work on it? Probably not, but it’s a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John black hole. Throw over whatever bug reports you want, let them do with what they want. But I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple is looking for are bugs in the operating system itself, of which there are usually plenty.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you want to be a good beta system and you want to report bugs, do that. Right. But and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to report bugs on third party iOS apps, talk to the developer and say, hey, can I be on your
⏹️ ▶️ John beta program the next time you have a beta ready? Send it to me and I will try it and report bugs. And they would appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything John just said is wrong. Thank you. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John are you trying to say? don’t you don’t want people to report bugs and overcast or you want them to report bugs about how your application
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work on beta OS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that I would only want bug reports from overcast beta users is completely wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, but like I’m saying, if you want to be a good beta, if you want to be a good beta citizen, like they’re not a beta citizen if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not using like, how would they even get to overcast beta if they’re not on your beta? You see what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but like if you if you’re using my app on a beta OS and you run into a bug, I would like to know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Chances are I probably already know about it, but what if I don’t? You know, my beta groups are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really small, and most of the time I don’t have a current beta running. So I want to know about that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the idea that you should only report bugs on the OS if you’re testing an OS beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is totally wrong. I don’t know any developer who wouldn’t want those reports.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s how you be a good beta citizen, because you’re testing a beta of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John TapBots Paul apparently doesn’t want to hear your complaints about their broken things, because they know they’re broken on the beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. Well, no, but again, I think it’s a difference of tone. It’s a difference of like, hey, just so you know, this is broken versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I demand that you fix this. You know, that’s a very different tone. And one of them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helpful and one of them is not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think even just reporting, especially if it’s a well-known bug or reporting it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s almost no way to say it if you were the 900th person telling somebody that their app crashes on launch
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iOS 11 beta. Like there’s almost no way you can say that. not going to eventually drive people crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John and I feel like I don’t think that’s a particularly useful thing to be doing like especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s something like crashes on launch if the developer doesn’t know that they don’t care about the app anymore and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hopeless right chances are good they know it crashes on launch and they’re addressing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if it only crashes on launch on a phone you don’t use I don’t know you know like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why like these I can’t think of a situation where I would not want those reports even if I’m getting a hundred of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then then I’ll tweet from the account saying hey just you know I know about this. Thanks for your reports.” Then you could not report the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. But like you know if if something like that happens, I want to know. To be a good citizen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how about don’t expect a response. If the developer is getting tons of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, then they won’t be able to respond to all of them. But like yeah by all means, please tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We need like that’s the point of betas. Even if they aren’t our software in beta, even if it’s the OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software in beta, we still need to know that’s kind of that kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I I think we need to survey more developers to ask them if they really want people testing their applications on beta OSs
⏹️ ▶️ John and giving them bug reports because I have almost always heard the opposite. That please do not
⏹️ ▶️ John do not send me reports of how my application doesn’t work on a beta version of the OS because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like it’s almost like a support function. Don’t contact me through support channels if you’re not on my beta to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me that my application doesn’t work in a beta OS like they just don’t want to hear it and maybe they’re just frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’re right. It’s just about tone. frustrated complaint and really it’s super valuable for them and
⏹️ ▶️ John they just eventually reach their limit and snap but I’ve always heard the opposite. Not that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sending these reports by the way. You just save them for the podcast. I’m being
⏹️ ▶️ John a good beta citizen. I don’t even send Apple the bug reports.
#askatp: APFS on Fusion Drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Paul writes to ask, do you think APFS will be supported on Fusion Drives and future builds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of High Sierra? So chief summarizer and chief summary, APFS was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supported on Fusion Drives, which are these kind of weirdo scenarios where you have a spinning disk and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD that is kind of melded to be one volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure that’s not going to satisfy John, but for the purposes of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco conversation, that’s all you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to know. And so they were supported in betas of High Sierra. And then when the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GM happened, oh, just kidding. There is no Fusion Drive support for you. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to have to reformat to HFS plus if you want to go to High Sierra. So the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think, I guess, John, do you think that this will be supported in future builds?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, I do. Because Apple has shipped a lot of Fusion Drives and I think they don’t want HFS plus hanging around
⏹️ ▶️ John and they almost had it working. So they’ll eventually get it working. I expect
⏹️ ▶️ John it. What is future? How many points do we have to go through? How difficult is it? I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I do expect it. I’ll be surprised if it’s not supported.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, Craig Federighi sent an email to somebody allegedly saying, yes, it’s coming in a future version, basically. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. Oh, fair enough. All right, well, that’s it for Ask ATP. As always, you can tweet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your questions with the hashtag, AskATP, and our magic spreadsheet will find them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pick them up, and then we will answer them if we think they’re good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No pressure. With continued apologies to the Upgrade podcast, where we stole this from.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t need to apologize. They’ve been they’ve been amply credited.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like all three households have received new toys in the last week, although not all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosts. So the Apple Watch Series 3 is out. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been received as of this past Friday by those who had preordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically at the obscene hour of three in the morning if you live on the East Coast like all three of us do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three households have received them. Marco, you and or Tiff have one? How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many did you get for the two of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all? Just one. Tiff decided she didn’t want one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. And then I got one for myself and actually Erin got a non-sell
⏹️ ▶️ John Although for Erin and Tiff, by the way, what were their reasons for saying they don’t want to sell?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, Tiff decided she didn’t want the watch at all. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that settles that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For Erin, there’s never a time she expects to be that far away from her phone to justify spending the extra money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each month. And Erin likes her watch, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair to say, but doesn’t love her watch. She views it mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a second screen in terms of notifications and very little else. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of that, she didn’t seem to think it was worth the extra money each month. And if she knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she was never, ever, ever going to pay for cell service, then why bother paying the extra money for the cell
⏹️ ▶️ John But she did want a new watch, then. She’s got a new one just because her current watch is slow, or you thought she should just
⏹️ ▶️ John get one so you feel less bad about getting an expensive new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch? All of the above. Her current watch, or her previous now watch, was a Series Zero, as was mine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was slow. And she has a 38 millimeters. The battery life was getting to be comically bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the course of two years, which is to some degrees to be expected. And I was spending a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of money on my fancy new watch, and I figured, you know, if I’m going to get a fancy new watch, then she should get a fancy new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John watch. And she— Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the solution to spending money and feeling guilty about it is just spend more money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. This is the Marco approach. And now the Casey approach, it seems. Have I taught you nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, anyway, so yeah. So your wife has or has not received hers yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John She has not received it yet. It’s a birthday gift.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. So I won’t be able to ask you about your experience then, but I will start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by asking Marco, because I suspect you will not have too much to say about this. Famous last words.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What is your experience?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What has your experience been with your Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not really used the LTE yet, because I mainly got the LTE so I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build Overcast with it when the API lets me do that. And I hope that is soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that is the main reason I got it, because I know, because all of my customers are asking for it so I figured I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need that for testing. Hello! But the the for the rest of the series 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fantastic. I mean it’s the the way that the keynote phrased the speed improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t sound like it was that big of a difference. It sounded like it was like an incremental speed update. It’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a massive speed upgrade from even the series 2 which itself, and series 1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which themselves were massive speed upgrades from the original Series Zero. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still have a Series Zero and you are at all thinking about upgrading, upgrade. It is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly fast device now. Not like phone speed, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that you’re never waiting for anything, but compared to where it was, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge speed upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree with that and I’d also like to quickly double down and say that the The battery life improvement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me anyway, has also been tremendous. So I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you. If you’re listening to this and you have a Series Zero watch, and that’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one I have experience with, I can’t speak for Series One or Series Two, if you have a Series Zero watch and you’re thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eh, maybe it’s time, it’s time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco because this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is way better, both speed-wise, as Marco said, and in my experience so far in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery life as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep in mind also with battery life, I was thinking about this the other day, like, the The Apple Watch is so dependent on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having adequate battery life. If your watch dies in the middle of the day, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really makes it a lot less useful to you. If it can’t make it the whole… And this is one of the reasons why Apple is so conservative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how it spends its power budget. It’s one of the reasons why the OS is so limited, why apps are so limited. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your phone dies three quarters of the way through a day, you can plug it in somewhere for a few minutes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then get back to using it again. With your watch, that’s really inconvenient. you just have to take it off, put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere, you probably don’t even have a lot of extra chargers for it, because they’re this separate thing, it’s kind of a pain, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this giant magnetic disc thing. So most people are gonna have one charger, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be next to their bed at night. So if your battery life sinks down to the point where it can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it a full day, that dramatically reduces your happiness and the usefulness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that device. So because these batteries degrade over time, I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of people are gonna be replacing them about every two to three years, even if they’re totally happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them, just because the battery will start fading and it’ll cross the point where it’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer making it through a full day for them, and that’s gonna suck. So if you have a Series Zero, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco describes you, which I’ve heard this is roughly the time that that’s really starting to happen with a lot of the Series Zeros,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the battery is just not making it anymore. If you have a Series Zero, and you are at all thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrading, this is a good time to do that, and these are great. I’m incredibly happy with them. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m probably gonna have to upgrade eventually too, because even though I don’t wear my Apple Watch, except for a few weeks a year, I do wear
