248: Chili Cookoff
16 Nov 2017After covering burn-in, Portrait Mode, VPNs, and Qi chargers, we’re still friends. Probably.
Episode Description:
- Follow up:
- Tradespeople and Face ID
- Multitasking gesture wonkiness on the home screen
- "I got this phone for $50 and it's fine"
- Pro-rated AppleCare+
- MacBook key repairs
- OLED and burn-in
- Kbase article (👋🏻, Stephen)
- iOS' commentary
- iPhone X camera
- Joe Rosensteel has thoughts about portrait mode
- Casey notices some failures too
- Focos
#askatp- GeForce Now (via Kim Ahlberg)
- VPNs (via MarcMV)
- AirPower for Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard
- What does "close to the metal" mean? (via Jonathan Bowling, who clarifies his position)
- Qi chargers
Sponsored by:
- Jamf Now: Set up and protect your Apple devices at work, from anywhere. First 3 devices are free.
- Betterment: Rethink what your money can do.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Get 15% off your first order with code ATP17.
Chapters
- Follow-up: Touch ID vs. Face ID
- Follow-up: Multitasking gesture
- Follow-up: $50 phones
- Follow-up: AppleCare+ refunds
- Follow-up: Single-key repairs
- OLED burn-in
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP17)
- iPhone X camera
- Sponsor: Jamf Now
- #askatp: GeForce Now
- #askatp: VPNs
- #askatp: AirPower Magic devices
- #askatp: The rejected question 🖼️
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Qi chargers
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Follow-up: Touch ID vs. Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like one of those confusing titles where people will listen to the whole episode and
⏹️ ▶️ John then glance back at the title before like it itself. At least I’m like, what was that about anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t love this title when you first said it, but you’re the two of you are convincing me that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing has got legs just like my icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s depth to that title. Depth of flavor and spice. It’s just a good time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But not a lot of levels of depth mapping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, John, you’ve redeemed yourself. So as always, we start with follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And listener Richard Buxton wrote in to say that tradespeople generally like Face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID. And this was something I hadn’t considered, and I really like this email. Richard wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to provide some feedback on the Face ID concept and perhaps shed light on an entirely different group of phone users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a tradesperson, or more specifically, an electrician, and Touch ID sucks. As a consequence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of manual work with rough materials all day long, my fingertips constantly get scratched and worn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The result is that Touch ID on either a 6 or 7 Plus constantly fails. I have perhaps a 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey success rate and I am therefore forced to type my password in a lot.” And thus, Richard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had written that he is really, really, really excited about Face ID. And that makes perfect sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was something I hadn’t really considered. The obvious thought of people who don’t have, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, hands or perhaps don’t have that are dexterous enough to be placed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a little fingerprint sensor. That all, you know, is semi-obvious, but I didn’t even think of somebody who has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially 10 working digits, but they’re hacked to smithereens because of the line of work that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re in. So I thought that was a really useful follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John You also didn’t think about people who have weather, which is the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about Face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the large portion of the year that many people don’t want to take their hands out of their gloves
⏹️ ▶️ John or mittens or whatever to use their phone. That’s why they have all those special gloves, with the touch sensors on them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then sometimes they only work for a short period of time, or sometimes it can be too cold for them to even work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and to not have to deal with that, to be able to basically say, if I got gloves that are dexterous enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John handle my phone, I don’t have to worry that, uh, that the phone can’t touch my fingerprints
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way, even if my fingerprints are pristine. I can just point it at my face and it will unlock. Uh, and then of course
⏹️ ▶️ John you still have the problem of how do you touch the screen? But I think that’s, you know, again, that’s where those gloves come
⏹️ ▶️ John in, where At least you can do touch and scroll things, but as far as I’m aware,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are no gloves that transfer your fingerprint through their warmth to the Touch ID sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I mean, with any of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biological systems, you kind of have to think like, you know, how many people does this exclude?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, and for the most part, like we, you know, our mainstream tech commentators and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media reviewers and everything, we usually are not very aware of the kinds of people or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groups or situations that this that anything you know could rule out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of these edge cases and like it’s nightly touch ID provides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fairly simple interaction but if you for some reason can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often that’s gonna be a major problem there’s no real out for you face ID I think is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit more flexible like they had the thing you know first of all I think more people can probably show their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face and then but not everybody of course but you know, but more people can, I think, then can take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out their finger all the time. Um, and there’s the wonderful accessibility option where you can turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the looking at it, attention detection. So in case people, um, you know, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use their eyes that way, uh, then, you know, they don’t have to be directly looking at the screen for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to unlock, you know, so like there’s, there’s that kind of accommodation and you’re never going to find a system like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that accommodates everybody, but it does seem like Face ID probably accommodates more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations than Touch ID did.
Follow-up: Multitasking gesture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would one of you like to tell me about why the multitasking gesture feels different
⏹️ ▶️ John This is me. I’m the one who last week described how I Couldn’t bring up the multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John switcher reliably from Springboard versus doing it from within an application so much so that I initially
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it wasn’t even possible to bring up the multitasking switcher from Springboard and I pretty quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out why after the show and back and looked at it more closely And it has to do with something that we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about which is animations Um, on when you do the multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John gesture on a screen that contains an application as you start to do the swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John up thing, whether you’re gonna like take a hard right and go multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John or go up on an angle and go to multitasking or go straighter up and go to the home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what one of those things you’re doing as you’re doing the gesture, the application that was in the foreground
⏹️ ▶️ John starts to like shrink and move upward. It doesn’t follow your finger exactly, but it reacts to what
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger is doing in a Reasonably linear way I’m swiping up
⏹️ ▶️ John at the far farther up I go the more shrinky the front thing gets and you know if I flick to the right
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the little multitasking thing or whatever um if you do it on
⏹️ ▶️ John Springboard the screen reacts to your Scrolling upward
⏹️ ▶️ John from the bottom like it doesn’t just sit there and not move at all It does sort of start to shrink and move a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit, but then it stops Shrinking and moving and is kind of inert
⏹️ ▶️ John for a period of time if you successfully complete the gesture the multitasking switcher appears
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t successfully complete it it snaps back to where it was and
⏹️ ▶️ John That discontinuity like the fact that there was a different Relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John between what my finger was doing and what was on the screen was apparently enough to make me
⏹️ ▶️ John think it wasn’t possible initially and then fail at it a way higher percentage of the time than
⏹️ ▶️ John on other screens. So what I’ve been trying to do is break that
⏹️ ▶️ John connection which is hard for me because I’m a visual person and I you know like that when
⏹️ ▶️ John things are connected in that way it makes sense to me when they’re not connected it feels like things are broken but to say look the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna react the same way in springboard just do the gesture right just do your little J turn do your little angle swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John do whatever it is you have to do to make and and have faith that even though the screen stops
⏹️ ▶️ John reaction to your sliding finger just keep sliding it just just keep sliding swipe me just keep swiping
⏹️ ▶️ John and have some confidence now I still am less successful and it could be that I
⏹️ ▶️ John need some kind of feedback to match up with my like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know yeah your thumb is making a right turn yeah it’s gonna happen for you see how the little thing is moving to the right a little bit like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know you know what the disconnect is there but I did find out that I’m not the only one. A lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John did tweet at me and tell me they some people also thought it wasn’t possible from springboard until they heard
⏹️ ▶️ John the program. Some people knew it was possible but have much more difficulty doing it. And then of course, there are all the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John the equivalent of tap a click wizards like I had no problem. I’ve never failed it a single time. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John an exact 45 degree line with my thumb and it happens every single time. So whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone has difficult you know, accessibility issue everyone has different difficult uh different abilities
⏹️ ▶️ John to swipe but I think the difficulty on springboard actually is explicable
⏹️ ▶️ John by the by the difference in animation because that is the only difference as far as I can tell like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still like the same gesture works in both places the only difference is what happens on your screen and if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John an expectation of something that’s gonna happen on your screen and it doesn’t it can cause you to to pause
⏹️ ▶️ John to rethink to move your finger differently to stop moving and all those things will mess up your gesture.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ll keep practicing on my wife’s phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the meantime, Apple should consider doing something about that Jeff is I don’t see any reason why
⏹️ ▶️ John springboard can’t have the same animation when going to multitasking. Obviously, you’re never going to go from springboard
⏹️ ▶️ John to springboard. So the only animation that has to initiate is the one that brings the multitasking switcher.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you bail on the gesture, yeah, it’ll snap back to where it was. But I don’t see why it doesn’t do doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John follow your thumb the full way through the gesture to give you the confidence to know that it’s gonna happen for you
⏹️ ▶️ John the multitasking screen is gonna come up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is weird. I’ve noticed that as well, that it’s super peculiar.
Follow-up: $50 phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of things that I think you said, John, last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this phone for $50 and it’s fine. Tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John more about that. That’s still funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was just me describing my sister getting her phone and how I wasn’t able to come
⏹️ ▶️ John in and get an iPhone. And it occurred to me that would be a good slogan for Android and some people took that and ran with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I did want to offer some clarification because some people thought it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John they were putting down Android. That is a pejorative, like, oh, this $50 phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John what a piece of crap, right? My main point was the opposite, that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phone you can get for $50 is fine, right? And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, as I said, a phone enthusiast or like an Apple enthusiast
⏹️ ▶️ John or a gadget head or someone who appreciates the ways in which
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS differs from Android, the supposed superiority
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS or Apple hardware or anything like that, does not even come close to overcoming
⏹️ ▶️ John the price difference, right? So I got this phone for $50 and it’s fine, sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you know, like Apple people yucking it up, but really it’s Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John problem in that if the $50 phone is fine, Apple has a problem there. And the second aspect is people say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do appreciate those differences. I just, you know, I do like high-tech gadgets. I just don’t like iOS or I like
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phones better or, you know, whatever. And those are the people who are shopping for the high end fancy Android
⏹️ ▶️ John phones. And those people were insulted. We thought they said, if you’re a gadget nerd, obviously you’re gonna like iOS. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-gadget nerd, then Android is fine for you. And that wasn’t my intention. I can understand where you
⏹️ ▶️ John got that impression. But yeah, of course, if you don’t like iOS at all, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John like high-tech fancy phones, yeah, you’re also gonna shop for an Android, but you’re not gonna pay $50 for it
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I’m getting out of there. Like you’re gonna actually pay the big money for the fanciest, highest end Android phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that phone is not going to cost you $50. So you are excluded from this guy. I got this phone for $50 and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I can say for those people is you do have to make do with a slower CPU. Sorry about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But other than that, if you like Android and the control it offers and all
⏹️ ▶️ John the various features that Android has that iOS doesn’t, like a configurable
⏹️ ▶️ John set of widgets on your lock screen and all that good stuff, then yeah, go for it. But yeah, my main
⏹️ ▶️ John point is I got this phone for $50 and it’s fine. Sounds insulting if you’re an Apple snob,
⏹️ ▶️ John but really it constitutes a semi-real problem for Apple because if a $50 phone is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John why the hell are we all paying $1,200 for an iPhone X? Yep.
Follow-up: AppleCare+ refunds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duncan Stevenson Price writes in, regarding AppleCare Plus, did you guys know that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can get a pro rata refund on the plan if you change your iPhone after one year? This changes the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey math. This individual wrote maths, that’s incorrect. This changes the math a little, though admittedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the overall thrust of your argument against buying it. I had no idea that that was possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t recall how they said that you go about doing that because I think they did include it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their email, but But apparently there’s a way to get a bit of a refund on your AppleCare+.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t get a phone every year, so I didn’t know about this at all. But to you two who do get a phone every year, you should try
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Well, if, you know, Casey, you bought the AppleCare this time. Next time you go to get a phone, say
⏹️ ▶️ John Duncan told you you’re supposed to get some of the money back for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey AppleCare and see what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I did not get AppleCare this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, no, you didn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. No, I got a—well, I did get AppleCare. It’s a $50 leather case. Remind me of this when I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shatter my phone. That’s right.
