288: Rich Person's Raspberry Pi

23 Aug 2018

Predictions and hopes for the rumored Mac Mini and MacBook Air updates.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Photo books → PDF (File → Export → Export Book as PDF → ☑️ Production PDF)
  • Active vs. Passive Thunderbolt 3 cables
  • Graphing Calculator vs. Grapher
    • This American Life
• Low-end Mac rumors
  • Intel NUC
  • Mac Mini ports
  • Plex
  • Infuse
  • Gruber's take on the MacBook Air
• #askatp:
  • Long-distance Wi-Fi
  • OLED TVs
    • Marco's TV
  • Jaguar i-Pace (via Wayne Robinson)
    • Top Gear's overview
    • Porsche Taycan
    • Small electric cars:
      • Chevy Bolt
      • Volkswagen e-Golf
      • Kia Soul EV
      • Prius Prime
      • Nissan Leaf
• Post-show: John's 🐝

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

Chapters

1. Intro: Worse than Destiny
2. Just one sentence
3. Thunderbolt 3 cables
4. Grapher, Graphing Calculator
5. Teaser: “Bees” update
6. Rumor intro
7. Mac Mini rumor 🖼️
8. Sponsor: Molekule (code ATP)
9. MacBook Air rumor
10. Sponsor: Handy (code ATP)
11. MacBook Air, continued
12. Fall expectations
13. 12” MacBook
14. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)
15. #askatp: Weak Wi-Fi
16. #askatp: OLED TVs
17. #askneutral: Jaguar I-Pace
18. Ending theme
19. Post-show: “Bees” update

Intro: Worse than Destiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John and Casey arguing about Corvettes, I think, right? Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} that’s correct. I don’t care about Corvettes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at all. Anyway, yeah, I think I think it’s the big thing poking through the hood and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} as much as I dislike the glass thing, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it better than the thing poking through.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, that’s not unusual. I mean, that’s basically like my dad’s Z06 looks almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exactly like what you see on Wikipedia right here. So yeah, it’s it’s not that different. I forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what makes the the ZR1 a ZR1 in the C7 line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Supercharger? This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worse than Destiny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh no, it’s not worse than Destiny. And no, the supercharger’s in the Z06 as well. My dad’s is a supercharged 650 horsepower behemoth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Once it goes mid-engine, maybe it won’t be so darn ugly, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Brutal. Is there, if you had to choose one era of Corvette, and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can give me years, you can give me C designation, what era would you choose? And please don’t cop out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and say none of None of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John None of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Uh, I mean- You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a hoity-toity electric person, I can’t even ask you this anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even when I was a gassy person, I still didn’t like Corpus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Funny, I’m still a gassy person.

Just one sentence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Joe Hurley writes with yet another mechanism for getting your beloved photo book PDFs. So can you tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us about this, please?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, my God, this is the topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that won’t die. It’s just follow up. It’s like a one sentence thing. And now you’ve dealt with the length of this by complaining about it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John congratulations. I was complaining about photos that how it was undiscoverable that you had the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John option click the buy book button. But that was unfair to photos. If you do the regular file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menu, export export book as PDF, there is a checkbox at the bottom of that dialogue. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do like me and hit command D to go to desktop and hit return real fast and never look at that dialog, you might miss it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But there is a much more obvious way to get the production PDF. Just use the checkbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the bottom of the OpenSave dialog box when you do export.

Thunderbolt 3 cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tell me about active versus passive Thunderbolt 3 cables. I presume this is within the context of CGPGrey’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fiasco trying to find Thunderbolt cables?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I was giving vague advice and warnings about cable length because I didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of the facts written down, but now I went and looked them up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That sounds like research.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} well, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much of a lookup. It turns out that the length limits are in fact exactly half of a meter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For a passive cable if you want the full 40 gigabits per second transfer speed, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s why the eGPU comes with Exactly half a meter cable. It’s not arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s a passive cable because they’re cheaper passive means they don’t have the little chips in the in the in the ends of them It’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of wires and rubber and stuff If you have an active cable you can get the full speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to 2 meters in length. So still you can’t really have one that’s 30 or 40 feet but you can go 2 meters.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah so if Gray, if he’s listening, we should just tell him in a slack. If you want to put it under your desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you want to get and you actually think you need the full speed you need to get an active cable which will cost some obscene

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of money that will make you cry. And if you use a passive cable you will be halving the bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which may or may not make a difference depending on your application, but just be aware.

Grapher, Graphing Calculator

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, tell us about the graphing calculator versus grapher.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was last week we talked about the graphing calculator that comes with your Mac that apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco didn’t know about. Did you not know about it either? I forget. I didn’t know. All right, anyway, and the original graphing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John calculator on classic Mac OS and we linked to that cool story about it. So two things about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. The story was also retold on This American Life if you’re more into podcasts, which you may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be if you’re listening to this. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the This American Life episode, which I hope you you can get a note, they like try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to monetize their back catalog. But and second, one of the authors, the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John main author, I don’t know, Wikipedia credit, the second person as well. Ron of it sir wrote in on Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say that grapher and the current Mac OS is the spiritual successor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to to his application. He says grapher used to be called curvus pro x

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or 10. Before being acquired by Apple. One of the curvus offers told me that use graph and calculator as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature checklist for inspiration, but no code is shared. So it It is not actually graphing calculator

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the classic days. that’s just merely inspired by it.