⏹️ ▶️ John it a few weeks a year. And my Series Zero, it’s, I mean, the battery’s okay, but it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in rough shape. Like, it’s so angry at me because I don’t wear it. I just leave it on its charger, sitting on my, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John dresser or whatever. I tried to upgrade it to watchOS 4, which took me like three days to complete, because
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone wouldn’t connect to it, or it would tell me it’s downloading, or it would say, download over Zoom when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to Wi-Fi, when I was totally on Wi-Fi, I’m like a foot from the Wi-Fi router and everything’s connected to Wi-Fi, or it said
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t connect to the phone, but the watch could ping the phone and say it was connected. I rebooted both
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. In the end, what I had to do was wipe the entire watch and start over and restore from a
⏹️ ▶️ John backup as the only way. And then I’m restoring from a watchOS 3 backup. And then once that got on, then finally I could upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John to 4, which still takes a year and a day to actually run. But I was glad to see that
⏹️ ▶️ John big circular progress bar and the four hour wait for it to upgrade. So anyway, now my Series Zero
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Watch is running the new OS, but I think I will actually buy a new one. I just, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t want to because I really like the stainless steel one and it costs a tremendous amount of money and I rarely wear
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But in the end, I probably will get a new one, not this year, but like next year or the year
⏹️ ▶️ John after. What will happen is I’ll go to WWDC or go on vacation one year and my watch won’t make it through the day
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said, and I’ll be like, well, that’s it. I’d like either, either I don’t have a Bible watch anymore, I have to buy a new one and and in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end I’ll probably buy a new one. But not this year. Although who knows, maybe seeing my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John use her cool cellular Dick Tracy watch should convince me that I should get one, but I doubt it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, hey, if you get one, you can switch back to your flip phone. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John God. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think I still have my flip phone somewhere, but I can’t go back. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word. No, and one other thing on the speed, too. Like, I would say, you know, again, like it doesn’t make it like a super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast device, but this is, I think, this is the first Apple Watch that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with all of that. So I got my Apple Watch Series 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late-ish Friday. I typically go and I do my exercise on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, generally speaking. So it wasn’t until this past Monday and Tuesday that I was able to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going for a run without my phone, which is kind of weird. I mean, I’ve only been running semi-consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few months. It’s not like I’m some expert forever long runner. And even in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a few months, gotten used to having my phone either in my hand careening out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my bum bag as I’m trying to put it in said bag, which is why my screen broke, or bouncing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around on my tailbone as it’s in my sort of kind of fanny pack. Hello, the UK.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You mean your sit bone? Yes, yes. That’s totally it, except not at all. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is it was very weird, but immediately very freeing not to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to carry my phone, which is super cool. So I put in my AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had previously downloaded some music onto my watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected my AirPods to my watch, and I started listening to music, started a run and run keeper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and went on my run. And it was really, really awesome. There are some problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this though. Number one, I don’t want to listen to music. I want to listen to podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can barely keep up with all my podcasts as it is, and running is a really great time for me to plow through,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, maybe one episode or an episode and a half or whatever of some of my favorite shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I don’t bring my phone, then I’m not listening to podcasts. And that’s a bummer. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only I knew the guy that uses my, that writes my podcast client app, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of choice, maybe I could put in a good word with him about how I’d really love some overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch support. And I understand what the problems are. And you wrote a really, really great post about it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this week’s Under the Radar, You talked about kind of the same thing. So as much as I joke, I’m not actually beating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you up about it because I know your hands are tied, but please, please Apple, give Marco the tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Give Marco the tools so we can have this nice thing. We just want nice things. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve already talked about the battery life. Battery life is tremendous as compared to previous. I have gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on not only a couple of runs with the watch, but also I have taken Declan to the little park that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within our neighborhood a few times. Generally speaking in the past, I brought my phone, which means I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often tempted to look at like Twitter or Instagram or whatever, instead of playing with Declan because I’m a terrible father
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not having my phone with me makes it much harder to look at Twitter or Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. Because I don’t have those apps on my watch and that’s been really awesome. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been less awesome is replying to text messages and things like that, because it seems that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about one time in three, the text messages just, the text message just doesn’t send.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I say text message, I mean both iMessage and text message. So that’s kind of a bummer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a big bummer. I don’t know if that’s a software problem. I don’t know if it’s a hardware problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m guessing it’s a software thing, but that really bums me out. The other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s been a little bit troubling is I have seen a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very small version of the bug that about half of the reviewers hit insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I run, I’m running in my neighborhood, And at one point or another, I will pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house because I start a little bit past the house. I run for a while, pass the house again, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I end. I end where I started. And I realized as I was coming to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of my run, which is close to the house but past the house, I was attempting to do something. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall exactly what it was. Maybe I was just seeing what the status was because this is all new to me and I’m trying to figure out, okay, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long does it take to get on the cell radio and when does it fall off the cell radio, et cetera, et cetera. I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I ran past the house, it picked up my Wi-Fi, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it tried to cling to it longer than it really should have, which I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blame the device because it’s of course going to try to power off the cell radio. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course going to try to hang onto the Wi-Fi because that radio is far less power expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to keep on. But what ended up happening was for the last, I don’t know, 300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yards of my run, I had no connectivity because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was still trying to find the Wi-Fi that I had already run past. So that was kind of a bummer. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general, though, I don’t have that problem. I leave the cell, I leave the software for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cell radio enabled. And what I mean by that is it can go on cellular anytime it wants. I have not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid any attention to like turning that off or anything like that. And 99% of the time, my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is right there, so it wouldn’t power the cell radio on anyway. But But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been maintenance-free in that regard, which is really nice. And so far, I really, really, really like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I’m glad that I have the cell service for the runs, and even more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for when I’m out with Declan and I don’t wanna be attracted to my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is absolutely a first-world problem. It is absolutely a Casey problem in that I should just have the self-control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to check Twitter every four seconds or Instagram or what have you. But I know myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to know that I don’t have a tremendous overabundance of self-control. And so removing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this problem by removing my phone from the equation is a pretty good way to fix it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost put TweetBot on my watch for instances where I’m, say, DMing with somebody or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it occurred to me by putting TweetBot on my watch, I will be defeating the purpose that I’ve set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out for my watch, which is to say being able to be distraction-free. Another couple things I’ve noticed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I upgraded to High Sierra and I could use Unlock with my watch again, because apparently there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that causes issues with the cellular watch and Sierra and below.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you have to be on High Sierra for your cellular watch to do watch unlock. Once I upgraded two of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my three computers to High Sierra, that has come back and that seems to be faster than my Series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zero by generally speaking, a pretty comfortable margin. Apple Pay is way faster. In the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of months that I had my Series Zero, I’d kind of abandoned using Apple Pay on the watch because it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much slower than my phone. And it is a fair bit faster on the Series 3,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I really like. All in all, the combination of the Apple Watch Series 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with LTE, with AirPods, is pretty darn fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only things that I’m really longing for are an update to RunKeeper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it will take a note of the map of what I ran. Because if you use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercise app that’s built into the watch, it will save a map to your health app. But Runkeeper hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built in support for that API yet, which is a real bummer. And again, I want podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my watch. Pretty please Apple, please look at Marco’s post and give me podcasts on my watch. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I want, please, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a volume widget, please, for the love of God. No one cared about a volume widget on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch until AirPods. And now, because AirPods don’t have a good way to control volume physically on them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody is demanding that with good reason. And yeah, I can’t offer it. Like there is no API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to offer them a volume widget for either phone or watch audio levels. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kills me. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So those are my thoughts. I definitely recommend it. I definitely think it’s good. I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am glad I spent the money on both it and the cellular service on top. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving it two thumbs up so far. Really, really love this device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the only thing I would add is like, it seems like the, like what we’re seeing with the cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, holding onto wifi and everything else, you know, this is clearly a device that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for power reasons has to use the LTE as little as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say it’s a good device to get, you know, if you have like a specific use case in mind like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey at the park or running without a phone, like that makes a ton of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say don’t assume this device is just gonna be always happily using its LTE the way like an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would. it’s going to minimize LTE so aggressively that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more useful to think of the LTE thing as a just in case I need it kind of thing. Like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a run and you don’t wanna be without a way to make a phone call in case of an emergency or you wanna be reachable by people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it makes sense for that. But I wouldn’t necessarily say that it makes sense to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the LTE version with the assumption that you’ll be using it just like a tiny phone. Because not only is it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, very, very conservative with when it uses the LTE at all. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app-wise, the apps are not really ready for that yet. There were good segments about app readiness on other podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, and there was a great one on Upgrade especially, and I think a little more on Connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But basically, yeah, it was Connected. But basically, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for Apple Watch have been written to date with the assumption that they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the phone and their corresponding app on the phone for all their communication.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the watch really couldn’t do much until fairly recently with its own communication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and until like last week that was only on Wi-Fi. And because nobody really went with the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without their phone and did much with it, there wasn’t much reason to really write the apps for that. So Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party apps still have a, and even first-party apps frankly, still have a long way to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they can really make good use of independent connectivity on the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the hardware probably needs a couple more generations before it’s really able to use the LTE radio more than occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. So buy it if you want to be reachable and to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lifeline, like that kind of use when you are out without a phone. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t necessarily say buy it just for entertainment to go phone-less like Casey at the park,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s not ultimately what it’s for and it’s not what it’s optimized to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, you can bring your phone to the park, man. Like kids at the park, Yeah, we love our kids, but they’re there a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s okay to bring your phone and look at Instagram while they’re climbing the monkey bars and everything. When you aren’t even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they’re not interacting with you, when they’re just running around, you can look at your phone, it’s okay. I give you permission to
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you look up and they’re gone, you don’t have to blame yourself. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, I know. I think part of the problem is that this particular park, it’s just in the neighborhood, so it’s usual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s only Declan and I that are there. And beyond that, he’s still in the phase where everything is daddy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this or really mommy this, and then if mommy isn’t there, daddy this. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s better if I am not distracted by something else and better if I’m paying more attention to him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, Hamiltonor in the chat points out a very good thing. Bring your phone to take pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, as people are realizing they can now go out into the world with just their watch, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them I’ve seen are also realizing, oh, crap, I don’t have a camera when I do that, and I’m used to always having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the thing is, and actually Mike and I talked about this very briefly on the forthcoming episode of Analog,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if I was going to bring a camera to the park, I would probably bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the big camera because I think the pictures are much, much, much better coming off of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, once I get my fancy iPhone 10 in 2020 when it’s finally available, then that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might change when I have my fancy, you know, two lens camera system. But for now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be more apt to bring watch and big camera than I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually a reasonable plan. I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I mean, obviously, this is kind of a unique to Casey use case, and that may not be the case for everyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I would agree with what you said a minute ago. Like if you, the listener, have a particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set of times that you think this would be useful to you, for example, exercise, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a situation where you don’t have access to Wi-Fi or anything else, so often but not always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outdoor exercise. Or if you just are like me and don’t have very good self-control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I think having a watch with LTE makes sense. And certainly one of the nice things is if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to just see what you thought, you could get a watch with LTE and just choose not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to enable it. So yes, it’s I think $70 extra up front, but you don’t have to incur that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monthly fee until you feel like you might want it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you don’t really have a particular use like that in mind, I agree with Marco that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it may not really be worth the money. What do you think of the Red Dot now that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish the Red Dot wasn’t there. Agreed. I have yet to see any model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except the white ceramic where I think it looks good. I think it looks okay or passable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the steel ones and maybe okay on the gold aluminum one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s about the best I could say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough. I think I feel the same way. I wish it wasn’t there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish I had an option to not have it there. I like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I could pay- There’s always watchdots. Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t trust myself to apply it in such a way that it won’t look like garbage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that is. Yeah, yeah. I’d be afraid of that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, if I could, I do believe if I could pay a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of extra money to have a version without the dot, I probably would have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just gotta find somebody who paints miniatures and
⏹️ ▶️ John in there with some enamel and
⏹️ ▶️ John carefully paint. You’ll never notice it, it’ll be practically perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, something like that. I don’t know, but overall, I was expecting to like the watch. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I am a pretty big fan of the Apple Watch as a platform, and I was expecting to like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new one a fair bit, And it turns out I really like this new watch a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is a very worthwhile upgrade. The cell, like we just discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe, maybe not. For me, absolutely. Marco, I suspect if and when you get overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working and if and when you decide to ditch your phone for bike rides, I think you’ll be more enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the cellular radio. But in general, I can see that one going either way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I definitely say this is a worthwhile upgrade I’m super duper happy with my purchase.
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High Sierra “review”
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John. So tell me about Hi Sierra and tell me, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgraded my MacBook Adorable, I have upgraded my work computer. Am I allowed to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iMac that I’m recording on as we speak? Not to say that I’m going to upgrade as we’re recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course, but am I allowed to upgrade my iMac, John? What’s the deal?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do what you want. It’s your iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what is the official John Syracuse review of Mac OS High
⏹️ ▶️ John The review is I still haven’t used it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my word, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have literally never used it because I didn’t install any of the betas and I don’t have it on any of my
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. Now why don’t I have it on any of my Macs? Well, obviously the Mac Pro that I’m talking to right now can’t run it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John never did do the whatever, you know, firmware upgrade trickery to make it run Sierra and
⏹️ ▶️ John therefore also run High Sierra. also run high Sierra, I probably never will. So that’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ John My work computer, we are not allowed to install it at work yet because of some Active Directory bugs that are supposedly fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 1013 one beta. But right now, if you try to install it, one of our
⏹️ ▶️ John works incredibly invasive, please don’t let me know how this actually works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hackery things is when you double click the Sierra installer, a dialogue pops up with a message written
⏹️ ▶️ John by our corporate IT that says you can’t install it. I’m hoping they didn’t patch the binary
⏹️ ▶️ John of the installer but whatever mechanism they have to intercept the launch of a particular application and throw up an
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrary message in a dialogue, god I don’t even want to know. So anyway I can’t upgrade the work one
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be the one I would you would be most likely to upgrade because I would have some faith that the IT
⏹️ ▶️ John team that I was just complaining about had tested it and made sure all our stuff works on it and it’s like practically brand new like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all fresh and like like I haven’t done anything weird to it. So if any computer is gonna work okay with it, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be that one. And then finally, my wife’s computer, which I thought I was gonna upgrade on day one, I found
⏹️ ▶️ John myself with cold feet. Not so much about APFS, although
⏹️ ▶️ John there are some issues with that, like SuperDuper that I used to clone just now has like beta support for
⏹️ ▶️ John cloning from it. But really, I’m getting cold feet about the.0. And in a way I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John with Sierra, I just, I don’t know. maybe it’s a combination like just the point zero
⏹️ ▶️ John is not enough to scare me away and just a PFS is not enough to scare me both of them. I’m hedging so I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John downloaded the installer and I’ve done like a fresh round of backups and clones and made sure all my
⏹️ ▶️ John backups are good and you know, I’ve done all this stuff I’m all ready to install but I thought I would pull the trigger and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like I’m, I’m not pulling the trigger and mostly what I would be upgrading for is the new version
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos not for a PFS was obviously I like that and I wanted and I’ll get it eventually but I wanted to try the new
⏹️ ▶️ John version of photos but that has me a little bit scared too. So I may turn out that I just wait for the point
⏹️ ▶️ John one, especially if the point one is due out soon. But right now I’ve been too much of
⏹️ ▶️ John a wimp to try it. So I’m just, I’m just in a holding pattern waiting to see other
⏹️ ▶️ John things, to let other people go first and see what kind of disasters befall them. And this is kind of weird for me because I upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ John almost all the other ones. I always upgraded my wife’s computer, like as soon as it comes out, just, you know, why not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s fine. But this time, I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. I don’t think there’s anything particular about High Sierra, because again, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John used any of the beta, so I have nothing to base my fears on. But I think the combo
