245: Senior-Citizen Advantage

26 Oct 2017

Chair arms, Bitcoin, Phish, iPhone X orders, and the Mac Mini.

Episode Description:

Follow up: The right to chair arms
#askatp
- Bitcoin
  - The Talk Show #74: Glenn Fleishmann explains Bitcoin
- iPhone SE... X?
  - Macintosh SE/30
- How to catch Phish
  - A Live One
  - Live Phish
It's preorder time
- Casey's tips
What are the iPhone X's biggest risks?
The Mac Mini is... still a thing?
- Riccardo Mori's 3 options
Post-show: Casey's still a car journalist

Chapters

Chair update
#askatp: Bitcoin
#askatp: iPhone SE X?
#askatp: Starter Phish 🖼️
Sponsor: AfterShokz
iPhone X ordering plans
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
iPhone X risks
Sponsor: Fracture
Tim’s Mac Mini email 🖼️
Ending theme
Post-show: Neutral 🖼️

Chair update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am NOT looking forward to Friday. Not at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hey, so you want to some follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, I think we only have one item here, and it’s a tiny little throwaway thing I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} know here. We go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How many times have we said this and then it’s like 40 minutes?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why we didn’t have a lot of pop last time we talked all about like Mac pros and stuff Maybe people were like okay fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Actually the Mac mini thing is in a topic section is a natural

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow-on from last thing not to be confused with follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} from our topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yes who invented follow-on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know is it even a thing I think I was just using the actual term the actual phrase as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in something that naturally comes after another thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean you probably thought the same thing when you were first using follow-up and then it turns out you invented that there

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John format associated with that there was a format what’s the format for follow on it just when you in the next show you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a topic that is a natural you know that naturally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follows the topic on the previous show I don’t know I think it’s whatever you say it is well we’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I do it if I do it for like two years regularly with a strict format and every single episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then we’ll see what we got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so let me just state for the record that we immediately ended up on a tangent on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that will be very quick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s fine carry

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} on I’m trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure out why there wasn’t a lot of follow-up. So the only item I have is more chair follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Of course. I can’t forget. I love this. Last week, I think I was sitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a gesture, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think you had just started sitting on a gesture, like that day or sometime recently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so I used it for a few days or whatever, but I’ve swapped it back now for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Embody. And now we’re like, I took the old chairs out of the room. So now we’re in the actual trial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John period where I’m gonna try one chair, and my wife will try the other, and then we’ll switch back and forth and see how we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go. I kind of know what I think of both of the chairs so far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I wish there was one that was just such a clear winner, but the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lumpy thing underneath the embody annoys me. But I think I like the embody,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I think it fits my body better than the gesture. So anyway, the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of follow-up I have is last week, I was sitting on the gesture, but I was wondering how I was gonna figure out to take off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the arms. And I’m happy to report that I did successfully remove the arms without too much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fuss. It was just a tiny little bit tricky. It wasn’t actually tricky. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John straightforward unless you are, if you don’t have a lot of experience disassembling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things. It’s, you know, and this is how you get experience disassembling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things. You do it the wrong way when you’re a kid a lot. Maybe adults don’t do this, but frequently as a child, if I wanted to take something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apart and I took a lot of things apart you would look at it and be like I want that thing to come off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’d look around for a couple seconds and see if there’s any obvious screw heads poking out somewhere or something like you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what do I need to unscrew or untwist or whatever to make this come out and if you don’t see anything you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you’re like well I’ve got a lot of tools and I’m pretty clever and I have opposable thumbs and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m a clever tool using monkey I can get that off like it’s coming off right You just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you you realize that you can do it You’re like I have I have leverage and and friction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all the whole sorts of things that will get this thing off But you end up destroying the thing when you’re taking it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off and so the steel case gesture chair is one of those devices where any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tool using monkey look at the thing and say I could get those arms off Probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I kind of have an idea like I see some some squishy plastic bits It seemed like they have seams and even though I don’t see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any screws that I can unscrew to get it undone. I see a lot of things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are soft enough that I can pry them off and surely underneath those things if I pry them off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be the screws that I seek and I’ll be able to remove these arms. But me having some experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disassembling things knows how this goes. Yeah, you probably will eventually do it that way but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also a very good chance that you will pry off all these soft parts and damage them and underneath them will just be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scary unyielding metal that doesn’t help you at all. So take two seconds to think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and I did take two seconds to think about it I didn’t pry the thing open and destroy it because you know it’s expensive chair and I want to you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be nice to it anyway like I said this is so it comes with the experience to take things apart so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I found you could feel the underside of some very large screws that were probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holding the arms on but there’s no way you could get at the top of them because there was no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like there was you couldn’t see the top of them and I like look well this chair went together someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assembled this chair and it’s not like so many Apple things one-way assembly with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with tabs don’t you know untab or like things that I fix it has to remove with heat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they’re glued like I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put this bean bag in the microwave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah or even just things a lot of things snap together like a plastic snap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John together model where there’s like a slot in the tab and like they really only go in one direction and you have no way to push that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tab back out like without breaking it but I figured a chair is not like that so the trick of it, in case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re wondering, is the seat of the steelcase chair slides forward and back on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a little like a it’s like rack and pinion steering there’s like a little you know rack thing and then a little gear that turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right and I could see that to get to the top of the screw heads that I wanted to get out they would probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be underneath the back of the seat so I moved the seat forward but I couldn’t remove the sort of plastic shroud it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like a car plastic shroud that was probably covering what I imagined to be the tops of those screws and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh well the street if the seat goes forward I looked underneath the seat. There’s no screws underneath there, but this was one tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tab. It was like Stopping the seat from going completely forward so you can move it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forward and back and what what prevented it Why did it stop going forward? This is one tiny little tab. It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made of flexible springy metal All right, so push that little springy tab down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Into the slot and now all of a sudden the chair you can just keep turning that dial the chair slides right off the front Like the seat slides right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off the front in one piece perfectly fine And then you have access to the body of the seat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then there’s a plastic thing with some little you know You peel off the plastic shroud with some little plastic clippy things in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’ll see the apparently expensive chair industry standard, which is a t30 torque

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screws and There were like six of them and they were really hard to undo and they’re humongous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple once I had all six of them out the arms came right off. No damage done at all reassembled perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So happy to report that I now have two armless chairs and did not damage them. And now I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have what I imagine is several hundred dollars worth of useless arms up in my attic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In case anyone wants to buy them. Of course. I have arms for sale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s by the way, that’s a, I don’t even know if I would sell them because I’m such a hoarder, but, um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, something I wish I had known earlier is you can buy the embody without arms for like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John $100 less. If you can find someone who will sell to you, you can configure it without arms and you will save

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a hundred bucks on it. So it’s no small amount. As far as I could tell, there was no place where you could buy the gesture without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arms. Because gesture, the arms and the gesture are kind of like half the point of the chair. They’re very, very configurable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re actually really cool arms. I just don’t want them on my chair. So that’s it for my update. I’m sitting on the Embody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are no arms and we’re off to the races. Life is good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wait, what, what about your wife though? What if she wants arms on her chair? Tough noogies? She doesn’t she doesn’t want them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, that was part of the prenup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No Not it was not part of the prenup, but she told me I don’t want arms They get in the way. She’s used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to having a chair with no arms as well And they just just get in the way. So no arms for anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s bananas. I can’t imagine not having arms on my chair. I’m serious, too like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explain this in slack today because you missed it, but like I don’t know people deal with arms on chair like if if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If your arms are positioned ergonomically on the keyboard like it should be like if you looked at if you look at at yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sitting at the seat in profile, it should be a 90 degree L from like your shoulder straight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down to your elbow and then 90 degrees out to the keyboard, right? That’s where you wanna be. In that position,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially if you have long arms like mine your elbows are already low enough that they’re probably bumping into the armrests.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And even if the armrests are below where your arms are, if you relax or move or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your arms might bump into the armrests. And I just feel like I feel constrained by the armrests that my elbows are constantly bumping them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So then I find myself pulling in my elbows to instinctively avoid bumping into the armrests,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that is uncomfortable and tense. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, I apparently get in and out of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chair sideways all the time, and when there are arms there, you can’t do that. Like, you know, you have to climb

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over them, you have to rotate, pull out the chair. And by the way, these chairs are really heavy, I wish they were lighter. And they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John roll that well on the carpet, but bottom line is I get into the chairs from the side, and once there are arms, you can’t get in from the side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And third, the arms hit against my keyboard tray, because of the height they would have to be. Like if I put the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arms below the level of my keyboard tray, they’d be so low that they’d be like hitting my hips and not my elbows, but like, what the hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the point then? So they’re just, they just, arms just don’t fit into my chair life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at all. And I imagine a lot of people who have arms in their chair who don’t mess with them, their keyboard is too high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like if your keyboard is on your desk, chances are good, your keyboard is too high. Like if you sit properly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and type and your arms do not make perfect 90 degree L’s or a larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John angle, so like 95 degrees or whatever, so that the angle at your elbows is bigger than 90,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you’re probably, your keyboard is too high, which may not bother you, but it super bothers me a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now all I can think of is I’m envisioning you mounting a chair by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hopping one leg over it, like Jonathan Frakes, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} what I’m talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was gonna do a Riker reference, and I’m like, nobody’s gonna get that, but I guess it’s meme-y enough that Casey got it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, come on, I love the next generation. Why you gotta do this to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} daddy? God. Yeah, but when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch Next Generation, did you know about that or did

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you only know about it after the meme came?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Only after. I think I’m more disappointed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I hear John Syracuse, mm-hmm, than when my own father does the equivalent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is an abusive

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} relationship.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Your own father has a podcast? Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my goodness. Let’s just move on to Ask ATP.

#askatp: Bitcoin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And Jonathan Rogers would like to know, how do you all feel about Bitcoin slash cryptocurrencies?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you think that there’s a real long-term value in them or are they just short-term speculation plays? Do you buy into the underlying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey structure for sustaining billions of transactions in the future and do you hold any coins of any type?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know almost nothing about any of this and have no cryptocurrencies of any sort. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would love to be enlightened. And I did hear Glenn Fleischman, I think on the talk show, try to describe, well, he did describe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bitcoin and it still flew right over my head. And so I just don’t get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I treat Bitcoin the same way I treat all other kind of high-risk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mostly luck-based or speculation-based investments, which is, this is a game that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people play that I should not play, and so I don’t play.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t even own individual stocks anymore. I used to have some of my savings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be in an E-Trade account that I could buy and sell individual stocks from? I did for a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years, and I came out a little ahead, but I was always worried about it, and the ups and downs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really annoyed me and stressed me out. All the index funds,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the same time, beat my performance. It wasn’t like I was being particularly special or clever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much any kind of manually managed individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco investments like this are, I think, not a good use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of my time or my money. If you’re a person who’s more into doing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you get a lot of interest and value out of that, that can be your game and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more power to you. But I decided that the best way for me to make more money was to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do things that made me money. Like, do more of them. And that was better than trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to extract an extra 5 or 10% a year out of some potentially lucky investments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that oftentimes weren’t so lucky. Bitcoin, to me, is no different than playing stocks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It really isn’t. It’s a volatile foreign currency, basically. Foreign exchange

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco markets, commodity markets, these are all types of commodity trading. Bitcoin is not the first thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do this. This world has existed for a very long time. It is very clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what can happen in this world, what can go well, what can go poorly. Bitcoin is in some ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even less secure than a lot of those things because of the way it works. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a way to make money, I wouldn’t advise people put a lot of faith

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in systems like this as a fun thing to play around with, or if you’re doing it for more political

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasons, like you want to make a statement about not being part of the official banking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco systems and everything, you might have other reasons. But for making money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s just, you might as well go to Vegas. Like, it’s just gambling. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just a different form of gambling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I view this kind of in the same category as many other things in my life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I feel like I was well-positioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John positioned to know about this type of because it’s a tech thing. Well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John positioned to know about this thing more than regular people to know about it sooner, to understand it better to sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of get into the ground floor like another example or a lot of like the internet IPOs and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from, you know, back in the days when no one understood the internet, but I certainly did because I was on it very early, right? As

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a techie person, there are some you have some advantages in some realms and Bitcoin falls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into that category. And Like all those other things, I kind of think of it as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet another case where I failed to make a lot of money and I could have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because, for example, if we all knew what we know now and put us back into 1990, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would all be bazillionaires because you would know to first of all buy all the domain names you can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for common names because some company will buy them from you later. Second of all, sink all your money into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stocks that we know are going to go crazy. It’s easy to go back in time and understand, but we were there early and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like I knew domain names would have value, but they were like, you know, 200 bucks to get one with Verisign

