261: Seven-Dollar Plastic Garbage
16 Feb 2018Sound quality, HomePod rings, hamburgers, parenting, Waze, and Leica. No controversy here.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Shake Shack, Five Guys, and Cookout
- Follow-up:
- HomePods put a ring on it
- Waze
#askatp- Are advanced safety features in cars comparable across marques?
- What's the deal with Leica cameras?
- Post-show: Parenting
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Hamburgers
- Follow-up: Boring battery stuff
- Follow-up: Casey’s MD5 checks
- Follow-up: Grocery-list apps
- Sponsor: Linode (code ATP2018)
- HomePod rings
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- Sound quality
- Buying on future promises
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- Waze
- #askatp: Car safety features
- #askatp: Appeal of Leica
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Parenting Corner
Pre-show: Hamburgers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so what you order at Shake Shack? I’m still jealous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Tiff and I have, you know, we go on special occasions sometimes to Shake Shack. Normally our order is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Shackburger each, which is the cheeseburger. Like the basic, like one patty cheeseburger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is somewhat small. So a Shackburger each, we share an order of cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fries, and we share a black and white shake. Solid. Today we decide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because every time, when you finish that burger, because it’s such a good burger, but it’s also a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small burger, every time you order that you think, I wonder if I could have gotten away with a second burger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not be thinking that. So today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we decided to splurge, being that it was Valentine’s Day, this is our special trip to the city just to eat Shake Shack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we got three burgers and we cut the third one in half, so we each had 1.5 burgers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is actually a very good choice. Yeah, and it turned out we were pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full, but it was not like a mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you really, you know, stretched yourself out a little bit with all the top four episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’re able to handle that much food. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness, there’s no Shake Shack anywhere near me. I think the nearest one is in DC, which is like a two hour drive, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me so sad because, you know, as with, what is it, In-N-Out? Like In-N-Out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is very tasty, but a little bit overrated. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think with Shake Shack, I would say it’s less overrated, but what I’m driving at is that some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the appeal is that it is not approximate. Is that the word I’m looking for? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near me. And so because it’s not near me, I seek it and yearn for it in a way that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much do for In-N-Out, even though I would say In-N-Out is good, where Shake
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised you asked Margo what he got at Shake Shack, because there’s nothing on that menu.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They expanded it quite a bit over the last couple of years. they’ve expanded. Well there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like burgers, there’s I think there’s a chicken sandwich now, there was always the mushroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John vegetarian burger. You have a chicken sandwich? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a chicken option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. There’s hot dogs, there’s a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know about the hot dog. We’ve got like two kinds of burgers, a hot dog, a bunch of different kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of shakes, and fries that are not good. And the mushroom burger, don’t forget that. A bunch of different kinds of burgers. I get the
⏹️ ▶️ John Shaq burger too because it’s like that’s you know, there’s just no variety. Which is fine, I like the burger,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good burger, but In-N-Out has better fries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I don’t think I’ve had in and out before. I have had Five Guys, there’s those around here, and I find them incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disappointing. I don’t think Five Guys is even in the same league. Like to me, Five Guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather just have like McDonald’s or Burger King or Wendy’s. Like it’s at that level. No way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re insane. Five Guys is so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or Burger King.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so hold on. So Five Guys, if I’m not mistaken, started either in Virginia in the DC suburbs or in DC proper. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel some amount of need to defend Five Guys. Five Guys to me is the kind of burger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have once a year because it is this is here’s a Simpsons reference for you John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it take you a year to forget how bad it is and how worth it it isn’t maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John shack and shake shack is better but five guys I think is pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no it’s not good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so here’s the thing with five guys though is that it’s so unbelievably and unabashedly greasy not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it’s not tasty but it’s so greasy I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think shake jack is greasier than five guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s see I haven’t had five guys in a while so Maybe you’re right. But the point I’m driving at, it’s like Dr. Nick when he was telling Homer how to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get fat and he just held up a piece of chicken or something like that to the wall or to a piece of paper or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember the exact reference. But he basically says, hey, if it’s see-through, then you can eat it, and that’s how you’re gonna get really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fat. I feel like that’s five guys. And so I feel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if I only have, my typical order is a little bacon cheeseburger, and I say that as though I go off, and I go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again like once a year. But I feel like after I have my little bacon cheeseburger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fries, I feel like a beached. I love that it’s called the little
⏹️ ▶️ John that they make you like. Try to shame you into not overeating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make you say the indignity of like, can I have the little burger please? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shack, if you say the Shaq burger, the Shaq burger is available in single or double patty, but the default is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single, which is probably what you should get. Like you don’t have to say, can I please have the smallest burger you have, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so anyway, so the point I’m driving at is, After I eat one, or after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I eat at Five Guys, I need like six months to a year to recover because I feel like a beached whale
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got to train yourself up because we get Five Guys here all the time. We have Shake Shack and Five Guys both close
⏹️ ▶️ John to us, so we get them both plenty. I think what you’re thinking of with the grease bomb
⏹️ ▶️ John is Five Guys fries are just grease bombs and are of varying quality. And they give you like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing about Five Guys, they give you, I think it must be in their manual. When somebody orders fries,
⏹️ ▶️ John fill up whatever cup size they told you to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey up with fries.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also dump a whole bunch more, which is fine. Like, as far
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco as… Yeah, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place it in a bag and then pour more fries on top of it such that the entire bottom of the bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so your cup of fries is padded from damage by other fries. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John good corporate policy because potatoes are cheap, right? I mean, they’ve got them stacked up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the thing there, and they give you more than you could ever possibly want. And people feel like that’s generous, especially for
⏹️ ▶️ John the ridiculous prices everybody charges for these hamburgers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For, you know, it seems like Five Guys fans rave about their fries a lot. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find them absolutely nothing special. And maybe this is just because the Five Guys nearest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us, maybe it’s just a terrible location. Like maybe it’s just a bad Five Guys. But again, one area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I think Shake Shack has done very well is that so far I’ve eaten at probably five or six distinct Shake Shack locations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are remarkably consistent. They are all, they’ve all been consistently good for me. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tastes like exactly the same. What are
⏹️ ▶️ John your Shake Shack fries? What kind are they? Because they’ve changed them and it might be location specific.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have what used, I guess what used to be the only kind, which is, they almost look like frozen crinkle cut fries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, all right, that’s what we have too. But they went to shoestring for a while near us and it was grim.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, that’s bad. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John be good, but theirs weren’t. Theirs were not good, so they changed back. But I think the crinkle cut fries are
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I think they’re wonderful. To me, like, Shake Shack fries, they taste like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frozen fries from your childhood, except done really well. And also, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find them greasy really at all, like beyond what the minimum required to deep fry something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But where Five Guys fries I feel like could make a piece of paper clear by just going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near that piece of paper, Shake Shack fries really don’t seem greasy.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least Five Guys has the Cajun option if you get sick of the regular fries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but Shake Shack fries are so good you don’t get sick of them. You just put cheese on top of them. And the cheese fries
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the cheese is gross. It’s like Cheez Whiz. It’s like, it’s Casey’s Velveeta. It’s terrible. No, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, it’s like, it’s lighter in color than like a slice of American cheese or like most nacho cheese sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s cheese food. It’s definitely some kind of, you know, like, well, it is because it melts very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a really nice, like somewhat mild cheese sauce. The distribution’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. And they give you that little wooden stick to pick up the fries with. It’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m with Marco on this. However, I do need to also bring up, for those of us who are from-
⏹️ ▶️ John Velveeta loves the fake cheese surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, well, I know, nobody’s surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also need to bring up, for those of you who live south of the Mason-Dixon, specifically in or around North Carolina,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a chain called Cookout, wherein you can get a truly heinous amount of food
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a hilariously small amount of money. And if you’ve never experienced Cookout but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the opportunity, you need to try it. cookout, their burgers taste, guess what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you had just cooked them at a cookout. Or as some people—where is it that they call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort of picnic-y cookout thing a barbecue, which is completely bananas? Is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Northeast? Mad Fientist
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole country, except for the South.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly Oh, God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s so ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Barbecue is its own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Anyway— Mad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fientist So honestly, I gotta say, I don’t like—and I’m using the lowercase version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the cookout word here—I don’t like cookout burgers most of the time. Burgers, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my opinion, are best made on a flat griddle surface, whereas when you put it on the rack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a grill, especially the way most people are just amateur barbecue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooks or grill cooks, whatever word you use for that large metal box that you put hamburgers and hot dogs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, for me, my move is always to go for the hot dogs, because first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re less filling usually. So you can have just one or you can have two, depending on on how hungry you are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get more room for the side dishes, which are always better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or one and a half, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. Right, thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and hot dogs are pretty much impossible to screw up that badly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas burgers on people’s grills are always, usually they’re way overdone. They’re also usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way under-seasoned. And a hot dog, you put it on the grill, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already cooked, you just need to make it warm, and maybe get a little bit of a split on the skin, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of the bubbliness on the skin the heat. And that’s it. You put it in a bun, you put anything or nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, and it’s delicious. It totally takes the barbecue cook out of the equation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless they like seriously, horribly burn it, but that’s pretty rare and pretty hard to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, all I’m saying is, if you’re ever in a position where you can go visit a cookout, get yourself a cookout tray,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you can, they consider a full quesadilla as a side item. That’s all you need to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all you need to know. The whole family, my whole family can can eat there for like under 15 bucks. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love cookout. God, I love cookout. Anyway, we should probably start the show lest I talk about food for the entire night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to talk politics? We can do that for a little while because I’m really fired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. I mean, now that we talked like fancy people’s burger chains, I feel like politics is a much safer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, probably. Can we just ban all guns? Let’s just do that. Can we all agree on that? Good, I’m glad
Follow-up: Boring battery stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up. And I don’t want to talk about any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this battery stuff anymore, so one of you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to either. Why are we still doing this? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not talking about it. I just wanted to give some—we’re still getting feedback about it, that much is certain. We’re not talking about it. Here,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s talk about it. Right. We’re still getting feedback about it. People continue to send us stuff, and I just wanted to give some representative
⏹️ ▶️ John examples from real live listeners covering the spectrum of the type of feedback we’re getting. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t practice pronouncing these people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey names. Did I just hear a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You sure did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I? Did I? Marco, I love you so much. I’ve never loved you more than I love you right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, what were you saying, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey didn’t practice how
⏹️ ▶️ John to pronounce these people’s names because I didn’t think I’d be doing it, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to do it. You don’t have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. We can skip this topic. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Just skip it. No, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco totally doing it. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re going to go with Migerdich Carnigian? No, that’s definitely not it. I need more beers to open. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. I think that’s it. I think that’s close. You give it a try. So we have some follow-up about my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Nope, nope, we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John these. It’s just you just gotta read them. That’s all we have to do. It’s not complicated. There’s no discussion required. You just have to read
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback. Oh God, why are we so talking about the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stuff? I don’t know. We’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, we’re reading feedback. That’s talking.