Follow-up: Single-key repairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen Harrison writes, you mentioned that it is not possible to remove individual keys on the new keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I just had a faulty B key on my MacBook Pro and the first thing they did with the Genius
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bar was take it out back, that sounds awkward, and removed the offending Geek app to check for dust,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey etc. underneath. From what I could gather, they have a special device or machine for removing keys, so it’s not something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one could do at home, but it’s possible. In the end, I still had a new top case with the accompanying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trackpad, touch bar, and battery, et cetera. There’s been a lot of talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about whether or not you can remove individual keys in a non-destructive way. And Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly thinks that it’s possible, although he ended up going the, or they ended up going the destructive route on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his behalf anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what we heard from geniuses in past feedback is, yeah, of course you can get the key caps off,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that the process of removing them has such a high chance of
⏹️ ▶️ John bending or breaking one of the very, very tiny, very delicate plastic pins that holds these
⏹️ ▶️ John things together. That the geniuses who wrote to us said, basically I’ve never seen anyone pull
⏹️ ▶️ John it off successfully or the success rate is so low that it’s not even worth trying. So I don’t doubt that they still
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do it, but I wonder like, why did this person get a new keyboard? Possibly because they
⏹️ ▶️ John got the key cap off and they thought they had done it successfully and they tried to put it back on and realized they’d accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John bent one of the little tiny pins. And it’s like, well, that’s it, game over. Because there’s no repairing a bent pin. no repairing a
⏹️ ▶️ John broke pin if you don’t get it off cleanly and get it back on cleanly
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s a whole new top case which is one of the many reasons that this keyboard is not friendly to repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah it seems like the the rate at which they’re able to properly rescue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with some kind of replacement in store or some kind of like you know not replacing the entire top case the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number of problems that are solved that way seems significantly smaller than the number that require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole top case replacement anyway. So however the multiple parts inside the keys work out, however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the serviceability works out, the reality is this is a incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service unfriendly problem. I also, you know, on this topic, there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of good discussions about this on Connected with Stephen Hackett, because he was a genius
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in the day, and he mentioned that the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one bad key key requiring the replacement of the entire top case of the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the entire top case being a very expensive repair because the entire computer is basically built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under it so you have to like basically take the entire computer apart in order to replace that and put it back together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He mentioned that this is actually not new to this current generation of MacBook Pros. This started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the unibody back what was that 2011 that the unibody started 2010 something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And ever since the Unibody MacBook Pros, you’ve had to replace the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top case and it’s been a lot of work if the keyboard breaks in certain ways. The main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference with the new ones is that not only are the keys more likely to break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that requires top case replacement, you know the older keys you had a better chance of servicing individual keycaps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also as we know the new ones have such an incredibly high key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failure rate with whatever it is, specks of dust, things bending, whatever the problem ends up being with these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know that they are failing way more often than they used to. So the whole top case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being acquired thing is not new, but the rate of failure and how severe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the failures are now does seem very new.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even the old keyboards with the scissor switches, I’ve manually tried to repair many of those and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a lesser version of the same problem. Removing the keycaps from an older scissor switch keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John is possible, but there is some fairly high chance that you will bend or break
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the little pennies. I think mostly I bent them. I don’t know if I ever really broke one off,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I definitely bent them in my attempts to repair things, both on the laptop keyboards and on the
⏹️ ▶️ John same scissor switches that are in the extended aluminum keyboard and stuff. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to mangle the tiny, semi-clear pieces of plastic in there because it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of little plastic hingey mechanisms with these little feet, little legs, little cylindrical
⏹️ ▶️ John sticks that snap into these little C-shaped clamps on the keycap, or at least with the scissors
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, I imagine it’s similar with the new butterfly ones. And that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a really difficult thing to work with. You kind of have to do a lot of them blind where you just have to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces aligned correctly, put the cap on, and then just press down and hope everything snaps in all at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John not not particularly friendly to repair it never has been it just seems like these new ones are
⏹️ ▶️ John even smaller and the little leggy things are even finer you can find some good like sort of macro photography
⏹️ ▶️ John of it online if you search but it’s not something that I would want to repair and I’m sure there are lots of sort of gung-ho
⏹️ ▶️ John geniuses who are like I’m gonna do it this is gonna be the time I’m gonna get the key cap off I’m gonna get it back on everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna work until the next speck of dust but you know they know that if they if they blow it $475
OLED burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s rough. I see the notes here about the OLED display,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have a feeling that somebody’s trying to tell a story with them. So rather than flood my way through it, whoever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming this is John, do you want to talk about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we touched on this in many past shows in terms of burn-in on the OLEDs and everything, and things Apple might be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that acknowledge the fact that it has burn-in, whether it be the 30-second timeout on the thing, which by the way, some people
⏹️ ▶️ John say is not new and just a bug or happened with non-iPhone X, so who knows? still mysterious but
⏹️ ▶️ John this the burn-in of the old is communicated in various Apple tech notes it’s also communicated in
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS itself if you look at the auto brightness setting on an iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ John it says auto brightness on and off and there’s a little descriptive text underneath it says turning off auto brightness way affect battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life right so that was the old message like hey if you don’t let the phone sense how much light there is in the room and dim
⏹️ ▶️ John itself if you just set up keep a brightness and set up the way all the time even in a pitch dark room it may
⏹️ ▶️ John affect battery life which is saying it may lessen your battery life right the new thing if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an iPhone 10 on that a very same switch says turning off auto brightness may affect battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life and long-term display performance so they added some words to that and what they mean by long-term
⏹️ ▶️ John display performance is that if you turn off auto brightness crank it to
⏹️ ▶️ John max brightness and don’t let it dim itself even in a dark room you’re probably gonna get burn in
⏹️ ▶️ John sooner than if you didn’t do that Because one of the tools like you know if you read the Apple docs they
⏹️ ▶️ John in typical sort of marketing PR speak They say the Apple display and iPhone 10 and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah blah have been engineered to reduce Burn-in and there are many aspects to being engineered to
⏹️ ▶️ John reduce burn-in one of those aspects is our Software will try to prevent burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ John by trying to be nice to your screen. We’ll adjust the brightness down So it’s not at max brightness in a dark room
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll dim as soon as we possibly can We’ll try to pay attention to whether you’re looking at the screen so we know when we can dim
⏹️ ▶️ John and also The way the screen is built to be resistant to burn in whatever that involves so it’s it’s the whole package
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just hardware. It’s not just software. It’s everything and part of that is you taking
⏹️ ▶️ John You know some responsibility in your own hands if you tweak the settings you if you put the brightness to max
⏹️ ▶️ John turn off auto brightness And probably also turn off true tone and put your sleep your display
⏹️ ▶️ John sleep timer on five minutes you are probably gonna get burn in sooner and more severely
⏹️ ▶️ John than someone who leaves it in the default setting. So, welcome to my world of plasma television ownership.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is probably my only long-term concern about the iPhone 10 and using OLED screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general on the iPhone, which, you know, this is not gonna be the first phone to do this. Or I mean, sorry, the only phone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, because we really don’t know what they mean by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critical word here, long-term. If you actually use your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone with the screen on a lot, because if you’re using it, the screen’s going to be on a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many parts of iOS are always in the same place, like status bar items and the home indicator and stuff. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they say long-term, which refer to OLED problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, how long? What are we talking here? Are we talking a few months? Are we talking a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years? I feel like whatever the number actually is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a great deal of difference on what we should do and how big those problems are. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out that OLED screened iPhones are going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really annoying screen flaws eight months into ownership, that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a really big problem. Even if they’re going to have really annoying flaws after two years of ownership, that’s going to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impact the used market. So either way, if this is at all likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have serious display flaws during the use useful lifetime of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product, that’s going to be a big problem down the road. And I really hope it’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it will probably be okay just because Apple seems so aware of this issue and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John held off on OLEDs for such a long time and also the whole rest of the industry, meaning Android has had OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John screens for so long that I feel like it’s not a, it shouldn’t be a mystery. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the first, you know, uh, company to put an OLED in its phone. So we should have data from all
⏹️ ▶️ John the many, many years of OLED Android phones of what their performance characteristics are
⏹️ ▶️ John like and how bad burn in is. And then Apple, of course, waiting until it gets just the right display,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully has one that is better in all ways that they can make it better, including burn in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my advice to people is to not be as obsessed about this as I am with my plaza television.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just, you know, use sensible settings. Maybe just take the defaults. don’t know what sensible settings
⏹️ ▶️ John are. I’ll leave auto brightness on. Don’t crank your brightness to max if you can help it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, let your display go to sleep, but in general, just use your phone because I,
⏹️ ▶️ John my prediction is that image retention will not be a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in the average light lifetime of a newly bought iPhone 10 because I would imagine the average lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ John a newly bought iPhone 10 is probably like two point something years, right? because if you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the fancy iPhone 10, probably you’re gonna wanna buy a new one within at least two years. And maybe there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John long tail people who try to keep them for much longer, right? Because it’s an expensive phone. It may be more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a problem when OLED travels down the line to the cheaper phones that tend to be kept longer. And Marco’s right about the used market,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know how much people buy their phones
⏹️ ▶️ John contingent on the idea of being able to sell them for them having high resale value. I’m not sure how common that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Versus trade-ins, which that’s the good thing about trade-ins is you’re not getting a big great deal on trading anyway, but I don’t think Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna give you guff about trading in your phone for their update program if you’ve got image retention, because it’s like, look, it’s your damn
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, Apple. It’s not my fault it has no retention. Take my phone and give me my pittance for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not that concerned. Also, when I look at my plasma television,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, I don’t know how old it is, but it’s older than two years old, and plasmas are just notorious
⏹️ ▶️ John for image retention. I don’t know what the OLED characteristics of retention are,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m pretty convinced that the characteristics of plasma are that if you are patient enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John your destiny HUD will go away in a year. Right, I don’t know if that helps the resale market or makes people feel better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, I’m actually kind of optimistic about this, having been in the burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ John wars for many, many years. And finally, having seen
⏹️ ▶️ John so many people in real life use absolutely shattered cell phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John like smartphones, just completely destroyed like not just a little spider web
⏹️ ▶️ John or a crack here or there but like whole giant glass chips missing circuit boards exposed
⏹️ ▶️ John like one step short of sparks flying from the phone as they use it
⏹️ ▶️ John i have a hard time believing that the average person will be thwarted from using their phone because it has image
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey retention on it
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s not even a physical defect like a tactile defect
⏹️ ▶️ John like they could feel that’s just like like, the home indicator always looks like it’s on the screen, but whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll be okay. But if you’re a super paranoid nerd about it, you know, take
⏹️ ▶️ John a look at your phone in a year or two. And I don’t know, Marco will put a free app in the app store that puts
⏹️ ▶️ John a checkerboard pattern on your screen that turns it and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I really hope that this is a non issue. But like, my concern is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so they They set it at the 30 second by default screen sleep, which I hate and thank God I turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it off. My concern is, since I raised that to five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes, if I get bad image retention on my screen in six months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they slash you slash all the crazy Apple defenders on Twitter going to say, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was doing it wrong. I was using this option that I shouldn’t have been using. Like, is that gonna be my fault because I changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this annoying setting back to where it was on all LCD phones before that?