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. And I couldn’t afford that because I was a college student, you know, working a part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time job to pay for my books, living in a crappy dorm. Like I didn’t, you know, it was, it was timing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was kind of good, but not really. Same thing with investment. I could have invested, I could have got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a large amount of VA Linux stock because I contributed to CPAN, right? but I didn’t have that kind of money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to invest and I could have got like a 500% return on my investment if I’d had the money to invest,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So Bitcoin similarly, when Bitcoin was first going around, it was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, I read up on it, I learned about it, I understood what the deal with it was. I even got to the point where I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John downloaded the software and was mining for coins on my incredibly slow computer, whatever the hell it was at that time, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I didn’t take it super seriously and didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John invest a lot of time in it And it was kind of boring to mine for coins. And I was like, eh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I, I don’t remember what I got out of it. Some fractional Bitcoin probably exists on some backup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my hard drive somewhere. I don’t know if I got one Bitcoin out of it. It’s like, oh, you should dig that up. It’s worth 700 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I’m like, I don’t even know where the hell that crap is. Which is another problem with the system that it’s so based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on like, do you ever lose track of your files? Well, how would you feel if those files were worth thousands of dollars?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway. Um, so, uh, but, but unlike the, the investing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gambling things, it was the type of situation where you, there was the possibility because that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are a nerd that you could have with like with no risk and no money upfront, it sounds like an ad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you just spend a little time on your computer because you’re there early and because it was easier to mine coins in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beginning than it is now. Right. Computationally speaking. Um, you could have done what many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people did is if you’re just a little bit more interested it and you had mined coins a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thoroughly for like a month or something, that didn’t cost you anything. It’s not like you’re putting your life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John savings into it. You spent a little bit of time and you’re having some fun and it’s a hobby and it’s an interesting thing and why are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing this? Because you’re a nerd and you know about this stuff and that would be worth a huge amount of money. But I didn’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the way I view Bitcoin is if you were in really early and mined when they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were easy and held them instead of buying them to order pizza like so many people did in those sad stories where they they ordered,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they sold their bitcoins and ordered a pizza for 20 bucks. And now the the bitcoins that they ordered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that pizza with are worth like, you know, 50 grand and I feel bad about it, right? I guess I suppose that would be worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But but that time is over. Like we all miss that. And now it is like Marco said, it’s just like, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now you look at it and you’re like, this is just a giant soap bubble floating through the air that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either about to burst or something terrible will happen or like it is it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so incredibly risky and scary and you’re you know supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy low and sell high not to buy a high and hope it’s going to go way higher and obviously that’s terrible advice if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re thinking of investing in apple and it’s 10 years ago but there’s risk like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s it’s not you have to put you have to put in money to make money at this point whereas in the beginning you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in like nothing to make potentially huge or nothing to make nothing It’s like penny stocks, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like very little investment probably is going to come to nothing. But it’s but it’s such a small amount. And it’s a fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to do. If you’re into this nerdy stuff, it’s kind of fun. It’s like steady at home, but for money. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. So so I regret, obviously not getting more into it earlier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what can you do? You can’t tell the future. And so anyway, I have no interest in getting into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Now. I don’t quite understand how they could ever sustain any large transaction volume. I see lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of potential pitfalls this but I think it is very technically interesting. Using math to make a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bunch of parties who don’t trust each other have a verifiable trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John relationship for transactions. I think that’s an important advancement, both the the math behind it, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably not that new, but the implementations of it, which it is new idea to say, can we actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John implement this in a safe way without bugs and problems and without letting more than 51% of the swarm

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a quorum and, you know, tip the the whole market or whatever the hell. Anyway, I think it’s cool,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As much as I’m staying far away from it, I know I’ve had no desire to get into it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for financial reasons. It is technically beautiful. It is an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco technical accomplishment and idea, and I really respect that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco despite all of its other problems, it is pretty awesome of an idea and a concept and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just have no interest in gambling with it as a financial instrument.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What’s not beautiful about it, unfortunately, is that due to the constraints of the current implementations, as in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, what is it up? Parties that don’t trust each other can have verifiable relationships at low transaction volumes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It has found its ecological niche, which is, you know, selling drugs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} all sorts of illegal things. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small number of parties who really, really don’t trust each other and really don’t want to use the banking system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they don’t have a large transaction volume, right? And so that’s kind of sad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But the transaction volume actually is a problem. You can’t move the entire banking system to a cryptocurrency until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they sort those things out, and who knows if they will. But I do really like the idea of whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disintermediation or whatever the phrase was from the 90s, which I think is still an important thing because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nobody likes middlemen. When the middleman is math, then there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are lots of interesting things it can happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, the other problem then is like, the environmental cost of Bitcoin is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} non-trivial.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like the amount of energy being wasted because all of a sudden,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wasting massive amounts of energy now has a financial upside for the people who are doing it, much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more so than I think it ever has before for doing apparently no other work. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not good. It is a beautiful technical system that, yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think you’re right, that if it never scaled to be incredibly big it would have stayed a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco beautiful technical system, but because of how big it is and because of how much money could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be made in it, basically it’s being exploited like crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for financial gain and the result is a pretty nasty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco burning of energy for no reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed.

#askatp: iPhone SE X?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, Neo Nintendonara, which apparently somebody has translated to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do not understand anything, would like to ask, do you think the next iPhone SE

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will be called iPhone SE X? Which was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a funny thought to say the least. The Model 3. Yeah, exactly. My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thoughts on this is that the iPhone SE will just continue to be the iPhone SE. It will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be more like a trim level, if you will, than an individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey model like iPhone 7. And so there will be, if there is another iPhone SE,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I think there probably will be, and if it eventually gets all the nifty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bits from the iPhone X, then I think it will still just be the iPhone SE. It’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just be the 2018 edition, if you will. I don’t mean that in a literal sense, but it’ll just be the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version of it. What do you think, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, honestly, I don’t really care. It’s a very nice, important product, but I don’t really care what the name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. I could also say they might do SE2. I share your opinion that it will probably get an update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would expect it to get an update probably next spring. Maybe it’s called the SE2, maybe it’s called the new iPhone SE,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe it’s called the iPhone SE 2018 or whatever. Like, it’s fine. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put this question in here because I thought it would be a quickie because I didn’t think anyone would seriously try to answer it like you two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just did. But good job for taking this. I just put it in here as yet another opportunity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me to tell an old Mac person’s story. For

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} people who don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, I’m glad some people in the chatroom do know this. It shows that the right kind of old people are in our chatroom. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back in like 1988, 89, the Mac 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had just come out and the successor to the Mac 2 was called the Mac 2X. It was a faster version of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac 2. And the Mac SE was the contemporary of the Mac 2, the all-in-one contemporary. So they made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac 2, gave way to the Mac 2X. So they had the Mac SE, naturally it should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give way to the Mac SEX, but of course they didn’t want to do that because it spells out sex and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t want to have a product by that name. So instead of calling it the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SEX, they called it the Mac SE slash 30. And the SE30 is my favorite Mac ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And its entire name is derived from Apple’s desire not to have a computer named sex.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so it’s funny all these years later that they have painted themselves into the same corner by having a successor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John product with a capital letter X in its name and having a product with SE whose natural successor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they default that naming convention and make one with a notch or something would have an X. And so I think they should call it the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone SE30.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and also, I mean, realistically speaking, you know, sex thing aside, the X or 10 branding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the high end phone and it’s going to remain the high end phone for probably quite some time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would honestly be surprised if by the time, like if the use of the letter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco X in the iPhone name does indeed end up filtering down the line, which is not a given, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might not, if it filters down the line over time, I bet by the time it gets to the point where it would be suitable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to use on a low-end model, the iPhone SE will not be the name that’s used anymore for that model. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they will have moved on to some other naming convention where SE is no longer used. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a funny question, But like, I don’t think it would even be under consideration because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re not bringing the letter X down that low in the line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and anyway, it’s capital and it’s a 10. Like back in the Mac days, it was a lowercase X and it was pronounced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X. So it really would have been capital S, capital E, lowercase X. And the two X was Roman numeral

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two, with two big bars and then the lowercase X. So that was it. I just wanted to tell the story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the SE30 for the people who don’t know it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel better for having known that story.

#askatp: Starter Phish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} in a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sad and terrible turn of events, I did not get to do the Ask ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey notes before John did. And normally that’d be kind of nice because I’ve had a busy week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but John has added the following question to Ask ATP. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have any upset or angry emails that you would like to send or tweets, please send them to John Syracuse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, James or James D., who asks, what’s the best place to start when trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to listen to Phish?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John, do you have any opinions on this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} My

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opinion is that everybody should get a question that’s aimed at them every once in a while, so this one’s for you, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Casey, do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to go first? I would say that you’re going to say some sort of live show, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the New Year’s Eve show from the most recent year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay, so basically what you need to know when getting into Phish is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the albums are a great place to start to get to know what their music roughly sounds like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but what most Phish fans listen to most of the time is the live shows because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are substantially better if Phish is the kind of thing you’re into.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can listen to the albums first, and they’re on every streaming service now, and everybody has a streaming subscription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for something these days, so you can listen to Phish music on pretty much anywhere, any service you have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would suggest start, if you can, if your service has it, and most of them do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco start with one of the live albums. Now, it’s a little different than most bands in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while they have live album releases that span like the last 20 years, they’ve put out like maybe 10 official albums

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are live, and one of the first ones was called A Live One. That’s on all the services.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can definitely listen to A Live One if you wanted to. And it’s good. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unlike most bands, every single fish show every concert they do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is recorded from the soundboard, professionally mastered, and released a few hours after the show ends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a legal, purchasable download from a site that they’re affiliated with called livefish.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think. Livefish also has iOS apps where I think you can stream for free.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You just can’t pick what they’re playing, but it’s like a constant live stream that I think you can do for free. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you listen on your streaming service of choice and you decide that this is something you want to hear more of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way to get more into it is not to go listen to all their studio albums if you don’t really… The way to get into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is to listen to more live shows. And once you exhaust the official releases that they’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over time, the way to get more into it after that is to go to Live Fish, either their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app or their website, and either preview for free or buy the stuff there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s it. And enjoy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took a lot less time than I expected. I hope you’ll insert some fish clip after you say the word enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at that point. Just like a guitar

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} riff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or like three of the words from the middle of the nine words that are in the middle of the half an hour song.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You have to put in meat stick because because that is the most preposterous Fish song.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ♪ Time for the meat stick, bury the meat stick, ♪ ♪ take out the meat stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. ♪ Well, which one? I have, hold on, 37

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco recordings of Meat Stick in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} collection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So for reference, I have 7,700 Fish songs over 112 gigs that span 42 days

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of total time. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s only what they’ve done since about 2009. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you buy every single show, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I buy the, like they have like season passes on Live Fish whenever they, whenever like a new tour is announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can pre-order the entire tour as legal downloads. So I just do that. So it’s like, usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like a couple hundred bucks for like a whole summer tour or something like that. And I just do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you’re, so, and I should point out too, like if you’re more into going to concerts, they put on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a great show and they put on lots of them. And so even though they sell out, like they put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on just so many shows aren’t that hard to get into if you if you try and you don’t have to like pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a ridiculous price to do it or anything. So if you are a concert goer, I highly suggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you go to their concerts. I personally just don’t enjoy going to concerts very much. I have been to exactly one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco FISH show and it was fine, but I didn’t feel like I needed to go to more. I really love listening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the live shows, but I’m not a concert person. But if you’re a concert person, especially if you’re into the the drug scene at all, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again I am not. They are apparently a great place to be if you’re into that.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So this actually isn’t so great if you’re in a very loud place like a subway station in a big city,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s awesome if you want to do things like listen to a podcast or take a phone call while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco walking or while running or cycling, where you really need to hear the world around you for practical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or safety reasons. And that could be as simple as you’re at home and you need to take a phone call or you wanna listen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to podcasts and you wanna know maybe when your kid upstairs wakes up from their nap or if somebody knocks on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the door, you wanna be able to hear it. So this is great, not for loud environments, not for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pristine music listening, but for practical speech content, phone calls, podcasts,

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iPhone X ordering plans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s atp.afterstocks.com. Thank you so much to Afterstocks for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So this week, as we record, in fact it will be in just a couple of days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is iPhone X pre-order time. Because the world revolves around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey California, and California’s stuck in the past, which is to say outside of Hawaii