⏹️ ▶️ John items, there needs to be no discussion about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we read in our minds and then not talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it? All right, three, here we go, here we go. I’m over it, I’m over it. Here we go. Here we go. We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speed run it. One person said…
⏹️ ▶️ John and done. So I for the reason I picked these three things is because they’re representative of the entire spectrum. One person
⏹️ ▶️ John saying my battery is great and I have terrible problems. One person saying that, you know, I had slowdowns on a fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it with clean install. One person saying I had slowdowns on a fix it with the battery thing. I just want to put that out there because lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John think that the various descriptions of things that might happen that we offer on the show are
⏹️ ▶️ John fictional or hypothetical or completely one sided. Every possibility is encountered
⏹️ ▶️ John for by people that’s we’re trying to express in these shows that You think you know exactly how everybody is handling it. It’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John throttling. It’s never throttling. A clean install always fixes it. A clean install never fixes it. Battery always fixes it. Battery never. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not true. We’re getting real accounts of all these different occurrences. So this is actually a complicated, nuanced issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sorry for all the people who think it is 100% whatever their pet theory is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hereby declare this topic done. Seriously? Permanently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. I understand why you brought it up, John. But I’m with Mark on this. We’re done. I’m done.
Follow-up: Casey’s MD5 checks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I was talking, and I guess it made it in the show, I never listen to the show after it’s released. I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under the influence of a beverage or two about my photo management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift console app. And one of the things I’d said is that I wanted to verify that if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find a name collision, whether or not those two files are the same file. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reason I made some of the choices I made is because this app was written just for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my particular scenario, all of the final versions of the files are stored on my Synology, on my network-attached
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage. And so what I was saying was, hey, I want to MD5 all these files to make sure they’re identical or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make decisions based on that. And more than a few people wrote in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually very, very nicely, you frigging idiot. The first thing you do is check the size of the files,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you worry about MD5-ing them, which was really annoying because I should have thought of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself and didn’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t mention it because I assume you were doing that. So yes, you should feel shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel deep shame and I am admitting it publicly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I’m with you Casey. I would not have thought of that. Like yeah, just check the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only MD5 at the file size match. I probably wouldn’t have thought of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you totally would have done it. When you’re writing the code, you feel it. You’re like, wait a second. Why don’t you like a
⏹️ ▶️ John very all right, God. I feel it’s impossible. I feel it’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John to write that code and actually have your fingers tied but without going wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well I can tell you it is not impossible because I did it. But no, all kidding aside, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an obvious answer that I just really did not think of. So I appreciate all of you writing in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have felt and continue to feel the appropriate amounts of shame. The final follow-up topic…
Follow-up: Grocery-list apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everyone and their mother also wrote in to tell Marco that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one true task management advice or app or what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Marco, did you try any of them and do you care?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried, I think, three or four different grocery list apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had lots of recommendations for these. I didn’t try anything to replace things as my main to-do app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve tried enough of those already and honestly, trying to-do apps, giving them like a real shot is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time-consuming and cumbersome that I don’t want to try a million of them. Like I’m very happy with things now, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. So for the grocery list role, you know, I mentioned that I use Clear and I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Clear for years and it’s been fine, but I would like something that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri integration so I can quickly add to my list. So a bunch of people wrote in and suggested a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of different apps that make grocery lists and do things in a smart way. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found all of them to be either hideous looking and or too complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them tried to be too smart. A lot of them, you know, I mentioned that one of the reasons I like using Clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it makes it very easy for me to just drag and reorder things to be in the order in which they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in the store because I know my storage really well and so, you know, I always arrange things to be in an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficient way. Many apps try to do that for you automatically through some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either by learning the the way you order them, or by defining sections like, okay, produce and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cereals and then dairy and you can even, some of them are even advanced enough to know that you can set like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this store, the aisles are in this order. First produce, then dairy. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very, these apps have a very, very advanced and complicated solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this problem. And I found none of them compelling enough. I have already food shopped with, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two or three of them and I found them not compelling. Either it was cumbersome to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use or it took a lot of space on screen or they were very cluttered. I didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way any of them actually flowed in use. Ultimately this is a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make custom apps that try to be smart about grocery shopping. That’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much for me. I’m fine with Clear. All I want is Siri entry and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing for clear. That’s it. A basic list that I can drag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reorder myself. All the intelligence stuff, it’s kind of like my Nest thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I first got the Nest back forever ago now, I very soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards turned off all of their automatic learning features. Instead, I just set a program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the website. You can just enter, like, all right, go to this temperature at this time, go to this temperature this time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop guessing what to do. I found that I greatly preferred that because the intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it would often just guess wrong or just get in my way. There’s a lot of places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this is the case in a lot of different things for a lot of different people. This is just one of those problem domains, this grocery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list thing, where for me the simpler option is not only good enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but better on average. Like for all of the gains that I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the ones that would rearrange themselves intelligently, there were just as many times where it guessed wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe if I used them for longer periods of time, they would learn better and they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get better. You know, whichever one I use most would like really learn me and my stores. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found the process so cumbersome to use them and so uncompelling. I don’t want to use them for any longer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like I’m fine just using a very simple list app now, which so far is clear. And I hope the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next version of clear, which I hear is being worked on. I hope it adds stuff like sharing in Siri.
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HomePod rings
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Today, there has been all sorts of drama about how you hold the HomePod incorrectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shelf or table holds the HomePod incorrectly. Well done. All this time, who knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we were supposed to be using coasters under our HomePods? Obviously, we are at fault here. We should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, who knew? So basically when people place their new home pods, which actually quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside, did either of you get a home pod yet? Because I have not. So I’ll tell you what.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here we go. What else did you do in the city today on Valentine’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes the UPS man just comes to Marco’s house and has things. We don’t know how it happens. Here
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. Is there a connection with Marco’s actions? Not conclusive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’d you do, Marco? I don’t have a home pod. I will say that. But I did think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I wanted to try it out, there is a, I was under the impression, or under the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conclusion so far, that there really was no place in my house that I could really use one. And that actually is not correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next to the Echo, I have a Sonos Play One. Not the new Sonos One that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the built-in Alexa integration. Not that. But the old Sonos Play One that is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speaker, just the Sonos speaker. And I have it there because when, you know, a couple, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years ago now, I started trying out Sonos to build an overcast integration and they were kind enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to send me some units to test with and everything and so I have those, I have a few of those in the house and I needed a place to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so I put it next to the Echo. I hardly ever use the Sonos stuff and when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, I hardly ever play things out of that output, usually it’s out of the living room output. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a, you know, short squat white speaker that is better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music than assistant type things already sitting next to my Echo, so I could just remove the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Play One and put a HomePod there. And then I can continue using the pair of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I have been using the pair of them so far, which is I use the Amazon Echo for kitchen timers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of personal assistant stuff that the HomePod is maybe not so great at, and especially timers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Come on. Why is that? Come on. And then I could theoretically then use the HomePod for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music there. I haven’t done this yet, but if I wanted to try one out, and eventually, you You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I hope so much that this summer at WBDC, we hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of new SiriKit intents that involve audio playback services. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey really, really hope for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Honestly, my hopes are not that high, or rather my confidence is not that high. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna actually get that. I really hope I’m wrong though. I really hope we do. If we do, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast has something to do on the HomePod. And so I will have to get one for testing, and so that will be a sensible place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put it. But until that happens, and unless that happens, I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that compelled to try it. But if I did put a HomePod there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is actually a finished MDF wood piece, so I don’t think I would create a ring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I did create a ring, it’s already white, so it wouldn’t really be visible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to back up, the issue that’s at hand is that people are starting to notice that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you sit your HomePod on some kinds of wood, or maybe treated wood, maybe untreated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wood, to be honest, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but if you sit your HomePod on wood,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will more likely than not leave a ring from the base of the HomePod on the wood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I don’t see how there’s really a lot of argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or discussion about this. Like, this seems like it’s bogus and it’s a poor design. And a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people are saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, you should put this on a coaster or a doily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s saying that? Who says that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’d be surprised, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m lucky. I must be doing a good job of curating my Twitter followers, because I have not seen a single person say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got to say, there’s a lot of people out there who feel like it’s their job to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explain Apple to everyone. And sometimes this is a wonderful service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sometimes it’s just people basically beating Apple’s PR department for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And I don’t think that’s healthy for anybody. That’s not healthy for Apple. It’s not healthy for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people trying to make a writing or blogging or analysis career, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t healthy for the audience. In fact, and I wanted to give a shout-out here, there’s a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called The Menu Bar that was, I think, reintroduced,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restarted a few weeks ago. Spoiler, I’m going to be the guest on it next week, and so this is partially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-promotional, but I suggest you listen to The Menu Bar. It is a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good angle of Apple critique, and not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, it actually is critique of the entire tech industry. There’s a really fresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take of Apple critique on the menu bar that I think is worth hearing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it isn’t just like, oh, the keyboard sucks, oh, the HomePod, blah. It’s not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not the kind of stuff, like if you’re tired of me criticizing Apple, it’s not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I do it like they do it in a much better way and a much more interesting and constructive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and thoughtful way so I strongly suggest checking out the menu bar podcast I’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the show notes and I’ll have it appear here in the chapter are basically the reason that I brought that up is the one of things they said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a couple of the episodes now is that they don’t feel like they need to basically like be Apple’s PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco department you know for them anytime Apple does anything wrong fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sometimes writers and most mostly Honestly, it’s just fans. A certain subset just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks it’s their job to jump out there and defend Apple in ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple doesn’t need to be defended. If the HomePod has this problem, which it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly appears that it does, this is absolutely