⏹️ ▶️ John of APFS and the.0 is keeping me away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am surprised by that. Me too. So Marco, have you upgraded anything yet, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only my laptop. I would like to upgrade my desktop mostly for the media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format support, but that’s pretty much the only thing that is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compelling for me right now. And the thing is like I’ve really been burned a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the last few Mac OS releases. Ever since the Discovery D fiasco,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much every, almost every major version of Mac OS in the last few years has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken some subsystem that I rely on for a little while. Sometimes for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire release cycle. I’m pretty sure Sierra still messes up Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input devices. I still think Bluetooth is messed up in Sierra. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people have reported, were reporting USB audio bugs earlier on in Sierra’s life cycle and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is my work machine. I can’t afford downtime of my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my main Mac here. I do my entire job here. The idea of taking a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk on high Sierra in early on in its life cycle. With
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sierra, it’s kind of like the devil you know. It’s like I know Sierra is buggy with Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pointing devices So it’s like I’m used to my mouse and trackpad just occasionally just Disconnecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for no reason and then reconnecting like I’ve gotten used to that now, you know with high Sierra I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what this year’s discovery D is yet You know, I’ve heard lots of reports that it’s that it’s the Windows Server rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and I don’t know like when I ask people on Twitter like hey, you know, what is is high Sierra? Okay, or not. What have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been your experiences? the responses were pretty evenly split between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s totally perfect, I’ve had no problems, and oh my god it’s been a disaster for mostly for the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Server things. So I assume that it mostly works if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing things the way Apple want you to do but if you have some kind of you know workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or setup that is that puts a strain on edge cases of the Windows Server. So for instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are Frequently connecting or disconnecting monitors or using clamshell mode maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that kind of thing I bet it’s probably more likely to have bugs Related to the Windows Server
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a particular GPU like
⏹️ ▶️ John Particular Nvidia GPU of a particular isn’t Steve Trout and Smith have some computer with some Particular GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that just kernel panics like based on a clock like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you can just say
⏹️ ▶️ John And 30 minutes in the kernel panics like that’s the thing about a lot of these graphics subsystem things in the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John Server that deal with GPU drivers, it could be perfectly fine for you because your GPU driver has
⏹️ ▶️ John no problems. And for someone else, it doesn’t matter how lightly or heavily you use it, if you’re disconnecting or turning them on, it’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John your GPU, the driver for it has some bug that gets tripped on average after every 30 minutes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard that as well. And I don’t know if that’s making me wear it because I assume I don’t want to have one of those weird
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs, but who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of thing, I’m just not willing to take the risk on my main computer when there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still widespread reports of problems of that magnitude. The advantages of High Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just not very compelling for me to take that risk right now. Over time, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calculus will change. Over time, it will start to become more annoying that I don’t have the latest version because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things around the Apple ecosystem these days will assume that you have the latest version and will only work correctly or fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the latest version, especially with features that are shared between iOS and the Mac. Things like, you know, like continuity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and handoff. Even simple things like notes. Notes has new features now. Um, the HVC and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco H and, and he stuff like that’s going to become more annoying over time as, as my photos app can’t edit the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones that are in it. Um, things like that, like that’s going to eventually push me over probably within the next few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’m, I’m, I’m probably just gonna install the 0.1 and hope that it fixes everything. Um, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 0.2, but basically right now, why should I install it? Like there’s no, There’s not much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to install it. And there’s just a lot of potential for there still to be pretty serious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with it that I just don’t need to be the one to fix. You know, like when I was at Tumblr,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of my rules was that, you know, when I was choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software or infrastructure that we were going to build upon, one of my rules was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to never be the biggest user of anything. You know, you want to use stuff that like Facebook uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Twitter uses because you know if there’s any kind of bug at scale, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have already hit it and probably will have submitted and fixed fixes for it. It’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fixed by them long before it’s ever a problem for you. And similarly with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS beta, why install the point zero? Why not let the entire rest of the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it first, report all the bugs, get Apple to fix them, and then install the point one or the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two? It’s selfish. We should, as a social good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to contribute with everybody. But no, screw that. I need my computer to work, and so I’ll let everyone else do that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll sit back and collect the fixes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of computer reliability, my shiny new space gray 2017
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro has already proven to not be as reliable as my
⏹️ ▶️ John outgoing eight-year-old 2009 Mac Pro at work. Because I’ve had it
⏹️ ▶️ John for what, like two weeks now or something? I came in one day this week and it was just off
⏹️ ▶️ John and I booted up and sure enough it had kernel panicked in the middle of the night at like 3am.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sitting there,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody’s using it, who knows what was going on, I didn’t get anything good, I did do the send, you know, send
⏹️ ▶️ John report to Apple, I looked at the thing, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, like it didn’t, nothing obvious jumped in, it didn’t even look
⏹️ ▶️ John like a full crash report, whatever it had saved in NVRAM, it was like just information about my system but
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t tell me about what had crashed or show me any symbols or anything like that. I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it wants to match my 2009 Mac Pros performance, it needs to
⏹️ ▶️ John not kernel panic again for another seven
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Pro did kernel panic.
⏹️ ▶️ John It did kernel panic a couple of times when they first installed the terrible antivirus software that they were forcing
⏹️ ▶️ John us all to use because it apparently had an incompatibility with like Xeons or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the story. Like, oh, you’re the only computer in the entire company with a Xeon in it and
⏹️ ▶️ John the antivirus software, kernel panics, reliably kernel panics, Xeons. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John changed to a different antivirus thing, and so that solved that problem. So those were the only panics I had, and those were explicable, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I could tell what was doing it. Let me see, did we have any other kernel panics in that
⏹️ ▶️ John one? Maybe, when I gave away, well, gave away, when I returned my 2009 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro at work, I also returned all the stuff that came with it, and you know what came
⏹️ ▶️ John with it? Snow Leopard on a plastic disk. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s what came out of this
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I had some kernel bandwidths back in it, but in general it’s just not a thing that I expect to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so within the first few weeks of it happening, remember this is running Sierra, not high Sierra but like 10.12.6,
⏹️ ▶️ John the latest version of Sierra. Not off to an auspicious start, but
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well, at least it boots fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the thing to remember too is like, you know, these macOS releases on a schedule,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not when it’s done. Apple usually ships high quality stuff. We complain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but their track record’s pretty good. But there’s also a hierarchy. You can be pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when a new iPhone comes out, that’s usually pretty solid, because they care a lot about that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they work really hard on that to make that rock solid. But everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else beneath the iPhone gets less and less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that way. You can’t be sure that a lower priority release is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as solid as iPhone hardware. Everything else has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically ship on a schedule whenever it’s ready. And again, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works out okay. But they were going to ship High Sierra when they did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless of whether it was done. So we got it and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably close to done. probably aren’t a lot of bugs but that was shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a schedule not after hitting a certain quality threshold so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s right that they do do it on a schedule but they control scope like even on iOS they do they control scope so they have
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s either you either can can change the schedule by saying we’re gonna push this out or you can narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John the scope so you can ship what is shippable and they did it in iOS too they didn’t ship that one feature I wanted the most which
⏹️ ▶️ John is the iMessage syncing that
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the release right? Because you’re right, they are shipping on a schedule. Look, we got to ship this because we got to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John some phones here and we got to ship iOS 11 and whatever it was like a month before that
⏹️ ▶️ John fell out because it’s like this is not going to be ready in high Sierra APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John on fusion drives and automatically converting spinning disks all fell out of it and fusion drives coming back right
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s what they’re trying to do is say we do want to ship on a schedule but we want to ship quality software
⏹️ ▶️ John so we have to make a call at a certain point not going to be ready in time for the schedule. So guess what feature
⏹️ ▶️ John you get booted out of the OS. And that’s that’s easy to do in theory. But in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling features out is not a harm free process, you’re left
⏹️ ▶️ John with a code base that is different than it was before, that may have new interactions that you didn’t anticipate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you now you have to test that new combination of stuff. And so it is difficult. And I see what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do. And in general, that’s how modern software development works. You usually they
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to have a reasonably fixed schedule, especially for something that’s like a marketing type thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where every year you want to have a new version of iOS or whatever. And you just control scope. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s easier said than done. And that’s what I was trying to do. But as you said, Marco, you know, even though they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the same strategy and both OS is the big show is iOS, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else in the the company gets slightly less of everything slightly less time,
⏹️ ▶️ John money, people, everything about it is less. How much is it less? Is it like, oritionally less?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it has fewer users, right? It is also a more mature product.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is also a product that makes us money. And like, so I don’t know, we Mac users have been feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John neglected for a while because iOS is it gets all the glory and stuff like that. But in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of articles. There was a good one. Stephen Hackett, a two articles about this, about high Sierra being like Snow Leopard,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But Snow Leopard was back in the days when Mac OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John was still pretty firmly in maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ John in the glory position, right? And it was an important product. It was a very important product to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when they did the no new features release, uh, a, that was a lie and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco meant it a little bit bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more. I mean, Grand Settler Dress Scratch was released in Snow Leopard, if I recall correctly. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty big feature to say no new features.