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I guess Alaska, it is the last American time zone. don’t email me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The pre-orders will go up at midnight California time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And as they do every year, California gives a big middle finger to the rest of the world slash especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey country. And at three o’clock in the morning, I will be waking up on Friday morning to pre-order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two iPhone Xs, one for me, one for Aaron. And I genuinely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey genuinely will be stunned if I receive either of these in 2017.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will be getting one of the, I don’t remember the official name, white, and one of the, I don’t remember the official name,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey black.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Both 256 gigs because children and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey movies and things of that nature. And I will be sufficiently broke thereafter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, what is your intention for this coming Friday?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So half the reason I put this topic in was just to have someone who knows and cares more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than I do to tell me exactly what time this is happening so I can decide whether I’m gonna be doing anything. Obviously I’m not ordering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one for myself, but potentially I could be trying to do this at 3 a.m. for my wife,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for her phone. I need her to tell me what color she wants and what size, I guess. Those are the only options,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Color and size? Yeah. Yep. And there’s only two sizes, 64 or 256, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, because even, like, I think she wants to know whether she really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wants this first, but you can always cancel an order. So it kind of makes sense to just like try to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. And if you happen to get an order and you’re lucky, fine. And probably before your order ships, you’ll be able to like see it in a store or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something, I’m assuming. Um, and you can always just return it after what is the 14 day return window or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Yeah. So I assume that she’s going to want a free order for this. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this may be the first time I actually do this. I’ve never done it before because I always just wait for my phones and normally she doesn’t care one way or the other, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think she’s getting impatient with her phone, which by the way, this is her phone. She’s got an iPhone 6s plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s got the latest version of iOS 11 on it and she says it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slowing down and getting all sort of stuttery and stuff and I did notice her animations were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuttery so I turned on reduce motion it’s like hey it’s fixed no more stuttery animations but she still complains that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s slow and crap like maybe hurt maybe her uh storage is filling up I got to look at it but if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyone has any bright ideas and how to if there’s some sort of problem related to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS 11 that makes iPhone 6s Plus a slowdown. Because 6s Plus isn’t that old. I think it should be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, she’s getting frustrated with her current phone and wants a phone sooner rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than later. So if she can’t get in a pre-order for this, she might just buy an 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Plus, which would be perfectly fine and she’d be happy with it, but it’s certainly more boring than trying the X.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let me just put it on record, John, before we hear Marco’s intentions, that if you order Tina a phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and if she does not want it, I would like dibs on buying it off

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} of you. You don’t even know what color it’s gonna be. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey size, whatever she wants, a 64. I don’t care, I am that like, so this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the first worldiest of first world problems, right, that I’m this worked up, as I get every year about getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the new Apple hotness quickly. But this is even worse than every other year because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has all but come out and said, or maybe they did say at some point, but they’ve all but come out and said, good friggin’

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey luck getting this anytime soon. So I am trying to work whatever angle I can in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey order to get myself an iPhone 10 as quickly as possible That being said Marco, what’s your intention?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I’m gonna get well, I’m going to try to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco White when I love Kim Alberg user in the chat said the official color names are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of black and somewhat white

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I’m going for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhat white variety Oh, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, you know, so I’ve had every single iPhone that I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far has been in whatever version of black was the blackest black they had that year. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I have Jet Black iPhone 7 currently, and you know, before that just space gray, space

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gray, space gray. It’s funny, Apple has no idea what color space is, clearly, with all the different space grays I’ve had. But it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in various points in the past, I have had interest in getting one of the the lighter backed ones, like the silver backed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones, just for variety’s sake, or certain models, I thought it looked better. But I never wanted the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco white front plate on it, like above the screen and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John, I just don’t think those look very good. Now I have the option to get either color with the same black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notch and black bezel around it. So, honestly, in the pictures I’ve seen so far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which admittedly, there’s not many of them because nobody has these yet, but in the picture I saw from the launch event, from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco backstage area, I thought the kinda white one looked better than the somewhat black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. But again, it could just be because I just want variety, because I’ve had so many black phones in a row.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, so I’m gonna go for that one. I’m gonna go for the large capacity and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Verizon or SIM-free one, if I can at all get it anytime soon. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am an AT&T customer and I’m not interested in changing networks because Verizon doesn’t actually cover my house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or most of my neighborhood very well. The reason I want the Verizon version, despite not being a Verizon customer, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re doing the same thing again this year that they started last year with the 7, which is that for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco GSM-only ones, the ones that are being sold as AT&T phones in the US, and I don’t know what situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is elsewhere, those have an Intel cellular modem. And the ones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are sold either SIM-free or that are sold on CDMA-based networks like Verizon and Sprint

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are using a Qualcomm modem. Allegedly, when this started last year with the 7,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh the modems are the same, it doesn’t matter, whatever phone you get it’s fine. You know, and there have been other iPhones in the past that have like minor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco component variations, like whether you got like a Samsung or TSMC system on a chip and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the 6S generation had like a minor battery variation and stuff. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have found with my experience with the Intel modem iPhone 7s on AT&T,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have had a lot of call dropping problems where my microphone on my phone will stop working and the person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on their end will not be able to hear me. And I have done a lot of research, I’ve heard from a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people, customers, I’ve even heard from a few geniuses at Apple bars or Groves or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever, are they called arborists now? Because they’re in the Grove? I don’t know what they are. Anyway, I’ve heard from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a couple of arborists that this is actually a pretty big thing, that it’s a pretty widespread

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issue that the Intel modem AT&T iPhone 7s frequently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have this issue where the microphone drops out during a phone call. Like this is just a thing. And so I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my best with this generation. And by the way, this has been really annoying. Like, you think you don’t get, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a nerd, you think, oh, I never make phone calls. It isn’t that big of a deal. And then I’m like on the phone with somebody at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple and it drops. And it’s like, you don’t want those calls to be unreliable when they happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for an app developer. Like, you want to stay on that call. It’s really annoying when that happens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it makes it very hard to use this as a phone. And I’ve actually had two different iPhone 7s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because one was replaced for a bad lightning port halfway through the year, and they both do it to some degree, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know it’s not just some fluke thing with my very first one. TIFFs did it too, they all do it, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s just an issue of whether, whatever network conditions cause this, you know, whether that affects

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where you are or not is whether it’s gonna happen to you or not, it seems. But anyway, so I’m trying my hardest to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get the Qualcomm modem in the iPhone X, and the only way to do that is to get the Verizon or SIM-free version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the US. And they’re not gonna probably offer the SIM-free version for a while. They usually, they don’t, with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high-profile release, don’t usually offer it immediately. Usually it’s a few weeks out or a couple months out even. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m gonna try to get a Verizon one but I don’t have a Verizon account so it’s gonna be pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much impossible for me to actually place an order for that. So what I’m probably gonna end up having to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is order the AT&T one in the app or whatever I do that night and then just go to the stores constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the next few weeks because there’s no way it’s coming on day one. So go to the stores for the next few weeks and I hope I can get myself Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one or a SIM free one somehow. And that’s about it. I too am gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wake up at 3 in the morning and I’m gonna try to place my order. I know I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be able to and when I am finally able to probably 10 minutes into the ordering window the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco delivery dates if I’m lucky will be December. If I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more honest with myself probably January and or even later into 2018. So I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not that optimistic about my chances of getting it in the app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only reason I’m waking up at 3am at all is that on the off chance that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple has made more of them than they thought they would this week or whatever, and if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can actually place an order at 3am and get it within a couple of weeks of launch day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will feel really stupid if I didn’t do that. If I decide to just get up at 8am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and try to place the order then and and go to the stores and just hope for the best. Like I’m gonna feel really stupid. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am not optimistic. I think it’s gonna be a really bad scene. I think even people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who get there in the first minute or two of the orders being open are gonna be seeing dates in December.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s just, it’s gonna be rough. And that’s if you’re lucky, if you’re lucky to get it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this year. And I really am a little worried for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what this is going to do for Apple’s financials and their sales numbers and everything for the next few

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quarters, because I really don’t think they’re gonna sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nearly as many of these as there’s demand for, but the people who have been waiting for this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some portion of them will say, all right, forget it, if I can’t get it the same time soon, or if the initial reviews

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come out and there’s some annoyance with them that certain people don’t wanna deal with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or that won’t solve their needs well enough, there is gonna be some percentage of those people who say, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forget it, I’ll get an 8 Plus, or I’ll get an 8, and that’ll be it. And so, you know, Apple will sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phones to those people for sure. Like, if I had to guess, I’m guessing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Friday, like, after everyone has tried to place an order for the iPhone X

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and has been told it’s gonna be January, I’m guessing Friday afternoon is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna be probably the second biggest sales day for the iPhone 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plus for its entire run. The biggest was probably its opening day. I bet the 8 Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has its second biggest day on Friday because of all those people who are gonna be discouraged from the X, sorry, 10. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was, I honestly didn’t mean to do that. They’re gonna be discouraged from the 10 and they’re gonna say, all right, forget it, I’ll get the 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plus and that’ll be that. But that’s gonna be some percentage of people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think it’s gonna be a high percentage of people. I think most of the people who are really holding out for the iPhone 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not gonna settle for the 8 Plus or the 8. they’re gonna just wait for the 10, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if that means springtime. And by then, they might say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know what, now I’m a third of the way until the next iPhone comes out, I’ll just wait till

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the X2, or whatever might come out next fall. If the shipping delays

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are long enough, they run that risk. So this actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be a problem. Apple is taking a pretty big risk here with the way they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco launched this phone. I tell you one thing, I would not want to be Tim Cook for the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year. Well, I mean, I guess he’s probably has a pretty good life. But I have a feeling he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to be under a lot of scrutiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if these financials don’t work out because they can’t sell enough of the iPhones that people actually are waiting for. That’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a problem for Tim Cook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’ll even out over time, though, because I feel like all the reports we’re seeing about inventory problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are all none of them say it’s anything systemic like a year from now this should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John settled right and so that’s bad because you got a whole year of under shipment right but that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it evens out eventually and I think he always takes the long view yes people are gonna complain to him about all the numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are crappy or whatever but that over a two-year three-year time period this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know the sales of this phone will just be a different shape but the total number should be good because as you said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if If they sales they lose for people who want to buy a 10 but can’t get it, are probably going to go to the eight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They have good retention and they’re not going to say, well, if I can’t get a 10, I’m going to try an Android phone. I mean, there’s some of that always, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the bigger potential problem is not inventory, which is, you know, it’s bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s better if you have enough phones to sell to people, that’s much better. Right. But it does even out over the long haul. If your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things are good, the real danger is what if the 10 is not that good or if the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 10 is not does not satisfy the customers who all think they want it now because you can’t that doesn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out over time that gets worse over time and that increases the chance of someone’s going to go to you know try an Android

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone or something like that. So I mean I bet he’s more worried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple should be more worried about 10 not being a good phone than they are about not having enough of them. They should be worried about not having enough of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them but not as much as not having a good phone. And from my perspective like I’m I always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cancel patients on this like I’m getting one. It just so happens that that there’s this confluence of events where,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, my wife’s phone is old and it’s her year and it’s getting slow because of iOS 11 or it could just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because of upgrade. A lot of voodoo people suggest to try to, you know, make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John become faster, including resetting a bunch of stuff. But I hate doing that because like if you reset stuff and it doesn’t make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster, then you have to change all your settings back for, and you just cost yourself even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more time and got yourself even more annoyed. Anyway, she’s impatient, I’m not. Casey is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always impatient, obviously, He already described that he needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a phone now now now and Marco kind of needs to have the new phone now No, no as well as far as I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think Marco and I are probably tied for least amount of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} patient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s got he’s got at least a legit reason that he can rationalize like he’s got to develop an app for it and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} right? Do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for a living?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re gonna have you’re gonna have one available at work. Like it doesn’t have to be your personal phone. Am

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I? Yeah, sure, right? I mean, if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} important for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you for your application to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} available.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but everyone at everyone’s job is under the same problem that we’re at. Everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} facing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same problem. Right, but you have a lot more of them. You don’t have to get a phone, just somebody does. So what I’m getting at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that I think just someone on ATP needs to have the phone for the purposes of doing this show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But we don’t all need to have the phone. So I think it’ll be fine if we just get one of them. And of course, it would be nice if Apple just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sent us one to review, hinting to Apple people. But so far, podcasts still don’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we wait patiently and we will try to order with the rest of the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for a loose definition of patiently. But yes, I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, for both regular people who are not in a hurry, just wait, like wait until the spring, nothing will happen to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you if your phone currently works fine. And isn’t like doesn’t have some weird problem. It’s making you want to get it don’t feel that thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey feels where he just needs to have the newest greatest phone like especially in the case of the 10, which might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be annoying or problematic in ways that nobody knows yet because nobody has them and it is is very different. The other phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not a known quantity. There’s so many things that could go wrong with it. So and you don’t want the first batch of them like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there. There’s so many reasons to just just relax. Just it’s so much more relaxing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be pretend you’re not listening to a tech podcast and pretend you just wander into an Apple Store in March and go, Oh, these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new iPhones, they go buy one of these and they’ll say, Would you like one? And you’ll say, Yes, I would like one. And they’ll bring it from the back for you. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ll buy it like a normal person who doesn’t listen to the accident tech podcast. It’s a cool way to live.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will also say like in the craziness of trying to get one, if you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one from somebody else, don’t have them ship it in the box that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shipped to them in. As I learned last year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this horrible incident, I still feel so bad in this horrible incident.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Basically you know I think Apple tracks them pretty well when they ship them to the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a customer such that I don’t think people at UPS are trying to steal them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or anything like that out of the boxes that Apple ships them in. But if you re-tape up that box and ship