a flaw. It’s as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple as that. It’s not going to end the world. It’s not going to make the HomePod a flop. It’s not going to cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of massive recall or anything. It’s an embarrassing flaw. We heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for months that the HomePod hardware has been done for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time and they were just waiting on the software. The hardware is done, it’s awesome, it’s perfect. And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hardware problem. There’s an actual hardware flaw that shipped and not a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. It just seems like it’s just yet another thing about this product launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just sloppy and rushed and apparently the hardware wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done well enough or they found this problem and decided it wouldn’t matter and shipped anyway, kind of like when they knew that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook keyboards were bad from the first MacBook, but decided to bring them across the whole lineup anyway. Somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, things are falling apart in weird ways. Flaws are getting shipped that should not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get shipped. That is cause for concern. Even if this particular flaw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t think is that bad or doesn’t affect you, we are seeing a lot of embarrassing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaws that get out the door. And it seems like either this product was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tested to the degree that we heard that it was, and the hardware was not done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as recently or as far back as we heard it was, or if any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco employees who had these take-home units that we heard about, that they were all over campus or, you know, all over people’s houses, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly somebody must have had this issue and must have reported it. And so either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t do enough testing, or they found this issue and decided Not only was it not worth addressing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by changing the foot of the HomePod, changing the material, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding some kind of pad or something, not only was it not worth addressing in the hardware, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even worth mentioning anywhere, in the manuals, in anything. Something’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong there. Mistakes are getting out that should not get out. That, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, big picture, not just the HomePod ring of death or whatever, That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more concerning thing to me about Apple right now. And that when these flaws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out, one of the main reactions from people both inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and out is defensiveness, not actually going back and getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these problems fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John One interesting theory I heard is that it’s not actually a design problem but
⏹️ ▶️ John a manufacturing problem, and that some manufacturer is responsible for making that smushy little ring cheaped
⏹️ ▶️ John out in a way they thought wouldn’t be apparent. but ends up being apparent and it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be that all the Apple people who got the take-home things got the good properly manufactured rings on the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John so they didn’t have this problem but then the mass production ones like you know some supplier cheaped
⏹️ ▶️ John out. I mean not that that’s also obviously also Apple’s responsibility but I can think of all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of ways how this can get out you know not because Apple didn’t test it thoroughly
⏹️ ▶️ John or or didn’t pay attention to it but simply because it’s it’s something that appears
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first time in the mass-produced models the customers get, which would be a bummer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Apple makes a lot of products that sit on tables and desks. Why hasn’t that happened before?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, this makes me think. Obviously for the HomePod, we expect them to test this, right? That’s what we’re getting at.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know this thing is gonna be sitting on people’s furniture all over the place. It’s the whole point of this
⏹️ ▶️ John device, right? But I think when I saw this, I think about, do you think Apple tests whether the feet
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac Pro markup furniture? I’m gonna guess they don’t, because there’s not much expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mac Pro, my cheese grater, is going to be all over the house on all sorts of different kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ John furniture. It’s basically gonna be on desks or underneath desks. Do you think they test with a little
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber feet on the bottom of iMacs markup things that they’re put on? I’m also gonna guess that they don’t. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that they don’t test on their own materials, but that they basically don’t test it at all, because, I don’t know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just doesn’t seem like, because it’s not a product like the HomePod, where they show it literally on like, We’re going to put it on your
⏹️ ▶️ John end table or on your whatever. So that’s why I think it’s much more relevant to the
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod, but it does make me realize that this blind spot
⏹️ ▶️ John probably extends to a lot of their products. Everything from the plastic that they make their
⏹️ ▶️ John cords out of to all the different feet on, probably the feet on laptops they do test in the same way that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would expect them to test the HomePod. But I bet they don’t test it on Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a wooden desk, like, I don’t know, maybe someone should write in and tell us, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a Mac that sits on a wooden desk and has marred the surface in some way? I think it’s plausible because
⏹️ ▶️ John I honestly don’t see them testing Macs on a bunch of different desk services. Whereas they 100% should
⏹️ ▶️ John have and perhaps did test the home pod and also the different services. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here again, I think it’s, it’s an instance of arguably an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instance of a a little bit better communication up front might have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solved the problem but helped the problem. Now I still think it’s bogus. I still think it’s bogus that if you sit this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on wood without putting something in between it that it could screw up the wood. That’s messed up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full stop. But it certainly would have been nice and somebody else made the, and I don’t remember who it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I saw it. Madhichy
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about the communication.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Well, yeah. And maybe it was him that said, oh, we knew that the jet black iPhones were going to scratch. We knew it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up front. We were okay with it because we knew what we we were getting. What’s the line from, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it was Batman Dark Knight where they say, you know, if you, something along the lines of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joker says, you know, if you expect something, people are totally fine. It’s when something unexpected happens that they lose their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minds. And so you can expect that your brand new, you know, $800 iPhone is going to scratch to kingdom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come. And that’s cool because we knew it was going to happen. But you know, you don’t expect this ring to show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and everyone loses their minds. And I would too. I’d be upset.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s entirely about expectations, though, like I understand the communication angle, but I think the comparison
⏹️ ▶️ John to the phone just how it’s how how different this is. Right. So whether people are aware of it or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John the tradeoff that Apple’s making with the phone that scratches more and Apple does advertise this but doesn’t connect it up as
⏹️ ▶️ John much is that, you know, they made softer glass in the hopes that it will shatter less often. Right. So that’s a tradeoff
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re making. They’re like, you can make the glass really, really hard, but then it’s more likely to shatter if you make it softer, it’s more likely to scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John scratch. That’s a trade off that they have made because they advertise about how much more durable
⏹️ ▶️ John and less likely to shatter the iPhone X and they also tell you it will scratch more. And they don’t connect the two of them for
⏹️ ▶️ John you, but I’m pretty sure they’re connected. So all right, that’s, you know, and then they warn you up front, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a communication, right? For the ring thing, even if they had warned me, I’d be like, oh, thanks for telling me I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy this because there is no trade. Is the sound better because it makes rings on my furniture? I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it is. I don’t think there’s any connection. Is it made of a magic material that makes it better than a non-marking
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber? I don’t think it is. Right? There is no trade-off. It’s just plain simple something bad about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could say, if they had warned, I would say, it’s great that I know this while I wait for my
⏹️ ▶️ John defective unit to be replaced for free, Apple. Thanks for warning me, but I’m not going to take it as,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they warned me, and so now I think it’s okay. It’s 100% not okay, because as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as I can tell, there is no trade-off. It’s not a design decision. It is a mistake. and it is a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John that can cause cosmetic damage to things in your house. And that I feel like is unacceptable. I don’t think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will recall these because of it, but honestly, I kind of think they
⏹️ ▶️ John should, if they really want to have a reputation as a company that stands behind its products, basically they should say, we’re not going to recall
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them, but if your HomePod marks up your furniture, send it back to us and we’ll send you another one with a foot that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mark it up. That’s the right thing to do as far as Apple’s concerned, or as far as I’m concerned for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Or they can just give everybody like a doily or a coaster to put it on. A fine Corinthian
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they don’t, they need to not have things that, I mean, it’s not a glass of ice water that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna sweat and leave a ring. Like, if there’s no water, it’s just, it’s an electronic device. It shouldn’t leave rings
⏹️ ▶️ John on wood furniture, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing we get no actual response from them on this, but who knows? I mean-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, we did get a response because they put in a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was typical defensiveness. The response was, you’re holding it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cleaning and taking care of your home pod.
⏹️ ▶️ John you should refinish your table. Yeah. Where to place your home is not unusual for any speaker with vibration
⏹️ ▶️ John damming silicone base to leave mild marks when placed on. You think it’s not unusual? I don’t know. It seems pretty unusual
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. Like, I have to think there is a vibration damping material
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can put on the bottom of a speaker that does not mark wood surfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, lots of, to put it this way, lots of speakers use the really, really pointy feet, which would leave like actual holes in your
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But at least that’s obvious when you you see the really, really pointy. It just doesn’t seem to me that that material
⏹️ ▶️ John is so special that there is no replacement that would, you know, it would impair
⏹️ ▶️ John the speaker’s sound quality if they used a different kind of rubber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And honestly, I think the PR response to this is poor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in their defense, as we record, there’s been like an afternoon and evening worth of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for there to have a response, because this just broke earlier today, did it not? Yes. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I mean, let’s give them a little slack. There may be some sort of response
⏹️ ▶️ John coming. Yeah, no, we don’t know what their reaction is gonna be. I’m just saying that their reaction thus far
⏹️ ▶️ John seems insufficient to me. And again, it’s not like they need to recall them all like defective airbags in cars or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John If someone has it and it’s sitting on, you know, a piece of furniture that it doesn’t mark, there’s no reason to recall
⏹️ ▶️ John that person’s thing or whatever. But if someone has one of these and it leaves a mark on their furniture,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should be able to say, Apple, take this back and give me my money back, or, which they can do if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the return window, or Apple, take this back and give me one that doesn’t leave a ring, and Apple should do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even going so far as to say, oh, Apple has to pay for the damages to your furniture, which would also be nice, but is a little bit unfeasible
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of logistics. But no, it’s a mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably an honest mistake. I can imagine how this slipped through, but it’s not acceptable. There is no,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a design trade-off like phone screens that scratch a little bit easier in exchange for not shattering as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But do you guys, do you have any thoughts on the teardowns? Those were done between last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this one, so we didn’t get a chance to talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. I looked at a little of them. I don’t think anyone was surprised by what was in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? It’s kind of, it’s very interesting to me, like to see a lot of the way that, the way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s structured and built. I think one of the, one of the weird surprises for me is how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of the speakers fire outwards. Like the woofer fires up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the tweeters fire down. Like the whole middle of it, you know, it’s covered in cloth, so you kind of get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feeling that it’s like one big speaker. But in fact, the speakers are firing out of the top and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom out of the little vents. And there’s nothing firing out the sides. The sides are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought we had seen some sort of indication like during WWDC of what this looked like inside, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least approximately. So I’m not, I’m not too terribly surprised by that, but I, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest, I did not get a chance to look at the teardown, so I don’t really know what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, while we’re on the subject of teardowns, gotta also give massive shout out to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season finale of this season of Welcome to Macintosh, the podcast by Mark Bramhill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was an interview with the founder of iFixit, who does these wonderful teardowns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about repairability and long-term recyclability of our devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was really good, and it really makes you think about things like e-waste and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way these products are being built and manufactured and designed and how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are ways you can design something for repairability and then later recyclability. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are ways that you can make that harder or impossible. And Apple seems very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco split on this issue. Like there’s obviously parts of Apple that care deeply about the environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and about recyclability of things. But a lot of their hardware designs are very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or impossible to recycle some pretty major parts. They don’t necessarily need to be done that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it’s a very good episode, worth a listen, and certainly thought-provoking.