Teaser: “Bees” update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Would like to tease that there will be a little bit of quasi follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the after-show section Because there is an entry in our after-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey section in the show notes that reads John’s bees update I know a lot of people have been very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excited to hear the update on the small yellow stripy things Situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so that will be coming in the after show after the theme song provided by Jonathan man

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So stay tuned for that and don’t touch your fast-forward button because that’s cheating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on. Good teaser. Aaron Powell. Thank you. I do what I can.

Rumor intro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The world went a flutter, and by the world I mean our little corner of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a couple of days ago when Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu wrote an article

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey entitled, Apple is planning a new low-cost MacBook and bestill our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey beating hearts, pro-focused Mac mini. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goodness, what is going on, gentlemen? So let me give you a few poll quotes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I think John actually pulled, but I will take credit for. Apple Inc. will release a new low-cost laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a professional-focused upgrade to the Mac Mini desktop later this year, ending a drought of Mac computers that has limited sales of the company’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey longest-running line of devices, according to people familiar with the plans. The new laptop will look similar to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey current MacBook Air, but will include thinner bezels around the screen. The display, which will remain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about 13 inches, will be a higher-resolution Retina version that Apple uses on other products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the people said. Apple is also planning the first upgrade to the Mac Mini in about four years. For

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this year’s Mac Mini, Apple’s focusing primarily on these pro users and new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey storage and processor options are likely to make it more expensive than the previous versions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, Apple, give it then you taketh away, specifically all of our money. So, Marco, how do we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feel about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think we should actually take these separately, Mac Mini and new entry-level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco laptop. Sure. I think the Mac Mini is probably the less interesting ones. Let’s cover

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that first, maybe. So we’ll build up, see, teaser. Nicely done. After the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco break, we’ll talk about the new MacBook Air replacement or whatever. So first of all, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just in general, these, after I say let’s take this separately, I’m gonna give a general statement about both.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the information here is really thin. And I don’t mean the laptops. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really, this is not much information at all. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chances are, you know, Gurman and sources that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tend to feed Gurman and people like him, but let’s be honest, it’s mostly him,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they tend to often get the high-level overview, bullet point facts correct,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but anything involving more detail or the story or the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Apple’s intentions usually ends up not being true or not panning out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I would look at this in a very limited way to say, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new laptop, similar to the Air, you know, blah, blah, blah, that’s, okay, that’s fine. So with German

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying the Mac Mini is gonna be like pro-focused, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t buy as being reliable information. Because that, like, whatever tipster he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has, it’s probably, the information he got is probably there’s a new Mac Mini update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, and, yeah, it just so happens Mac Minis are used by a wide variety of people, some of whom are pros

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or developers or people running servers or headless things or whatever else, but like, I don’t, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably not even the majority of the market. So, you know, having this be like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, a pro-focused Mac mini and also likely to make it more expensive than previous versions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he’s not good at that kind of information. Like that, whenever he has rumors about that kind of information, it’s usually wrong. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would say the only information we really have to talk about is that it sounds possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that a new Mac mini is coming soon And also, a new small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco laptop is coming soon that is going to be similar in dimensions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and screen as a Retina MacBook Air. That, I think, is all we can really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talk about. Covering the Mac Mini first.