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to somebody else as resale, those happen to get stolen quite a lot as I learned last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year. And so don’t do that. Put it in a different box maybe and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t try to resell it. If you do try to resell, yeah, for the love of God, put it in a different box and don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco label it iPhone or anything. Oh, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} section of this. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did you get in your box? You didn’t get like a rock or something, did you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it was just the plastic wrap from the outside of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} iPhone box. I feel like it’s a little bit classy. Pecan peanuts and plastic wrap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a little bit classier when they replace it with a rock or something. I feel like that shows the personal touch for the thieves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, and I got a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lightweight box that was literally stolen from the UPS supply chain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it was stamped before, like it had it’s weight stamped on its label before it was replaced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by nothing. So that was fun. The other thing I would say is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you think you might want one, don’t follow John’s advice and be patient.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you think there’s any chance you might want one, put an order in. Because you can cancel it with like three clicks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you decide before it ships that you don’t want it. Just put the order in if you are at all on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fence because then you’ll at least have an option to get one in two months when it finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ships. Or you know what like you’ll have a date that you can get one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But now you’re tempting people to stay awake at 3 a.m. Like, you know, or midnight at least. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re saying, well, if you’re gonna order it, you might as well order at the beginning, because why

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ordering anyway? So then, you know, you’re setting your alarm for midnight or 3 a.m. I’m saying, no, don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it. That is what I’m saying. I am actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying, like, just, like, if you think there’s any way you can, if you think there’s any chance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re gonna want one, stay up till 3 a.m. or wake up at 3 a.m. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Plus, you’re encouraging more competition for us, the Tubbles people of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} today. That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bigger problem. Stay up till 3.15 a.m. and order it. There we go. So you’re on for 3.15.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah. That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other thing I’m hoping, considering I might actually be doing this this year, is I’m hoping that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the casuals all bought iPhone 8s, right? Normally there’s this big pent-up demand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the new phone and everyone who wants the new phone goes at once, but now we have a tier where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want the new phone, but do you want the super expensive one or do you just want the new iPhone? Because the 8’s pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s new and it’s different enough that I think it satisfies what people want, you know, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a different outside with the glass things and the better cameras and you know, all that other good stuff, different colors,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? I hope those people are people that you would have normally been competing with. Like those people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were there trying to get the sevens or whatever, right? But a lot of those people go out and they got the eights now leaving,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hope, a smaller group of people for the 10. Now, unfortunately, that smaller group of people for the 10 is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John competing for a way, way, way, way, way smaller number of 10s that are gonna ship in 2017. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s probably not good, but I do like the fact that at least we got a little bit of help from the people buying eights.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but yeah, I wouldn’t count on that too much to actually helping. Yep.

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iPhone X risks

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I was wondering, this is probably our last time to talk about the X or speculate about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it before this actual press review is out I would guess. Is there anything about, so John you mentioned earlier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that like you know the biggest risk for the for Apple with a 10 is that it has some kind of problem or it isn’t very good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or isn’t very compelling after all. What do you think the biggest risks are for it? Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like what’s the what are the biggest ways that this might not pan out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I mean, the big ones that a lot of the press talk about is face ID. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is, again, not not having ever tried it and not, you know, not getting much information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the people who did. If face ID doesn’t work well enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, I don’t know if it has to be as good as touch ID out of the gate, but it has to be close. Like if, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let’s put it this way, what did you use a bad analogy that will make everyone sad? If face ID works like Siri, it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a bad scene,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cause cause Siri does work and you can demo it and it does cool things. But for the unlocking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your phone, if face ID like falls below some minimum threshold of convenience people unlock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their phones a lot and I think a lot of people lock their phones now like we’re not in the old days where you just slide to unlock people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have codes on their phones they’re used to touch ID touch ID is amazing and works great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John face ID has some minimum bar that has to reach so if it doesn’t reach that that is a big problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because no one wants to get a phone and just really be annoyed every time you have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unlock it and the second thing is app updates you have to update your app to deal with the stupid rounded corners

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the home line thing and the notch. And I listed them probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the order that they’re annoying. Like you would think the notch is the problem, but having seen overcast in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simulator screenshots and everything, it seems clear that the rounded corners are a much bigger problem than you think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you haven’t considered how you’re gonna fit your app into that because it really does cut off a lot of things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so, updating apps. How fast are developers gonna do it? If you buy a new phone and Face ID works great, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every app you put on it looks all weird and janky and goes crazy in landscape, even though it’s not quote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unquote the phone’s problem, like oh, the phone is fine, nothing wrong with the phone, people will have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bad impression. I waited all this time, I stay up till 3 a.m., I spent $1,200, and as a reward,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all my apps look and work weird on this phone. Those are the two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that occurred to me right off the bat, setting aside like, oh, the battery’s exploded, there’s some kind of hardware reliability problem, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, all that stuff that can happen with any phone. But the things that are unique to the X, Face ID

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and app updates.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I agree with John. I am super curious to see real world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reviews of Face ID because I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s going to be as good as Apple promises, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey scared. And you know, I’ve talked to friends at Apple that have used them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they all say, no, really, it’s amazing. But I don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to have a third party tell me what they think. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be very good. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think it’s going to be pretty darn amazing. I think the Face ID is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the most obvious stumbling block that could happen, but I think the most obvious stumbling block

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that will happen is what John said about third party apps, that they’re just not updated in timely fashion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or not updated well or whatever the case may be. And I think that’s the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is going to be most telling. And we’ll see, whenever these reviews come out, we’ll see if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the reviewers have run into a lot of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think you guys pretty much covered what I was going to say too. Apps I think are the biggest thing I worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about. And not just like how many apps will be there on day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, because I think the answer to that is probably going to be not enough. There’s going to be some, but probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not enough. I don’t even know if I’m probably not going to make day one with Overcast Update because I just keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco running into really annoying UI issues that are, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of which are my fault, many of which are my fault from like, you know, technical debt that I’m still repaying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and trying to get rid of over my previous UI hacks. But some of which are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone being harder to work with than I predicted and the UI being harder to manage than I predicted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But ultimately, the biggest problem with apps is gonna, first it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when the apps get letterboxed. Like, I’ve seen a few people running simulator tricks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to kind of show what apps look like when they’re not updated for the iPhone X, when they’re running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the iPhone X size screen and they just look ridiculous. It’s almost as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if, they look almost like when the iPad first came out and you could run iPhone apps in that little tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco window, like in the middle of the iPad. It almost looks that ridiculous. They just run in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tiny little area in the middle with these giant black bars letterboxing the top and bottom of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone. It looks really bad. This is not just a simple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco recompile with a bigger storyboard. This is a large undertaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a lot of apps. Best case scenario, even for very simply designed apps,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even apps that use very standard stuff that make it very easy to convert, even they typically have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to spend at least a couple days on this update. It’s a significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change that a lot of things have to do to adapt to this screen because it’s so different. It isn’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same properties but bigger. There’s no more corners

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and now the bottom is not solid and you can’t really put anything there and you should probably take gestures away from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being near it. The top is giant, but you can’t put anything there, and you should take gestures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco away from it. There’s all sorts of, and when you rotate the phone, if you happen to support landscape in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app, you have to change something on almost every screen of your app. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco may be difficult or not, depending. Like if you use table views, and you use background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things in table views, chances are you have work to do. There’s so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco little and big design changes and technical changes your app now has to do. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to give Apple credit, the API for all the safe area inset stuff is remarkably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco complete and remarkably useful for accommodating the notch and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the various insets that the notch creates, especially in landscape mode. The API is good, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we still have to use it. We still have to do it and work on it and redesign things and move things and test things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just proving to be a ton of work for almost every developer I’ve talked to about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would not expect many apps to be updated soon. And no matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how, like, even if the apps you use, for the most part, are by really on-the-ball

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developers who are really gonna be there on day one and be ready, you’re still probably gonna use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a number of apps throughout your day-to-day life that aren’t gonna be updated for a while. So you’re gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those giant ugly black bars on top and bottom for a long time, depending on what apps you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use. But like, you’re gonna see this a lot for a while. and it’s gonna be annoying for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco owners of the X for a while. The other thing is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I worry with the X quite how much of iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been rooted in the idea for a long time that you can always reach things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the top bar of an app. And to some extent the bottom bars of an app, like button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bars, toolbars, tab bars. And with the iPhone X, it is a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different aspect ratio than any other iPhones or iOS devices have ever been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it is very, very tall and skinny. If you have trouble reaching the top

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and bottom of a screen on an iPhone Plus, you’re definitely going to have to have problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reaching the top and bottom of the screen on the iPhone X. And so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of iOS has been built on the assumption that you can put pretty frequently used buttons and things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in bars on the top and bottom of the interface that even when you account for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco insets from the notch and from the home indicator area on the bottom, things are still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna be really hard to reach for a lot of people and apps will eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change from this like the plus phones encourage apps to change to some degree from this but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it wasn’t quite as bad and you could still say well if you have really big hands you’re buying the Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or if you don’t mind using two hands you’re buying the Plus but oh well that’s that’s just because you’re buying the Plus you can deal with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But now like this is going to be like the mainstream power user phone and also the Plus kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of already has been becoming that honestly for about the last year year and a half or so. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps have to totally rethink their interaction models to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to minimize requiring use of the top and bottom of the screen because those are going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be way harder to reach for way more people now than they were before. The OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in general is going to have to do that also. Like iOS is going to have to change a lot of its own standards

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a lot of its own app designs to better accommodate this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s all going to take time. It’s going to take years. So I think, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overall bullet point here of risks to the iPhone X’s reception and to the quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of using one for the next, you know, little while, the overall heading there is apps. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way bigger and potentially way longer to get right. You might find it really annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to use apps on it until things are better designed for it. So that’s a pretty big sticking point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only other thing I would think of is battery life. The battery life is a giant question mark because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve never had an OLED iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’ve seen, you’re the second person I’ve seen worry about battery life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I didn’t list that on things because this is the phone that they said has two hours more battery life. So even if they’re off,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it still has better battery life than the 7, right? What are you worried about? You think it’s gonna be worse than the 7?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, the way they measure battery life is useless for real world use. It always has been. Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco measure they use for battery life does not reflect the way anyone I know uses their phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But proportionally, they said the 7 was better than the 6 and it was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? It was, yes. But the battery also got bigger and so it was basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like roughly the same type of components that we’ve always known, but bigger, right? And so it kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of made sense that that happened. it wasn’t a big surprise. But it depends on how they’re measuring it. Like if they’re measuring by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talk time tests, a web browsing loop, things like that, they optimize for that. And they can design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the phone to be really responsible in what they consider those typical uses. But then if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you do something on your phone that is not typical use, so for instance, that crazy new processor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the six cores that can now all be on at the same time if they want to, if you’re doing something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco processor intensive, that’s probably a pretty high power usage ceiling that the processor can have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And while they’re doing whatever they’re doing with their battery tests, they might be not setting it that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way, or not using the processor in that way, but if you do something that uses it that way, you’re gonna have very different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco results. Similarly, like their tests probably have, yeah, they probably don’t use GPS, they probably don’t use,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, heavy cellular data or roaming or anything else. Like there’s all sorts of things that can be different there. And also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just the nature of how users from an OLED screen, where now the screen can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not only does the screen use probably less power overall, when it’s on, the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uses a varying amount of power based on how brightly the pixels are lit up. So if you have like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco black pixels that are effectively off with an OLED, that’s gonna use less power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than if you have white pixels that are lit up all the way. That’s different from the way LCDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have always worked. So like, the way the iPhone X will use its battery and the variation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you will have, we don’t really know the answer to that yet. Like we’re not gonna know that until we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few months of using this to really get a feel for how that battery behaves. And the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple quotes the battery time, I think is almost meaningless for how that will work in practice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because these are all new components with all new profiles of how they use power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I don’t think we can really say for sure how it’s gonna work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s meaningless, and I think the OLED screen, even if it was 100% white all the time, would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tire beat an LCD. Like, that’s the point of OLED. That’s why it’s on the watch. It’s lower power,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if the stuff’s turned on. That’s my impression, anyway. So I’m like I said, I’m not worried about battery life. I mean, if the batteries explode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s a problem. But battery life wise, even if it doesn’t meet the extra two hours, I feel like it will be better than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seven. And as long as it’s better than the seven, people will like it. Because you know, it’s like the fact that you’re replacing your phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a battery that’s gone through several charge cycles. So it’s already kind of crappy. With a new battery and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new battery gets more battery life, I think it’ll be fine. I’m optimistic about battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To go back a step to what Marco was saying, part of the thing that worries me about app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey support is that if nobody can get their hands on one of these in the first place, like if no developers can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get their hands on one of these, it’s only gonna exacerbate this problem. So there’s, you know, it’s a two-pronged issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One of them is that almost every iOS app, like Marco was saying, is designed for top-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey navigation. You know, your back buttons are at the top, your create a new thing, like a new message in messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or whatever is typically at the top. All of that might need to shimmy down, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in many cases, a really, really deep and in wide update,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that’s rethinking your entire app’s architecture. And on top of that, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you don’t have a real test device for months, I mean, we were just saying, we’re planning on waking up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at three in the morning and we don’t think that we’ll necessarily get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our phones until 2018, like that’s gonna be a big darn problem. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey optimistic, I hope that it’ll work out just fine. I hope that I’ll get my iPhone a week from Friday,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I feel like we’re raining on everyone’s parade, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think that’s anyone’s intention. We’re hopeful that it will work out for the best. It’s just, there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of signs. You have the Magic 8-Ball saying this is gonna be an interesting rollout, and it’s gonna be an interesting first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey few months with it. But let me tell you, I’m still super amped in March of 2018 when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I finally get my phone. I’m super amped to unlock it with just my face. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m excited.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the other thing about your developer thing too is like, keep in mind, like exacerbating the apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem is that developers won’t have these phones for a while, as you said, which means there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco immense pressure on us from users and from Apple to update our apps for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone X like yesterday, like to have this needs to be done now, now, now. This is immense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pressure on us to update our apps for a phone that will probably handle pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco differently than anything that we have used before that deserves significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco redesign consideration that we have to design for without ever holding it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And sure, we can change it later, but the initial batch of updates for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone X might not be good. I would say it’s gonna be really hit or miss because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost all of them will have been designed and developed without the designer and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developer having access to one. So it’s all gonna be just, it’s gonna be like the very first wave of iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Apple watch designs when those came out, which was like really hit or miss because they were mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developed in the simulator.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So somebody put out numbers, those, the Nikkei reporters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that, what is it, a newspaper website? I don’t even know. But anyway, this is their speculation, obviously not from Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they’re saying 20 million iPhones between now and the end of the year. And you’re like, well, that sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s a lot, right? But last year, between October and December, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shipped almost 80 million. So that’s a factor of four. If this guess estimate from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these third-party people with knowledge of the supply chain and blah, blah, blah is right, then not like we’re saying there’s gonna be 20% fewer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones than last year, whatever, four times fewer. And again, maybe the eight buyers are gonna help with that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I’m not sure they’re gonna help Forex. So I really hope these numbers aren’t right because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is really grim. I hear the graph of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how bad is it gonna be in terms of pre-order times. I also hope that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the number of people who are awake at 3 a.m. exactly, hammering on their phones to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to order another phone, is itself smaller still. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re really getting to are the people, like this is the type of thing where I like, where the people who are willing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do the ridiculous thing to lose sleep, to set their alarm for 2.55, to do all this stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there are, there’s a small number of them, and the numbers get bigger, the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who want to order the next morning and then bigger still for the people who the next day and so on and so forth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so it can be you know if you if you want the best chance to get it as soon as possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then just do what we do and as many people pointed out and who have gone through this before very often the barrier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not your CDN updating in Margo’s case where he doesn’t even get to see the phone on his app until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s too late or Apple Store crapping out which happens but at various points during the purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process depending on what you buy, it may need to contact your carrier servers, and the carriers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suck in the US. So that’s where your entire order process goes off the rails