⏹️ ▶️ John said may affect battery life and long term display performance. Marco, can’t you read?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it does say that and yeah, that will contribute to it. But like that, I don’t think there’s any consequences like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I’m going to say, you know, you like if you bring it in with image retention, I’m not sure what their their deal
⏹️ ▶️ John will be. But same thing with the iMac. Like if you just let your iMac screen dim more often or move your windows around
⏹️ ▶️ John more often, maybe you’d have less image retention, but it still just replaces is green for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I wonder if it’s kind of like if you use launch control on us on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sports car. There’s there’s there’s always like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there’s always like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conventional wisdom that like there’s a counter for the right and like if you burn out the engine like they’ll check that counter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re doing too many launch controls like they won’t service your car like is there like a counter on the iPhone of like how many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they that I’ve let it you know reach that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John five minutes. I max brightness
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco minutes without you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry sir we can’t replace this panel you changed this one setting too much. It’s been in
⏹️ ▶️ John the bathroom. Red tag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Red flag John red flag.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was actually a tag though wasn’t it wasn’t the proper tag?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, at least a couple people wrote in and were confused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash perturbed that we didn’t really talk about the iPhone X camera last week when we were going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over our impressions. It’s a fair criticism and I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that much to say, surprisingly. I do really, really like portrait mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until Joe Steele corrects me and shows me all the ways in which portrait mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is terrible. But my eyes are not discerning enough to be able to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of cases, all the places that portrait mode is just falling on its face. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portrait mode is where they get the fake bokeh, whatever, however you pronounce it, background
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blur and the depth of field tricks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those words like niche or niche where no matter how you pronounce it, everyone’s going to tell you what you’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, um, uh, if I remember, I’ll see if I can dig up, uh, some links for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, for the show notes, but follow Joe Steel on Twitter. He’s funny and he’s, he’s good. Uh, but anyways, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has gone through some of the pictures I’ve taken and noted all the places that, uh, portrait mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been not as good. And it’s funny because some of the things that he’s noted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are extremely obvious in retrospect, but in the heat of the moment, I just don’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Like I think I had tweeted a picture of a cup of Diet Coke at McDonald’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a friend of the show, Alex Cox, and half of the straw was missing and I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice it until Joe pointed it out. Like, again, it’s super obvious that I should have noticed. I just didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe it’s because I’m just predisposed to like this because this is the first time I’ve had this in a human-sized phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I really do like portrait mode and I think it’s pretty cool. it just has a lot of room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to improve. But I don’t know, Marco, what do you think about the camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had a hard time evaluating the camera in any kind of useful way to anybody else because I didn’t have the dual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens camera from the 7 Plus because I didn’t do Plus phones before. My impressions of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that giant disclaimer aside, I love the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras on this, the regular wide and the regular quote telephoto, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a telephoto, but I’ll take it because it’s like a 45 millimeter-ish equivalent, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I very much enjoy that focal length, and so I’ve really enjoyed the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using its regular modes. I have played a little bit with portrait mode and portrait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighting, and have managed so far to take zero acceptable pictures with it. In addition, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen other people’s pictures using these modes, I have seen, I’m pretty sure, zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them that I considered good without obvious weirdness or flaws.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it’s because I have a lot of experience shooting pictures with big cameras and big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glass with proper background blur with shallow depth of field. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pictures from portrait mode, and not even getting into portrait lighting, which I think portrait lighting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically the same thing, but with some weird effects applied to the same data that sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work but usually don’t. portrait mode itself, it just always looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bizarre to me. It never fools me into thinking that this was taken with a shallow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depth of field and a lot of glass. Ideally, it shouldn’t be perfect every time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it should be able to provide that illusion much of the time. And to me, it just doesn’t. And maybe I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being too picky or too observant or nitpicking on the details. But the problem with me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically have two critical problems with it. Number one is obviously the depth map
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it captures just simply is not granular enough. It is not high resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough and you can see there’s actually been a couple of apps. One of them is called Focos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is really cool like 3D. You can kind of like it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like shows you the picture in a 3D rendering as the depth map
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can kind of turn it and you can see like the different layers that it captured in the depth map it’s really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see but you can see from these depth map viewing apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the resolution of the depth data is not very high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not very granular it’s it’s pretty coarse there’s not that many levels and there’s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not doing per pixel depth mapping so that’s why you can have like if somebody has like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hair sticking out of their head that hair will be blurred away in this effect whereas on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real camera that hair if the rest of their hair was in focus that hair being focused to and
⏹️ ▶️ John in infinity starts like at the back of the people’s head like not only does it not have a lot of levels but it uses up
⏹️ ▶️ John all the levels on the stuff that’s close to you so it’s like nose cheek ear back of the
⏹️ ▶️ John head and then everything else is one depth which is behind like the the
⏹️ ▶️ John farthest depth so when you do the three three thing and you rotate it looks like everyone’s head is embedded in a wall
⏹️ ▶️ John and that wall is like here are the levels close closer close goes and then everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else is basically either infinity or whatever that and so when they blur the background they’re blurring everything that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond their last level of depth resolution as if it’s equidistant and and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the tree that’s 10 feet from you is different than the tree that’s 40 feet from you but as far as the
⏹️ ▶️ John blurring is concerned it has no more depth information so it treats them all the same which contributes to the
⏹️ ▶️ John what Marco was talking about if you know what it’s supposed to look like and you see these pictures it’s so obvious to you that something is off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right so like so you know problem number one is that the depth information is not high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution enough to even do the effect consistently around things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco object edges. And that’s where usually the obvious problems appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is around edges. Edges of people’s heads, edges of objects, because they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applying this very coarse map and they’re trying to be smart about it and they succeed sometimes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even Apple’s example photos… I remember when the iPhone 8 and 10 where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when their event happened and they put up their big press pages on the site, even some of their example photos I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought had obvious flaws from the algorithm. So again, maybe I’m just seeing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much, but they’re not capturing enough resolution of depth data to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do the edges correctly. That’s why edges always look weird and fuzzy and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blur things that shouldn’t be blurred and vice versa sometimes. And the other problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what John said, the blur doesn’t look right. Like if you have seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual blur photos from real optics more than a few times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will probably recognize that the type and look of the blur in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these portrait mode photos isn’t right. Like, and it’s hard to put into words why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s just not the right kind of blur. It doesn’t look the way it would look from a lens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if the depth map was perfect and they were able to do it pixel by pixel, the blur is still wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it looks, it just looks like a filter. It looks like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap image editing filter that’s trying to cover up bad optics, which it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, well, you know, not bad optics, small optics that are not designed for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, so all that being said, I am very, very happy with the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without any of these tricks. That’s a fantastic camera and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the portrait crazy effects that all look weird and blur the edges of your dog off. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need those to make this camera look amazing. They’re a fun trick. They’re a fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demo. I’m sure people have fun with them and I’m sure everyone’s going to write in to me saying how much fun they have with them. If you like them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, but I really, really don’t. And the cameras are so good without them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I almost find them like an odd detraction from this otherwise awesome camera. But fortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t get in my way. I just don’t use those modes. And I get to take awesome pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, technically awesome. My composition is terrible, but I get to take technically awesome pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this camera and with both of these cameras and finally have the flexibility of having that zoomed-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens. And I love all that. I just have no use for the trickery modes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having a telephoto lens is really, really nice. And I forget that it’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first, because I’m so used to just never, ever, ever zooming my camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever, you know, and early with my iPhone, I should say in the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never really use the flash ever because I’ve just trained myself to never use the flash, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually from everything I’ve gathered and seen the flash on the iPhone, both front facing and rear is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually not bad. I mean, it doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, but as a flash goes, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a phone, pretty decent. And so because I’ve trained myself to never zoom, I forget that the telephoto lens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a thing. But as it turns out, it’s awesome just to have, like you were saying, Marco, just to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the option to zoom at all is really, really nice. And as a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside, at work today, we had a chili cook-off and I’m going somewhere with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The way it worked was we had something like, we had something like 12 different employees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cook chilies and then they gave us like a little shooter, like a shot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cup, or it would be a glass if you will, but like a little paper cup that was like the size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a shot that you could take a little sample of each of the chilies and vote on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whichever one was your favorite, right? So I had taken a picture to send to Aaron earlier today and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used portrait mode. Now in the defense of Apple, portrait mode was only really officially marketed as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being for people. What I did was I took a shot of my stack of, you know, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shot cups, if you will. And, and I sent it to her and I just looked back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it a few minutes ago and realized that if you look at it at a glance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks really, really good. Or at least it does to me. But if you look at it for even a second, more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than a glance, and I’ve put a link in the show notes and I put a link in the chat room, look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right side, all the way at the top. Like part of the cup is just gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is kind of preposterous. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithm kind of hopefully found the edge of that design on the cup and expected that that was an edge of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey blurted it out for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I mean again to be fair to Apple, like this is a really crummy situation to put this software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through, right? To put this edge detection through. Like this is ripe for failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But at the same time, like it is clear that I’m not going to be giving up on my micro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four thirds camera anytime soon. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the blur effect that Marco thought look bad. I think that blur
⏹️ ▶️ John effect would be fine if there was depth information back there. Because the reason I think it looks terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John is because it is basically blurring a flat photo. Whereas if you have an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John optically, you know, blurred stuff, depending on the distance, the closer things are blurred less than
⏹️ ▶️ John things are farther away, like depending on how close they are to like the focal point, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you only have depth information for the first like two feet in front of you, everything behind that
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a blurred poster and it looks like a blurred poster. But all that said, I agree with Marco, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need this, the cameras are great without it. That’s probably why we didn’t talk about it. It’s like these are the best iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras ever. Everything Apple says is true. They are better than the previous cameras and the previous cameras are already
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good they’re great and you’ll take good pictures with them. Two things to say about this
⏹️ ▶️ John the portrait lighting modes I think fulfill their purpose better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the whatever the portrait blurring mode because they’re so focused on
⏹️ ▶️ John like selfies and you know dramatic pictures of people they’re more like Instagram filters we’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah we’re gonna mangle your picture for an artistic effect no one is going to think like this is an untouched
⏹️ ▶️ John photo and that’s the point the crazy studio lighting where it blacks out the background for extra drama and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get some hilarious weird effects out of that, but it’s kind of, you know, that’s it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John people who want to use it and try it are getting exactly what they want out of it. Ridiculous overblown dramatic effects
⏹️ ▶️ John that are going to screw up a lot of time. But hey, you take 900 selfies before you pick the one you like anyway, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John no problem there. As for the portrait mode blurring thing, which has been
⏹️ ▶️ John around for a while now, and I see all over the place in real life on an Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the main feature of that is if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a big expensive camera and most people don’t just look at the numbers like they don’t sell a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John big expensive cameras as compared to the number of cell phones this is the first time many people have
⏹️ ▶️ John ever been able to take a picture that has this
⏹️ ▶️ John look that you know oh the thing I wanted to take a picture of now look sharper
⏹️ ▶️ John because the rest of the thing is blurred and so I’m not distracted by the background and and
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like a better picture. It looks more professional. It doesn’t matter whether they can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it looks right or not. All that matters is that they had never previously had the ability to take pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John that were anything like this, that had any kind of depth of field, right? It was always like everything was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there was some tiny pinhole camera and everything was in focus because all the light beams were getting found through this tiny, tiny aperture
⏹️ ▶️ John on their, you know, cheap camera on their phone, right? And so for
⏹️ ▶️ John them, it’s a huge upgrade of never having this effect. And subjectively, looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at a picture of your kid with the background pleasantly blurred out makes your kid look better, right? It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re comparing that to how it would look with an actual wide aperture, big glass, expensive camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they don’t have one of those and they probably never will. They’re comparing it to how it would look with that effect turned off. And as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re concerned, this looks better because it just looks closer to like a quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John professional picture or a magazine type picture. And I can see that. I can see when I see people use it, Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they just say, I just like it better. It looks better. So in the end, the blurring portrait picture
⏹️ ▶️ John is giving people a better experience with this phone, at least in the moment
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re like, this phone takes pictures that I’m just blown away. They maybe don’t even know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it is about them. Like they just look better, right? And even if you point out, oh, you just erased your kid’s ear. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John I hadn’t noticed that, but I still like it. The only concern with the blurring, which so many people love,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that I worry that years down the line, they will feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ John that all their pictures are blurred. Now Apple also saves the unmodified picture, so that shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be a problem, but I still worry that somehow that information will get lost or
⏹️ ▶️ John the blurred one will be burned out to a flat JPEG and moved around to a different service and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know. Like I’ve already heard from some people who kind of regret that they took a lot of pictures of their kids with that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know they can recover the original or maybe they can’t anymore because they’ve exported
⏹️ ▶️ John it in some way. But in general, I think despite what Marco and I and many other
⏹️ ▶️ John big camera-owning people think about it, a lot of people like this feature. I think it helps sell
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones. I think it makes people happier with their phone and happier with the pictures they take with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. And again, if you don’t take a critical eye to it, which for the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us is, or certainly the two of you, probably the three of us is hilarious. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I don’t really and truly look at these pictures, even those cups, which as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you take a true look at it, it’s so obvious how broken it is. But at a glance, I didn’t even notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, if you’re not discerning, then this is more than enough. And it saves you the thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus dollars of getting another camera that has big glass, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you wouldn’t want to spend $1,000 on a camera, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you guys spend $1,200 on a phone, it’s fine though. Bye.