⏹️ ▶️ John But these days, it does feel like, like if this is supposed to be a Snow Leopard, it doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John very Snow Leopard. It doesn’t feel like they took Sierra and just polished it. Because you said, Marco, Sierra still has some rough
⏹️ ▶️ John edges that just seem to have never been resolved. And now you’re adding more stuff. And it’s not just like taking
⏹️ ▶️ John Sierra and making it more reliable and faster. I don’t know. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I haven’t installed it. I just my spidey sense is tingling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Great. I mean, I have, like I said, put this on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable in my work computer. And so far, the only thing that I’ve really noticed is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can now use my unlock with my cellular Apple Watch again, like I discussed earlier, like otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t really seem any different to me. And in fact, it seems so similar to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I intend to go through Stephen’s review, not only because I want to read it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in general, but to tell me what it is that’s different. Because it seems like a lot of the big differences are Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I had previously put on my Sierra builds, and photos, which I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use. So once you take those away, it’s kind of like, eh, I’m sure there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other good stuff there, but eh, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I hope that, like I mentioned how Sierra still has these Bluetooth issues that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be fixed. With High Sierra, have they fixed them? Or did they just move on and now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breaking other things? I don’t know. I hope they’ve fixed them. But you never know with these kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases. That’s one of the reasons why I haven’t installed it yet. But what you said, Casey, that you could barely even really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell that you had upgraded, for a release like this where there really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t user-facing changes, that’s what you want. is the ideal case. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we’ll see. I mean, you know, your track record of reporting problems to us with your computer is pretty poor. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us in six months, oh yeah, by the way, it’s been rebooting every day at noon and I don’t know why. Like, wait, that’s a problem. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just been fun. I haven’t wanted to take it in. Like, but but you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope when I install it, I don’t notice and that maybe my trackpad and mouse stay connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s that’s what I want to happen there. I don’t want any excitement there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot about Mac OS that I hope Apple is working on, and I hope they do improve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term. Stevens Review had this great paragraph towards the end that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was listing a whole bunch of areas in Mac OS that are still big problems and could really use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements, big and small. If you think Mac OS is done,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that it’s perfected, and that there’s nothing more to do, you aren’t thinking about the problem enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacOS still has tons of places it can go and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could use lots of improvements, big and small. Right now, it looks like Apple’s not really doing much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I hope that’s just because we’re in the middle stages of those efforts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s nothing to show yet. There’s still tons of things to make Macs awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to make them better and to modernize them that appear to not be happening. So again, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really are happening and they’re just not ready yet. And I think what we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple in the last few years is that it does seem like there was a period a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago where they really were not working on the Mac much at all. But it also seems like a few years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kind of had a change of heart on that front and that they began reinvesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot in the Mac again. That resulted in things like the Touch Bar and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that that progress continues. Even though I haven’t personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed the Touch Bar, I honestly think it was a pretty big miss and I think the lack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of any Touch Bar changes in High Sierra might indicate that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple realizes that too, I don’t know. But the fact that they’re investing in the Mac is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. I hope they continue to invest not just in cool hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tricks like the Touch Bar, but but also in fundamentally moving the software forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With High Sierra, they laid some new groundwork with the Windows Server. I hope that was a big deal for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving everything forward. I hope it succeeds and I hope they maintain it properly to iron out the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to fix all these subsystems that might have been broken and move the platform forward. We haven’t seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, but I hope that’s in progress. Agreed. Thanks to our three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors this week, Squarespace, Backblaze, and Jamf Now. and we will see you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John or into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie 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,
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check the podcast so
Post-show: Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you know how there was a time when Marco really enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adding just kind of random things to his Twitter bio? And, you know, he would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coffee enthusiast and then he would be analyst and then there were a couple other ones after that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember that time. When do you look at Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The elephant in the room? That was my favorite one.
⏹️ ▶️ John remember that but it wasn’t adding things. That was one thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Changing things in the bio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The point is that I am now changing my Twitter bio to car journalist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason being, for the last week, I have had a loaner car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Fiat Chrysler of America.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That loaner car is not what I hoped it would be, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not the thing that I was promised, and I will explain. A friend of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, Sam Abuel-Smid, who we discussed earlier of the Wheelbearings podcast, which you should listen to if, and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioned this a few times in the past, but if you ever wanted neutral, but by someone who doesn’t, who, who actually knows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they’re talking about, unlike us three idiots, you would like Wheelbearings. Um, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sam wrote me, I want to say it was in May or June and said, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wanted to, if you wanted to take a spin with that car, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to tell you which car it is, I could probably arrange that. And in June,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I told this tale of woe already once. In June, I was told, it was I think the week after WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will give you this car as a loaner. And then right before it was my turn,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the tire exploded apparently or some such, and then they needed to get a new tire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipped in because apparently this was not an off-the-shelf tire. A month or so later, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were going to give me the same car again. And then as it was coming down 95
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Washington, DC to me, apparently picked up a chip in the windshield or like a shatter in the windshield. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I turned around and went back to DC. So as an apology tour, Fiat Chrysler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of America has loaned me a Jeep Grand Cherokee 4x4 Limited,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m not mistaken. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. I do have the sticker in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, not in front of me, but I do have the sticker. Yes, Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited 4x4.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has about 5,000 miles on the clock, and it is… it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing. It’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that your review?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what happens when you get that big Volvo SUV. You get this big Volvo and they’re like, he likes
⏹️ ▶️ John giant shopping carts. Let’s send him a big…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what it is. That’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cart. A big tippy shopping cart. Well, so… So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem. If I hadn’t had the Volvo in the family, I think I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been fairly impressed by this car. But having the Volvo in the family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this car is the American version of a luxury SUV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say it’s not that luxurious and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got big cup holders though, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? It does have big cup holders. So it does have a lot of really good things going for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does have a fairly robust Bluetooth setup that has some really neat features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does have, and that’s Uconnect, the letter U connect, and it’s been around in Chrysler cars for a while now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does some neat things like it’ll read you your text messages. You can even put on a do not disturb mode on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the infotainment so it will no longer offer to read you your text messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Bluetooth connectivity for media worked reasonably well. All that is decent. It has a backup camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does not have a 360 camera. It has an auto raising and lowering lift gate. It actually has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a AC plug. So a, not a DC plug, like a cigarette lighter. I’m talking a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full on, like the same kind of outlet you would find in your house plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the back of the center console. So for the, for the rear seats, which is super cool. I knew that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had put these in cars before, but those, you know, to get a decent one of those as an aftermarket thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like a couple of hundred bucks. And this is just in the car. Overall, it was a nice car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did a lot of things reasonably well. This particular model was the V6. The V6 is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast. It does do the stop-start thing. It actually, I think, was a little bit smoother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the stop-start than Aaron’s Volvo, believe it or not. So far, things are looking good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then everything takes a turn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I’m building and pricing this thing to match what you’re saying, the next step that I have to choose is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color. You know I only have one question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not white, you jackass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a dark, dark, dark gray. What is the official color? Where does it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco say it on the sticker? It looks like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes in about 16 different grays. The exterior color is granite crystal metallic clear coat
⏹️ ▶️ John This thing is almost the same price as your Volvo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The base price was $40 according to the sticker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a 4x4. Limited trim, right? Correct. Grand Cherokee Limited 4x4. This is a 2017 model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, I’m a $39.99. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the base price. Optional equipment includes the customer-preferred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey package 23H, which is apparently Luxury Group 2, which is a $4,300 option that includes a 506-watt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amplifier, 8.4-inch touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, leather-trimmed seats with perforated inserts. Ooh, we need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about heated and cooled seats, actually, because that’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lane Departure Warning Plus, Parallel and Perpendicular Park Assist. Have you tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto parking in the Tesla?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work? It works mostly, but it’s so slow, I usually just do it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. It’s, I tried it once with perpendicular parking and it was garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, to be fair, so was Aaron’s Volvo. ♪♪