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Sound quality
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Any other HomePod thoughts? John, how do you like
⏹️ ▶️ John John Wrenn I was actually thinking of getting one because I thought I had a line to get one at a steep discount because like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a place to put it and I’m like, oh, I want to hear how it sounds, but I have not been able to
⏹️ ▶️ John secure one for less than retail price. for significantly less than retail price. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still back to, well, I’m not paying $350 for it. So I’m still holding out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing also, you know, we’ve had a lot more impressions and reviews and like kind of like real world tests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and impressions that have come out. The opinion on the sound quality is starting to get a little bit split.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people still think it sounds amazing, but there are some people who have heard them and come out of it saying, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like the sound. And I think it’s interesting, like most of the complaints tend to be either the processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing something weird with the mid range that doesn’t agree with their music or their tastes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a common complaint is the bass is just too prominent. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard with the HomePod because it does room calibration and because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is listening to the bass response and dynamically adjusting it and things like that, and because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does so much processing on the audio to try to separate the components out and into different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco positions in the room and everything. Because it’s so complex like that, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to get an idea of what it sounds like, because it could sound like lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different things. Whether the sound works for you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be highly dependent on what the HomePod has calibrated to for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room, and also how it’s processing things like centering part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-range that thinks it’s vocals, and then putting parts of instruments in the background because that thinks those are instruments and whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works for certain songs or not. It’s gonna be a really hard thing to get a handle on, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it works for you or not without actually just trying one, because it’s going to vary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much. And even like trying to test it, like there was that Reddit post where like the guy, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, did allegedly a controlled test, although it wasn’t that controlled. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measuring its frequency response and distortion and things like that. But that’s really hard to test on the HomePod because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s doing so much processing to the sound, you really can’t get a good handle on what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will always output because there is no one frequency response or one distortion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate that it will always output because it’s doing things to the input sounds based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various intelligence and heuristics and stuff. So it’s really hard to get a solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea on whether it’s for you without just listening to it and without trying. Your music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your house, in the room that you wanna put it in to see for yourself. But I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not having any tone controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably a mistake because, you know, the Echo doesn’t have any tone controls as far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Echo sounds like garbage, so it doesn’t really matter. Like, no one’s seeking good sound quality out of that, and Amazon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not selling it as good sound quality. Sonos has tone controls, I think. Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows, who cares? But because Apple is positioning this as a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good speaker, and also because they’re doing so much non-standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing of the audio, I think they need to offer some kind of basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tone control. Even if it’s as simple as, like, how much bass do you want? Like that, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might need to be a control, because a lot of people have reported that not agreeing with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s because it’s really hard to design a speaker that appeals to everybody. It’s even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder when you’re doing very heavy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-standard things to the audio, not just replaying it out of transducer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That sounds like a feature, and we talked about this before, about how, you know, you have the hardware, it’s just a question of adding software
⏹️ ▶️ John updates to it. That sounds like a feature that could come in a fairly soon in a software update. Like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John just even just for bass response. I’m not even saying they’re going to throw like give you, I mean, an equalizer
⏹️ ▶️ John because almost every other audio thing that Apple sells, but I think iPhones have it in the music app, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they? Well, certainly iTunes does has an equalizer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s in the settings app. Yeah, but it’s only for music played in the music app. It doesn’t apply system wide. And also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t a real equalizer. They only have presets. It’s like the same like 10 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John presets like
⏹️ ▶️ John rock and pop and random.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same ones that iPods had like 10 years ago. They have not changed and there’s no actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equalizer for you to just Like if you want to get in there and define your own thing, you can’t. If you want to like adjust certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequencies for certain things, you can’t. I get the feeling most people just probably don’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But anyway, iTunes has a full equalizer, but then like the HomePod, like you said, it doesn’t need an equalizer. It doesn’t need presets. It just needs
⏹️ ▶️ John one slider for bass and that’s it. Yeah. Like, and that would, that would go a long way towards making it a appeal
⏹️ ▶️ John to a much wider range of people. And, and, and I would say that that slider should go up as well as down
⏹️ ▶️ John because some people want more bass than the HomePod puts out. Right. I mean, that’s why, you know, beats headphones are so popular, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Beyond that, I think there’s not because of all the dynamic adjustability
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, there’s probably not that much more control that you can give people because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, what are they even controlling? Are they controlling the final output? Or are they controlling like the input before
⏹️ ▶️ John the home pod decides how it’s going to interpret that? Like, are they controlling the signal before it goes into the home pods processing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or are they just like, you know, the base is easy, you you can just lower the output to the one
⏹️ ▶️ John big speaker that you know most of the bass frequencies are sent to. But for everything else, I think it gets a little bit tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ John Agreed. Anyway, that feels like a no-brainer update to me for
⏹️ ▶️ John a software update that will widen the appeal of this device. For
⏹️ ▶️ John the, what you were talking about, the testing, that blind test that Pogue
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, that was pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about this test. Like you mentioned, I think you were talking about this on
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, how subjective sound is. Oh yeah. Some people like lots of bass, some people
⏹️ ▶️ John like not as much, some people have certain reactions to certain songs that sound a certain way, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very subjective. And then doing any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John audio sort of blind testing, even though David
⏹️ ▶️ John Polk said he, well I figured his wording was, but he basically said, I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to volume match them by ear, like, because that’s a very important thing about sound testing. So one thing we
⏹️ ▶️ John know if you make one speaker slightly louder, everyone picks it as the best no matter how bad it sounds like people are very sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John to volume, right? So it’s important for all the speakers to be the same volume. But the way you get
⏹️ ▶️ John them all the same volume is probably not listening to them all and saying, Yeah, I feel like they’re about the same volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And furthermore,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you even adjust the volume on a thing that is dynamically changing how it outputs
⏹️ ▶️ John sound based on what it detects about the room. Like how do you even adjust the HomePod volume? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to do. And then finally, how many people did he test it? I put it in front of four people
⏹️ ▶️ John that make, I guess you get an article out
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of that. I put it in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, did you put it in front of 400 people? Like even if you did, all you’d be doing is getting a survey
⏹️ ▶️ John of what people think of the HomePod. That’s why I feel like the frequency response things, at least it’s, it gives you a baseline.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t mean that, you know, like frequency response, like here’s, here’s the ideal and Here’s what it sounds like doesn’t mean you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna like how it sounds but at least it’s something that you can measure so if you Know that you like speakers that are dead-on for the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know expected frequency response You will like the home pod if it’s close to that and if you don’t like speakers that are
⏹️ ▶️ John like that you won’t like the home pod so let someone read something and Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with an audio file probably know am I going to like the sound of the speaker because we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done some objective Measurements on the speaker and then you can decide do you like speakers that have measurements like this or do
⏹️ ▶️ John you not like them and? again, only audiophiles would know that. For everybody else, it’s just kind of a crapshoot. You buy it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you put it in your house where you’re gonna put it, you listen to it, and you either like it or you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco people are comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the Echo, I can’t imagine anyone not liking it, because as you said, the Echo sounds terrible, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what it’s supposed to do. But for comparing it to
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonos and other things that are high quality, I’m not sure, like, if someone was asking
⏹️ ▶️ John me for advice, Should I get a Sonos or a HomePod, which sounds better? I don’t think there’s any
⏹️ ▶️ John answer I can give them that is the truth. It’s like, they’re both good speakers. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll have to hear each of them in the environment where it’s gonna be and then return the one you don’t like, which is the answer nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to hear, but that’s just the nature of sound, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is what I was ranting about on Twitter. First of all, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really agree on what is a good frequency response.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of people think, oh, you want it to be flat. you don’t. And people can’t agree on what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the curve should be. There’s a couple of like, you know, why they don’t have standards. Like there’s like a Harman Kardon one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of, or like the Harman curve that a lot of manufacturers use or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set as their goal. But like I find the Harman curve fairly boring because it really is weak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the treble side. And I like some treble strength. And I find it a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco withdraws the vocals. And I like some vocals. And so everyone has different tastes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am an audio a file who used to compare products online by looking at their frequency response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graphs. Like I made so many headphone purchases or avoided so many headphones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at their frequency response graph and thought, you know what, either, oh, that looks like something I would like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that looks like another Harman Kardon headphone and I probably wouldn’t like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I have found that frequency response graphs can almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never really provide useful input for whether something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will sound appealing to you when you actually have it. And it’s even more, and that’s just with headphones. Headphones are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super easy to test and very, their output is very reproducible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you don’t really have the room to worry about. Speakers are a nightmare of inconsistency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they depend so much on the room and the placement of the speakers and where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are sitting relative to the speakers that It’s almost impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have any idea how a speaker will sound unless you actually put it in the room it’s going in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just try it, which is really inconvenient with speakers because they can be quite large and quite heavy and a lot of times you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have to buy blind and just hope it works out. Fortunately this kind of speaker is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much smaller and much easier to buy and return if it doesn’t work out. But all this is to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t look at any measurements or read any reviews or For God’s sake,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch any videos. Like, a video is completely useless for letting you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear how a speaker will sound. Like, I don’t know why people keep doing this. Because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, going through a different microphone, and then whatever your speakers are, it’s totally garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only way to really know how it will sound, and whether you will like it, is to get it in your house and just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And the HomePod, you know, it seems like people do generally like it, so it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, your chances are good this will probably work out for you, for you if you’re interested. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of these tests are particularly useful. And no frequency response graph
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or measurements really are very useful for this product for so many reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not least of which is the massive processing it does. But also just these graphs aren’t useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time anyway for any product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be fair, I think the first round of reviews struck the right balance. Because mostly the things
⏹️ ▶️ John you want know that are that anyone can tell is like, uh, how loud does it get without
⏹️ ▶️ John distorting? Because we’ve all had small speakers that strain to be heard when you’re far away. And if you crank the
⏹️ ▶️ John volume up to max, they just start distorting heavily. Like that’s, I don’t think you need instruments to measure
⏹️ ▶️ John that. You can kind of see like, you know, your, your iPhone, for example, your iPhone at max volume, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to fill a room with sound. You don’t need to any instruments to measure that you can tell. And is
⏹️ ▶️ John it faithfully reproducing the sound or a max volume? Is it somewhat distorted and certain frequencies like you don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an autofile to kind of tell no, it’s not. That’s not really what this song sounds like. And at max volume,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not particularly loud, right? So I mean, obviously, that’s an extreme, right? But anyone,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the homepage review said, this gets surprisingly loud. And even at
⏹️ ▶️ John high volumes, it doesn’t start fuzzing out and sounding terrible. And overall, the sound quality is pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I think is the right balance to strike for this type of review. Because if you start
⏹️ ▶️ John saying things beyond that, like direct comparison with the Sonos play five or play
⏹️ ▶️ John one or anything like that. It’s just too subjective to say anything definitive
⏹️ ▶️ John about until you start getting out the instruments and you know, and then once you get out the instruments, the home pod defies
⏹️ ▶️ John you because you stick an instrument close to it and it thinks it’s next to a wall or something and changes the sound in a weird way and you have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what’s going on. That was the question with the sheet they put in front of like to be a blind test was the home pod
⏹️ ▶️ John detecting that the sheet was there even though it’s supposed to be acoustically transparent as I think it’s a wall and it’s trying to bounce sound off it and doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something weird. Who knows we have no visibility into the black box that is the black cylinder that is
⏹️ ▶️ John the home park or space gray or white. So anyway, I’m still I’m still interested to try one in my
⏹️ ▶️ John house and see how it sounds, but still not interested enough to plunk down to 50 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly how I feel. And I was really hoping that Mr. I all I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is spend money would come through for us on this one. But I thought about it. You’ve let us down, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s getting there. Give him a couple more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks. Yeah, I mean, probably. But so like Like if I’m honest with myself, yeah, probably by next week’s show.