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#askatp: GeForce Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Create your free account today and see for yourself at jamf.com.atp. That’s J-A-M-F.com.atp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Manage your Apple devices from anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on to Ask ATP, Kim Albrecht
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes in, Would John consider gaming on the GeForce Now service instead of getting a tricked-out new Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Kim included a YouTube link, which we will put in the show notes. So, what is GeForce Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what is this all about?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the short answer is no, I wouldn’t consider that. But the longer answer is what GeForce Now is.
⏹️ ▶️ John GeForce Now is another sad slash, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sad to me, attempt to get gaming, to bring gaming to Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John users, right? You’ve got a Mac, you want to play games, boot camp is there for you if you want it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if you go in bootcamp, uh, you probably don’t have the best GPU because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t sell max with it. And so you’re like, what, what if you want to play the most demanding modern
⏹️ ▶️ John PC games, but you don’t want to own a PC, you just have a Mac. You’re kind of stuck these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John And GeForce now is a service a lot like some services in the past, including
⏹️ ▶️ John the one I’m most familiar with on live for many years ago, um, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it will run the game for you in a data center far away on a tricked out PC with all the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy hardware, presumably using NVIDIA GPUs, right? And then it will let you remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John control that PC, sending the picture of it to your screen and letting your keyboard and mouse act as input
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. So that’s what the GeForce Now service is. And it lets you run on like your dinky,
⏹️ ▶️ John like MacBook Escape with a wimpy GPU. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John run the most modern game at a really high frame rate, at a really high resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not running it. It’s running on a fancy computer far away from you. You’re just displaying the results as
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a dumb terminal. But of course, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John free lunch. You’ve got latency because you’re communicating over the internet. The image quality that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting is not going to be the same as if it was running locally because they have to compress that video and send
⏹️ ▶️ John it to you. You need to have a fast internet connection. You need to have not many hitches in your internet connection. You need
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a surprising amount of bandwidth because there are a lot of frames in that video. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John generally why I wouldn’t want it instead of a local computer, because the compromises are not
⏹️ ▶️ John great, and they are especially bad for some of the types of games that I like, like a game like Destiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I wanted to try. I would love to play Destiny 2 on the PC, because I get a higher frame rate and it’s higher res,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Destiny’s the type of game that is very sensitive to lag. It would really affect gameplay.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanted to play something like Civilization or some other game that is also very demanding, but maybe not as sensitive to lag, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, someone who plays Civilization could tell me if it’s a game where you need to have twitch reflexes, but surely there are games out
⏹️ ▶️ John there that you don’t care about the extra latency and it’s more about you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the rest of the gameplay experience. This would be something you might be interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be a pay service and then you have to pay for the games on top of that, so it’s you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper than buying a gaming PC but it’s an additional cost. So I wish them luck with this service
⏹️ ▶️ John and it seems like a good idea, I just wish that gaming would actually get better on Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if that’s never ever going to happen, I’m kind of glad that someone still feels like there’s money to be squeezed from Mac users
⏹️ ▶️ John who want to play games. As long as they make that amount of money smaller than the price and hassle and
⏹️ ▶️ John desk space of buying a gaming PC, I guess maybe there’s a market for it.
#askatp: VPNs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Mark M.V. writes in, do you use a VPN? If so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which one would you recommend? So the motivation here, I think, is that there are many VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey services that allow for different things. One example is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you live outside the United States but want to have an internet connection that appears to be within the United States
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you can use, well, I guess Netflix used to be a good example. Now I don’t think it’s quite as important,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or any number of other services that are forced to be US only. But another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option is if you’re just in a public Wi-Fi hotspot and you want your communications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be encrypted, then you could use a VPN for that. I do use a VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I am out of the house on a Wi-Fi network that I do not trust,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if for some reason I want to get on my in-home network. And the answer that I have for what VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I recommend, well, I recommend the VPN that you run on your Synology that’s sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your house, which is not a terribly useful recommendation, I’ll be the first to admit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, you could install Mac OS server if you have a computer at home, a Mac at home that’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time. If you have any sort of like cheap computer that can run Linux, you can run, you know, various different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers that do it that way. Or if you have a Synology, I strongly recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting up a VPN server on there if like me, you connect your Synology to the internet, which I know Johns is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s what I do. I can’t speak for either of you guys. So Marco, what do you do for this, if anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly don’t use them because, first of all, I’m hardly ever out of my house. And when I am, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually on the cell network. And I know the cell network is not perfectly secure, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hardly ever connected to somebody else’s Wi-Fi, is what I’m saying. So where I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the most common need for a VPN is to protect yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that kind of situation. There are lots of other reasons to use one as you said. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that up on what’s the best solution if security and privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the main reasons you’re using them. You can use a big service like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the one I use occasionally when I need it is encrypt.me which is formally known as Cloak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I signed up for that a little while back, but it’s mostly for practicality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like sheer amount of security. So for instance, at my in-laws place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their crappy rural ISP blocks outbound SSH connections.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can’t SSH into any of… Yes. So I can’t log into any of my servers when I’m there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably like… I’m sure it’s like, you know, some like Windows worm probably started attacking SSH servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just bigger they block. I don’t know. I’m sure there was a reason like that. It’s not a, whatever it is, it’s not a good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, but the fact is I, I have to occasionally log into servers when I’m, when I’m away. So, um, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I basically bought it just to do that. Um, but I use it also when traveling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when I’m, when I have to be like on hotel wifi for reasonable connectivity, I’ll use it then. Uh, but for, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually don’t use one. Um, because again, I’m usually, I’m almost never connected to anybody else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wifi networks. I think the whole idea of connecting to a random Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network in public and letting all your traffic flow over that without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always being encrypted, like without everything running over HTTPS, which you know, let’s face it, you’re gonna have something that probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t. The idea of that sounds crazy to me and I think we’re gonna look back on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of using public Wi-Fi networks unencrypted. Like I think we’re gonna look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on this and think that was crazy in not even that long, maybe in five or ten years. The whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of connecting to random public Wi-Fi and everyone not having every device have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cellular connection that is theirs and private, that’s going to seem barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, yeah, I use Cloak, which is now known as EncryptMe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hardly ever actually need to use it. If you are doing it more for privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know a lot about this, but I do know there is always discussion about which of the various VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services keep logs or will be beholden to government requests or things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of like levels of paranoia slash security depending on your point of view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can go into with this. And I’m not familiar with that. So I will say if you lean that direction, or if you have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced needs like that, you’re probably better off doing something more like Casey just suggested, which is like kind of running your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some kind of server that you can trust somewhere rather than doing somebody’s big service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s I don’t know anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always worried about, you know, kind of like the stories about antivirus software being a vector for malware,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The VPNs that are secretly run by like some hostile foreign government,
⏹️ ▶️ John unbeknownst to you, they’re just man-in-the-middling all of your traffic, even the secure stuff, and feeding you
⏹️ ▶️ John fake certificates for SSL and all sorts of other stuff, and like, oh, I’m using it on my Synology, it’s local, it’s fine. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know that, you don’t know. Like, Synology could be unknowingly shipping some, you know, thing that is infected with
⏹️ ▶️ John some malware that is sending all your traffic to who knows where. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, I, in general, I use VPN at work for work because I have to, I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John if the VPN I’m using for work is actually making things more secure or not, but I have to use it. So I do
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m out and about, I’m never connecting back to anything in my home because I have no way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do so just because that is makes me feel more comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I tend not to you know I think I have cloak and a couple other
⏹️ ▶️ John VPN software that I think I’ve used on occasion when I’ve been feeling particularly paranoid and have no choice But to connect to some potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John sketchy Wi-Fi network, but in general I I will connect to the Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John at the hotel I’m staying at and I’ll just use it and just try not to worry about it I’m basically going for the big sky
⏹️ ▶️ John theory which is a lot of people out in the world and unless someone is specifically targeting me I’m probably gonna be fine
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m on cell most of the time that I’m away anyway, but I have to think back a few times I was
⏹️ ▶️ John at hotels. I use the hotel wifi. I rely on the fact that the things I care about should all
⏹️ ▶️ John be over a cell, and I just hope that I’m not being man in the middle with some fake certificate authority
⏹️ ▶️ John crap. And I just keep my fingers crossed because what else can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s also other practical reasons you might want to use one. Like there’s a lot of VPN services that provide built-in ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocking for like just all of your stuff through the VPN. There’s some that enable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Casey said, to enable you to change your regions for video services, which can be nice. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, and that could be not only just internationally, but even that could be for things like sports blackout things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I won’t even pretend to know anything more than just that’s a term that exists. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s also things like on airplanes, where a lot of times the airplane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wifi providers will throttle or block certain things, they’ll do they’ll do creepy things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like recompress images down to lower lower sizes and if you’re trying to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that requires you to not have your images recompressed like if you’re doing web development or something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might get in your way so you can you know oftentimes they will allow you to get around those restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when you’re like at a hotel or something or on some kind of like large public Wi-Fi network like an airport
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that a lot of times they will use different traffic prioritization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schemes games to deprioritize or limit certain types of traffic that might get in your way. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you know, if you’re like, you know, trying to download something off of a CDN, or if you’re trying to watch a YouTube video or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that might get throttled or blocked by a hotel or airport, if you download it directly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you go through a VPN, it might not be so like there, it kind of gives you more flexibility and more options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have this tool at your disposal. If you’re out and about a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some people use it just to get a different route. Like if you’re having trouble reaching server and people say, Oh, connect your VPN
⏹️ ▶️ John because then your traffic will go through the VPN, which may be geographically located in a way that totally changes your route to that
⏹️ ▶️ John host and suddenly you can get through to it. Some people have tried this like getting through to the store when ordering
⏹️ ▶️ John putting their thing on Wi Fi through a VPN to have a different route on one device to see if maybe their CDN
⏹️ ▶️ John comes up sooner. Lots of interesting things you can do to sort of using VPN not for
⏹️ ▶️ John its its primary purpose but merely to just take a different path to the same destination.