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, finally, a $595 blind spot and cross path detection and a destination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge of $1,000. Total sticker price, ladies and gentlemen, $48,230, which is quite a bit less than we paid for Aaron’s Volvo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it feels like the American take on a luxury SUV. A lot of the stuff is nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it does have a lot of the bits and bobs, like the radar cruise control. But so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, it gets wrong. Like this Uconnect thing, and this isn’t that interesting without a visual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aid, and so you’re just gonna have to go on faith until I eventually write my blog post. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Uconnect thing is an assault on my eyeballs. It is a billion buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is gray, everything blends together. There are neat features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. So as an example, when you’re in the Bluetooth like media screen, there’s a little teeny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tiny button that says map, and then it will do a popover of the current map. So you can look at where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are without leaving the context of the Bluetooth screen. That’s a kind of cool idea, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t pinch to zoom or whatever the case may be, which Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. The resolution of the screen was not very good. Aaron’s car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t call it retina, but it’s of that kind of caliber, right? It’s a decently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high-res screen. This thing looked like it was five years old, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 2017 model. And here again, as I was starting to say at the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so frustrating because without Aaron’s car as a comparison,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a benchmark, I actually think I would have liked this car a lot more. And when I met Aaron way back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when, you know, she had said her like fantasy car in a lot of ways was Grand Cherokee. She’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really liked them. And you know what? I always really liked them. I always thought they were really nice car or trucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say. But as compared to the Volvo, which does all of the things this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does and more and does every single one of them better, except of course, going off road,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would choose the Volvo any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Knob feel, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a seven or eight. It’s a nice, it feels nice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s not. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the category for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. It really is. But it’s not, it’s, you can tell it’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not all there. And the things that really drove me nuts about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were things where they just didn’t think it through. So, as an example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of you listeners probably live in an area where at a stoplight –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and for Americans, it’s a left. For those crazies that drive on the wrong side of the road, it would be making a right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for Americans, if you’re trying to make a left, let’s say that there are two lanes to make a left-hand turn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re on presumably like a multi-lane road and you’re at a stoplight. You’re going to make a left-hand turn,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the difficult turn for an American to make. So you stop the car and the stop-start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably kicks in, so the car feels like it’s stalled, but it’s actually fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You go to take off once the light turns green, the car starts right up, that actually works really well, and like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually a little smoother than Aaron’s car, surprisingly, especially since it’s two more cylinders.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And immediately, weee, weee, weee, because what ends up happening is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it thinks, perhaps because I’m an idiot and I’m the only American that ever uses my turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signal, it thinks that you’re signaling to make a lane change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to tell you there’s somebody next to you, which on the highway at like 70
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles an hour or what have you, that is a useful thing. But when you’re on a surface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey street accelerating from zero miles an hour to 15 or 20 or 30 or 40,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment you leave zero miles an hour and all of a sudden you hear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my word, is it frustrating. And a lot of the roads in the, in the area in which I live are multi-lane roads in each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direction. So there are a lot of times when I’ll be, I’ll be making a left adjacent to another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car and all the time, it is unbelievably frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s an example of where. It’s a great idea in principle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s just poorly executed. The Uconnect thing with like all the Bluetooth bits and bobs and all of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Great idea in principle, not a good execution. And furthermore, where’s my damn car play.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just infuriating. And so so much of this car, and I know I say this about so many things, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was death by a thousand paper cuts. I, in a lot of ways, I really liked it, but God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was terrible. Any thoughts about the car? And then I’d like to do a little inside baseball about what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the delivery process was like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you disable stop start?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. And it’s actually a physical button right there on the dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never had a car with that, but I would so desperately, I think I would not buy one if I couldn’t turn it off and
⏹️ ▶️ John have to remember the setting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s really not that bad in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John grand scheme of
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I know, I know. You won’t even notice. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Save some energy. Blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah. Nope. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You would notice. I’d notice. You would absolutely notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you do get used to it. And especially if you drive a car with three
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I understand the theory. And I think I might leave it on on something big like a minivan
⏹️ ▶️ John or an SUV or some other thing that I didn’t consider a real car. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t want that. The TrueTrop Stop-Start is what Marco has.
⏹️ ▶️ John When he’s at a stoplight,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco nothing is moving in the drivetrain. It
⏹️ ▶️ John then when he goes again, he doesn’t have to wait for the engine to start. And I know it’s not waiting. I know they
⏹️ ▶️ John start really fast. The starter motors are fine. They’re built to be started. Maybe you’ll notice, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll never be any lag. I don’t want that. I don’t want it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still sucks. No, I mean, like to me, like all like Start Stop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CVTs, all these new autos that have like a million different gears in them, to me it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like when LCD came out for TVs and LCDs were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, but they were fairly simple. But then towards the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle and end of the LCD era in TVs, they started adding all these crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacks to try to boost their specs. So that’s when you started getting like the weird dynamic backlighting and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all sorts of like weird hacks that really were just like piles upon piles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hacks that made certain things worse all in an effort to try to boost specs towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the end of their life before we switch to a superior technology of OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that to me is what gas engine cars are going through for like the last 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years or so. They’re trying so hard to eke out every single last mile per gallon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to meet new spec requirements and to be more competitive and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just adding all these crazy hacks that add up to being a lot less fun to drive or a lot less nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a drive in certain ways and to certain people who care about such things. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, really, these are just all temporary hacks on the way to the next thing, which is electric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, in cars, things move more slowly. And so it’s good. You know, we’re going to be in this transition for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but ultimately We’re going to look back on all these crazy gas engine hacks as just these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awful relics of a transitional time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also the sensor stuff. This is kind of the, I think we’re in the mouse motor seat belt error.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if mouse, I’m not getting it right. But do you remember the seat belts? There was a requirement,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was like a government requirement in the US, that you either had to have airbags
⏹️ ▶️ John or automatic motorized seat belts. Do you remember the seat belts that go along a little track
⏹️ ▶️ John along like the A-pillar. Is that what those were for? Yeah, because it was like before, car makers weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ready to put airbags in yet. So like, well, we’ve got this bottle of car and we haven’t figured out the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole airbag thing yet or we don’t have a supplier or we haven’t certified it or the car is almost done or whatever. So they would
⏹️ ▶️ John put in the motorized seatbelt. So when you open the door, this little motorized thing would go down your A-pillar with
⏹️ ▶️ John the shoulder harness attached to it. And then you’d get in the car and close the door and it would go and motor
⏹️ ▶️ John back up to like be over your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey shoulder. That’s what my
⏹️ ▶️ John had. And those, first of all, those are an abomination and I never would have bought a car with them and they’re terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was like, oh, from now on safety features will just be more and more invasive. But no, like we figured that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually we got the airbag thing figured out, the motorized seatbelts went away. So I feel like sensors are in the little
⏹️ ▶️ John motorized seatbelt there where it’s like, sensors are good. We want them for safety. Government’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to require certain things or whatever. But a lot of them are poorly implemented. Like Casey’s, you know, lane
⏹️ ▶️ John detection thing that is telling them he’s going to go into a lane where somebody is there and really he’s just making a left along with
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of other people right sensors are good we should have more of them we should have more cameras you know
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff that like makes it easy to park and you know the backup cameras are mandated in 2017 models and later
⏹️ ▶️ John in the us i think like those are all good but a lot of the early implementations are not good and so
⏹️ ▶️ John we get angry like oh the safety equipment sucks i don’t want to have all these electronic sensors blooping at me
⏹️ ▶️ John i want the sensors i don’t want them blooping at me so i’m I’m hoping that these,
⏹️ ▶️ John the incredibly annoying blooping sensors, that we get this figured out and it settles
⏹️ ▶️ John down into the current state of safety equipment like airbags, where you don’t notice them, they’re small, the
⏹️ ▶️ John steering wheels aren’t gigantic because of them anymore, and we just all accept the safety
⏹️ ▶️ John benefits of them. But I don’t know, it’s been a while with the sensors and almost every reviewer still mentions,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, can you turn that stuff off? In some ways I’m almost kind of glad that I didn’t get that more expensive option on