Mac Mini rumor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m it’s it’s good news. I mean we all the Mac Mini again It’s never been updated frequently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but this has been an especially long run and also the last update made it appreciably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worse So it’s actually it’s actually been since 2012 that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Mini actually got better That’s kind of embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a number of levels. I Hope they do something really nice here It would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a shock, honestly. The Mac Mini has always been used almost as punishment to Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco owners and Mac developers. It seems like Apple hates this product and they want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us to know they hate this product and they hate people who buy this product and they really don’t want you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to buy this product and they’re not gonna even try to hide that. That’s always how it’s appeared. And that’s not just Tim Cook. Steve did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same thing under his reign. The Mac Mini has always been really a punitive product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I don’t expect that to change. Whatever they do here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s probably not gonna be updated again for a very long time after that. It’s not gonna suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco join a frequent update cycle because it never has been on one. I also don’t expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to be a good value at all. Now again, this isn’t necessarily new. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mac mini was originally advertised as like the $500 entry level Mac, but even when it was only $500 to start,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a while it went up and then the last one they brought it back down. You couldn’t get a good one for $500. Like you could barely get a functioning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one for that, but if you actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spec it up to be somewhat useful as a general computer for most people, you were closer to a thousand, or at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like 800. You know, like you were definitely much higher than 500. And so I expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that same trend to continue. Apple is really good these days, especially at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of ratcheting up the prices of everything over time and ratcheting up how much you actually have to spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get what you want, that’s not gonna change here. So people hoping for a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco value here, you’re gonna be disappointed. People hoping for the Mac Mini to get on a good update cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and become like a favored product, that’s never gonna happen. So if you want simply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a newer implementation of the same kind of BS story the Mac Mini has always been, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s useful, but it’s gonna be rarely updated and it’s not gonna be a good value, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re probably gonna have that continued. I think people are going to project onto this a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of their wishes, especially like with the pro-focused claim here. People are going to think, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the modular Mac Pro. That’s not going to happen. I got news for you. It’s never going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I hope they do something nice at least because it is pretty clear that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever they do we’re probably going to be stuck with it for five years after this. So I hope it’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a Mac Mini. I use it as a home server and a few other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco types of tasks. I have the current model. It seems positively ancient to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it is still the current model. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t mind having better options in the future whenever that dies or if it needs to be upgraded. And I know a lot, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Mini is an important product in their lineup in the sense that it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco serve a lot of roles. It patches over a lot of holes, a lot of things that you just need a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco headless Mac to do. But I would caution fans, don’t get your hopes too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far up about this because I wouldn’t expect a major change to what the Mac Mini story has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s an interesting alignment of the original incarnation of the Mac Mini and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tim Cook’s Apple before the April Mac Pro event. And that the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^John incarnation was like, bring your own monitor and keyboard and stuff. buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac mini and you now you can use the monitor that you have, the keyboard you have, the mouse you have, that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole point of it, that you could buy a Mac that literally did not come with any of that stuff, it was just a little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, puck thingy or whatever, right? And that model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, yeah, of like buying just a computer and adding your peripherals was something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple was on the path to do when it was stopped selling its own monitors basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, you know, was still selling a Mac Pro. It’s like, well, if I buy your Mac Pro, buy this trash can, what am I supposed to hook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it up to? You’re not selling monitors anymore. It’s like, oh, bring your own monitor because this is for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who, you know, know enough about computers to either have their own stuff or have particular needs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They have something, need to have some special monitor setup that they have or whatever. And everything I just described, the idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of buying a computer and then buying your own peripherals or already having them, maybe It’s not a pro thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s it’s part of the reason that the Mac Mini was not really Did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never really fill it didn’t do a good job of filling the role of the entry-level Mac because yeah, it was cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then you have immediately these other questions. Well, what monitor I use what keyboard to use? What mouse do I use? How do I hook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it all up together? it’s the kind of like the Contrast to the the old iMac ads like you just take it out of the box plug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the power and The mouse and keyboard and you’re done It’s all in one package as opposed to the PC with all the wires

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming Not that it’s a huge hurdle for people to buy input devices and a monitor, but it’s just more decisions they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to make. And the whole point of the Apple stuff is supposed to just go in there and get what you want. So it was never,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it never really filled, I’m not gonna, I don’t know how to describe it, but like whatever the opposite of pro is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac mini was not good at filling that, other than the fact that it had a cheap price. So an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actual pro-focused Mac mini, whether it is a real thing or not, would make sense because it would acknowledge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fact that especially today, the only people who want to buy computer and then buy their own peripherals

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then use their own monitor are probably computer nerds. Like people are into computers at the very least,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? The entry level computers, you know, first of all, computers now are laptops. So desktops are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already out of the mainstream, right? And laptops come with everything you need already built in, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And apple has a bunch of them and we’ll talk about them in a little bit. But it’s by definition, almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every desktop computer is kind of a pro focus machine. And since the price has been crawling up on this, and since because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loves to charge high prices. One way they could do it is sort of admit that the Mac mini is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the cheapest way to get into a Mac. Like whatever they do with low cost laptops, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assume there’s still a laptop that’s $1,000. There’s no way you’re gonna get a reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac mini plus monitor, plus mouse, plus keyboard for $1,000. You probably can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even do that today with the crappy one due to the prices. Like Marco said, you don’t want the base model, you always want the one with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a couple things added to it. So why not just lean into that and make a Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is more expensive than most of the laptops. And it’s like, yeah, this is for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who want to have a desktop Mac, but they want to have a separate monitor and keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and mouse or whatever. And it costs $1,300 or $1,500 to get the one you want. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, at least that’s a kind of a more, more honest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rendition of the Mac Mini. I was saying it fits into the Tim Cook model of doing things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it was under his reign that they decided we don’t need to sell Wi-Fi routers and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitors. People will just bring their own stuff to it. Of course, that has been reversed now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I guess consumer demand to say we’d really like to buy an Apple monitor because it takes away one decision that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t have to worry about anymore. So don’t sell us Mac Pros without having any extra monitor and have it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John partner with LG and have us deal with the monitor that Marco spent the last show complaining about. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a satisfactory experience. That’s not an Apple-like experience, even for pro customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I can see how this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John analysis of the Germans thing of focusing on pro users is something that could come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into someone’s mind. Because it would be much harder to write a story that says, oh, they’re going to update the Mac mini, and it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be focused on casual consumers. How is that even possible? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Mini can’t be focused on casual consumers. Casual consumers buy laptops. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure how they’re gonna make sense of this line. Marco’s very conservative vision of, guess what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s gonna be a new Mac Mini with better internals and they’re not gonna update it for four years. Probably, like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would work fine. My difficulty of believing a pro thing is, besides