#askatp: AirPower Magic devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Elliot George would like to know, do you think Apple will eventually bring air power to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its magic mouse and keyboard? So to recap, the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones all support Qi, Qi, Qi, Qi, Qi, wireless charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Transnich. Exactly. And Bazelle. They pronounce,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they pronounce, they support that wireless charging. So the Apple has announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not released a special mat that will allow you to charge your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, your watch, and your AirPods, giving you spend money on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey special case or get a brand new set of AirPods, all on the same mat. Because currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can only, for most of these pads, you can only charge one device at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so AirPower will allow you to do, if you’re a super nerd like me that has a watch and AirPods and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phone, it will let you do all three on one pad. So Elliot’s asking, do we think that Apple will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring air power to the Magic Mouse and keyboard? I don’t think so, but I can’t figure out why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just doesn’t feel to me like something Apple would do. I think they’re perfectly satisfied with having you periodically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge via the lightning cable, even the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey harpooned turtle that is the Magic Mouse. And I don’t I don’t think they feel like there’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any need to change or improve that. But I don’t know. That’s my thoughts. John,
⏹️ ▶️ John they changed their Apple input devices so infrequently, the keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John change infrequently, the mice change even more infrequently. But all that said, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse is, they should do it. And I think there’s a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John chance that they will just because the harpoon turtle is ridiculous. And the reason they did the harpoon turtle is no other good
⏹️ ▶️ John place to plug the thing in. And the mouse is small and easy to pick up and put on a mat.
⏹️ ▶️ John So once a month when you have to recharge it, it’s easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John just say like the thing pops up to just plop it down on the thing keyboard would be too awkward. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you pick up your keyboard and like balance it’s bigger than the air power mat you’re not gonna have a map
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the size of your keyboard and the keyboard would take up the whole thing and which part of the keyboard needs to be over the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just seems like not a good fit. The mouse is more or less the size of a phone and I think it would
⏹️ ▶️ John fit perfectly well and I think it will solve their harpoon turtle problem, solve their like where
⏹️ ▶️ John do we put the charging port problem. And if you do have one of those mats, there’s a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John chance that it will be on the desk where your computer is because that’s where you plop your phone when you’re using the computer so
⏹️ ▶️ John you plop your mouse there. So I’m, I’m semi optimistic that five years from now when they finally
⏹️ ▶️ John revise their mouse again that it will have whatever the current standard of wireless charging
⏹️ ▶️ John is because it make sense to me as a product to be a thing that you put on a mat to charge everyone in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that sounds about right. The only thing is that the lightning method
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of charging them also provides a secondary function, which is it pairs them to the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You never have to go through Bluetooth pairing and everything. All you have to do is plug them into the lightning cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s connected to a computer, and it just automatically pairs to that computer, which is really nice. It’s also frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used for me when my trackpad disconnects itself for no reason. Thanks Sierra!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I have to plug it back in about every two days so that it reconnects itself. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons why you need, why the cable is nice to have besides just charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree with John that it doesn’t make as much sense on the trackpad and keyboard where it’s not only that they need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be plugged in generally less often but also you can still use them when they’re plugged in. So if you forget to charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a keyboard or trackpad, not that big of a deal. Just plug the cable in and keep working. Whereas if you forget to charge the mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to literally just stop using it for a while as it sits there sideways. And then you go back to your trackpad that has disconnected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for no reason. So, um, not that I’m bitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This to me, it’s, it’s an interesting problem to solve on the mouse, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they just move the port to the front of the mouse and gave us a little like indentation there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would also solve the problem with lightning port. I think it’s the chi charging makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is less necessary and is less compelling for a device that you only have to charge once a month for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little while. You know, it’s it makes a lot more sense on devices like phones where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are using them constantly and they’re draining their batteries constantly and then every night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even throughout the day they need to be topped off. They need to be recharged. That’s not really the case with these peripherals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can’t really see them doing that necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ John They really need to add is to solve your disconnecting problems like the equivalent or maybe the identical
⏹️ ▶️ John like the W1 chip. The fact that you can plug it into paired is great because it gets you out of the whole Bluetooth device pairing
⏹️ ▶️ John game like they’ve circumvented it with a hardwired connection. But also on AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John they have their own pairing mechanism. Yes AirPods are Bluetooth but the whole W1 thing and the experience of opening a little
⏹️ ▶️ John container and switching easily from device to device and all that stuff. That experience
⏹️ ▶️ John would help you presumably, uh, work around OS bugs when your trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John disconnects without having to actually plug in a cable. Uh, and so, you know, the wireless,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything for devices that are small and handheld, uh, I think is a reasonable future
⏹️ ▶️ John and like I said, they revised their mice so infrequently that by the time they do all this stuff should be
⏹️ ▶️ John more reliable, lower power, cheaper, and just sort of be table stakes for any portable thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that has batteries that presumably will become less common to have to keep plugging these
⏹️ ▶️ John things in and have to have ports on them and have to deal with connectors it’ll just be like put it down on the
⏹️ ▶️ John pad and let it ago.
#askatp: The rejected question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So why don’t you like the next Ask ATP, which I know we’ve already hit three, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m bothered by you not liking this question, and I’m willing to give Marco the editing work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to clean this up. So in the show notes, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reads, how would you define quote close to the metal quote to non-nerds? And do you have a favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-computer analogical use for the saying? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that a word. I don’t think so. It looks terrible. and it’s prefixed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in italics, I don’t like this question. So I asked in Slack earlier, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why don’t you like this question? The response I got was as follows, many reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was busy, I don’t have time to type a big thing. I was on my iPad, I gotta type a big answer to you on my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what the hell’s wrong with this guy? I thought this was a perfectly reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, you don’t have a smart keyboard on that iPad? No, that’s it. No, I don’t. Oh, you’re missing out. The only way to use an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is with a smart keyboard, it’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t type on it. I’m just reading the web and browsing Twitter and watching YouTube. I’m not typing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Yeah, because it sucks to type on the screen, but if you have a keyboard, you’d start typing on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t. I’m using my iPad. I have, if I want a laptop, I would get a laptop, but I don’t like laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t have a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Except your work laptop. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John got no choice. No choice. True, I don’t like that one either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, what the hell’s wrong with this question?
⏹️ ▶️ John My assumption is that they’re asking this because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Merlin, many years old, troll gag of trying to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, is that close to the metal? I think he was like riffing on something that we said in an early tech podcast that
⏹️ ▶️ John he reframed and, and, you know, I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John close to metal was something we said or it was close to something we said, but he catch, he latched onto it as
⏹️ ▶️ John like a a catchphrase and a sort of a nonsense thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t like. It’s a it’s a multi layered multi year old gag that
⏹️ ▶️ John has lost all meaning and never really did have a meaning. It’s like his returning null thing, right? That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s not, it doesn’t seem like an honest question because what how would you define why
⏹️ ▶️ John would you find yourself needing to define close to the metal unless they also listen to a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts with me and Merlin for years and years to understand what this gag is about, in which case you would never need to define it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s context that’s missing here. What is the why does this come
⏹️ ▶️ John up? Why are you saying close to the metal to anyone? Why do you feel like you have to explain it? Why is
⏹️ ▶️ John it important thing for them to understand? Do you understand it? Are you asking me to explain it to you? Or do you just want you think you understand
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but you want me to tell you how to explain to someone else who doesn’t care about it? It’s a bad question. That’s why we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John answering it. Are you serious
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right now? This is the most insane thing
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, maybe you guys don’t have that same context and maybe this I’m wrong and this person also has no idea what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about and they just like I’ve just heard close to the middle I don’t want to know what it means or I know what I mean but I need to explain to other people
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s perfectly honest but I didn’t interpret it that way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how would you define quote close to the middle quote to non nerds okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was literally verbatim the question how in the name of Zeus’s butthole did you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much context from that little
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you don’t have that context but if you had listened to tons of podcasts with me and Marlon and knew and Remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John origins of this whole gag you would have the same context as I do. That’s why I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m I’m stupefied right now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Understand the words coming out of your mouth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But how you concluded from how would you define close to the metal to non nerds?
⏹️ ▶️ John did you come to that conclusion? Because the only reason they’re saying close to the metal is because
⏹️ ▶️ John like I mean again, I’m assuming you’re right But but like it’s too much a coincidence Marco who actually
⏹️ ▶️ John listens to Podcasts that Merlin is on and I am on and probably remembers this more better than most of
⏹️ ▶️ John us You know what I’m talking about right? I don’t think so well Do you forget forget aside whether you like to
⏹️ ▶️ John question? I you know that you know the origins of the close to the metal thing right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in computer terms I know what it means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know the John Merlin podcast axis of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John forgotten it I mean all right well, then maybe it’s just me But anyway, that was that was my interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John and my guess is that the person asking this question also knows what I’m talking about even if nobody else does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Bet you that you are 100% wrong on this
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, you can see why I didn’t want to try to type that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So can we answer this without all of that? completely bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’re abstaining
⏹️ ▶️ John from this no, no, no listen listen if you you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? What is the non john Merlin related context for
⏹️ ▶️ John asking this question? Do you think close to the metal is a phrase that needs to be explained to other people? Does it come up in conversation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would anyone? Why would anyone say this and be disappointed that someone didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand it to them and yet not know how to explain it to them? Like what? Why is this a legit question in any way independent
⏹️ ▶️ John of any other stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who Who knows? Why are you judging whether or not Jonathan Bolling has used the phrase close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the metal in conversation? That’s not up to you. You’re not the boss of him.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like you’re going to say, how would you define, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a slippery as a banana peel to non nerds? Do you have a favorite analogy used to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it? It’s like, well, that’s not even a common phrase. You know, yes, the bad appeals are slippery, but as slippery as a banana peel is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that people say. So why would I have to explain to you how I explained to other people? just doesn’t come up
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s arbitrary it’s too arbitrary have you ever had to explain close to the metal to non-nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John have you ever said that to anyone when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i’m sure i have oh my god i’m sure i have at some point because there’s a big difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to answer the question see i’m going to sneak the answer in here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco there’s no way this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is making the show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey preposterous
⏹️ ▶️ John this is all for the chat room this is the quality you get for being in this chat room There
⏹️ ▶️ John is no way this makes the edit you get fish and you get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The answer to the question which jonathan will never hear is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that something he
⏹️ ▶️ John already knows what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means No, he does or oh, or maybe he does but you just know how to describe it in a simple way
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Oh my god I’m, so angry at you right now because you are putting this poor man in a context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t think you’re putting him In a box john you’re putting him in a box Anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer to the question is, my answer to the question, which John will then refute and be angry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, is that there are many different kinds of computer languages, programming languages, and some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are literal direct translations to ones and zeros that are run on the CPU in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. And most of them are not. And as you get more and more current, most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these languages have many more abstractions that they’re built upon that get you further and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey further and further away from ones and zeros that are run on the CPU. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re close to the metal, you’re doing something that is either directly translatable to ones and zeros or is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very, very close to directly translatable, as opposed to something like say Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or PHP or certainly Perl, which is built on so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many abstractions, it’s almost hilarious that any of this actually works. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the stuff that the three of us work in day to day is nowhere close to the metal. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions and so many—it’s a layer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cake, just layers all the way down. And thus, that’s what—when somebody says close to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the metal, it means you’re working in a situation where you are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a tool chain that is very difficult to work in because you’re talking—it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more about talking the computer’s language than it is talking about human language.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, when you said, I bet John’s gonna have complaints about my description, I’m thinking to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, sure, it’ll be fine. But then as you got further into the explanation, I was like, you know what, I would explain that differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there we go. So you were right. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco were right. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take it. Of course. Why would you even think that that wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, you know, I’m not gonna have any objections to your explanation, but then it was like, no, no, I wouldn’t say it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. Anyway. Do you know you? this exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly so how would you explain it then King
⏹️ ▶️ John no you did fine you just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fine just bowling already
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what it means
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no he doesn’t and if he has a
⏹️ ▶️ John need to explain it to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey non-nerds that’s it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m tweeting right now I’m tweeting at Jonathan bowling and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John gonna find this right this is sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he probably is but
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you what if Jonathan bowling legit needs an explanation he email me and I will email him
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if he can give me a convincing… So after…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re gonna complain about my explanation and you’re not even going to actually give your own explanation?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to explain but I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t think there’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pronounced Syracusa.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any… Marco, you’re like one of the only few people in the world who can actually pronounce my last name correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, don’t encourage him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So really, you’re not gonna answer the question?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s fine. Like, it’s nitpicking. Like, I’m… what you said is perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John adequate. I would have to know why does you know don’t I would never say close to the metal
⏹️ ▶️ John to non-nerds and expect them to understand What I was saying like why use jargon? Tech nerd jargon with someone who you know
⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna understand it like anything I’m throwing out destiny jargon and regular conversations people and expect them to
⏹️ ▶️ John to follow along. No, would we even know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, you would know because it would sound like nonsense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh My gosh, I I cannot believe you’re gonna complain and moan about my about my description
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then not actually I
⏹️ ▶️ John said you were right I said you were right
⏹️ ▶️ John that I thought I would wouldn’t have any objections to it, but in the end I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is preposterous I’m so angry at you right
⏹️ ▶️ John now Anyway, the main reason why this shouldn’t go in the show is because you only get three questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know who defined that as the rule?