Buying on future promises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One more thing to consider though is like this is a product that has shipped without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of its major features. They just didn’t make it in time. You know, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously it lacks AirPlay 2, that’s the big one, and that also means it lacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-speaker stereo pairing, it lacks multi-room, and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri is greatly lacking in a lot of areas, some small, some pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling this product is going to grow slowly. I have a feeling that there’s gonna be a lot of people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are waiting for one of those things to get fixed. I would caution people, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it today unless you are okay with the features and Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has today. And this is not a statement about Apple, this is a statement about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all tech products. Never buy tech products based on future software or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service promises, because so often they either don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliver, or they deliver really late or incomplete, or just crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, whatever the HomePod, like if you’re on the fence about the HomePod, you’re like, well, this one limitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Siri, you know, but they’ll fix it in a software update. Assume they won’t. Assume they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never will fix it. If you still want it, okay, it’s safe to buy. But don’t buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the assumption of some future thing that they will change or improve or add,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until that thing is actually delivered. And that applies to all tech products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, how is your full autopilot working out on your car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never bought full autopilot, and I would not recommend anybody buy Tesla’s full autopilot until it’s actually released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and demonstrated. You can add it later for a small additional charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we had this conversation privately a few days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly why I brought it up. Yeah, I, as always, am waffling on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea of a HomePod. In so many ways, I like the idea of having a really small, but really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good sounding, ostensibly, speaker. But I still am struggling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to find an actual justification for 350 bucks. If this was 100 bucks, which I’m not saying it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overpriced necessarily, I’m just saying if it was $100, I think I would have bought it and just said, yeah, the hell with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll give it a shot. But at $350, that, for me anyway, is something where I have to weigh the pros and cons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just, right now I’m with John, it’s just not compelling enough for me to spend the money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when I have one next week, you can all laugh at me and we’ll play this clip back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what color are you not getting next week? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey definitely not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space gray. Definitely not. See, I would have to not get the white to live next to my Echo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you would get white and I would get black. Hmm, funny how that is.
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Waze
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waze for a year and I added it to the topic list a year ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I wanted to spend five seconds saying, you know what, I use Waze and it’s awesome. And John’s like, oh, I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot to say about that. That has to be a full topic. And so it was It adds to the topic list, and it’s been floating on the topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list for a year, right at about spot number four. And most shows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have three topics. So it has never gotten into the main topic list. And we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always been one topic away from covering the Waze topic. And I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what John wants to say about it. What I want to say about it would take maybe five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let’s have you do an opening statement then. Let’s test
⏹️ ▶️ John that five minute idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everyone look at the time stamp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have used a lot of GPS systems, either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in cars or as apps on computers first, laptops, and then phones. Many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them try to be smart about routing you around traffic. Or even just the basic routing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries to be smart in some degree. But many of them try to be smart. Like when there’s traffic, if they have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of internet connectivity for traffic service, like they detect traffic and they try to route you around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they offer you an alternative. hey you can go over here and save 10 minutes and it could take you off some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdo like crazy path through residential areas or off a cliff or whatever those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found have almost no credibility whatsoever ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every time one of the traffic routing apps has suggested a route
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me to save time it almost never does save time and it almost always makes me regret having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it because of some weird place it brings me through whether it’s like you you know, really narrow roads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like dirt roads or like going through like, you know, really like, you know, bad neighborhoods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or residential areas that like, it’s just really weird to just keep going through a million stop signs in front of people’s houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. I started going to Long Island a lot for the beach last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer. And I started using Waze a lot. Going to Long Island is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always a traffic nightmare, especially when you go on the weekends when everyone else is going. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have since been using Waze, so yeah, for about a year, and I’ve been using it since then also. And Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much better than every other traffic routing system I have ever used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a long shot, to the point where it has earned my trust. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waze tells me to go a certain way, I go that way. It has not steered me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong yet. It is so good, and I know that there’s, I know first of all it’s owned by Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is constantly sending lots of data to them and really burns your battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you gotta have it plugged in. I’m aware of the trade-offs here for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy and creepiness for this service, but it so dramatically is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than everything else out there in so many ways. It has earned my trust, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I highly suggest, if anyone else is okay with giving a whole bunch of your location data to Google while you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waze, I strongly suggest using it when you drive somewhere. And there’s lots of other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it that, a lot of people first heard about it because of its feature where people can report where police
⏹️ ▶️ Marco officers are and it’ll alert you, hey, there’s a police officer up ahead, .5 miles ahead or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s honestly, that’s a side benefit. The traffic routing is really where it’s at. That is where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waze kicks so much butt across everything else. And it’s also incredibly good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at time estimates. Like, I can go on a two hour drive with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of traffic in the middle, and whatever time estimate Waze told me at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the drive, when I would arrive, on a two hour traffic-filled drive, it’s right within like five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes, almost every time. It’s crazy how accurate the time estimates are. So, unlike a lot of the other systems I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used, you know, you don’t sit there and watch the timer count up, and which is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discouraging. Like, you know ahead of time roughly what you’re getting into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can even plan drives. You can say, I’m going to be driving from here to here tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning. What time should I leave? And you can scroll through this cool graph where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll show you, well, if you leave an hour earlier, it’ll take less time. And if you go near this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time zone, it’ll get really traffic-y, but then it’ll lessen out down here after rush hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so nice that it is one of the very few things that I’m very willing to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a massive amount my privacy and my data for the incredible benefit that it gives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, why am I wrong about everything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, that was roughly four minutes. Well
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes! I would love to see what those graphs look like if you’re in the Hamptons
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s Sunday night. It should be like, just go to sleep. Try
⏹️ ▶️ John on Monday morning. Because it’d be like, if I leave now, I’ll get home in seven hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I leave five hours from now, I’ll get home in one and a half hours. Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this Waze has been a topic for so long, I have no idea what I think I was gonna say about it. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But I do have
⏹️ ▶️ John some things to say. Do have something, well, one fairly silly, but possibly depressing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to say about it. I have Waze on my phone at various
⏹️ ▶️ John times during drives or before I knew it was going to take a drive, I’m like, we should use Waze
⏹️ ▶️ John because there might be traffic and I’m interested in alternate routes. I’ve tried to use Waze
⏹️ ▶️ John by launching the application and it has sent me into like a signup funnel that I have never made
⏹️ ▶️ John it through. And I don’t remember now what it is that was sending me away,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think at least three or four times I was motivated to use Waze. I
⏹️ ▶️ John started down whatever funnel of signup thing it had for me and partway through
⏹️ ▶️ John I bailed out because it was like too onerous. Did it want like my social security number? Did
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it want? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not one of those people like, whatever, take my email, I’ll make a password, I don’t care, I’ll make an account. Like, it’s not like I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, shy about making accounts, but there was something about the signup process. And this, I think it’s like the first app that it’s happened to,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s memorable to me because I have been repeatedly motivated to try the app because people
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s good, and yet it keeps repelling me. So I have no idea if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s changed since the last time I’ve tried it, but whatever it is, like, I couldn’t get through
⏹️ ▶️ John to the app to use the app because of this funnel that it was sending me through, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John find that kind of depressing. My question for Marco is, what are the competitors? Like you mentioned Waze, CompareDialogues,
⏹️ ▶️ John what other things have you tried? Because honestly, I don’t even know. I know Apple Maps, I know Google Maps, and I know Waze, and that’s it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are probably the big ones. I’ve also used the built-in systems for Tesla. The Tesla system is garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has Google Map tiles, which is nice, so you can see the good maps, but through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably some weird licensing thing, it doesn’t use Google for the directions. like Tesla I think has their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own service or licensing something else for the routing. And so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Google tiles are literally just there like as the image of the map. And so Tesla has its own system for routing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has options for dynamic traffic routing and it is horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t recommend anybody use it for that. Like to the point where I had this giant touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my car which I love all other times. And we’ll often use like to browse around the map and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know what areas around me or full of traffic right now, if I’m going somewhere local, I wanna see how I should get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The giant Tesla map is awesome for that. But then I’ll have my phone in this little $7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suction cup mount right next to the Tesla screen running ways when I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going somewhere like on the highway because it’s so much better. So yeah, the Tesla system’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also tried the Lexus system and two or three generations of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW iDrive system, none of them are very good. the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traffic routing on all of them is pretty poor. BMW system also has the additional benefit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being incomprehensible. When it’s offering you traffic routing options, in case you’ve seen this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be pretty awkward trying to figure out what button here do I hit to take this route or decline this route,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then if you decline it, can you go back later and see it or what is it going to do for you? It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confusing and very hard to use. All the other systems have led me down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy paths, that didn’t pay off, and made terrible time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco estimates along the way, and made terrible decisions along the way, where Waze just hasn’t. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ve had maybe one or two times where Waze told me to do something, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards I thought, maybe that wasn’t worth it. But it’s nothing like with the other systems, where you take one of their traffic suggestions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and every time you’re like, oh God, Tesla does not know what speed traffic moves on side streets in New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco City. Like, that’s crazy. Like, it’s that level of bad with the other systems. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waze just, again, it has earned my trust. Like when Waze tells me to take some direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if I know that it’s gonna be indirect, I know they’re telling me for a good reason, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I take it, and it works almost every time. It’s shocking how good it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, well you have the advantage that the New York metro area probably has incredibly good coverage for like Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Oh yeah, I mean, like there’s a reason why like if you get into any Lyft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Uber or even a lot of taxis and car services, like the drivers of almost all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these services use Waze to route themselves. Like you can watch on their phones that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have mounted, a lot of times they’ll have multiple phones, one of them running like the Lyft driver app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of them running Waze. And even if they only have one phone, they’ll be switching between those two apps, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be actually using Waze to route them there and whatever map Uber or Lyft is telling them to take as the driver,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re mostly ignoring because Waze is better. So yeah, obviously, it is obviously a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data-dependent service, so if you’re in an area where there’s not a lot of users of it, it’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as good at traffic routing but it’s really popular and it’s been really popular for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time and it’s really popular among people who drive a lot like taxi drivers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there tends to be a lot of Waze coverage pretty much everywhere in my experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve used the Google app and it has suggested to me alternate routes. I don’t know if Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Google, if they own Waze, I would think they would leverage some of that information,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John if the Google’s, you know, so every once in a while I have taken the suggested alternative route from Google and