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because their servers are unresponsive. And while you’re trying to get through that phase where it has to contact Verizon or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the phones have been ordered. And by the time you get through that, now your ship date is February

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 21st, and what can you do? So it’s one of the strategies people suggested is buy the one without a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SIM, so you never have to contact a carrier. but I don’t know what chipset, to Marco’s point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that thing is gonna use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That does get around it. The problem is it’s exactly what people wanna do when they’re scalping them. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple does not usually make the SIM-free version available for a high-demand phone on day one. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually wait a few weeks or months and then they make it available.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then the people go to the T-Mobile one, they go to T-Mobile which doesn’t contact their site, but then you get a different chipset

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that loses different radio bands, and it’s all very fraught and confusing. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know, I’ve never done this before, so I can’t say, but I’m not optimistic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I have a feeling that because what I’m trying to do is exactly what scalpers try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do, I’m probably gonna have to just go to the stores a lot and just try to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lucky that way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you’re using the senior citizen advantage, which is like, I’m home during the day, suckers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wander into the Apple Store while you’re all at work, and I can just come there every day and go, hey, how you doing, it’s me again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any handy phones?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, the good thing is I’m now getting allergy shots twice a week at a building next door to an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twice a week? What are you curing yourself of allergies from?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Allergies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} to what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pollen, everything?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Pollen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ragweed, not dogs fortunately, but cats, bugs, rabbits, mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the pollen and the ragweed, which makes pretty bad seasonal allergies. But no, fortunately I have a hypoallergenic dog

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and he’s wonderful and I could put my face on him and have no problems. But if he was a rabbit, I would have problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because rabbits are kind of like cats, but they’re constantly moving, so they have a cloud of allergies around them constantly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s awful. Yeah, so if I could show up early to an allergy shot, like twice a week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can get to an Apple store at like eight in the morning, maybe nine in the morning, and you know, I’ll see. I’m sure it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not gonna work during the first week or two, but maybe during week three. That’s probably gonna work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before my 3 a.m. order will be delivered.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, isn’t that how I got my iPhone 7? I seem to recall it was an in-person wonder-by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. I wasn’t in a super either, but it was the same deal. The jet blacks were hard to get. I didn’t even bother trying to get it early

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. And I think I did a lot of, you know, oh, we’re in the mall, let’s stop by the Apple store and see what they’ve got.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t remember if that’s where I bought it or not, but that is a very good, because Apple stores do get shipments in, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, weekly, daily, whenever they get them. Daily, usually. They get a small number,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if you happen to be the person who wanders into the store when that small number appears, you are like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a mini line that only consists of the people who happen to be in the Apple store the moment the shipment comes in. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that line is way shorter than the line we’re all gonna be in at 3 a.m. trying to get in a big giant queue with the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world to get a phone shipped to us in February.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’ll be, it’s not gonna be fun. It’ll be fun, but no, it’s not gonna be fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s gonna be a slog, but we will eventually get this phone. And you know what? All of my concerns aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ultimately I am very excited to get this phone. That’s why we’re all waiting for it. Because like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if it’s good, which Apple, you know, for all their problems with Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco recently, their record with iPhones is pretty solid. Like, they usually don’t have major

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues. Sometimes they have minor issues. They don’t usually have major issues. The likelihood that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is gonna be as described and gonna be good is pretty high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if that’s true, this is gonna be great because it’ll finally be like the nice middle ground

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between the iPhone 7 and the iPhone Plus that we’ve been waiting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for for so long. And to have the best cameras in the quote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco medium sized phone, even though it’s not quite, but to have that would be great, to have a bigger screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a smaller body will be great. There are a lot of asterisks on this. There’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things we’re having to give up to get this, but if it works out, it’s gonna be awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m tentatively optimistic. I think it’s probably going to end up being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great. We’re probably going to look back on all these worries and laugh at how ridiculous they were, and I hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it turns out that way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I hope so, but I think what’s going to end up happening is I’ll get my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in December or January, and you will get yours in about a week by going to the store every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey single day. Yeah. nature.

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Tim’s Mac Mini email

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So speaking of things that are That are positive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, maybe apparently the Mac mini still thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Here’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing. Do you have the Tim Cook statement handy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Does it matter? We all know what he said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Can you read the statement,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just for the record? I’m glad you love Mac Mini. Why is it never THE

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac Mini?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That’s a Steve carryover, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think. I know, it just drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me crazy. And for context listeners, this was an email. Somebody emailed Tim Cook asking about the future

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the Mac Mini and got this response that allegedly it was posted to MacRumors So what was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it? Go

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} on, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I’m glad you love Mac Mini. We love it too. Our customers have found so many creative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and interesting uses for Mac Mini. While it is not the time to share any details,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we do plan for Mac Mini to be an important part of our product line going forward. Best,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tim. Yeah, so all the websites took this to mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tim Cook confirms the Mac Mini’s not dead, that they’re working on a new one. When

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I read this, I was less optimistic. Or at least, I found this to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be relatively content-free. Almost all of the words that Tim wrote back allegedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t mean anything, are non-committal, you know, PR, CEO speak BS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the few words that mean something were so vague and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-committal that what he could mean is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re just gonna keep selling it like it is now. Like that’s all he really said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s still a thing in the line. Like when they gave that wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco statement during the Mac Pro roundtable last spring where it was something on the lines of that Mac Mini remains

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a product in our lineup it was like one of the best things I’ve ever said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this is about the same. Like, I don’t think this is saying anything about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco future updates.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you’re bending yourself into pretzels to try to make it seem like the same. It’s not the same. They said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, not time to share any details. If it was going to be the same, there’s no details to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John share. Not that there’s much information in it, but the one piece of information is an official confirmation from the CEO

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Apple that they plan to share some details

⏹️ ▶️ ^John related to the the Mac Mini in the future, which means, as far as I’m concerned, like if this was the Mac Pro, what we’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be saying is, this is confirmation the Mac Pro is not dead, right? He might as well have said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re going to come out with a new thing that people who like the Mac Mini will like. He didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even say it was going to be a new Mac Mini. Who knows what it could be? I mean, I think we want to discuss that, right? But the whole point is that, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they, like, there’s not like, they’re not going to just fade away. Like, we’re not making the Mac Mini anymore. So we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to sell this one until it becomes really embarrassing, and then we’ll stop. they were planning on doing with the Mac Pro. Sell it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until it becomes embarrassing and then just let it fade away and replace it with the iMac Pro or whatever. That was the plan for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac Pro until they turned around. This email does not have much content, but the one bit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information it has is, does the Mac Mini have a future? Yes, no? Answer, yes-ish.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} again, they don’t say it’s going to be a Mac Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the person was asking about the Mac Mini and his answer is, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wait, we’ll have something. And so I think at least Tim believes that the person who likes the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mini will be interested in this future thing. So it’s gotta be something Mac Mini-ish.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s not a lot of information. Like, what do you expect? Like, it’s not gonna tell you a date and yes, we’re gonna have the Mac Mini or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, we’re gonna replace it, like whatever. But it’s more than we had before. It’s from the horse’s mouth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I take that if I was a big fan of the Mac Mini, I would be excited now to know that that computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line is not 100% dead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s two parts of Tim’s wording here that actually mean anything at all. Wow does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not time to share any details. This implies there will be a time in the future where something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is shared.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So not a time in the past, because he doesn’t have a time machine. It will have to be a time in the future and he will share details. Details about what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Details that this person who sent this email apparently would be interested in. This person wants a Mac Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, so well so what that clause means is there may come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a time in the future where there’s something to share. The only other part of this that says anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is important. We do plan for the Mac Mini to be an important