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything I just listed, how do you make a Mac Mini pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, you put a Xeon in it? Do you put a really, really fast SSD in it? You don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room for a good GPU in there. So how do you even make it pro, other than saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re just gonna increase the price and acknowledge that only computer nerds buy this computer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I mean, I think they could, similarly to how the laptops don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Xeons or ECC RAM or things like that, in the way that the current Mac mini,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it was released, was basically the guts of the 13-inch Air or MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro, depending on which CPU you got. The new Mac Mini could also be basically the guts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 13-inch laptop. The new quad-core 28-watt chips, a T2 with SSD-only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options in there, that could be really nice and really fast. And the Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used to be quad-core back in 2012, before they updated it to make it worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s not totally unheard of. And they wouldn’t even need to go to the, like back then, that was a higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wattage chip. Now they could fit this 28-watt chip in there and have roughly the same cooling capacity current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one has and be totally fine. So if they basically just make it a desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version of the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, that’s really nice. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, I think, would be very, very welcome. Like, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, there’s going to be price complaints, of course. But besides price complaints,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that would make most Mac Mini fans very happy, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if it’s Thunderbolt 3, you could buy an eGPU for it, and there is your way to get,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, I’m going to say gaming performance out of it. But you can’t put a good GPU in there, but you can have an external

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one that’s okay as long as your cable is half a meter or less.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It also serves a whole bunch of like, you know, little ancillary rules because of how many ports it has. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, I know modern Apple is going to love taking away ports, especially on a small machine like this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like the current Mac Mini, like the reason I’m using mine right now in my entertainment center and I’m using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. It’s constantly running an audio hijack graph to process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the audio that goes to my TV in various ways and combine it and boost the bass and stuff like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I’m using it has optical in and out through the line in line out hybrid optical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash analog ports, which every Mac used to have and they’ve been removing them and all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them. But like it has optical in and out slash analog in and out. It has four USB ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It has HDMI. I’m using all of them. I’m using all four USB ports. I’m using the HDMI port.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m using the optical in and the optical out. Like, it’s a great, it has so much, the only ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not using on there are the Thunderbolt ports. But like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so great because of all that versatility. And again, like because the Mac mini is used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to kind of fill in a whole bunch of specialized needs and specialized gaps, I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hope they don’t skimp on the ports because what this computer needs more than anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the versatility to cover as many edge cases as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The other thing to go back to what John was saying about how is this a pro computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wouldn’t put it past Apple to say, look, these specs match our MacBook Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Thus, it’s a pro computer. Why? How could it possibly be better? Now the reality of the situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, you’re exactly right, John, that by any reasonable metric something that matches the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 13-inch MacBook Pro, but in a desktop configuration. That is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey far, far cry from a pro desktop. But I don’t think it would be difficult for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple to just pitch it as pro simply because the specs match another thing that they say is pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it really a far cry? Like if you look at pretty much anything but CPU performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and GPU performance, the other specs of the new 13-inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro are really like, it’s like, you know, general performance CPU, like single thread performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco um, SSD performance. Those are all really competitive with even the iMac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s fair. Like, you know, if they can call the laptop pro, which admittedly, you know, that’s, that’s mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco marketing, but like, but they, they call the 13-inch MacBook a MacBook Pro and no one’s like, well, that’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, actually people do complain about this, but like, you know, people who most Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fans and customers look at that and like, you know, we don’t complain like they shouldn’t use the word pro because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t have a Z on like that’s that’s an artificial distinction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, we say it because it doesn’t have an SD card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yes. I take your point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I take your point. But I mean, people are absolutely complaining and moaning about how pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the MacBook Pros are people, including the three of us. But nevertheless, you do make a good point that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey especially in SSD performance and in CPU performance, it’s actually I should have chosen my words more carefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey earlier. It actually is not that far away from from a pro machine, you are correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So another way they could go with this, and it’s a river that we talked about a while before this pro thing came out, although you could still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apply it. But again, pro could mean anything. Yeah. So computer nerds, computer nerds who like to have computers or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the house kind of person like Marco, who would connect a Mac to his television to do God knows what he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing, because he doesn’t doesn’t want to have a receiver or whatever, right? Yep. Something else that they like, and something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else that some computer nerds we know have already purchased is, a really, really small computer that’s about the size

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the Apple TV. You got the Intel NUC thing, or however you pronounce it, various Raspberry Pis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Mark has also played with. So, prior musings in the many year drought between Mac mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updates are like, I wonder if the next Mac mini will basically be Apple TV sized,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it would be really, really mini. You know, they don’t need the optical disc anymore. They could make it smaller if they wanted to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If Apple introduced a computer like that, could you consider that? Oh, that’s obviously a pro thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly because using pro here is a synonym for computer nerd because who the heck’s going to buy a puck-sized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer except for somebody who is a computer nerd and likes to have computers all over their house, right? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that would be a direction that the Mac Mini could go that would satisfy a different subset

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the Mac Mini people. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think the problem with trying to aim for the smaller market is, first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people who buy Mac minis, for the most part, there are going to be a few exceptions, like people who make hosting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco companies out of them, but for the most part, people who buy Mac minis largely don’t have the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, this thing is too big. Making it smaller, while I’m sure Johnny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would love to design that small little box that will exclude everything you actually need to run the thing because it’ll make the box smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Besides that little obsession, I don’t see why it serves Mac Mini customers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make it unnecessarily smaller. Now that’s not to say they can’t make it smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just by technological advancement, but if they start making it so small that they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for example, can’t use fast CPUs. Like if they make it so small that they have to use like the 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inch MacBook CPU, those little 5 watt things that suck, you know, that is not really serving the market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very well. If they have to, you know, cut off a whole bunch of ports on the back and only have like two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco USB-C ports for the whole thing, like that’s not serving the market very well either. What this market needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is versatility. And while it would be nice to get it even super, super smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like if you look at the back of the current one, it’s crammed full of ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s not that much space you could save by modernizing this thing unless you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significantly reduce the cooling capacity inside and significantly reduce