⏹️ ▶️ John Go find that recording of like how many questions that we should have one two three We’re like all three questions sounds good. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’ve been doing ever since we’ll make it a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey topic Well, yeah, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John The close to the middle topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically it’s follow-up because it was discussing another podcast before right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the follow-up people about that I think where that’s follow out right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who invented follow that I mean It couldn’t have possibly been the same people who invented ask podcast, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Was that I don’t I it was track of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John So many of them and they change names so much not
⏹️ ▶️ John which has never changed
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s only ever been up. No, but yeah, but the the Dugga Dugga was from like three of my curly shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s what I think so. Wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that? Friday Yes, they do it and do by Friday
⏹️ ▶️ John But why are they doing it and do by Friday because an earlier show they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John imitating an earlier show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I’m watch this is the verbal version of like Looking in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brain and seeing the world’s most intricate conspiracy theory with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yarn It’s not gonna be where it comes from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like someone in the chat room tell me where the dug a dug is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the verbal version of like that t-shirt that says Helvetica printed in Comic Sans
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone says the prompt is that ringing a bell do you guys the prompt remember the dug a dug on the prompt?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John a dug a dug on that They had the recording of the word follow up with a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and it had a little musical like trill in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no. It’s like I said It’s like a space laser sound effect. It sounds awful. Actually the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sound of right
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s what they’re imitating undo by
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Friday. No, no, not even no, no It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like TV news like yes, like do the good break breaking news
⏹️ ▶️ John that I thought what they were doing was imitating the prompt certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the John where
⏹️ ▶️ John the voiced word follow-up is from the prompt, right? Yes, that
⏹️ ▶️ John prompt and so I was tying those two together if the dugout is not my bad I
⏹️ ▶️ John recalled that little musical laser trail and I thought that’s what they were imitating and it slowly warped until it goes dig dug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow I Don’t even know where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This this this is we have just created a verbal in oral
⏹️ ▶️ John references all the way down and anything that gets filtered through Merlin slowly mutates until it’s unrecognizable
⏹️ ▶️ John recognizable, so what can you do?
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Qi chargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. Betterment, rethink what your money can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a Qi charger, but I hear rumors that one or two of us do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can one of you with a Qi charger tell me if they’re any good and worth buying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got my first Qi chargers this past week. And so I have the Mophie one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Apple Store sells, which is one of the only ones that Apple has ever officially acknowledged its existence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of and I have the what is this? Let me see the rav power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand up one that it looks like it looks like it props it up so it can like stand up on your desk. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this black thing that has fast charge in the middle of it for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rav power seems to be a reasonable brand. They seem like they’re like pretty much on the level of anchor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of like power and charging and battery gear that is inexpensive and seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably made. So anyway, and Mophie is very well regarded too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually find their stuff a little bit pricey for what it is, but it’s good. It’s well made stuff, so it’s, you know, I can’t complain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much. Anyway, so this is my first experience with any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of wireless charging for phones. I know with previous phones you could get cases that were basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, and Mophie even sells those actually and a few other people do too. But I have no experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with those. All the reviews that said, why wireless charging is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very good. I think the only reason they were saying that is because it seems like Apple gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Belkin charger to reviewers, not the Mophie charger. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Belkin charger seems like it has, I haven’t tried it because everyone said it sucked, but it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has pretty significant problems with the phone vibrating off of it and also the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like correct target spot of where you have to put the phone being pretty small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it and it being very easy to put it on there thinking that you’re charging it, but it’s actually slightly misaligned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it doesn’t charge. I have not found this to be the case at all with either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Rav power stand up one or the Mophie circle pad thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so let’s I don’t I don’t know what these are called the Mophie disc. Yeah, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh so you know, let’s get that right out of the way the and I don’t know if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mophie one has multiple coils. I know like one of the ways that the stand up ones try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix this problem is they’ll have multiple coils in there. And so if the phone is aligned with any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like three different coils, it’ll charge properly. So you that way you can maybe have it in different orientation like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the desk ones. They support the phone being in landscape. If you’re like standing up to watch a movie or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but he’s a nice little touch the you have to have like a coil kind of down low for that and they also have one kind of up high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle so the phone can be standing up in different heights anyway so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience of using these things I got to say these are these are amazing these are awesome like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for a number of reasons now they’re not perfect they there are a couple of downsides as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned you do have to actually land it somewhere near the charging spot in practice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found this to not be a problem at all with these two chargers Maybe there’s other ones that are terrible, sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are, but with these two charges, the only ones I’ve experienced with so far, they seem great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s other slight problems like the flat ones, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like having the phone flat on the desk for Face ID purposes, so you’re probably not gonna have Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work with it lying on the desk flat. The stand-up RAVPower one that I have on my desk though does actually work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and will unlock Face ID with it in the stand. So this probably has to do with angle and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance and everything else but just so you know that’s a thing that can work so I’m very happy with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other main downside to be aware of with these things is that they charge fairly slowly compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to high wattage power bricks. It seems like most of them charge at 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts some of them will charge at 7.5 watts on the 11.2 beta. I don’t know how many of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will do that but at least the Mophie one will and that’s roughly that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like that’s like roughly two-thirds of the speed that you get out of an eye out of if you use an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad power brick or any kind of 2.4 amp charger so it’s not quite as fast it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to the speed of the little crappy power brick that comes with the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which for many purposes is totally fine so if you’re charging overnight like next on a bedside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco table it’s totally fine and let me tell you being able like every night for the last,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, decade, I have, upon going to bed, placed my phone in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of dock or charger on my nightstand to charge overnight. I have a feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a pretty common use case. I think pretty much everyone does something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve gone through so many different docks and, you know, good and bad, lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. There used to be zero good docks. Now there’s lots of good docks. Our friends at Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neat make one, the Material Dock, that’s wonderful. It even has an Apple Watch option. I have one of those on my desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great. That’s how I keep my watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charged. Yep, my bedside table is one of their Material Docks with my phone and my watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And were it not for this Qi stuff, I would probably use that frickin’ forever. But now that Qi is a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s got me, it’s got my eye wandering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there’s been all sorts of efforts over the years to make docks that were easy to lift the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone out of one-handed. I believe Elevation Dock kind of made this famous. then right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after Elevation Dock launched, the 30-pin connector was replaced by Lightning, and it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screwed them over for a while. And they had various attempts to fix that for a while. Their current,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way most docks seem to fix this is to just have one of those micro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suction pads on the bottom that just sticks it really hard to the surface it’s on. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way you can just pull the phone out and have the dock stay where it is. So, you know, there’s lots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have the new Elevation Dock too. It’s also really nice. What’s especially nice about it is that you can adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alignment and thickness of its charging things really quickly and easily with little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knobs on it. So if you frequently change whether your phone has a case or not, or you change between two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different thicknesses of cases or something like that, the Elevation Dock is great for that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get to Qi charging, once you try a wireless charging pad, I have a feeling you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not wanna ever use a dock again because it is so different. it is so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rather than having to align your phone into a dock, no matter how good that dock is, no matter how nicely it’s designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then having to pull your phone out of that dock in the morning, rather than doing that, to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lay it on a pad and it lights up to confirm that it’s charging, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s awesome. And then when you want to pick up the phone again, you just reach over and pick it up. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly, it’s so much lower friction, it’s so much, both physically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, metaphorically. It’s so much nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it really is like a behavior changer. Similarly, the one on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is nice. I was reminded by somebody on Twitter the other day. I’m sorry I forget who right now. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find it quickly. But I didn’t realize that Wi-Fi iOS app debugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had shipped and is a thing we can now do in Xcode 9.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still haven’t tried it. I knew I did know it was a thing, but I still have not tried it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the great thing is, so all All you do is you go is so so basically the reason why I was I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lightning cables on my desk is that as an iOS developer you frequently need to from Xcode do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a build and run where you are building your code that you just wrote and you deploy it onto your iPhone or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad and you get to test it right on the device. To do this before this fall you had to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cable you had to be plugged in via USB and a lightning cable and it helpfully also charged the phone which is nice during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this during this time but you had to do that with Xcode 9 that came out this fall you can now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do Y Wi-Fi build and run and Wi-Fi debugging and all you do is you go into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organizer pane and go to go to that device and there’s a little check box at the top that says something like access via network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it’s just always available. It doesn’t have to be connected via USB anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is a perfect combination with a chi charging device because you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have your phone sitting there charging when you’re not running and then when you build and run you just pick it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hold in your hand and you’re running and debugging code it’s glorious it is so so nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it works as far as I can tell it there doesn’t seem to be any difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in performance everything seems to work just fine it isn’t like horribly slow or anything in my initial testing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use so far it’s great so anyway so now on my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I lose a big reason to plug my phone in or a big reason why I would need to plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone in so that’s why this ramp our thing is great to have my desk because here’s the phone standing up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s charging much of the time and when I want when I want to build and run I can just pick it up and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glorious and another thing about these Qi chargers is that there are tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them in all different shapes and sizes and looks and while many of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them I would say are these hideous plastic things with fast charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written in capital letters on them somewhere for no reason some of them are decent looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re all really inexpensive. Like you can get tons of them because Apple didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invent Qi charging. It’s been around for some time and Android phones have supported it for some time. And so there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole ecosystem out there of existing Qi products that are all pretty functional. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, they’re pretty ugly, most of them, but they’re pretty functional and they’re so cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even Ikea makes a lot of pretty decent looking ones. And because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so plentiful and expensive, you can afford to put these pretty much all over the place. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I already have the one next to my bed, which is amazing. I have the one on my desk, which is incredibly useful and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. I’ve ordered a few more to have on the kitchen counter, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the end table next to the couch, because when we watch TV, I often will put my phone on that table.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Might as well have a pad there, right? I mean, I might confuse it for a coaster sometimes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s only 18 bucks, that’s not that bad. So like it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a pretty big game changer. It also brings another big advantage that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can charge the phone while you have something plugged into the lightning port, like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones, which is a very, very common need. Now that I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Qi charging actually works, and I’m sorry Android people, this is like the opera did at first people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Android people are just screaming right now, Like we know we’ve had this forever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you guys are living in the past. We’re never like, I know how frustrating this must be for you Android people, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is new to us. And so whatever you were talking about six years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you and Opera did it together, we are now enjoying this now. So let us have this moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s so clear to me now that the iPhone 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should never have been the phone to remove the headphone jack. the 10 and the 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have been because that’s interesting. Once you have wireless charging abilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest annoyances about the removal of the headphone jack is you can’t charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone at the same time you have headphones plugged in. You know, there are other annoyances like having that dongle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other headphones, but the fact is most people use the earbuds that come with it. And so, or they use Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones, honestly. Um, so you know, it’s, it’s less intrusive as long as you can use that lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port. But you can’t, but so many people listen to their phone like all day at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work because their work computer doesn’t have any, you know, they can’t install apps on it or something. So they use their phone to play Spotify or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so common for people to want to listen and charge all day long and with the iPhone 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they couldn’t do that without buying some kind of expensive dongle or adapter or series of adapters and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dongles and it was horrible. Whereas it’s I think it’s a much more defensible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position to remove the headphone jack when introducing Qi charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you can just get a $15 disc and put it on your desk and that problem goes away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, a little side note there. But, overall, this is really great. And the charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed thing, that is indeed a problem. You know, it is noticeably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower than like an iPad brick through a wire, or like a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power brick through a wire. But when you can afford and when you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practically and when it’s low friction enough to put these little charging pads all over the place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the charging speed becomes less important because the battery is probably more charged most of the time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to go from 15% to 80% in a half hour because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re probably not dropping the battery down that low most of the time. And for the very few occasions that you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need very fast charging, you can plug it in somewhere for that, you know, you can cable it for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other benefits of this is that all of these, all these times every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night and throughout the day that I’m not plugging in a lightning cable over and over again, plugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in, unplugging it, putting it in and out of dock. I’m saving tons of wear and tear on the lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connector and on the, and on the outside edge of the bottom of the phone. Like my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iPhone seven, I had to, I had to get my, my iPhone 7 replaced after about six months because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lightning connector broke. Like it just through regular use, it just like started frying cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then eventually just wouldn’t charge because it had probably some kind of damaged pins or something in there. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and, and from what I learned at the time, that was not that uncommon of a problem to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so with this, I am, I’m turning the lightning port from something that I plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something into, you know, two to eight times a day, probably on average
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into something that on some days I’ll never use at all. And so that’s probably going to be great for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longterm reliability of the port and of the phone. So to me, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much all wins. I don’t know. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys think? So what room do you think there is for Apple’s air power, Matt,
⏹️ ▶️ John to come into this market and give you something that you feel like you’re not getting? Like what, like, is, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John a place for Apple innovation here or is like no matter what Apple Apple comes out with, you’re just gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ John surveying the field of cheap Android focused chargers and just buy like 50 of them and spread them around your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like if you have like the full Apple combo of AirPods, Apple Watch, and phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that becomes more compelling for the AirPower Mat because right now, the AirPods and the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not Qi compatible. You can’t just put them on a Qi disk and have them charge. They seem to be their own little thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only the AirPower Mat will support. So if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the current Apple stuff, you get the new AirPods or the new case for your old AirPods, you get the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 3, so it has whatever this thing is in it, and you have the iPhone 8 or 10, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can go buy the AirPower Mat whenever it comes out. Honestly, I’m kind of wondering where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems kind of weird for them not to release it when they release their Qi charging phones, but oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can see being popular for the people who are all in on new Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear and want to charge it all at once. If it isn’t too big or heavy, that could also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really nice to bring when you’re traveling. If you travel with all those Apple products, that could be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, then not have to travel with as many chargers or cables. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, I have a feeling it’s going to be very expensive. Who knows where it is? It isn’t out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I think it’s going to be a totally good product probably. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very likely to be a good product, but I think it’s going to be unlikely to be very compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you are one of those Apple superpower users with all the new hardware. See also HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way. I think HomePod’s going to have the exact same problem. And where is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Another good question.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’ve got all that hardware, but I’m thinking that you’re not going to get it because you You want
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone to charge while you’re wirelessly debugging it while FaceTime can see you
⏹️ ▶️ John and the AirPower mat makes everything lay flat on the table. So even though you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you could get the, you have AirPods and you could get the new case for it for 60 whatever bucks if you wanted and you have
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple watch even though you hardly ever wear it, uh, and you have a phone, but I don’t think you
⏹️ ▶️ John want all three of those things on the same mat. Even on your nightstand, I would imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have your AirPods, your watch, and and your phone all charging on your nightstand because that’s getting
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty crowded, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my nightstand isn’t big enough for all those things. And for me, my personal use here is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use the AirPods. Tiff uses the AirPods. I had to give her mine because they make my ears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John hurt. That’s right, you got the weird ears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I really, I wish I could wear them because they’re so good, but I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t have AirPods, that’s one thing out. And then the Apple Watch, I do wear it frequently, just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for long durations. I wear it almost every day for dog walks and for much of the morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then I take it off when I shower and get dressed for the day after dog walk and school drop off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. Anyway, so the Apple Watch lives on my desk, not upstairs. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is, I get this is a very unusual setup that I have here. I think most people who own the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably wear it every day or most days. So they might have different needs than me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m guessing the AirPower Mat’s probably gonna cost like one to $200.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Although on a recent
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, I think it was Cortex, uh, uh, Mike and Gray brought up the, the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of if you have like one of those bands that doesn’t let your watch lay flat, right? Like a link, like bracelet
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, then I guess you also can’t use the air power mat cause you can’t get your watch
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the charging part of your watch on the bottom to contact with the pad. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that, you know, what, what, mostly what I’m getting at with the air power mat, which seems like a good solution for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the fat part of the curve of like, Hey, you’re all in it. Like you said, you buy, I got a lot of Apple stuff and this will charge it all at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John And isn’t that convenient? But I don’t envision Apple selling 17
⏹️ ▶️ John different charging mats. Like they’ve just got the one that they announced and maybe there’ll be a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John variety on the line, but nothing will ever compare to the
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem of cheap charging stuff that’s out there. And this is the type of thing charging
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, even though there is a fat part of the curve where Oh, most people charge things
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. There are long tails on both sides of all sorts of different scenarios.
⏹️ ▶️ John Developers who want the thing upright. And what I’m thinking of is like for me, families with lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, we recently we’ve had lots of problems figuring out where to charge all our devices. And as our kids got older and
⏹️ ▶️ John have more and more devices that they actually care about, you we have a problem of where you charge all these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And the current solution we’re using, it is really the only one that physically
⏹️ ▶️ John fits in the space we have allotted for. We have like a sideboard table and we have let’s see we
⏹️ ▶️ John all have iPads and we all have something that’s phone shaped and
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of us have watches, right? There is no room
⏹️ ▶️ John for all those things to be laying on pads The pad would have to be like three feet by five feet to
⏹️ ▶️ John fit all those iOS devices in the crazy jigsaw puzzle on it Right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John even if Apple made like a family pad where you can put all your stuff Good luck finding a
⏹️ ▶️ John place to put four iPads, four iPhones and two watches down on a pad. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to dedicate an entire piece of furniture to this? It’s just not efficient. So we have one of those things that like, lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you put them like books in a shelf, like vertically, you know, so they’re all sort of like lined
⏹️ ▶️ John up with each other. And you know, you plug in lightning cables in the back of them. So it’s like this big, this big,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even that big. It’s like nine inch by nine inch square with slots. you
⏹️ ▶️ John just put the iPads or the phones in the slots and you connect the lightning cables from the side and
⏹️ ▶️ John we can actually fit like three iPads and four phones and no
⏹️ ▶️ John watches unfortunately because I don’t do watches into a fairly small amount of space. These
⏹️ ▶️ John extremes like I always want to have my phone upright and facing me so I can take it on and off when I’m doing iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John development or I have a family of you know many people with many devices and I need a place where they can charge
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them every day and not you know cover the surface of some desk with either a giant pad or
⏹️ ▶️ John a rat’s nest of wires or both, Apple’s never gonna address those needs. They’re gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two pads, just like they make one or two docks, and that’ll be that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John despite whatever advantages Apple may have, are the Apple Pad charges faster, the Apple Pad can charge your
⏹️ ▶️ John watch, the Apple Pad is less finicky about finding all your devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s never going to be the go-to recommendation, I think, because your first question will
⏹️ ▶️ John be how many devices do you wanna charge and where do you want them to charge and what orientation do you want them to charge?
⏹️ ▶️ John And pads in general will never be the solution to lots of devices if they require any
⏹️ ▶️ John device that charges on them to lay flat. I mean, imagine if you had a family of four people all with 12.9 inch iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, now you’re getting into like a coffee table just filled
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with iPad space. It’s inefficient. You want them to be- The Apple Surface.