⏹️ ▶️ John so far hasn’t stayed very long, but they haven’t been radically different. It doesn’t like take this major highway instead of this one because there’s an accident
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, good, thanks. But for the most part, I have not entered the world of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, letting go and letting Waze just tell me where to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have not done any sort of scientific testing on this, but my completely anecdotal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single data point based on my experience is that Google does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the same data that Waze does, but it seems to be a lot less aggressive about routing you through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody’s backyard, like Marco was talking about. It will keep you to only ever so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slightly aggressive changes of route, whereas Waze will send you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through a residential street and not even think twice about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It also, it’s kind of funny when you are doing that, there’s almost always two cars ahead of you who are following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same route.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And you can tell like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is the Waze cluster right here. We’re all the Waze users are going through this random residential street. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we pop onto the highway magically right in front of a giant traffic jam. It’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I guess that was worth it after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s totally true. The one thing that really bothers me about Waze has almost nothing to do with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Waze at all. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do I need for that? A vinyl player? Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A vinyl turner, I believe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A vinyl turner. That’s what it is. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, one of the things that really bums me out about Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that if I’m in Erin’s car and she has a 2017 XC90, a Volvo XC90 with CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m in Erin’s car, and you must run into this in the BMW if you ever take that for any long journey, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t, I know, I know, but you can’t use Waze natively on CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not clear, and it may be that that’s entirely Waze’s fault. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. It’s not. The only way that other apps can integrate with CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is as audio playing apps. That’s it. There’s no other APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no other integrations that they’ve done with partners or anything. It’s only audio playback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. So it is infuriating that here is a really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really lovely, perfectly, well, maybe not perfectly, but really well thought out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secondary display for my phone that is right in the center console, right where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would want to look at it. And there is nothing that Waze can do about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Waze can’t use it at all. And it’s super duper frustrating. One of the nice things about Erin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car is that I will often plug in my phone to her car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so we are looking at the car-played display of my phone on the center display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s easy for me as a passenger to reroute her or choose a different route or whatever the case may be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple Maps or just do something different, change where we’re going or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case may be. It’s nice as the passenger to be able to do that but to affect the display that she is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at. don’t have to call out every four seconds, make a right, make a left, make a right, make a left. She can just look down and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see it for herself. And that would be amazing with ways. And I would kill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to have ways on Aaron’s CarPlay display, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Apple is the walliest of walled gardens, no dice. And this is the same problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have with Spotify on the home pod. And it is getting to the point that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am starting to get deeply frustrated about this deeply frustrated enough to go Android.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eh, let’s not go crazy, but I am getting deeply frustrated by this. And I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. Apple is really doing themselves any service, particularly in this context. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could see how you, okay, fine. Let the home pod drive Apple music sales. Fine. Whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I still disagree with it, but I can at least understand the perspective. But in this case, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why are you forcing people to use Apple maps? And I actually don’t have that much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a problem with Apple maps and I’ll Turn to that when I’m doing any sort of normal like half an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour or an hour journey But if I’m doing like what you’re talking about Marco going to going to the beach or doing like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two hour plus journey I’m always all the time and especially if I’m going to DC which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a traffic nightmare I’m I’m go I’m going waste for that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is infuriating that because of hubris because of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of obnoxiousness. I don’t know what adjective you want to use here, but for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laziness, Apple just does not let us use the one app that I think almost everyone universally
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I understand why CarPlay is so limited. I think they’re just very nervous about
⏹️ ▶️ John putting arbitrary third-party iOS users or interfaces up on a screen, even just for display
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes, that they just want to be conservative and say, these are the things that we’ve decided that
⏹️ ▶️ John are, don’t distract drivers, I don’t know, that are distraction-free
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that we feel like we are in the right band of legal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there’s also, it’s a difficult problem because there are so many different laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different countries and even different states about what a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car screen can display and how much can it change, how many items can be in a list of items,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they don’t want people browsing long lists while they’re driving. There’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many regulations and stuff that it’s, and again, when you’re dealing with auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safety, you really have to be very conservative, because literally lives are at stake if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. And so there’s lots of regulations and safety concerns there. So it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense why they don’t add much to it, but the reality then is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people do is what I’ve done with my car It’s like you just get a cell phone mount for $7 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you stick it to the car and then you have your phone screen available to you. Maybe that’s an acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromise because then they’re legally covered. He’s like, well, we didn’t do that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder if that’s necessarily the best idea. But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea or not. That’s what everyone’s doing. And across all walks of life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android and iOS, that’s what everyone does is they wanna use Waze in their car, which a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, they just get a cell phone mount and stick it to the dashboard or the windshield. And it’s not the best setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world, but it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be increasingly wasteful as large screens in cars trickles down
⏹️ ▶️ John from the high end to basically every car, which is slowly but surely happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right now you feel the frustration. I got a 17 inch LCD in my Tesla and I gotta look at my little phone
⏹️ ▶️ John screen because I can’t display Waze on my giant Tesla screen. And the same thing with all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John high end cars have displays in front of the driver and in the instrument cluster and everything like that. Fast
⏹️ ▶️ John forward 10, 15 years where every single car you buy has like two or three giant
⏹️ ▶️ John screens in them and still people are clipping things to ventilation, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John ports so they can look at their tiny phone screen and have all the wires dangling all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ John That that’s bad. That’s not good. I don’t, I’m not quite sure what the solution is because I don’t think you
⏹️ ▶️ John should just let arbitrary phones display whatever they want on the screens in the car, but that may be
⏹️ ▶️ John inevitable. The only the only comparison I can think of is one that is not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John not a particularly good comparison, which is radar detectors, which there are all sorts of laws against as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think we ever got to the point where any car manufacturer was brave enough to build them into the car, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So everyone who wants to have a radar detector or laser detector or whatever, in the days before we
⏹️ ▶️ John had ways to tell us where the cops are, um, would have a device with a suction cup and a
⏹️ ▶️ John cable snaking down on their car. And it never changed from that. Like even cars
⏹️ ▶️ John with radar, you know, I don’t know if they have the sensors built in for that, but, you know, self driving cars that have all sorts of sensors all over
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I don’t think any of those sensors are dedicated to, uh, finding laser
⏹️ ▶️ John or, uh, radar speed detection or could even be hacked to do so. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the current solution is internet and crowdsourcing. That’s how we find out. But I’m hoping the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John issue resolves itself in a better way because unlike speed trap
⏹️ ▶️ John detection stuff I think it is possible to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John constructive useful non
⏹️ ▶️ John law breaking application of better directions inside our cars
⏹️ ▶️ John because most cars have some way to do directions and a map and and all the other stuff we
⏹️ ▶️ John We just want an environment where we can choose the best map for whatever area we
⏹️ ▶️ John live in and not have to, like the HomePod or all sorts of other
⏹️ ▶️ John not have to pick the hardware based on what software runs on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because, first of all, I think this is different than the radar detector example in the largest way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s so much more mass market than radar detectors ever were or will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many more people use cell phone mounts in their cars than ever use rear detectors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was always such a kind of edge case for high-strung men, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is so mass-market. People like Apple or Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are designing things for cars that don’t accommodate the fact that everyone’s going to just use cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone mounts unless they make a better solution to put any app on a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like that fight has already passed them. The market has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already decided, we want arbitrary apps to be able to be displayed on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our phones and our cars. And that’s terrible because it’s very unsafe. You don’t want people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing a texting app or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Or watching YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco videos or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. There’s lots of reasons why that’s terrible, but the reality is people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it and people will continue to do it because for very compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and totally legitimate and safe uses like Waze or other navigation apps, that’s such a compelling use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people are just going to do it anyway. So they might as well, you know, the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pragmatic solution here is not to try to, you know, stop people from doing that or try to lock people into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, you know, your built-in thing and your in whatever, you know, gated system you run, but to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acknowledge the fact that people are doing this and will do this and try to give them a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, safer way to do what they’re going to do anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to test the model three by recollection of the interior is correct. Actually throws a monkey wrench into it and
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have vents in the traditional sense where you can clip in your holder. So you’d have to use like a windshield suction
⏹️ ▶️ John cup. And in that case, I don’t know how far away the windshield is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, yeah, I don’t know if that would work. So I started out with a vent clip and moved to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a suction cup with like a little like you know two-inch arm or four-inch arm and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for just it’s because the suction cup thing or the vent thing just kept falling out as my phone got bigger and heavier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as I accelerated harder sometimes it would just fall right off but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works for me because there’s like a there’s like a flat piece of trim right below the vent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I just have it suction cup like vertically to that but that like I’m kind of worried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whenever the next model s comes out, which is probably, I think, going to be in time for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my next lease. I’m a little worried they might change the interior to be more like the 3 and not give me a spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stick a suction cup.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then you’ll have to do it on the windshield, on an even longer arm, because the windshield is really far away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t want to do that. It puts it too high up for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why it reminded me of radar detectors, even though, like you said, it’s not this way more common. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the ugliness of messing up your car’s interior with this extra wart that you have to stick onto it, plus
⏹️ ▶️ John the associated cord that’s attached to it. Plus the associated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cord that’s attached to the board. Well that’s why I resisted it for so long. Like why I just wanted to use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in systems for so long. And then why my first thing was just the little vent mount because that was something I could just keep in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little center console and just like when I wanted to use it, take it out, take out a lightning cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stick it on there and use it. And then when I was done, I would take it away. And it took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four months of that before I was like, all right, I’m sold on this setup. I’m in. let me do it right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it less annoying and less finicky, and now I just have a permanent touching cup stuck right next to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant touch screen of my beautiful car interior with this semi-permanent wire running down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side because it just has that much utility. Like it’s so good and so helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that I’m willing to tarnish my interior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this $7 plastic garbage that’s sitting next to my beautiful screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is just that useful to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing that could make this slightly less clumsy, and I’ve always been a
⏹️ ▶️ John proponent of this, the idea of rededicating old devices to specific uses.