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ports in the back. And I don’t think either of those would be serving it well. If you give it enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bulk to have a nice CPU in it, maybe like from the 13-inch line like it has now, if you kind of keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that thermal class of it, which would then keep the performance class and allow it to have these new awesome quad-core chips,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you’re gonna have an enclosure big enough, bigger than the Intel NUC thing, and you’re gonna to have an enclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big enough that you can have a good amount of ports on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the puck thing would serve a subset of the many customers, but it’s like how big is that subset is probably pretty small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And arguably, that subset is not has never been well served by the many. The only reason they use it is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is literally the smallest Mac you can buy. It’s not a laptop, right? They have no choice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, it’s also a much lower end line, like, you know, the the nook and everything those like those like super low power,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super cheap PCs. Those are very inexpensive with low, you know, low powered low performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff, low specs. Apple’s not really, they’ve never gone for that with the Mac mini, and I don’t see them doing it now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, it’s more likely that they’re gonna keep it at the like seven to 800 to $1,000 price points, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you just can’t sell one of those class hardware boxes for $800, no matter how much Apple tries.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they know that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple could, they’d just make the case out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solid gold. Well, then it would cost more than that. And so, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I see them sticking with, certainly not going down market if anything going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up market.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so here’s the question for and again, I don’t think they’re doing the Puck based on this rumor because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t think they would characterize that as pro is just a different kind of computer thing. But assuming they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a Puck and they do, you know, some kind of fairly traditional Mac mini of some stripe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will it be physically larger or smaller than the current Mac mini?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I think it’ll be smaller. I just don’t think it’ll be a ton smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean, one one question is like, does it need to be square? Like from the you know, from the top down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view, does it need to be square? Because maybe they can make it if it’s not a perfect square, maybe they can cram.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, who am I? I was going to say maybe they can cram more ports in the back, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} no, it’s a triangle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s Apple. They’re going to shrink it down to a smaller square and just cut all the ports off. Yeah, let’s be realistic here. What they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to do, but I really I hope they don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If they’re going to shrink it, I feel like they could save a lot of room by ditching all the USB-A and replacing them with USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slash Thunderbolt. What else could they ditch? I don’t even know what’s in the back of the Mac Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you look in the back, they can lose the SD slot and scoot some things over. You know, the vent kind of gets in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You just advocate getting rid of an SD card slot in anything? Are you feeling okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In the context of a desktop computer, I’m worried about especially, no, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one that is aimed at the kind of markets the Mac Mini is used in. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think it needs an SD slot. It would be nice to have one, just again, for the versatility needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, you know, maybe some buyers need it sometimes. But I would say it’s less important on this than it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a laptop that like, you are out somewhere and all of a sudden need one. You know, it’s very different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you have a desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know if I agree with you. And the reason I say that is because I think you and I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and possibly John, tend to think of the Mac mini as an accessory Mac in the same way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say, my MacBook Adorable is an accessory Mac. my iMac that I’m talking to you through right now is my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey primary machine. But I would argue that for a fair number of people that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mac Mini may be their only Mac, may be their primary Mac, especially people potentially who are switching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from PCs and have keyboards and mice and monitors and so on and so forth. And for them, an SD card

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slot would be useful. And I guess that’s part of the conundrum of the Mac Mini is, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is this computer? The three of us were just discussing, is it the sort of thing that a NUC would handle where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey relatively low-powered, not exceedingly fast, but physically very small and can be put anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do any number of things, almost like a rich person’s Raspberry Pi or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s certainly something the Mac Mini can do and does do, but it’s not the only thing it can do. It can serve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for some as their only computer, but I think you’re right, Marco, that certainly anyone that I’ve spoken to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it tends to not serve as a primary computer as much as it serves as an accessory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or secondary computer. In which case, then yeah, the SD card slot should go, but I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if, I don’t have any idea what the usage patterns are in the aggregate for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And to be clear, I’m not saying they should remove it. I’m saying they could

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} remove it and it would have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it would have less negative impact than anything else, than moving anything else on here. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think what they will remove is the audio in jack, which is a shame. It’s the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac sold that has an audio in jack and you know people use that. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hate that trend where they got rid of all the audio inputs that are built in. I’m somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who owns lots of audio input peripherals. I don’t usually need it but sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do and it’s really nice to have and I’m using it on my current Mac Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think what they are likely to do if they update the port situation, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re gonna replace the Thunderbolt 2 ports with Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports. That’s a given.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There is an open question of whether they would also have any USB-A ports on it. The iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro does. I hope the iMac Mini would for the same reason, that they have the space and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s useful. So they might as well keep USB-A if they can. And otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t expect, you know, I think the argument for having a hardware HDMI port