⏹️ ▶️ John on my accord for the Honda sensing package and stuff, because I have the backup camera, which is the most important thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But all the other sensing stuff for like lane change and whatever, like, I guess it would be easier
⏹️ ▶️ John than turning my head, but I would probably still turn my head anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever it’s worth, both the BMW and the Tesla systems for these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not been annoying. They have not annoyed me at times where they shouldn’t. They’ve been great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the Volvo’s is very good as well. The only problem I have with the Volvo is there’s been a couple of times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s done a panic stop on behalf of the driver when really it wasn’t necessary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very startling. But that’s only been a couple of times where by comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Jeep, you know, half the time I was driving it, ee, ee, ee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Couple of other thoughts actually before we do a little inside baseball. Remote start on a car that you can only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool once the car is started, that is awesome. Aaron’s car can be remote started,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curiously enough, from the Volvo app, but cannot be remote started from the key fob, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of backwards from what I would expect. But this thing had a remote start right on the key fob and that was super nice. Ventilated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seats, they’re cool, I guess. And I don’t mean that to be punny, but it didn’t make that big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a difference. I certainly liked it. And if it was like a one or $200 option on a Phantom car I was about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy, I would probably tick that checkbox. But if it was like a 500 or $1,000 option, no way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cooled seats, heated seats are a different beast. Heated seats are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco very much. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. I’ve had a number of different ones. My current car does not have them because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time I bought it, Tesla didn’t offer them. I think it still doesn’t. The way cooled seats are implemented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a huge difference in how useful or non-useful they are. What is cooling them? Are they just like taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an offshoot of a vent from the main system and cooling you that way? Are they just blowing air like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their own little fan? Do they have their own compressor even? Like there are different degrees of cooled seats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it makes a big difference. Also, one issue I had with the, the M5 had it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost never used it because the cut of the fabric on the sport seats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have a lot of room for the big areas with the holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would ventilate. So it would cool part of my thighs, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the whole area that needed to be cooled. And there wasn’t a lot of airflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way you’d sit in it would just block it shut. The best I have felt yet, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while back, TIFF had a Lexus IS250, and that one had really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air-conditioned seats. It was like sitting on a glorious air-conditioned air hockey table. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would feel it, it cooled really strongly, to the point where eventually your legs would get cold and you’d have to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down. And I never had to turn it down in the M5. Like, the M5 was always like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just dying for more. But from what I understand, There are a lot of different levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how good these things can be. So I’m not familiar with the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was in your big Jeep monstrosity, but maybe it was just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the good ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, very well could be. And I think that’s mostly it. Obviously I will write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some amount of review for my website about this. What was interesting about it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently Fiat and all the other car manufacturers have fleets of vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s presumably one on the East Coast, one in the Midwest and one in the West Coast. And so when this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being arranged, I had come to find out that the car was in –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually thought at the time DC. It turns out it was actually in Baltimore, which is about a three-hour drive from where I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am. And so when we were arranging it, I had assumed that that meant I would have to meet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the driver halfway somehow and pick the car up and then drive it the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the way. But as it turns out, no, when you’re press, oh, they come to you. They drove the car all the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. We spoke for about two minutes. They handed me the keys, and then they drove back to Baltimore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was that. And tomorrow, they’re going to come to my house. I will presumably speak with them for two minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then they will go back to Baltimore, which I just thought was the most bonkers thing. But I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s normal. There was no formal or implied agreement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would write or talk about any of this, really. Obviously, I wanted to in part because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I kind of owed it to them, but they never said like it has to be a good review, it has to be so long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that. I mean, they never really even said you have to talk about it. They just said, hey, if you want the car, you can have the car. And I said, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please. It’s a very odd thing. And I’m very thankful to Sam for kind of arranging this for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ll see if we get the car that I was originally slated to get because, you know, like I said, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of the apology tour car. We’ll see if I ever do get my hands on the thing I originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to get. And we’ll find out. Is it from the same company? It is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Chrysler of America.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, maybe. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been a couple of times when I’ve been given review samples of things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s similar in the sense that, you know, they don’t—I’ve never been asked to provide a positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review in exchange for receiving a thing. I mean, I’m sure there are, like, less ethical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies that will ask to press that, but I don’t think they would last very long doing that because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive ethical problem and I think the press would not react kindly to being asked to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So no one’s ever asked me for a positive review or anything, but the implication is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they expect a review. It’s never like, I don’t sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a contract saying I’m going to review it, but usually the implication is they’re sending me these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to review them. when I give a particularly negative review, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t usually hear from that company again. So given your summary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this car, I don’t know how this company works and how they deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their press outreach and review units, but I maybe wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect you to get whatever car that you actually wanted. The relationship might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It shouldn’t work that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, but it does work that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of companies a lot of the time. Honestly, this is part of the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that style of review. This is one of the… when you combine it also with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nature of advertising-driven publications, this is also one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s often a conflict of interest and one of the reasons why I think Consumer Reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco famously just goes and buys their cars to review, like they don’t take review samples,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can be seen as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affecting the outcome. And even if you try so hard as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reviewer to be neutral and to be objective about everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still does make you feel better about a company if you got something for free. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affect the way you frame it in your mind, even subconsciously. It’s very, very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to turn that off and try to be totally objective. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big justification, I think, to publications and reviewers who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accept freebies and who just buy the things they review.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the corollary to this is that Consumer Reports has terrible car reviews and the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Good Car magazine,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good car magazine like Car and Driver, have spent decades crapping
⏹️ ▶️ John on entire brands and lines of cars and companies just decade after decade of GM
⏹️ ▶️ John makes crap everything they make is terrible and they still keep sending them their cars right so like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s obviously you’re not car and driver so markers probably right in your case right they don’t need you but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re big enough and important enough they’ll just keep sending you cars even if every single time
⏹️ ▶️ John you send them like like you crap on their cars right and And they’ll say things
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much just as harsh as what Casey said only in slightly different language like common less than all the
⏹️ ▶️ John comparison tests. The summary reviews are terrible. I mean, how I read you the the one liner summary
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Acura TLX is automotive wallpaper. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you think accurate to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John sending them their cars, but they’re going to they’re going to keep sending them because their car and driver so it is possible to
⏹️ ▶️ John get enough cloud to. I mean, you know, people complain like one of the best complaints about car and
⏹️ ▶️ John driver is they’re on BMWs payroll because they love BMWs for years. guess what that changed recently
⏹️ ▶️ John right about the time they added electric steering and start screwing up all their cars and it changed a little bit with the bangle error with
⏹️ ▶️ John styling so now people now all the the conspiracy theorists
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what to do because it’s like I thought we were paid off of BMW BMW keep losing comparison tests and all their reviews are negative
⏹️ ▶️ John so you know some some form of decent journalistic independence is possible even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you get free cars and go in all the press doors there is my but look at Casey is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a car and driver, so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know how that’s going to shake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Yeah, you’re right. Once you’re big enough that they have to send you a review sample just to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevant in the press, if you’re big enough for that, then yeah, then a lot of this stops applying to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re going to send it to you anyway. But when you’re a smaller reviewer or when you’re just trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started, it’s really, really hard to risk getting on a company’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side because that might cut off your supply of review units.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the weird thing is the the the nicer the car like sort of objectively
⏹️ ▶️ John the Harder it is to get those cars to the company’s sending you the car So a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John car magazines have a lot of difficulty getting the supercars or the top-end luxury brands
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they don’t want anyone possibly saying anything negative about their you know Half a million dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John car and they don’t need you because no one reading that magazine is gonna buy that car anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John So, they have to do like what Top Gear used to do, was like find an owner who’s nice enough to let them drive their
⏹️ ▶️ John car, because they can’t get any from the manufacturer.