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of our product line going forward. But the problem with that, when a CEO says important, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your call is important to us. Like that is complete BS. They do not mean it. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying that to please you. That doesn’t mean anything. When you remove the BS speak from this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all it really says is, we plan for the Mac Mini to be part of our product line in the future,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going forward. That’s it. That’s all it says.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Steven Buzzell Yeah, but like I said, don’t have anything to share right now. We will have something to share later. And if the product doesn’t change,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s nothing to share. If there’s something to share, that means there’s news. That means there’s news that Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John owners want, and the obvious news is there’s going to be a new Mac Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Michael Morgan Wow. So basically, I think part one of my skepticism on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is I don’t think this email says anything real. I think this is 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fluff and nothing there’s no meat to it. I completely agree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s not 100% it’s the one it’s 1% a promise that the Mac mini is not dead as a line of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah but if you’re Tim Cook you’re not gonna make that declaration in an email to some rando you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it. Yeah sure you will like I think that is the minimum the minimum amount that you can because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s nothing else he can say that he can’t just say what Phil said which is it remains a product in our lineup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that will be taken like if you’re answering at all if you answer with that, that’s taken as a confirmation that it’s dead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because if he can’t bring himself to say, you know, patented Tim Cook, just stay tuned. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really excited about blah, blah, blah, future blah, blah, blah, nothing to share today. Like he does that all the time. That’s his little shtick.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If he can’t bring himself to say that, and he actually replies and says remains a product in our lineup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that means it’s dead. So he has to either not reply, which would be the smart thing to do, or reply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and say, no, we’re We’re gonna it’s not dead, we’re gonna do a thing. And he gives his little answer about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, nothing to share today. That means there’ll be something to share like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that is, you know, you could say 90% BS and 90% content free. But that one little nugget, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said, if I was a big Mac mini fan, that would make me very excited because I feel like it is unambiguous, unambiguous. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tim Cook thinks in the same way, by the way, that they would have said, we have, you know, Mac Pro users, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have something you’ll be excited about. And they meant the iMac Pro. And so you can still be disappointed, but like, oh, I was hoping they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would, you know, keep the Mac Pro, but it turns out the thing they thought we would be excited about is the iMac Pro. And we would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of be excited about it, but it would still be not as good as a real Mac Pro. Right. So there’s still room for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Mini owners to be disappointed, but that’s that, you know, that’s their lot in life, right? Isn’t that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah. Wow. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always been a disappointing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} product in some people, but okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So anyway, I think I think it’s not that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Part one of my disappointment with this was, you know, Tim’s fluffy language. When Tim says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things in those interviews I don’t even watch them or care because there’s so little content really he’s so guarded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he’s so careful that you see no personality you get no real ideas of anything so I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway so I wouldn’t put anything into his words the other thing to worry about is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do we want today’s Apple redesigning the Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like when they last did it in 2014 Yeah, in 2014, they basically took the 2012 model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and made it worse. What would they do if today’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple redesigned the Mac Mini? Because what everyone wants is one thing. What everyone wants is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, maybe bring back the quad core option that it used to have. Maybe bring back the user replaceable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upgradable hard drive and socketed RAM. Like, things like that would be great because this is a machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that appeals to low end and budget conscious buyers more than their other machines.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So like that matters like the upgrade ability and repair ability over time that matters more on this machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than on probably any of their other machines. And they made it worse substantially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the 2012 update. So like when people say when an updated Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think number one what they want is upgraded components that would be nice to have like you know modern processors and everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they’re also thinking of some kind of redesign and everyone has their idea of what they want it to be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Mini users use them as their primary computers generally want upgrade ability.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple commentators like there was a great a great segment on upgrade this week and where Jason still argues that it should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be more like the Intel NUC the N-U-C however that’s pronounced where it’s like the size of an Apple TV. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like you know take the Mac Mini and make it even smaller make it have even less components and upgrade ability inside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even fewer ports, you know, things like that. I honestly don’t think Mac Mini owners are looking for that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I think if Apple did redesign the Mac Mini today, it would be more like that. It would be like, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make it even smaller, let’s give it all USB-C ports, you know, like take away all the usefulness of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep the same high price, maybe even increase the price with today’s Apple, and now you have less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upgradeability than even before in the 2012 and the 2014 revision. Like, do you think today’s Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would actually issue an update to the Mac Mini that Mac Mini buyers would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happy with? I think it’s very unlikely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you’re kind of dancing around this article that you haven’t read in the show notes, which is by Ricardo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mori, who offers three, he categorized three possibilities for the future of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac Mini or things that the Mac Mini people might like, and you already covered two of them, but just to cover, what was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John link in the show notes to read this article, which is longer. The first option is, it’s the same Mac Mini you see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John today, but it has upgraded internals, which is like the minimum they could do, right? Better CPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GPUs, faster SSD, like all the things you expect, you know, USB-C ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the back, but like, but otherwise it’s the same and probably a price bump, because why not, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Second option is the Apple TV size Mac mini, right? It’s smaller, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like has a lower power stuff in there in both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John senses, but it’s like the size of a hockey puck, so a whole new realm of things becomes possible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the Intel NUC, like the Apple TV, you know, that’s the second option. And the third option,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which you didn’t mention because, you know, I think this is probably the least likely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that it’s basically the X Mac or the poor man’s Mac Pro. It is a small modular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer, but that it goes like upmarket in terms of power. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what if you don’t want an iMac because you don’t want screen, but you also don’t want a bazillion dollar Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro, You want a desktop Mac that is nevertheless configurable and you can put some powerful stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it. And you don’t even have to say it’s upgradable. Maybe it’s not upgradable at all. Maybe this is totally, you know, but it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like faster. Like it’s actually got some fast processors in it and a fast SSD. It’s like a little mini speed demo. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is the least option. All of these are small computers. They’re small computers that do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not have a screen. It’s not a laptop, but they’re like, it’s like three sizes. You know, you got the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size, which I think is actually kind of gross. It’s like, you know, flat and wide. I kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that I like the taller, skinnier one, but I don’t like things to get wider. Like I think that limits usefulness. But anyway, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got that form factor, you got the hockey puck, and then presumably the X-Mac or the Poor Man’s Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro would be bigger still than the current one. And these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three options are not equally likely. And you know, like you said about the puck, like who really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wants that? And it’s extremely limiting. The X-Mac or Poor Man’s Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro is just not gonna happen. Like give up, you know? That’s why the X-Mac will never,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, that’s something that enthusiasts want and they don’t want. And so that leaves the first one where it is a new Mac mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with updated internals and maybe it changes size in some small way because they can make it smaller now, but it’s not hockey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John puck size. You know, like, and I guess there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, fourth option or whatever that’s just something entirely crazy. Like, that’s by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac minis and the Mac Pro both seem to induce this in people where they start to get the idea, like what if it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like a bunch of Mac minis? You could combine them and they would combine forces like Voltron and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know use some sort of magic technology to distribute Computing across them and if you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John added more Mac minis it would get faster and all sorts of fantasy scenarios They’re like this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not the 90s This is not the Apple that made the duo dock like that’s not gonna happen. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not their important product you could technically do some of these things but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but not the Mac Mini. It is the least investment of any Mac, so you should just hope that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they update it, that the price is not too obscene, and that it is good to go for another three years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think that’s the best you can hope for, and I think that’s what’s gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think it’s kind of sad, though, that the option that we think is the most likely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is also probably what the fewest Mac Mini customers are asking for or want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you think so?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do. I mean, so the most likely one, obviously, is the one where they make it even smaller and remove

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from it. Oh, no, no, I think the most likely one is they just update the internals. They can still make it smaller, but it’s not gonna be puck. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the puck is the most likely one at all. I think it’s like, it’s still a silver box, it just has different ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and different internals. I think that’s the most likely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So based on what Modern Apple would do and what Modern Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should do, I think making it better, making it more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco powerful, more expandable, more upgradable, that’s not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the best we can hope for is that they keep it the same and just update the guts. So, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really telling to consider that is, that’s what we’re hoping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for here is like, please Apple, don’t touch it too much. Like, please like touch it a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit, like give us upgrade components, but like, I feel like, you know, going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back to my argument, I think last year or the one before about Apple lacking confidence in its design,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seems like Apple refuses to update a product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where it’s just a spec bump a lot of the time. You know, the Mac Pro famously was never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco updated after it was released. The laptops before that had wide, long spans where like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they could have upgraded CPUs, but they didn’t. The Mac Mini is the clearest example

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet of that now in the current lineup, because I consider the Mac Pro not in the current lineup, even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s typically for sale. Anyway, I think Apple needs to get over this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco insecurity or this roadblock they have in their head that every update has to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some kind of new external design or mind-blowing thing, because that is important for some of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their products. I’d say the iPhone is the big example where the market really values that. But there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are a lot of products they sell where the market doesn’t really care about that so much, And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if the alternative to having a fancy new external design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a regular basis is never getting an update of any kind, then Apple needs to really consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what that says about them and what kind of computer company they wanna be, if they still wanna be a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company, please for the love of God, please, I mean, jeez. That’s a valid question these days. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is totally fine for the Mac Mini to get updates where the external design does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not change. Like, the market, like, and Apple should be confident enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be able to update it without saying, well, we can’t do anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big, so we should just wait until we can. Because that’s not how computers work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, that’s not how people buy computers. That’s not how, that’s not what anybody wants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Didn’t they just do two updates to the Mac Mini like that, though? The last two updates have been, form factor doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change, internals get, quote unquote, better. The first of the 2012 one is they didn’t get better. So I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the Mac Mini, if only because they don’t want to spend the money to design and do new tooling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a new thing. And to be clear, I think it is entirely possible the Mac Mini will get smaller. I’m just saying it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not gonna become something the size of the Apple TV. Like, not gonna become super duper small, because to do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would have to, you’d have to really cut the power on it. Like, it would have to get way slower than it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. You can’t, or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe we could say the same speed as the three-year-old’s computer. But the whole point is people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want a bump because they want a Mac mini that is more capable than the current one. And if you just say, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how about if it’s the same speed or it’s the size of a hockey puck? I think they can make it smaller, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not make it so darn wide and have a smaller case, but it should be faster than the current Mac. If they introduce

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new Mac mini that is not faster than the old one, that is definitely not what anybody wants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They already did it once. Yeah, I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I know. That was the core

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account thing and then nobody liked that update and stuff, but the one after that, it actually did get faster. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, no, I have that one. I have the one that got slower. The 2012

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wasn’t the one where they cut the four core option?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 2012 was the good one. They killed the four core option in the current lineup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} which is the 2014.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, well anyway, that’s what people want. Because why are you not satisfied with the current Mac mini?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s super expensive and what you get for that money doesn’t run Mac OS that well because it’s old and slow. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give me a new Mac mini and if we say, new Mac mini, same speed as your old one but the size of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hockey puck, Like that’s not what I wanted. Right, that’s not, that doesn’t help me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would just like, I would just keep using this one. So I agree that it will not be an X Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I think it’s also not gonna be a Puck. I think it will be a Mac mini, either the same size as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current case, or smaller, but not Puck size. And it has to be, it has to be faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How could it not be faster? It’s just three year old guts in there. Probably older, it has to be faster. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tim Cook didn’t say that in his email, but maybe I’ll email him later

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and say, Hey Tim, the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mini, it’s gonna be faster, right? And he’ll send me one reply that says yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right. No, are you kidding? He can’t say one word. He’ll give you three sentences that say nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is also worth looking back at what the role the Mac Mini was supposed to be in the first place, when it was first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco launched, what, about 12 years ago, something like that? What was the role back then? At the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was basically the Mac for new switchers to the Mac platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was a way that, you know, If the rest of the Macs were too expensive for your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco budget or for your needs, then here’s a way you could get a Mac for less money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You supply your own, you know, whatever display and keyboard and mouse you already have or you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can get cheaply from other people, you bring that, we’ll give you the box. And that can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your Mac for a lot less money than our big towers or our laptops. I think if modern Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still viewed the Mac as a business that had potential growth in it, which is a big question mark,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think which is unfortunate because I think there’s tons of growth to be had because for all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the you know press narrative that phones and everything are killing computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we all keep using computers and we all keep buying them and you know while the PC market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the whole is not growing very well anymore and in some cases it’s not growing at all anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple doesn’t have a very big share of it and their share can grow so there’s tons of growth to be had if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanted it but I think it’s worth revisiting that original purpose of the Mac Mini, which is to attract

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new people to the Mac platform who otherwise won’t or can’t buy the other options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if Apple really wanted to do that, you know, I think they’ve always had this tension with the Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they probably don’t want to cannibalize sales of the higher-end Macs. Because one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, you know, one thing a lot of people don’t talk about in the Apple comment-o-sphere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that when you look at what Apple actually sells, the volumes they actually sell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the The computers they sell ridiculously high volumes in are the lowest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and cheapest configurations of each type of product. They sell a ton

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the cheapest iMac and the cheapest MacBook, which for a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been the MacBook Air. Before that it was the MD101, like the famous non-written

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple sells massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quantities of those to businesses, schools, things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so they have to make sure that whatever is the cheapest thing in a category,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it is both okay for Apple that they sell a lot of those instead of anything else,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that it is a reasonable computer. I think they clearly want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people to buy the low-end iMacs and not the low-end Mac minis as the cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desktop. The reality though is that laptops outsell desktops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much these days. That was not as true back when they first launched the Mac mini. Laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are now the computers that almost everybody wants. So if you’re gonna still have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desktop whose sole purpose is to sweep up the rest of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the edges of the market, as Jason Snell said this week in Upgrade, it’s kind of like the catch-all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It catches a lot of edge case needs that other Macs might be impractical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or unusable for. Like people run server farms on Mac Minis. Like there’s so many cool uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you have, you know, home server, stuff like that, headless things, cheap things, portable things. There’s so many things you can do with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Mini where an iMac would be impractical or just not really work for that purpose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a laptop wouldn’t really work, you know. So the Mac Mini is an important

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of the lineup where it’s actually true. The question I think is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it worth expanding what that means now? Because in today’s environment, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is very different from when the Mac Mini was first conceived and introduced,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they actually had a compelling, inexpensive, little desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing that you could put a standard two and a half inch hard drive in if you wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for expansion, or things like that, like things that would make it appeal more to low-end and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customized buyers, they could I think really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco increase the appeal of Mac OS for a certain category of people without I don’t think really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cannibalizing meaningful portions of Mac sales because if they introduce a desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that cannibalizes sales of the lowest and cheapest iMac I don’t think that’s a big problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for them especially because the Mac Mini it’s not going to be that cheap like it’s not going to be a great value because it never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been so from that angle I think it’s okay and And the reality is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most low-end buyers these days buy laptops anyway. So I don’t think they have to worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much about low-end cannibalization anymore as they used to. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so what this product could instead do is be a market expander, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Expand the market share of macOS, of people using real Macs instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Hackintoshes, who want their own desktop, who don’t want to pay iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prices, who want to put like two terabytes in it with a standard drive in some way, like things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. This could be a market expander for them in a way that would detract from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their core profitable markets almost not at all if they wanted it to be. But I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it doesn’t seem like Apple views the Mac as a growth market anymore. But I think that’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought you’re getting into X Max territory when you keep talking about the idea that It’s gonna have a 2.5 inch bay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere in this computer like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it did until 2012 or no it did in 2014