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is as strong as it’s ever been for these. So if, you know, they justified having it on the previous model,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the new model should also have a hardware HDMI port. USB-C HDMI dongles are not good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough and are not reliable enough, so it still needs that. And I hope it still has audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in and out, although I’m pretty sure it won’t. At least, not in. Other than that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really am curious to see, but I really hope they err on the side of more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco versatility for this product, rather than trying to make the tiniest thing possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has no ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here’s how to most comprehensively ruin this thing. You mentioned perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having the internals of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Yeah. So make a Mac Mini that on the back of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has power, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and a headphone jack. It’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a MacBook Escape with no monitor, keyboard, or trackpad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yay! And keep it expensive and keep it relatively large. So it’s no good for the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who wanted a puck, and for the people who currently have a Mac mini, it is the total dongle town

⏹️ ▶️ ^John punishment, thing that you could, because it’s like, you got all this room back there, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no HDMI, there’s no ethernet, there’s no USB-A, there’s no audio in, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SD, it’s like, yeah, it’s like a 13-inch MacBook Pro, it’s awesome, right guys? Everyone loves it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Sorry, there wasn’t any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco room for any other ports. Yeah, see, and this is, I’m so, as I mentioned in the last few episodes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I’m so curious to see whatever the next, like, newly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco redesigned Mac is from Apple. Because we don’t know what direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve taken. We don’t know, like, if when they released all the USB-C generation of stuff, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two years ago, and there was a whole lot of negative feedback, we don’t know, did they take that to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heart? Did they change course? All we have is the iMac Pro, which is a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco signal in the right direction. But we don’t know yet what they’re doing to the other products and whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re actually, you know, considering a lot of this user feedback they’ve gotten, or whether they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to just keep yelling at us that a small number of USB-C ports is the answer and the only thing we need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whatever Mac Mini is being, you know, shipped this fall, allegedly, was probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco designed after that feedback came in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You really? I think they might have started redesigning it as soon as they released the last one. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. It just takes them four

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years to design one of these because there’s just one guy doing it all the work himself. Maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, if that one guy hasn’t changed, then maybe he’ll keep it really good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe he doesn’t know about USB-C yet. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He’s off on some remote island somewhere. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really want to see both, you know, this new laptop we’ll talk about in a few minutes and this new Mac mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just for the sense of like, what’s different? Like, you know, if they don’t actually change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the external case at all and they just do a spec bump, first of all, for the Mac Mini, that’d be totally fine. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s all they do, that’s totally fine, Apple. If that’s, that’s better than nothing, all right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But, you know, that I think won’t be a sign of a whole lot of, you know, input on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco subject. But, if we see an entirely new case design for either of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products, that I think is a useful signal for where the rest of the things might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be going that could help us judge whether they’re on the right track or not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It can’t really be surprising though, can it? I mean, when is Apple lately anyway done anything but make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it thinner, lighter and fewer ports?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The iMac Pro. I mean, we’re still saying it could be thinner, it could be lighter, it could have fewer ports, but it can’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports. Like there’s fewer ports and then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like no ports. Right, so fewer, like what we, you know, Marco’s already saying he’s willing to give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the SD card. That seems reasonable. I think if we lose all the USB, that’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world. But if you lose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ethernet and HDMI out of some misguided sense of purity, that’s just stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Any other thoughts on the Phantom Mac Mini?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are any of us going to buy one? I guess Marco, will you buy one if it has audio input?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It won’t. And honestly, my current Mac Mini is fine. So when my current Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mini dies, if I ever need a second one, I would definitely buy another one. Like I’m not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason I use a Mac mini, I don’t see that I don’t see those reasons going away for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco foreseeable future. So as long as I need some kind of headless Mac running, running these, you know, accessory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tasks for me in my house, it’s going to be a Mac mini and all likelihood, but at the same time, I have no reason to upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my current one yet. So I would probably not buy one immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey, would you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one? No, I have no need for one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Interestingly, I’ve never owned one. And I think the main reason I wouldn’t get one now is the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John TV does a pretty good job of what I might use a Mac mini for. I’m not gonna use it as obviously my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desktop. And we’re not gonna use it as my wife’s desktop. And all my kids demand laptops because that’s what computers are. So why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hell wouldn’t they want a laptop, right? And so the only place left I really have it is some kind of home

⏹️ ▶️ ^John server or something like that. Well, home server, my Synology handles. And TV connected box,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my Apple TV handles. My Apple TV can run Plex and Infuse, Plex with transcoding happening on the server

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and infused with transcoding happening on the Apple TV and they read files from my Synology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which serves as my home file server thingy so there’s really no place in my computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life for a machine like the Mac Mini. If I didn’t have an Apple TV then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this would be a way for me to buy an Apple product that let me have a thing connected to my TV that’s less trouble

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in theory to deal with than a Raspberry Pi or a NUC or or whatever, but I do have an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John TV. Like I think the Apple TV is, the current one is fairly powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and as thin as the tvOS apps may be, like there’s not a lot of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re not great, there’s enough of the important ones, particularly, you know, Plex and an app like Confuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all the various iOS ports applications, let me watch Hulu and Netflix and all that other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s enough for me for a TV connected to box. So Apple may have cannibalized that market with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the increasing power of the Apple TV. And I’m kind of afraid to compare