⏹️ ▶️ John The tricky part with directions is like, yeah, but who’s gonna pay for a phone that only lives in their car forever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But some fancy schmancy cars come with their own cell connections that
⏹️ ▶️ John granted you have to pay for, but if you’re paying for an internet connection or like an LTE connection
⏹️ ▶️ John for your car, then you could reuse an old iPhone with no SIM in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John merely going on the car’s Wi-Fi and permanently mount it, or an old iPad for that matter, and permanently
⏹️ ▶️ John mount it somewhere in your car and have it be a single purpose device. The only thing this thing does
⏹️ ▶️ John is runs the Waze application and it’s permanently plugged in and I can route the wire. Like you’re basically designing your own
⏹️ ▶️ John car interior. I have a dedicated iPod Touch in my car for music purposes. You know, I can Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John play music from my phone as well, but it’s nice to have a dedicated thing It’s always in the car always connected always plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John in I could see people doing that with with directions If it was possible to get it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah I honestly considered using a cellular iPad mini for this purpose Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like that’s kind of like a really good balance like it doesn’t cost much to have the cell plan on that It’s a pretty good sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen bigger than any phone So like for if you like if there was a place for that to fit in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interior without blocking a third of the screen I might have done that
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got a Model 3 because there’s nothing on that dashboard. Plenty of room for nothing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross. Anyway, it’s funny you bring that up, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because as we were talking, I was thinking to myself, you know, Aaron’s car does have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an LTE connection that we’re not paying for. And you can like cough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near a cell phone store and get a free Android phone. I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a free Android phone, install only Waze on it, turn everything else off, install it in Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just have that be our car computer. Because it supports Android Auto as well. And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost sure, even regardless of the fact that Google now owns Waze, I don’t think they have near as many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restrictions, as far as I’m aware, on Android Auto as Apple does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thus, why couldn’t I just get the world’s crappiest Android phone? I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of redundant,
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. Anyway, this is a good test of Casey’s sense of injustice about cell
⏹️ ▶️ John phone plans. All right. So the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which is very
⏹️ ▶️ John small, was a great affront because it charged you however much it charged
⏹️ ▶️ John The car is very, very big. So how much does a cell connection for your car cost?
⏹️ ▶️ John And do you feel it is okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s the same or it’s double one or the other. And this is why we haven’t paid for so like we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our free six gigs, whatever it was when we bought the car. And I’ve never paid for it since because I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that’s worth the money either. But the car is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big. Oh my God, I’m not going to entertain this conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m not sure. It’s 100% true. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s no, it’s not true because I’m not paying for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. How many watches could fit in the in the mass of the car?
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m saying is like that. I firmly believe that it seems more
⏹️ ▶️ John unjust because the watch is small than it would for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey larger. I’m not debating that. I completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the car is the largest device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How often would you use the Carways LTE connection versus how often do you use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches LTE connection? Have you, are you actually using the LTE still?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, two to three times a week. Well, not for the last two months because I just had a kid and it’s been freezing out. But yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime I go for a run, I go with only AirPods and my watch. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John every time I do that, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I guess I shouldn’t say I am using the LTE connection, but I want to have the ability to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that make sense? So like if I break an ankle or something, I want to be able to call Aaron and say, please come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me. I would count that as using it. Like if you’re going out without your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being connected via LTE, that counts as using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is why I’m paying for it. Like I’m grumbling about, well I grumbled about it. I didn’t bring it up this time, thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I did my grumbling, I moved on with my life. This is why I do pay for the watch. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t pay for the car, and haven’t paid for the car, or the LTE connection in the car that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I did the math, just in a figurative sense I did the math, not even literally arithmetic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought, you know what, it’s very rare that I’m in the car long enough to justify using its connection. Even if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am, I can just tether. There’s really no need for me to pay for a connection in the car. Would it be more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it was free? Absolutely. Is it worth, and I think it’s either 10 or 20 bucks a month. I can’t remember which. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worth that money for it? No, probably not. But I only brought it up to say it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a solution one could do is get, even if you’re a devout, you know, iOS person, you could get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free Android phone, stick Waze on it, hook it up to either tethering on your existing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone or just hook it up to your car or what have you, use Android Auto and everyone’s happy. I don’t recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but you could.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what? I’m totally fine having a $7 piece of plastic stuck to my dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco semi-permanently, but I don’t think I would ever put an Android phone there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Could you even tell that it’s an Android phone because doesn’t the Waze interface look the same?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, it’s clear that neither of you have ever owned a radar detector or installed one properly because on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 300ZX, my Valentine 1, was hardwired into the car. You could see wires absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they tuck it like under the trim and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Yeah. And also I had a remote display on the steering column. So the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detector itself, okay, so you could see like a couple inches of wire going from the radar detector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the headliner, but the display for the radar detector was mounted on the steering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey column. It was a secondary display that you could buy. And so this way, nothing lit up in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the windshield area. It looked like another part of the dash from afar. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saved myself from a ticket in Virginia where these are—well, I hypothetically saved myself from a ticket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Virginia where these may or may not be legal, but I haven’t used my radar detector in years because it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth it anymore, and I don’t drive that
⏹️ ▶️ John quick. I think part of the utility of not having it hardwired and having the little coiled-up phone
⏹️ ▶️ John cord wire snaking across your thing is so you can hastily disconnect it and chuck it in your glove box when you get pulled over.
#askatp: Car safety features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over. All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Stephen McClennan writes, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is continuing in our car theme, are advanced safety features found in cars comparable across manufacturers? Features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that use technology like lean departure warning, forward collision warning, and blind spot detection are offered in BMWs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Hyundais, however you’re supposed to pronounce it. Are they equally as effective, or are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they much better and more expensive cars? How can one compare? I don’t know the answer to this question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it would be a really fascinating test. If only I knew someone who did car videos from time of time, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I think it’s a really interesting question, but I have to imagine that they’re nearly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think anything that doesn’t involve automated driving, that’s a whole different can of worms, but if you’re not talking about automated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving, you’re just talking about like, you know, panic stopping on behalf of the driver or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, nudging the driver back into the lane. If they’re starting to drift, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume and imagine that they’re not that different between both luxury and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey economy marquees? Would you guys agree with that? Let’s start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, John will tell us the real answer here. I don’t actually know. From what I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think these sensors and systems tend to be sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to multiple car manufacturers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. So like, there’s a small number of companies that make these kinds of systems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they sell them to BMW and Mercedes and Audi. Like, you know, like they sell the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to multiple people. So I’m sure some people have their own stuff or have exclusives deals on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the things, but some of the features probably are literally identical because they’re literally using the same modules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and same software. And some of the stuff like, you know, you mentioned like, you know, lane departure warning, blind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot detection, that actually doesn’t seem that hard to do. Like the blind spot detection, where it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like lights up the little warning light on your side view mirror when somebody is in your blind spot, like that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think is very complicated. that seems pretty reliable and pretty easy to do these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So stuff like that, I wouldn’t expect a lot of variation between manufacturers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of the harder things, like automatic emergency braking, like if you’re about to hit a wall and it tries to stop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing, I would expect to vary a little more. Obviously, as Casey said, anything that tries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to steer for you, like Tesla’s autopilot thing, I would expect that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vary a lot more because it’s just a more complex problem. So John, what’s the real answer?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why you’re asking me, because in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco same way that I have never owned a car that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have three pedals, unlike everyone else on this podcast, I’ve never owned a car with any of these features.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lane departure, forward collision, blind spot detection, I have never had a car with any of those features. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea how they work. And honestly, I’ve been, in the same way with the stick shift, I have been intentionally avoiding
⏹️ ▶️ John those features, because as far as I’ve been able to tell from reading things about them and
⏹️ ▶️ John being in other people’s cars that have them, they can be super annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John if they can’t be turned off. And if I’m turning them off, then why the hell am I paying extra to get them?
⏹️ ▶️ John I am thus far avoided getting them. It’s not to say that I think they’re bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they are good, especially the things that will break automatically for you if you’re not paying attention and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, the only ones that have even been offered on cars that I’ve got are the ones that just use
⏹️ ▶️ John lame departure. And you know, I have the pretensioning seatbelts and stuff. I have like things
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, pull the seatbelt tighter when you’re in an accident, but that’s not quite the same thing as these active systems. As for
⏹️ ▶️ John what my impression of how they might be on fancy cars versus regular cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John as with all car technology, they come out first on the expensive cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the first time you’re going to see like lane departure, whatever that was, however many decades ago, was
⏹️ ▶️ John probably on like a BMW or Mercedes or some fancy car, right? It was surely an S-Class. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those features, when they first come out, are not that great. Like the very first anti-lock
⏹️ ▶️ John brakes, which was also probably on a Mercedes or something like that, those anti-lock brakes
⏹️ ▶️ John were not that great. By the time anti-lock brakes comes down to the Honda Civic, it has been
⏹️ ▶️ John refined many, many times over. And at the point that you get down to the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ranks of cars, anti-lock brakes are more or less the same from a Mercedes S-Class
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way down to a Honda because it becomes commoditized. That doesn’t really answer the question for these
⏹️ ▶️ John things, because I think they are not yet commoditized, especially as Marker pointed out, things to steer the car for you. Not even
⏹️ ▶️ John close to commoditized, but I would say right now, they’re bad on the expensive cars and non-existent
⏹️ ▶️ John on the cheap cars. So I don’t like, for features like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you run out and get the expensive car just to get the feature, you’re probably getting the worst version of that feature that is ever going
⏹️ ▶️ John to exist. Whereas if you ignore that feature for a couple of decades, by the time it trickles down to your $15,000 car, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be about the same across the entire line. I think across the entire auto industry, that is. Self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much more complicated that I’m not sure if that applies to, but things like lane departure and anti-lock brakes and front collision
⏹️ ▶️ John warnings, and even like auto following, what do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you call it? Cruise control?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, radar cruise control. That I feel like is filtering down pretty well now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe it’s not entirely the same across the lines. Maybe it’s a little bit harsher on the bottom ones, But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way better than the very first radar cruise control that came out in the 80s or whatever on Cadillac or whoever did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say that on Erin’s car, she has pretty much all of these features. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lane departure or lane control or whatever is tremendous. I love it. It will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just gently nudge you back in the lane if you start to drift a little bit or whatever the case may be. And it works really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. I really, really like it a lot. The panic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop, what is it called? I forget, the forward collision warning. That definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does have some false alarms from time to time. Now, the good news is it’s a false alarm that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it tries for just a flash to stop when it doesn’t need to. And I’d rather that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it, you know, just assume, oh, I’m sure it’s great. And then we plow into a wall, you know? But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does occasionally go, wah, wah, wah, and it, you know, kind of just, it instantaneously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stands on the brakes for you and then immediately lets go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boy, is that startling. Oh my word, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. That would scare the crap out of me. Like I have like the audible alerts and my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offers automatic emergency braking, but I’ve never had it engage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, all in all, I do think it is good and worth it because God forbid I’m not paying attention and something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens, but there are definitely some false alarms on it and that’s kind of frustrating. And that actually reminds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me that On the Grand Cherokee that I briefly borrowed before I got the Julia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed that every time I was at a stoplight, I think I might’ve talked about this on the show, I was at a two-lane stoplight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so say I’m making a left, and I was adjacent to somebody, I would start to make the left and it would go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey berserk because I thought I was having a collision with the person next to me, and that was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoying, but that’s the only instance I can think of where I’ve seen dramatically different behavior on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safety stuff between different manufacturers. But as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all said, I think self-driving is a totally different conversation that has not yet really been standardized.