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturer won’t even return their calls. It’s like, no thanks, why would we let you say anything bad about our car?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just gonna say that our car is wonderful, and sell it for millions of dollars, and they’re all already sold, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t need your car magazine, and nobody subscribing to your stupid magazine has enough money to buy our car anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so forget it. So, it’s not all of them, obviously, but that’s more likely the case when you’re not gonna get a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John because of some kind of it says, Why would we even risk you saying anything remotely negative about our car? Why would we risk
⏹️ ▶️ John you like comparing it directly to one of our competitors car? We don’t want that to happen. It’s all downside for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. I haven’t talked to Sam about what the best approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, because I’m going to write about it in some way, shape or form. I’m almost sure of it. But I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if maybe I hold that until I get a date for the phantom car that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and the thing that I was promised originally is something that is much more my speed and so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much more inclined to enjoy it. In fact, I had feared when I before I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wasn’t getting it anytime soon. I had feared that I would like it enough that that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up choosing that car to replace the 335 whenever that time comes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is much more in my wheelhouse this this phantom car that I’m hoping to
⏹️ ▶️ John get you keep saying Fiat Chrysler I’m like is he getting a the the rebat the restyled
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Fiat 124 spider thing it’s not just restyled I guess different engine
⏹️ ▶️ John too but uh or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it doesn’t anyways that is not it but it is a good
⏹️ ▶️ John guess but now that you say you’re thinking replacing your car it’s got to be one of those stupid what do they make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what’s their big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly they don’t own Cadillac do they they do not know that’s jam I was worried you’re trying to get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those weird like angled Cadillac m3 things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost bought the CTS-V.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think of what he could replace his BMW. What the hell does
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Chrysler make?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing if Casey’s looking to replace his BMW, it’s going to be some kind of small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hatchback that’s fast and that has a way worse interior than his BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s made by Chrysler?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Dodge? Is it a Viper? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so let me suggest something. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though this is not to the best journalistic integrity, you gave your review of this car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You just did it here on this show. Podcasts are wonderful because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who doesn’t listen to the show is going to like get linked to this in the company’s PR division and be like, look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this guy. We’re not going to like you’re you’re going to be relatively safe from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of negative repercussions that might arise with this company that you’re still trying to work with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just leave this here, don’t make the blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you got to make the blog post. You got to do it. Why? Because the only thing he has going for him is his integrity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you gave your honest review here and you could just say like, look, if they ask, which they won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so don’t even bother, but if they would ask like, hey, you never made a blog post, just say like, you know, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really didn’t work out for me. This car is not for me. I didn’t feel right making this giant, trashing blog post about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it.” Something like that. You gave your review here. You’ve done your duty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a car journalist, which I guess you are now. Congratulations, by the way. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve done your duty. You don’t have to make a blog post that would be very easy for people in the company to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, find, notice, and then tell someone else who’s dealing with you, hey, you know what? We don’t need to deal with this guy anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would say, thank you for your honest, constructive feedback. We will take it under advisement. not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You don’t know how PR works. If he
⏹️ ▶️ John does it in the PR people wouldn’t, but if he does it in a nice way, I think it’ll be fine. You’re not talking about the Chrysler 300, are you?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no cars that you should be looking at from Chrysler, Casey. That’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telling you. Pretty sure John’s off the list now too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right? I would refuse a review car from Chrysler. I would refuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would refuse a review car from Ferrari.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I would not refuse that. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would. You’d be like, this isn’t the one I would
⏹️ ▶️ John want. Ferrari, me at any queue get on the phone. Not refuse
⏹️ ▶️ John that. What am I missing? What? Dodge
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Chrysler? You are absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But is it the Alfa Romeo that they’re not Fiat Chrysler? Are they?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they are. The new Alphas I actually do think are pretty cool looking. I don’t think I would buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one but they do look pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John They look horrendous but they’re getting great reviews. They came out the
⏹️ ▶️ John tops in the recent comparison with like the three series like in those types of cars, the Giulia was number one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it is a great car. I just cannot stand how it looks. And there’s also the questions of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but will it fall apart? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, fair enough. Yep. So twilling in the chat says that he ditched his M two for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quadra fog Leo. How do you go? Yeah, that thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty cool. But it’s my favorite thing about this is that on its product page, along with its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs, it lists its Nürburgring lap time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s the way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Will you tell us if it’s an Alfa, Alfa Romeo? It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Of course it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John Alfa, come on. That’s just the Giulia, that’s just a particular model of the Giulia. There’s not any more
⏹️ ▶️ John Alfas. They named the 4C and the Giulia, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not the 4C, all I said was that it’s not the 4C, that’s all I’ve told
⏹️ ▶️ John you. And you said it’s not the Giulia too, right? I guessed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the Giulia before. When did I say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? Okay, so it’s the Giulia, fine. I hope you get it because
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. Alright, well then it’s the Giulia, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really bad now that you’re an SUV person is it a Stelvio Quadra foglio no it is
⏹️ ▶️ John no anyway the Julia is a really good car I think you’ll really like it if you can stomach the looks and if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apart I absolutely can stomach the looks the thing I might not be able to stomach is the transmission
⏹️ ▶️ John stick is only Europe that’s right the reviews I’ve read say that even with the automatic that it is a really
⏹️ ▶️ John good car I think you will like I have read the same but but if you are concerned with expensive repairs and
⏹️ ▶️ John reliability perhaps Alfa Romeo is not the brand for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. So I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see if this 4C ever shows up or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, not the 4C if the Quadrifoglio ever shows up. My guess is probably not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, I mean, this is basically an M3 competitor. And and it looks to I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it looks good. I know you hate it. I think it looks good. And if you can if you can leave the transmission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of it. Oh, man, I think this would be a fun car to own. So if and when I ever get a spin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it, it would be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s my problem with this. Number one, price to performance ratio here. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in order to get a car that’s actually faster than your 335, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to go Quadrifoglio, which is $72,000 starting price, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco admittedly noticeably faster, which is nice. It would be a nice upgrade, but you’re then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very high price bracket. Oh, yes. Secondly, if you’re gonna lose a stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not have a DCT and be willing to spend $72,000, get a used P85D. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, at that point, if you’re not gonna have a stick, get a Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then get a faster car.
⏹️ ▶️ John This makes better noises than the Tesla, even though the Tesla might be faster. This is lighter than the Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. You’re not gonna care the noises it makes when you are squished against the back of your seat from the P85D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can get used for that price.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that much faster than this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing is. It’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John faster. And this thing handles better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, if you’re getting to 60 in 3.8 seconds, you’re already in a place where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are way faster than what I’m used to. And the sound. Oh, that sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, it does sound pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good. And in this price bracket, it’s 70 grand. Like I said, this came out on top against other cars, some of which cost
⏹️ ▶️ John more. So it’s not like there’s a cheaper car that is better that is out there today.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m pretty sure if they had thrown a Model S into that comparison, it would have come back way in the pack because despite it
⏹️ ▶️ John being really fast, it is like a £5000 car and it would get destroyed in all the handling tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fair, but I still like if this car was available in a stick or a DCT,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say awesome, go for it. But because you care so much about that stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because this is not available in that stick, I think you would be I think you would miss it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re gonna miss it, go electric where you have other great benefits and better performance anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or get something different that has a stick and you’ll probably enjoy it more. I assume your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beloved Golf R comes in a stick, right? Oh, it absolutely does. I bet you would have more fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving that than driving this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably true, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s something to be said for a car that is kind of rare, kind of interesting, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unique, and has basically a Ferrari engine within it. I mean, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s pretty freaking cool. I don’t know. I like the idea of the Giulia Quadrifoglio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a lot, but I think Mark goes onto something that in pure fun I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably enjoy the Golf R more in part because it’s all wheel drive. And as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I fancy myself a really skilled driver, the fact of the matter is I’m a ham fisted driver and having all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheel drive would keep me out of trouble. Oh, less trouble. Well, you know what I mean, but I and I’d want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have three pedals I really would
⏹️ ▶️ John but you get a civic type are if you want to have some fun and stay out of trouble Maybe not fast enough to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super fun You’ll find yourself in an action movie with those as you know what that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right He’ll be racing around with all his fast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco furious friends. I mean the fact is like if you if you want fun You want a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick like that’s I know you you know you you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true Yeah, this car would be really fast and you’d have fun for a couple of days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you’d miss your stick and then after a couple of days the novelty will have worn off You won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about who made the engine or what it was originally specced for you will be really missing
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he’s getting old maybe he’s maybe he’s become soft and maybe he will like the lack of a stick
⏹️ ▶️ John and just get by on the The luxurious the luxurious interior and the sound of the engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John He just won’t even miss shifting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean it is possible. It certainly is possible, but I still come down on Marco’s side so far But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean if and when I ever get it to spin in this which to be honest I’m assuming will never happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can go take a test drive at a dealer right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I suppose that’s true, but it’s you know It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a lot different. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John forget to test drive the 2018 Accord people are loving the little stubby shifter It’s the same one from the Type R.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should oh And when you go to a dealer to test drive this don’t tell them you’re a car journalist Because then they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let you test drive it It’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? We saw your Twitter bio, sir. You know how to test drive this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really should change my Twitter bio, shouldn’t I?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, that’s my story. But even if this is my own, my lone foray
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into car journalism, it’s been a tremendous amount of fun. And I felt very fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and very, very, very cool and part of a small
⏹️ ▶️ John And you wasted it on a Jeep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you can’t win them all, John Syracuse. You can’t win them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just wanted to let Mercedes, Porsche, Bentley, Ferrari know
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m available for test drives. I will tell the world about your knob feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised you’re not soliciting the NSX.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to try an LFA, if anyone has one of those available, hanging
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey around. Oh, sure. Yeah, they’re just hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around. There’s plenty just
⏹️ ▶️ John hanging out. Yeah, when you’re not using it and like it anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send it my way. Twilling in the chat has one of these in white, just FYI. He just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link, I’m assuming he just put a link in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room. You are not allowed to buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in white. No, red is the only color for this car. I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It comes in two different reds. Although they look like two of the same red, but. For some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get it either in red, or you can spend $2,000 more and get it in the same red. Which one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the more expensive one, the darker one? I think it’s the different, one of them is tricote, competizioni,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of them is just regular red.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your Italian pronunciation is befitting of your Ohio origins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go ahead, John, tell us how it’s supposed to be pronounced.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, but not phonetically, when you know, like, it’s not saying foglio,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like you’re supposed to say the G.