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the CPU power of the current Apple TV with the current Mac mini. But if they keep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the Apple TV has been getting more updates than the Mac mini, which is not saying much, but still it has been. At a certain point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Apple TV is probably gonna be faster than even this new Mac mini. So it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have much appeal for me, which is kind of a shame because I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m the type of computer nerdy person who should be interested in the Mac Mini, but so far, no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 1,406 days as we record since the Mac Mini has been updated. The 16th of October, 2014.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To put things in perspective, I didn’t have any children

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then. I was only a couple of weeks away from having a child,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I did not have children when the Mac Mini was updated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now you’ve got two.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, so the other thing that Gurman spoke about, it was the don’t call it a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBook Air, MacBook Air thing. So to re-read the quote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the new laptop will look similar to the current MacBook Air, but will include thinner bezels around the screen. The display,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which will remain about 13 inches, will be a high-resolution Retina version that Apple uses on other products, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love their dumb style guide. I intentionally leave in those the people said things because they’re so hilarious.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you always know we’re reading a Bloomberg quote when we have the people said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, indeed. So I’ve been thinking a fair bit about this, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have come to no good conclusions about what Apple is going to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And Gruber posted just a little while before we recorded a really good summary of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what he thinks will happen, which I’m sure we’ll end up talking about. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I try to think of what is my fantasy, like, low-cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple laptop that’s in the spirit of the air? And I think what that basically amounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to is the MacBook Adorable with another port, and maybe that’s it. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ll be the first to tell you the likelihood of that hitting the $1,000 price point that it seems the Air needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to hit is unlikely. It doesn’t seem like you can get a MacBook Adorable unless they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey give it a hilariously small SSD. I don’t think you’re going to be able to find a MacBook Adorable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for $1,000. Why is that, though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was the Gruber wrote about that and the thing to it, how the MacBook never really came down in price.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so it’s like, well, so obviously it can’t be that big as that’s an expensive product. Should it be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that expensive? Like I’m looking at like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, there are certain things about it. So like, so I have a whole bunch of, you know, points I wanna hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. So maybe I’ll go into this now cause it kind of gets into that. I think one of the reasons why that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is so expensive is that it is more expensive to make things super tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in some ways. like they have to have probably tighter tolerances on a lot of the metal. There’s probably more complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco machining on that metal. They have that weird terraced battery in there because they can’t use like regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sized cells because they won’t fit. So like there are things about making something that small that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably do require it to be more expensive. My biggest point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here is that Apple needs to be willing to break the pattern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’ve had for a while where the smallest device in a family is also the cheapest.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When this pattern was established 10 years ago, whatever it’s been,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} the range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of sizes of laptops, it was a much smaller range. And by the way, a lot of this applies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to iPhones too. But the range of sizes of laptops that you had,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say 10 years ago, was like 13 to 15 inch, basically. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was briefly the 12 inch PowerBook, which is an exception to this. Although the 12 inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was indeed a PowerBook, which was like the MacBook Pro line, it was not the iBook. The iBook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which was the value line, was 13 to 14 inches back then. But anyway, so, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back when the assumption that the smallest could be the cheapest was established, the range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of sizes was a lot smaller. Even the smallest models back then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were still highly versatile. You know, they still had almost all the ports of the big ones, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had almost all the abilities, and they were still very good for pretty much any general purpose needs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The capabilities of the smallest model were not that different from the capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the biggest model. The main differences were basically screen size

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and possibly GPU type abilities, but there were not that many differences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between the laptops. And also their size and weight range wasn’t that big either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The two or three fairly similar sizes that had fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco similar capabilities. And all of them were kind of mass market friendly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco general purpose friendly, and were very versatile to lots of different needs. Today though,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through a combination of technological progress and also just making a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot more compromises, today the smallest in the lineup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has gotten way smaller than what used to be the smallest. And between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the smallest and the biggest, there’s a much wider range than there has been in the past of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco capabilities, performance, and versatility. The difference between the smallest and even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the next one up is a huge difference now. And so the assumption

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the smallest needs to be the cheapest is actually bad for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both sides. It’s bad for the small products in the sense that lots of people buy the small products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not because they’re the cheapest, but because they’re the smallest. They’re people who would spend money on something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that maybe had higher specs. But if the smallest has to also be the cheapest, then it has to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cut corners and cut costs and not have all the nice specs, not even have some of them even available as options,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it has to be the cheapest model and they have to cut corners as a result. And it’s also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not good for the buyers because now the smallest models require

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco such extreme compromises and have such extreme and controversial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco engineering and practicality decisions about them, that a lot of people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just don’t wanna buy or can’t buy one of the more expensive ones end up buying whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cheapest one is, even if it’s like super not fitting their needs. And that’s one of the reasons why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the existing MacBook Air, which has been around forever, is still being sold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and is still selling pretty well and people still buy it a lot. Because if you go into an Apple store with like 1,100 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you wanna walk out of there with a Mac, your options are pretty poor, and if you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at what you get for your money with the MacBook Air versus what you get for your money with the 12-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the Touch Bar or the Escape, it’s kind of no contest. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple needs a new differentiation and market segmentation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco strategy that doesn’t rely on small size to create