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No, that seems very unlikely to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me They love the PCI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} little so and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now SSDs you can still there is still space in the case design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco For one and you can I think you can still order them with fusion drives So like you could have a stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a bay in there But if you didn’t order it with a Fusion Drive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then the hardware to mount the drive isn’t there. Like so mine is SSD only, and I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to expand it because it’s only 256, and I can’t. Like I just can’t. There’s no hardware in there to support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything. So I have to just do external stuff if I want to expand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. So we don’t, Apple hasn’t broken out iPad mini sales in forever if they ever did. So we don’t really know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the numbers are, but I bet they’re super small. And what you’re describing would be a cool thing, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it falls under the same category is the Mac Pro as in they would have had to have a special announcement about that. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s getting into X-Mac territory. We’re saying we’re going to reimagine the Mac Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it is going to fulfill a different role. And that role is exactly what you just described, Margo. But it would have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be a very different product. It would have to basically be a miniature Mac Pro designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be modular and configurable, to be able to spec it up and down, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a really cheap low-end one but also a really fast high-end one in a similar form factor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and be upgradable and fulfill all those roles that you just described for a different kind of person like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the iMac would be the I don’t want to worry about it I don’t want to have any boxes or cables it’s all in one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I’ll get the low-end iMac right and I just it’s all in one box and I get a nice screen and a nice computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s all there and then the other end is I want a computer that is configurable and upgradable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and potentially can be cheaper than the iMac if I already have a monitor but also can be more expensive if I want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crank it up and try to get something faster and that’s until X max territory but so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t know anything about this but it’s still those are it still seems just much more likely that it will continue to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it is which is like the cheapest way to get into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac as long as you don’t need to look at a screen right like you already have a screen and a keyboard and a mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can probably spec a Mac mini so that is cheaper than Apple’s cheapest laptop which may not be true for much longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John given how the Mac Mini prices keep going up and that Apple continues to keep around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John low-end cheap laptops like what is the you know the 13 inch air with a terrible screen is that below $900 yet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s around there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah so yeah it would be nice if that trend reversed and you could actually get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a cheaper Mac Mini but I’m not really into the Mac Mini but I feel for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who use them in various roles. And it’s one of those products where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it probably doesn’t make them money. Like they probably don’t sell enough of them to recoup the cost of development of the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case that they’re going to design if they do design a new case or whatever. But it keeps enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the of the right people happy. The people who are enthusiasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who will spread the word of Apple and be satisfied to be in an all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple ecosystem because they can make their music server be a Mac Mini or they can use it in some little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John situation that tickles their nerd hearts, right? Like just there is value in that beyond

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the value of how much money do we make on selling them? Because I really think they sell very, very, very, very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very few Mac Minis and like the Mac Pro, it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t update for three years and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John increase the price and make it slower, yada, yada, yada. But I’m personally less angry about it. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m just willing to be patient but like I said, I’m excited that there’s gonna be details that will be shared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Supposedly. I still am very skeptical that that’s anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think the problem with the Mac mini is that it tries to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all, it’s three different computers at once, right? Or at least two. I know a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that love to have them as a entertainment computer. And I know that with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple TV and other boxes like it, that’s less important now, but I know people that have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Mac mini connected to a TV and that’s how they prefer to manage their media.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s one kind of Mac mini. Another kind of Mac mini is the sort that Marco, I think uses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wherein it’s just a very, very cheap in-home Mac based server. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey also oftentimes used at development shops like mine. We, for a long time, used a Mac mini as a continuous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey integration platform, which is something that Marco does not understand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Then there’s also…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Put it in the parking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} lot. Yeah, we’ll put it in the parking lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it later. A scrum or frol about it tomorrow morning. Yeah, that sounds perfect. And then finally, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the one that it sounds like Marco’s most interested in, unsurprisingly, which is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cheap but expandable and flexible Mac. Something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s kind of sort of like the MacBook Air that John had just brought up, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey desktopy, you know, where you can expand it potentially, and you can bring your own keyboard and mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and monitor and so on and so forth. And I think the problem is, is that no matter what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does, shy of making three different machines, there will be one or more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey groups that will be displeased by the results. And I don’t envy them in that regard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And yes, to a large degree, this is a self-created problem, just like John said, and Marco said about how, you know, well, you haven’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you didn’t update it for three years, and the updates you did before that were crap. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the bed they’ve chosen to sleep in, but it’s a crummy situation, and I don’t know how to dig yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out of it outside of making a few different machines. It’s not gonna matter though, because our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPhone 10s will be quicker anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s probably will. 100% guaranteed, unless they did the X-Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Fracture, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Aftershocks, and we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to begin, cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The Anti-Marco Armen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USA Syracuse, it’s accidental It’s accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They didn’t mean to Accidental Tech Podcasts, so long.

Post-show: Neutral

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The sound of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Italian power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is that what that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is? I don’t know. I don’t know what your BMW sounds like. Plus your BMW is in the shop. I don’t think you might have rev

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it like that. Probably blow up the valve train again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is true. like some kind of dinosaurs exploding in sequence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and possibly eight sequences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is not eight sequences. It is six sequences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a V6 on the Julia.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is a V6 on the Julia and that is what you just heard. I recorded that last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey night.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sounds good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So my alpha has arrived. I am back to being a car journalist, ladies and gentlemen, and I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco excited. Wait, did you like glue a camera to the back of your car? How’d you get this? It’s a GoPro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey okay. With a suction cup. You’re a vlogger now. I know, right? Work has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a GoPro, what is this thing? It is a Hero 3 Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And anyway, and I bought literally an $8 suction cup mount. You know, quick aside, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not why I’m bringing all this up. I had never really used a GoPro before. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing is amazing. Like, everyone including I think the three of us and I very much include myself on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one. We had said, oh, you know, the GoPro is going out of business

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because, or maybe we never talked about this, but I feel like we did. GoPro is going out of business because that’s why you have an iPhone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re like waterproof now and you’re good to go. And yeah, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} thing- I don’t recall saying that. Okay, maybe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} wasn’t. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always love saying, you know, we all said this. Did we all say that? If you can’t even remember, chances are we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all say that. Yeah, well, yeah, but I don’t trust my own lack of memory. Anyway, the point is, is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve heard somebody say that GoPro is going out of business, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have no idea what their financials look like. But this thing is so damn flexible, not in a physical sense, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is so damn flexible and so good that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you do any sort of videography that involves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any sort of motion and putting things in odd places. That sounds bad, but go with it here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is a tremendous device, and I am so glad I was able to borrow it from work. So yeah, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey suction cupped a GoPro to the back of the Alfa Romeo as I was going through a parking garage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sort of near my house, don’t be creepy. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I got delivered to me an Alfa Romeo Giulia. Let me try this. I’m sorry, Federico,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who probably doesn’t even listen to the show. He actually recorded for me a clip. I should send it to Marco so he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can just dub it in. He recorded for me a clip of him pronouncing it at my request and I’m going to butcher

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. But anyway, it’s a Quadrifoglio. Giulia Quadrifoglio.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s the high speed twin turbo V6 version of the Alfa Romeo Giulia

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it is unbelievable. Holy ** is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a nice car? It’s take your Take your Tesla,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but make it much more tossable and make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it sound like sex. And that is basically what this is. Or perhaps take your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M5 and make it lose 15,000 pounds. Because by comparison, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loved your M5, don’t get me wrong, but this thing feels like it’s one tenth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the car that the M5 was. And oh my word, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m a little concerned about your opinion of the sound of certain things, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This does sound really good I think it looks good John doesn’t agree that it looks good, but I think it looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good Oh, it does not look good If you don’t want to stick of course, that’s the sticking point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess that’s our first question Like how is the automatic transmission in this wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sex car? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The automatic is an odd thing. Um, this has the ZF eight speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that BMW uses that the challenger Hellcat uses, it’s the same ZF

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey eight speed that’s used in anything that wants to go fast, but only have two pedals and doesn’t want to be a DCT.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I still want to stick, but damn, if this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t a decent substitute. And the biggest problem I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had with this car is that – and to be clear, in case you haven’t been following along,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is my Alpha only for a week and then it goes back to Alpha Romeo. It’s a press car that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was arranged by friends of the show at the Wheel Bearings podcast, which we’ve linked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to before and I’ll link to again. Imagine our show neutral but by people who actually know what they’re talking about and that’s Wheel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bearings. So anyway, so I’ve spent zero dollars on this car. I’ve already gone through like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a half a tank of gas in the span of three days, but That’s a different issue. But this car will be going back to Alfa Romeo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Monday. So anyway, the 8-speed, the ZF 8-speed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it feels unlike any other automatic I’ve driven. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know if it’s just that it has a lock-up torque converter that spends almost all of its time locked,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it feels much more like a DCT than it does a traditional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey automatic. The problem I have with the Alfa Romeo, though, was that, or is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey first gear is pretty much useless. And I don’t know what it is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, it just doesn’t really move in first gear. And then you bang into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey second gear and suddenly, you know, the, the, the Kraken has been released and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all bets are off. Well, at least that’s what I thought. And it turns out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I’m just too programmed by BMW. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey too used to seeing the dashboard light up like a Christmas tree

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if the traction control comes on. So earlier today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out. And the Alfa Romeo has four modes. It has D,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey N, and A for dynamic, natural, and advanced efficiency, which basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey amounts to sport, normal, and eco crap. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it also has race mode. Race mode is scary because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey race mode turns off all the electronic nannies, and that’s the way it works. It also makes the exhaust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sound even better, but it turns off all the electronic nannies. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had it in race mode. I had it firmly planted with the wheel at zero degrees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because this is a rear-wheel drive car with 500 horsepower and I don’t trust my driving skills as Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saw at BMW in South Carolina. So anyway, I had it firmly planted at zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey degrees and I mashed on the gas. And I realized, oh my,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey first gear isn’t the problem. The problem is it doesn’t have wide enough tires to get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey traction to the ground or to get the torque to the ground. And so the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that it’s neutered in first because it just can’t get the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey down. And oh my word is this thing quick when it hooks up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is unbelievable fast. The numbers say it’s 0 to 60 in a little under

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey four seconds, which is probably about the same speed as Marcos Tesla. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh my word, it feels like a rocket and sounds so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good. It is unbelievable. I don’t know what to make of the reliability.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, you know, obviously everyone has like a dad or an uncle or a grandfather or a cousin or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that, that had an Alfa Romeo 20, 30 years ago and said that they never worked for more than 10 minutes at a time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I believe that to be true. I don’t doubt it. I don’t know if this is reliable or not. Who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey knows? But if it is reliable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and if one can have one under the $80,000 or so that the sticker’s for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wow, what a great sedan. And so much of the inside feels like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a BMW, but slightly different. The gearshift is straight out of a BMW.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m assuming not literally, but it’s the exact same style as like Tiff’s car has. The paddles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are humongous, but otherwise very BMW-ish. Although, the BMW

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loaner I have today, because my car went into the shop for another $2,000 repair, the loaner I have today is a 340 Grand Touring,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Grand Turismo, whatever the hell the thing is that TIFF

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} has.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sorry, not 340, a 330 GT. And the paddles are on the steering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wheel, and I think I prefer that. But my understanding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that I’m wrong. So John, do you know why I’m wrong to prefer the paddles on the wheel rather than the steering column?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought about that a lot because every time I read your view, someone is people have strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opinions like usually they’re they’re raving about them in the Ferrari and how they’re how they’re on the column and not on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel. But I really the only thing I have to compare it to is, you know, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audio controls, which I use a surprising amount because I do random play on my on my iPod

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the car and I do a lot of skipping much to the consternation of everyone in the car with me. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very often I will want to skip to the next track while I’m turning. And I think about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would it be better if I could get to that control and it was always in the same place? Or would it be better that it stays,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, because the audio controls are actually on the steering wheel? And I can’t say. Having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only paddle shift car I’ve ever used is Marco’s M5. And I don’t think I did a lot of sharp turns in that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But my recollection is that those paddles were on the column. Is that correct, Marco? No, they were on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, I thought they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were on the wheel. My recollection is not helping

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} me, but anyway. I’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco driven one that had it on the column.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So using my audio controls, I think I would find it more convenient for them to turn with the wheel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because where are my hands? They’re usually like I’m not, you know, it’s good that the ones that are on the column never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move, but it’s bad that my hands might be far away from it if I’m in the middle of a turn and holding on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for dear life. But I confess that I have no actual experience in this situation. Closest I have is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking a suburban street street turn a little bit too fast while I’m trying to skip a track.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And in that case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like the fact that it’s by my hand, but changing audio is not, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not the same as shifting gear. So what is your experience with, uh, have you used both kinds,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Well, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So to back up a half step today, my car, my three 35 went in for service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, I asked for a state inspection, which is required by law in the state of Virginia to be $16. the bill is about $1,600.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The reason being, apparently my rear tires were on the wear indicators to the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they would not do a safety inspection, they would not pass the safety inspection, and then they said, oh, the fronts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are bad enough that you should probably do the same thing. So $1,600 later, I now have new tires, or will have new tires,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but the problem I have is every time I bring my car into the shop, as you guys know better than anyone, it’s usually there for at least an overnight,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as it turns out it has been, if not a week or more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I asked for a loaner when I booked this appointment like two or three weeks ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then the Julia showed up and I thought, oh, maybe I should just tell them, don’t give me a loaner because I have this car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But then I thought, no, if I do that, then it will need a full like coolant system replacement or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey water pump or something like that. So I better just have both of them. So right now in my driveway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there is one car that we own and two cars that are borrowed. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the borrowed car, like I said, is a 330 GT, which is the neutered version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey TIF’s car. The rear visibility out of that, by the way, is comically bad. But anyway, the 340—I keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saying 340—the 330 has steering wheel-mounted paddles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think I vastly prefer that, because I’ve been driving the Alfa predominantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and manual mode, and it will aggressively try to avoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shifting by presumably shutting down cylinders or killing the fuel into the engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather than shifting. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’ve been a couple of times where I’ve been turning the alpha and wanted to grab the upshift paddle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it’s not where I expect it to be because it’s hanging out at the steering column, and my hands are at 12 and 6 o’clock.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And even though these paddles are freaking enormous, which I do like, um, they’re not where I expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them to be and I don’t prefer it. So in my brief experience with paddle shifted cars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I prefer it on the wheel, which is weird because almost everyone I ever like almost every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey YouTube video I ever see seems to think that on the, on the column is the better way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the people who like it on the column is, uh, based on racing. And I bet you steer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John differently in racing. First of all this you know it’s not it’s not the same as going to suburban street where you might cross your hands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over each Other I imagine maybe the racing technique is not to do as much Like to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more of passing the wheel through your hands instead of going into these crazy positions where your arms are practically crossing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Each other, but that’s just a guess because that’s the scenario where you would want it on the column I mean I’m just think of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John f1 cockpits where you have to take the steering wheel off to even get in the stupid thing you don’t you don’t have a lot of room to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like turning your hands over each other, and even if you’re making sharp turns and the steering ratios are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the same as in regular cars. So maybe in that situation, although they don’t have paddle shifters in F1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cars anyways, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I can see the argument both ways based on how you drive. What is your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John driving technique like? With a giant steering wheel on residential