⏹️ ▶️ John God. But you want them to be vertical. And for vertical stuff, you need, you know, something like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, I always forgot the name of that. the other company started by the guy who did on live
⏹️ ▶️ John steve prohman or whatever the wireless power delivery that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wife uh… information so no uh… artisan area
⏹️ ▶️ John artemis p cell yeah something like that where you could actually have them file bikes books in the shelf
⏹️ ▶️ John and have them all wirelessly charge but we’re not there yet so anyway i’m i’m intrigued by what
⏹️ ▶️ John you described are collected you know the the sort of are described as crossing a threshold
⏹️ ▶️ John like yet only slightly less annoying to plug in but you cross over some threshold and and you’re freed
⏹️ ▶️ John up from, it just feels so different. You never wanna line up a little thing with a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole one again. And so I’m actually kind of interested in that and I’m assuming my next phone will have wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John charging and I’ll think about, do I want a pad for my nightstand? Do I want a little upright thing for my desk?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I want both because they’re only 20 bucks each? Maybe I’ll-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get both. I feel like that’s the power of this ecosystem is that because there are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many options and most of them cost pretty little, you can just get a lot of them. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna last a while because you’re not having some connector that’s getting plugged and unplugged all the time. Like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the wear and tear on these is probably gonna be fairly minimal. I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna last multiple phones and maybe down the road, it won’t be the fastest charging method.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it isn’t today even. So like, you know, maybe down the road, they’ll develop higher wattage ones and maybe you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want those in certain places. But I bet having these around everywhere are still gonna be useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a question for you, Marco. I know you’ve only tried a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these so far, but I’m looking at Ikea and they have something that’s spelled R-A-UMLAT-L-L-E-N,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wireless charger, comma, black, that’s $12. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it looks to me- That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pronounced chi. Yeah, exactly. It looks to me to be quite a bit taller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the, what was the good one that you said?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. Okay, thank you. It looks to me to be quite a bit taller than the Mophie, but the Mophie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is listed on Apple’s website as $60, and this is 12. Like, having never held the IKEA one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the best that you can, do you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Mophie one is, you know, like five times better than this is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not. I mean, you know, you’re paying the Mophie tax, you’re also paying the Apple certification tax,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like that’s, you’re paying a lot of taxes on that, you know, for what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this RAMPower one, I think, was like 20 bucks, something like that, somewhere around 20 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s totally fine, too. It seems to charge at the same speed for now. I mean, I don’t think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the 7.5 watt upgrade, but I don’t honestly really care that much because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need that much charging speed on my desk right at this moment. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like this is the kind of thing where, first of all, because everything is so inexpensive, you can afford to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few of them and see what works best for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, ultimately, if you buy one and it’s just kind of okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you want to later down the road get a nicer one, you’re totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s totally reasonable. Just move the one that you’re not using anymore in one place, move it somewhere else in the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’ll figure out a way to use it. These things, I have a feeling, are going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as useful and long-lasting as cables are. No one says, like, no, you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy another lightning cable. You’ll never use it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on maybe if you buy so many Qi chargers, you might not use it. But I know what you mean. I know what you mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But like now it’s like, it’s, it’s so useful that now I’m thinking like, you know, do I want to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my little power bank battery with one that includes a Qi pad? Some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Like some of them can, some, some of the batteries have Qi charging pads on them. So you could place your phone on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery and not even use a cable to charge it. Like, stuff like that. I’m now looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at other things that, can I put one in my car? Can my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dock? I have some kind of little suction cup mount in the car so I can use Waze, which at some point we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna talk about. But I had one of those, and it’s like, can I get one of those that uses Qi so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to plug the cable into that over and over again? It’s the kind of thing, once you get one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things, you see how awesome it is. You’re like, all right, where else can I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take advantage of this? Like, can I put one on the couch and table? Can I put one on my nightstand? Can I put one on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my spouse’s side of the nightstand? Can I put one in the kitchen? Like, you kind of want them all over the place because it’s so nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you’re walking around with a pretty much always fully charged phone so that when you do need to leave the house or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go somewhere or do something crazy, you can do that and your phone’s not going to totally burn through like the last 20%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of battery it has because you haven’t been charging it all day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So a couple of notes about this IKEA one. First of all, this apparently tops out at 5 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second of all, it may or may not include the wall brick and associated paraphernalia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you need to plug into the charger itself, whereas the Mophie one apparently does come with all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Also, the Mophie one, as far as I can tell, Marco, does not have any illuminated lights or LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything when it’s charging. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct? No, it has a very small white LED in the base. It doesn’t, it isn’t like a ring-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. The RavPower has like a small ring around it that glows softly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white when you first put the phone on. It does not stay lit, it just like goes on for like a minute when you first put it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mophie pad, it has a single white LED shining from one dot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one side, I think, just one side. And I don’t think that stays lit either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either way, if you’re charging an iPhone, you don’t need any kind of lighting. And I’m very happy to just cover these up or tape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or paint over them or something because the iPhone, when you put it on the charger, it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen turns on for a minute and it goes, blink, you know, it makes the plugged in sound. And so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very obvious without any kind of indication from the charger itself. The iPhone makes it obvious whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are on it or not. So, and which is one of the reasons why, like I have not yet had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any issues with like misalignment or misplacing it because it makes it very clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I brought this up because a friend of the show, Jelly in the chat room had said that he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has the IKEA one, and it works fine, but it has a pretty bright white light while charging. And I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Belkin one had a very bright blue light while charging, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco mistaken. Yeah, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Anchormix one that has like this ring of blue LEDs around it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know why. Yeah, it’s the kind of thing like, unfortunately, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a lot of like, you cheap commodity hardware, taste does not come frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to these products. It’s very hard to find nice ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we will. I’m sure now that the iPhone supports this and now that a lot more high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buyers are looking for these things, there’s gonna be a lot more coming out. Like there’s one this Portland company called Grove Made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has one that’s coming soon that I’ve pre-ordered that is like a fancy like metal and cork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for like I think 80 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say, your days of $20 Qi chargers are coming to an end as the artisanal handcrafted
⏹️ ▶️ John ones start appearing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well yeah, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco start buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Like the one on my desk, that can be the, you know, the the one that says fast charge and big letters and has an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LED in it, but like the one I put in the living room on the couch end table, that’s probably gonna have to be something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer. Your whole end table should be the Qi charger,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like every car, like the little like center console things, they all have Qi
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco chargers all over
⏹️ ▶️ John them now, where you just chuck the phone into this little bin and they all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge. Yeah, no, that’s that. I want that. No, and it’s funny. So IKEA actually sells one of the IKEA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things is just like a charger that’s almost shaped like a cup holder insert. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea is you take a hole saw of like exactly that size and you can drill a hole into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desk or table or any desk or table you already have and just drop this in there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that becomes a cheat charger, which is kind of clever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And actually, I’m glad you brought that up, John, because a friend of mine who has recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acquired an M2 has pointed out to me that between wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car play and the fact that the M2 actually does have Qi charging in it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has like the perfect setup for his car. And I was curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, if you’ve looked at Tiff’s car to see if she also has a charging pad within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure that was available as an option and we didn’t select it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lol iPhones don’t support wireless charging. We’ll never need this. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just seeing a video review of a car. Maybe you saw it too Casey of someone complaining that the little cubby
⏹️ ▶️ John where you chuck your phone, it’s like hard to get your phone in and out of there. Like they seem to do everything right. Hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John got wireless car play. You got a T charging that when you get into your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wasn’t that the Verge’s iPhone 10 review with Nele?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, anyway, the point is that like leave it to car makers to find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco screw it it up, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, finally the dream. You just get into your car and chuck your phone into it. Like, that’s what people do with their phones now anyway, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the most part is either they clip them in a little clippy thing so they can see the navigation or they chuck it somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can be dangerous and see their text messages when they appear or stuff like that, right? Um, or plug it into
⏹️ ▶️ John a charger. Like my wife has a, like a wire coming out of the little center console, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning thing so you can plug it in and, and you know, charge while you drive your phone. Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to plug
⏹️ ▶️ John that in, but then car makers make the cubby in a weird place or awkward to get to or
⏹️ ▶️ John fiddly to get your phone in and out of or to place in it so that it actually stays on the pad and isn’t like up on an
⏹️ ▶️ John angle and not actually contacting the pad. But you know, give them a few decades, they’ll figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and one more thing to be careful of when you’re looking at Qi chargers, some of them have fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this, depending on your point of view on fans, one of so and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely clear yet from from like Amazon reviews. So there’s, you know, these things support like the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five watt charging rate. And then the reason why some of them yell fast charge on them is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they support like a higher wattage thing for certain Android phones that have these varying fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge standards. As far as I know, the iPhone does not support those fast charge standards, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future, who knows, anyway. So I’m not clear whether the fans usually only kick on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during fast charging, or whether they are on all the time, or I don’t know, like if you put an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone on there, will it engage the fan? I don’t know. Some people like the fans because it keeps their phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooler because when you fast charge lithium ion batteries, they get hotter. So that’s actually a thing that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be necessary. I don’t think an iPhone is going to draw enough power for you to need that, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re doing all day trickle charging at five watts. So I have elected to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy zero models with fans and I intend to never buy one with a fan because that sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terrible idea to have this already very inexpensive and tastelessly designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco object. Let’s throw a cheap fan in there and see how well that works out. No thanks. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a real-time follow-up. It was an M550i in the Verge’s iPhone X review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additional real-time follow-up from our conversation before, Jonathan Bowling has clarified,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey “‘It was an honest question, “‘but I was betting something pretty funny “‘might happen in the answers.’”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So John, I am vindicated. I am vindicated, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s betting something funny would happen. Doesn’t that mean it’s not an honest question? Oh, come on,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. He knew that he knew the background that it wasn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, oh Yourself it would be as don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think about I just have an
⏹️ ▶️ John honest question Can you tell me how you might explain to someone how to pronounce bezel? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just an honest question No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no connection to anything. I just want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know like I will not I will not
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling the answer might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be kind of funny funny. No, I will not allow this you are reading way too much into this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John entirely revealed too much by
⏹️ ▶️ John saying he had an idea the answer might be funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey He should have
⏹️ ▶️ John and said it was not his question because we have no way to verify what he’s telling you truth he went too far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, come now you are being absolutely preposterous. I cannot believe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot believe you’re hanging your hat on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this I really true. Back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the back to the car on the verge review. By the way, the reason I remembered it is not it. You’re right. Not X five. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was I remember when they showed the badge and I said, Oh, Casey’s going to be angry about this because it’s the M five 50 I like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John is the M five 50 I is it an M five 50 I Oh, it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John M sport package and they named the thing and that’s why I had remembered it because that’s BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least we can all agree on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I cannot believe you’re hanging your head on this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You can’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just explaining. Thanks for our sponsors this week. Betterment fracture and jamf now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you soon.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John to accidental Check my cast so long
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we still friends? No, we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just hate John a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John when I say I don’t like a question, it’s not an invitation to discuss it on the show. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an invitation to not discuss it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on the show. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried to not discuss it on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but you didn’t give me a satisfactory answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you? By bringing it up on the show? That’s your attempt to not discuss it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show? You did give me a satisfactory answer, so then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John needed to discuss it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John show. I explained, and you just didn’t like the explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Many reasons. It’s not a f***ing explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you mean I explained I told you I was on my iPad and want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey type. Well now I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that Now I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that I didn’t know I
⏹️ ▶️ John was catching up on Twitter watching destiny videos is important
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pre-show Oh, yeah, that’s more important than talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John good friend Casey I
⏹️ ▶️ John know I was gonna talk to you on skype in like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh That’s alright if
⏹️ ▶️ John feel I was busy talking to Merlin aka mr. Close to the metal about other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. If it makes you feel better, I was fully prepared and I was manning my battle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stations to take Marco to task about his laptop article earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s still in there. And we never got around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not going anywhere. I know. We just never got around to it. So really, that was frustration with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco that somehow ended up on your lap. So, my bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Your time will come, Marco. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time will come, indeed. I do still love both of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though John, you’re killing me today.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not killing you. You’re the one who’s busting my chops about the question of the
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you don’t like the question. Explain yourself. Why don’t you like this question? Oh, you’re ridiculous. Like, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John let it be. I don’t like the question. You like the question. You can leave it in. But like I said, I don’t. The reason I didn’t delete
⏹️ ▶️ John the question is because like, I just pushed it down because I felt like I had three more better ones. You know, the three
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that were up on top were better. All kidding aside, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John So and like I’m like, you know, if we didn’t if we needed this question for next week or you want to answer it You had an angle because it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to know what you know angle you might have on an answer Like often I put things in there because I have a specific kind of answer
⏹️ ▶️ John about it Even though this the question looks, you know, particularly simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, no, no, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did that’s fair. That’s fair All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco What else we can delete it now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s gonna make it in the show, so of course I can delete
⏹️ ▶️ John it Yeah, I don’t know I feel like Marco should edit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that out. Oh Nope, you can leave like a little so funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in the ending thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco oh, it’s gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay the problem is you guys made it too good. I was gonna cut it out, and then you made it good You’re welcome,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s gonna be like nonsense It’s a lot of nonsense a lot of inside baseball that people don’t care about isn’t that a whole show
⏹️ ▶️ John no not all not the whole Show it’s it’s the it’s the podcast equivalent of talking about sky like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know Oh, we did that too! We already crossed
⏹️ ▶️ John that off the list! But he’s gonna cut out the sky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts! Oh yeah, there’s no way the sky part’s staying