#askatp: Appeal of Leica
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The next one is mostly from Marco. This is Jeff Cooney writing, what is the deal with Leica cameras?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve always loved their industrial design, particularly the M models, but upon doing some research, it seems like their features and specs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are no better than other cameras from leading companies like Canon or Sony that cost thousands of dollars less. What am I missing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about these cameras that commands this exorbitant premium? I don’t know anything about Leica cameras other than that they look pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that they’re super duper expensive. So I’m actually kind of curious as well. Marco, what’s the story here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Leica’s been around for a very long time and they have some really impressive engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have built up a really strong reputation for a very long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time among high-end, usually like more artsy or hobbyist photographers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily pros, because they don’t quite make gear that would satisfy most like pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs if you’re like a wedding photographer or something like, you know, you’re probably not using a Leica for lots of reasons, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are very, very expensive. And some of that you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just paying for the brand. But, they do have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of good qualities that make them compelling to certain people. Some of it is just like, if you have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money and you want a really cool camera, like you gotta like it. I’ve heard them called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dentist cameras. But, yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should clarify, I have very little experience with them. I rented an M9 for Christmas a few years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually made a big blog post with some simple pictures about it. And I found what a lot of people find, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them is that the raw specs of it were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very competitive, especially for the price. Things like the sensor, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise performance and the resolution on the sensor was nowhere near competitive with good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensors of the same time frame. Things like the burst rate and features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think any of them offer video, or at at least they didn’t for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like you’re paying a really high price for not top of the line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology within them. But what really impressed me about Leica back then, and what still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impresses me today about them, is two major areas. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, the optics in their lenses are just incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now when I rented the M9 and wrote this post back in Christmas of 2012.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sony, the Sony FE series was not really quite there yet. I think it either wasn’t out or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just the very first models. And Canon had not updated a lot of their lenses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they have recently. And so back then in 2012, the Leica M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lenses were some of the best lenses you could get in the industry. And to get the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what blew me away with my rental of it was the sheer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optical quality that this basic small lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provided. It was a 35 millimeter F2 Prime something, Summicron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, I don’t know. And it was like a $3,000 lens. I mean, this is why I rented it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was still, the optical quality blew me away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now today, we have a lot more options that also provide really good optical quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like basically in the last five years or so, there’s been a huge revolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in lens design, especially coming out of Sony and then later on coming out of Canon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And unfortunately Nikon people, I haven’t been following Nikon that closely, I apologize again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but clearly like the massive upgrade in lens quality and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution especially, coming out of Sony and Canon over the last few years has been astronomical. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like now, I feel like you can get similar optical quality, if not even maybe better optical quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of lenses from other manufacturers. But back then, you couldn’t. So that was one thing that blew me away, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, like I’m looking at this blog post I made, like still, to this day, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really good optics and really good pictures coming out of this. The second thing that Leica
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has going for it a lot of the times, is that the way a camera interprets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data coming off of its sensors is not all the same between different camera manufacturers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every manufacturer and oftentimes even between different models have different ways of interpreting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the raw sensor data and then they have different ways to apply things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color tone and color balance and contrast and sharpening and things like that. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you get off the raw sensor is not anywhere close to the final picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any camera. iPhone all the way up to, you know, the Leica M whatever. Leica’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing of the photos is just really appealing to me and a lot of people. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it renders colors, the way it renders contrast and things like, it just makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice pictures without a lot of effort, without having to do a lot of post-processing on them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or without having to like manually tweak a lot of the colors and color balance and everything else. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is another one of those areas where a lot of it’s just personal preference. Like, like Tiff does not like the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Sony cameras render colors. She can’t get the color balance she wants out of my Sonys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t get the color balance I want out of Canons. Like, it’s a personal preference. And Leica has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its own color balancing that it does that to me is just incredibly appealing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s been one of the only things that’s ever really tempted me to give that another try maybe and maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy one is just like, the color rendering is just incredible on them and the way it renders tones and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. It’s just really nice. So there’s areas about photography that aren’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the specs. And it’s hard for, especially as I was getting into this hobby and as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developed over time in this hobby, it’s been hard for me to learn that and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel that, that to me it was so much all about specs for so long, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’m realizing there’s more to it than that. And so the appeal of Leica, in part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is yes, like a rich dentist slash hipster thing because they’re cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s reasons that you would buy it that aren’t just because it’s cool. Like it actually backs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with really nice photo processing, really nice tones and colors and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just stunningly good optics in most of their lenses. So that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, there’s also a couple other, like they have so many different models now it’s hard to keep track. So everything I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said was based on my experience with the M9. That’s been updated lots since then. There’s other full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame rangefinder models. They have a couple of mirrorless ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they have interchangeable lens yet. It’s hard to keep track honestly because they actually do a fair number of models these days. They have some that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only shoot in black and white. And I actually got to play with that one, the black and white only one. It was like some kind of like mirrorless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So it was like basically a direct competitor to the Sony RX1. What blew me away about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was compared to, at the time, my a7R II that I had, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was way more responsive. Like, you could, the viewfinder, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like the difference between like 15 frames per second and 60 frames per second. Like, it was like, the viewfinder was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, it was like looking through a piece of glass. Like, it was, even though it was electronic, you know, looking through the sensor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just so, such a high refresh rate, such a high frame rate, it was just precise, fast. You could snap pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It would not slow down. It just handled really well. It was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfying to use. And again, the tones that I saw out of that, granted this is like literally playing with a friend’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera at a conference for five minutes so I didn’t get a lot of use out of it but like it was very compelling and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time I had a need for a fixed lens camera that you couldn’t change lenses on where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually wanted that particular lens I would have seriously considered that so yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more qualities that cameras can have that are not about specs and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are hard hard to get in reviews or the review might mention it but you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom past it because you think it’s BS or you don’t think it’s a spec or you don’t care. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Leica has earned their reputation for good reasons. They might not line up with what you want in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera, and it’s up to you whether you think it’s worth their quite high prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there are reasons for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s interesting. I’m surprised you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. I mean, you don’t know that I don’t have one. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have one. We also need to call attention to this adorable picture of baby Adam in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word. I know, isn’t he cute? He’s so little.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Away, Linode, and Eero. will talk to you soon.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See you next week!
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at ATP dot FM And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter You can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CAS EYL ISS so that’s Casey list and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a RCO a RM Anti-Marco Armin
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to, accidental Check the podcast,
Post-show: Parenting Corner
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we have any more baby updates?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s mostly fine. Actually, the thing that’s maybe not interesting, but the thing that we’ve been fighting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with lately is we moved Declan to a toddler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bed or whatever you call it. So basically, instead of being in a full-on crib, he’s in a bed that he can easily climb out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of and has been for a few months now. I forget exactly how long, but it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a not insignificant amount of time. But over the last couple of weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly, this had started before Michaela, but it’s been particularly egregious the last, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few days, most especially, but egregious in general in the last few weeks. He’ll get out of his bed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tell us, like, come to our room or, you know, whatever the case may be, and tell us, I don’t like sleep time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I’m hungry, or I’m thirsty,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John is— These all sound like legitimate complaints. How are you addressing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? I’m hungry in so many—in a very, very gentle way. I’m obviously paraphrasing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hungry, tough noogies. You should have eaten more before. We warned you about this before you came upstairs. You’re not getting any more food.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m thirsty is here’s a little, you know, cup of water, drink it, and then you’re done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and then eventually actually you’ve gotten to the point of leaving him a bottle of water in his room just to get away from the I’m thirsty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaints. You know, the answer is, well, you have a bottle of water in your room, drink it. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite is I don’t like rest time. In which case it’s like, well, how do you say to a three year old tough shit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This happens every night. Like, you know, there’s no reasoning with
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Does he ever come in and say, uh, I missed the love that this baby stole from me?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not yet. Not yet. Dark. Because I feel like that’s what he’s saying. Maybe, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. And I’m trying to stay cool about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It couldn’t be the universal kid thing of, I don’t want to go to sleep right now. Well, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I’ve been attributing it to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Genuinely. Well, you know, he’s describing this as a change in behavior. So I’m saying what’s changed recently in Declan’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life? Well, it’s gotten worse since Michaela. I think you’re both right to be honest, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally come down more on Marco’s side, but again, I think you’re both right. It started before Mikaela, but got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse in the last week or two. And my favorite is when he comes out of his room. Declan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why are you out of your room? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you can tell, even, Adam does that too sometimes, and it’s like you can tell, what do you need?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can tell the gears start turning at that point to come up with something. Exactly. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, so one issue is, he’s still napping, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has quiet time in his room where he is allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get out of bed and play quietly or whatever. And I would say between a third and a half of the days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he will actually sleep for that. And the other two thirds, half to two thirds, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just sitting there playing in his room or in his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bed. Yeah, so what we found, and what I think a couple of our friends have also found, so it seems to be a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is obviously when you’re transitioning out of nap phase, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting to the point where most days he shouldn’t be having a nap. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we found is that when we were in that phase, the days that he would nap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be the days that he would just be impossible to keep in bed because he just wasn’t tired enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you start thinking about it that way, it’s like, well, the best thing you can do, it sounds like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably at that phase, so just stop napping. and do what you can to make it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he does not nap. Like, don’t take a long car drive right in the mid-afternoon or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like that. Don’t, like, try not to give him a chance to nap. Try to keep him from doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that by various activity planning or anything. Because then, when bedtime rolls around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he will be tired enough that he will just go to bed and not give you as hard of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a time about it because he’ll just be so tired. Like, that’s what we
⏹️ ▶️ John found. You have to think about moving his bedtime too because I know you have a routine, you’re like, great, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John a child and the child always goes to bed at X o’clock. That is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco change. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna change on its own, you have to consciously think, oh, he’s not six months anymore, now he’s three.
⏹️ ▶️ John Should his bedtime be different? And repeat until they’re five and 10 and 13.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t, as much as I would love to do it, I love the naps, I love being able to put the kids to bed at 7.30, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, it’s fine in the grand scheme of things, things could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John be so much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John until they encroach on every waking hour of your actual life. It’s like, wait a second, if by the time the kids
⏹️ ▶️ John are in bed, it’s time for me to go to bed, when is my time? And you’re like, that’s right, it’s gone, it’s gone, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John No naps. And they go to bed at the same time as you.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even wanna know. So welcome to your future.