⏹️ ▶️ ^John roads in a regular person’s sedan, on the wheel probably seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s better, but for the people who are raving, It could be just a situation of if they’re on a racetrack,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s why Ferraris have them. There are advantages in that scenario. Maybe if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had… Well, let’s say when you did the BMW driving school, did all the BMWs…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you use stick shifts or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} were you paddle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shifts? No. They had 1 Series Ms not too long before we were there, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they said they were constantly blowing clutches because nobody knew how to drive them, and so they abandoned those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and everything was DCT when we were there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were all steering wheel mounted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. I don’t think BMW’s ever made a car that wasn’t. If it has paddles, I think they’re on the wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The only thing that’s a bummer about these humongous paddles, though, is that they’re exactly where I’m used to having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a turn signal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every time I go to use my turn signal, I hit the damn downshift paddle or almost hit the downshift paddle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But yeah, this ZF 8-speed, man, it is a great transmission. And my buddy Brian, who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had the R32, he had an E36 M3, he had the 335, he was the only recommended to me that I buy my 335.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey He now has a six-speed X5, which turns out is the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I believe I’ve spoken to you two about it, and I’ve driven it, and it is completely wrong in every measure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it is phenomenally cool. Well anyway, he had been telling me for years that the ZF 8-speed is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really good, and I kept telling him he was out of his damn mind, and it’s DCT or six-speed or get out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still think I’d prefer DCT, but I think if I had put,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if Marco or myself had ended up in this car and not known if it was a DCT or a slush

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey box, I’m not sure either of us could tell the difference. It is really that good. It is phenomenally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good. And the car is just tremendous. So much of the switch gear feels like BMW.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It does get silly things wrong. As an example, BMW turn signals are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very peculiar, but I love them. And the way it works is they always end up in the center. So even if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have the turn signal constantly going for an hour, the stalk will be in the center.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what you can do is if you want to cancel the turn signal, you can either hit it in the same direction it was going before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or you can even go in the opposite direction just a smidge and either way it will cancel like a pending turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey signal. In the Alpha, what I’m used to doing is I’ll turn on a turn signal and if for some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reason I want it to turn back off, I will just hit it in the same direction again. So if I hit the left signal, then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hit it again to cancel it. And in the alpha, the only way to cancel it is to go the opposite direction, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is this little quirky thing, but it drives me bananas. The other quirky thing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is, it is really good Bluetooth support. Everything seems fine with that, except every time you get in the car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you need to re and you, and if you go to your phone as the media

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey input, you need to tell it to reconnect to the phone for media. It’s already connected for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey telephone, but it’s not connected for media and it’s instant when it does it because it’s already connected via the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phone But you have to tell it. Yes. I would like to listen to my phone. Please enter media mode on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my phone It’s so annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty but yeah, but it works great And the display is pretty high-res the backup cameras comically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not but the the display is pretty high-res It blends into the dashboard much better than any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey BMW does with like those like TIFs car where it’s just like a screen hanging out of the dashboard out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nowhere. Audi does the same thing. That’s not unique to BMW. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most of the switch gear just feels like BMW. And I mean that in a good way. It feels very familiar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One of the advantages of having a two pedal car is it has a remote start, which is kind of neat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What else did I write down? The biggest thing for me is just that it feels much like the M5 did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it feels much like the Tesla does in that it feels like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey infinite power from almost any part of the RPM range. The other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing that’s interesting is 3000 RPM in any standard transmission

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car I’ve ever driven is about where I would normally shift. So like 1500

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to 2000 RPM in any car I’ve ever driven is like the comfort zone. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And 3000 RPMs when you’re starting to get out of, you’re definitely out of the comfort zone, but you’re starting to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey into like, no, you’re clearly trying to go somewhere with a quickness. That’s like what 3000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plus is in this car, which has about a 6,500 RPM red line in this car, 3000 RPM feels like 2000 RPM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in any other car, which is to say 3000 RPM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feels like, okay, this is about the top of the comfort zone, but still comfortably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the comfort zone. So it just wants to rev like, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no other car I’ve ever driven. And it is phenomenally, phenomenally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun. Now all in the chat room is giving me all sorts of grief because I didn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a perfect quality video for him or her And is wondering why I’m doing a video at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My intention is to do a proper, you know car review of this and put it on YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Probably sometimes six months from now, but it’s I’m trying to get a whole bunch of film

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I can splice together using either iMovie or if I decide to spend the money on Final Cut Pro and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hopefully get like a five to ten minute video out of this this. Also, interesting – oh, and I’m definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to write something on my blog about it. Also, interestingly, if you – and I don’t think I have the link handy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but if you look up the Ars Technica review of this car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as it turns out, that review was written by someone based out of DC. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this car is based out of Baltimore, and if you look at the plate on the car that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my garage as we speak, and if you look at the plate of the Ars Technica review, it is the same plate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and thus one would assume it is the same car. Also, interestingly, there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey another review I saw based out of, by someone based out of New York and the plate on this car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is either six or GLP K17 and the other review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I saw was, I guess it’s six LP K16. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} it’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey surprising, but it just struck me funny that apparently, you know, Alfa Romeo or really Fiat Chrysler of America,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, imported, know, maybe six of these or something like that and just went to the Michigan DMV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and said, okay, I would like to register six Giulias, if you please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Additionally, when the car was delivered on Monday, it was delivered in the car is the Competizione

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Red, which is beautiful. When it was delivered, the chase car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was another Giulia. It was not the Quadrifoglio. I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right. I’m sorry, Federico. Anyway, it was just the more pedestrian version. The chase car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was white. The loaner that I got today, and I did not ask for it, is white.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This white thing follows me even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want it to. Matt Stauffer Sure, you don’t want it to. Rob Stauffer I don’t, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really don’t. But God, this red is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. Matt Stauffer So I will just say, in my history of getting service loaner vehicles from car makers while my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco car is in the shop, I’ve never gotten a white one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Rob Stauffer You had a bunch of white ones when we were in South Carolina at driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} school though. Thank you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very much. Anyway, the car is tremendous. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t want to give it back. I really, really love it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I was to buy a car tomorrow and I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey willing to give up on the six-speed and I had $80,000 to spend,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really think I would buy one. I really, really do. I mean, I’m used to a car that never runs anyway, so why not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get another one that’s unreliable? This thing is tremendous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s really nice to hear. I knew John would not like the way it looks and would therefore rule

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything else out about it. Plus, John would never buy a car this expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco matter how much money he had. So I am… That’s not true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} That is absolutely true. No matter how much money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had, you just made an infinite time scale

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey argument. Okay, on an infinite money

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} scale. Okay, on

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} an infinite money scale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, but anyway, I am most pleased to hear your opinion of the automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco transmission because your description of it like Really avoiding shifting when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in manual mode like really avoiding shifting itself The main problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had with with all manually shifted automatics that I’ve ever driven have come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down to too many gears and and also that it would second-guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me and that it would shift itself when it felt like being convenient for me. No matter what kind of sportier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco manual mode I put it in, that was always a problem for me. And so I’m glad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to hear that this one appears to be a much better implementation of that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the only automatic shifting that the M5 DCT ever did for me was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you came to a complete stop, it would put you in first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gear. Yeah, and this will do the same, you’re right. But I totally get your point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and yes, it is really, really good. Stunningly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stunningly good in a way that really kind of makes me uncomfortable. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I also kind of mean it. Part of my identity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as a car guy and as someone who has enjoyed cars is driving a stick.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel like I would be losing part of myself if I bought an automatic car that I drove every day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I recognize how bananas and kooky that sounds. I fully own it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s just, it’s the way it is. Like, if I’m really honest, it’s the way it is. I guess it’s turned into analog all of a sudden, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this car is good enough that it would make me second guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey having a stick, like I would, I would absolutely take the stick if it was an option, but if, since it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t. I would absolutely still consider this car if I had $80,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to spend, you know, if I felt like it would ever run for more than 10 minutes at a time, etc, etc, etc, etc.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But it is so good. And I think part of the reason it’s so good is because it’s 500 horsepower, right? Like, if this was in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a 200 horsepower car, I don’t think I would be near as amused. Thoughts, John? Are you going to come visit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tomorrow?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. Maybe if you had a Ferrari, I would, but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, I see how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is. Luigi, follow only the Ferrari. You wouldn’t fly down there. there. No, you’re right, I wouldn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} But I don’t know, maybe if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe for a Ferrari, I might, I don’t know. But no, it sounds good. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What can I tell you? I don’t think it looks that bad. I really don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Gerber baby. Spice Navigator.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I was in the market for this kind of vehicle, I would give this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco strong consideration. Like, it does, I think it looks good. I I like the idea,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having never driven one, I like the idea of it having spirit and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a soul that most modern cars lack. Giving you feelings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like, this is so awesome, I just love this, I love the way it sounds, I love the way it drives. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something that is really hard to find in the rest of the car world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the time. Especially at the high end, where so many high end cars also have to appeal to old people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with stiff bones that like, you know, they finally have the money to buy them. So it’s like, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to also appeal to like Lexus buyers. And so it’s hard to find really nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sports cars that are also really fun and make you feel feelings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know? And so if this does that, that’s really special. And that’s pretty rare.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I would definitely give it strong consideration if it’s the kind of car that I was looking for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’m ruined now for electric forever, But if I was not, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certainly look at this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be hard. So John and Marco did not know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had received the Alpha. They knew it was a possibility, but they didn’t know I had. And earlier today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John and I were talking about the new six-speed, what is it, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Accord Sport? I don’t know, I already went to sleep even thinking about it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} the point is- The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John car you can afford that will work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} To

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey its credit, it will probably work forever. But yeah, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey okay, the idea of a six-speed sounds great. The idea of an Accord, mostly sounds great. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the idea of 250 horsepower, that is half as many horsepower as this thing has.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, and I know it’s also the third the cost, or probably even less than that, probably a quarter the cost.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But, oh my God, it’s intoxicating. It’s just so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} intoxicating. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about all that trunk space the cavernous backseat that your children who will not be small forever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will thank you for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey someday. I mean, this thing is reasonably large. I mean, Declan’s been in the back of it. I will also say that Erin, who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, if you recall, six-ish months pregnant at this point, she and Declan and I went

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to dinner Monday night and she did not like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} not because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s fast. It’s not because it’s fast. Like, that doesn’t bother

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} her. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noisy and a rough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ride. The noisy mostly didn’t bother her, but you got it with the rough ride because I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it in dynamic mode, I believe, for most of the trip. And I don’t recall if I was manually shifting or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but she did not care for the shift because the speed and the ferocity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the shifts in dynamic mode. Now once I turned it to advanced efficiency, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey again is basically eco mode, then it was fine. And it’s actually very docile at that point. But when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had it even, I think, in normal or natural or whatever, and it is in DNA, when I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it in that mode, even that she did not care for. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, she did not like it until I kind of neutered it. And some of that may be pregnancy, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey asked her that, and she said, no, I don’t think so. She said, it’s pregnancy that’s causing me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to hate getting in and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} pregnancy that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey causing me to hate the jerkiness of it. It’s a fun car, though, and I’m gonna be really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really sad to give it back on Monday. Super duper sad. Oh, you gotta buy one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh yeah, that’s the right answer. $80,000. Yeah, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco start a Patreon or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, that sounds great, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Send

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the reasonably affluent white man a bunch of extra money so he can buy an Italian sports sedan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That sounds like a great idea. I’m sure that’ll be trending on Patreon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco momentarily. Isn’t that basically what YouTube stars try to do? They’re all on Patreon?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Eh, touche, touche. I don’t know. I’d love, oh man, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey love this car. It would probably work for 10 minutes at a time, but man,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} would I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love it. Yeah, just like your BMW.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exactly. true story.

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