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a entry-level price or to make cheaper products. And they also, you know, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been, their strategy so far for the last while has been, oh, just sell old models. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the old models would be our entry-level price. And I think that strategy is not aging very well either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the market’s getting kind of tired of that, honestly, especially as the old models get older.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So selling the old models as the cheap models, I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that time has passed, that’s a good idea. And again, selling the smallest model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the entry-level model, I think the technology has changed such that the smallest model is now so small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that’s very compromised And that’s that’s not no longer suitable to be a mass-market machine So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the good thing is I think Apple has seen this too. I think they figured this out, too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s why I think we have the especially the the biggest signal for this is the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inexpensive iPad the 329 iPad that came out last year was updated this year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It used to be that the cheapest iPad was the iPad mini, and they sold a whole bunch of iPad minis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to schools and business and stuff, not because they wanted the smallest iPad, but because they wanted the cheapest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad. And it turned out that Apple could make a cheaper, better one, and they made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a full-size one. It wasn’t the smallest one. And it’s way better than the iPad mini, partly because they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not updated it, but put that aside for a moment. That 329 iPad is a really good deal. It’s inexpensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They found ways to differentiate it from the iPad Pro, which costs almost twice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as much, because there were lots of features added in the meantime that high-end buyers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanted that low-end buyers didn’t care about. Things like the pencil support, the fancy display, the bunch of speakers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that, the faster processors. So anyway, they found ways to cut the price without selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either ancient models or just the tiniest one they have. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also signs in the rumor mill about them doing this with the iPhone lineup. That apparently this fall,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the iPhones is going to be this LCD mid-size model that’s between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 10 and the rumored 10 plus. It’s like the 6 inch or something like that. I forget the details. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s the rumors about this new iPhone that’s going to have more value targeted components,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but not just be the tiny little iPhone SE. Because again, the iPhone SE has been their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco low-end entry-level model for a while. And honestly, it hasn’t worked that well as an entry level model. It hasn’t opened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up to new markets like India and stuff because people don’t want a tiny phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They want a nice big phone, but for it to be cheaper. And people who buy the SE

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not necessarily buying it because it’s cheap. They’re buying it because they like the small phone. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe they don’t want the small phone to have the crappiest components in the lineup. Maybe they want nicer stuff and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco willing to pay for it. So separating size from market is a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing. And so getting back to this MacBook situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we might have here, it’s very promising to me that the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the value priced new laptop are that it will be similar to the 13 inch Air, not to the 12 inch MacBook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That I really hope that is correct because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think that’s the way to go. I think the market has shown that the 13-inch Air, and by the way, remember, they discontinued

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 11-inch Air about two years ago or so, and it kind of made the 13-inch like the cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bulk purchase one, because again, they realized maybe that the smallest one was not necessarily the one that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should be the cheapest one. So anyway, I really hope this rumor is correct,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the new Value laptop will be similar to the 13-inch MacBook Air, and just updated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you look at what they could do in the Mac lineup, similar to what they did in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad line to make that 329 iPad and separate it out from the iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and its capabilities. They could still have it be the 15 watt class CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like they have in the current era and the Escape so it could have decent performance for lots of people for lots of different needs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe they make the case less fancy. So I mean, I wouldn’t honestly rule out plastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know they probably won’t do it. I think it’s unlikely, but the white plastic MacBook was awesome. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enjoyed mine. And you know, for a product that is hitting a price point and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to be the best of the best in every possible way, it can be plastic. That’s totally fine. There’s lots of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different materials and styles that can use these days that would still seem modern but that people would not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not dislike but might actually really love. It wouldn’t have to be as thin as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the MacBook Pro line because again, you’re hitting a price point so it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could be a little bit thicker than the new USB-C laptops. that doesn’t need to be so thin. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the use of something less expensive requires a thicker case, then that allows them to save again, save on machining, save

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on tolerances, they can save on that terraced battery thing I mentioned earlier, like you just use regular battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cells. These are all ways to bring that price point down. You look at what the iPad does,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it doesn’t have that laminated screen. The screen is less fancy. You can make the screen less fancy than this. You could have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it not have the P3 wide color, not have true tone. Maybe it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have even the force touch trackpad, or maybe it’s limited, maybe it doesn’t do the deep touch, it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does like the first click. Maybe it only has one microphone instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the two noise canceling ones. Maybe it has slower flash for the SSD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco modules. Maybe it doesn’t have the T2, or maybe it does to save component costs, who knows. But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of things they can do to this component. Maybe it doesn’t have, even if it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco USB-C, maybe it doesn’t have Thunderbolt, just like the 12-inch. The 12-inch MacBook has USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s not Thunderbolt. It’s just USB 3. Maybe they could have that, but just have more of them. You know, they could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have four USB-C ports that are just USB 3 and not Thunderbolt. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of things they could do to cut the price and to segment it from the pro needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the super nice maxed everything of the pro line without making it a piece of crap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I really hope they do this. I really hope they have learned, Finally, like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need a modern, not necessarily smallest model to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be your entry level in the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The phone is a more apt comparison as you already made, because I think they have and the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have done that with iOS devices made the smallest, the cheapest just because people pay more money for big things. But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, historically, even when there was the 11 inch air, was that always the cheapest?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought there was always cheaper models, like because you could get the you know, that That was back when they had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macs with optical drives and the 101 model. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I think they’ve done a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty- Yeah, the 101 was cheapest for a while, but then there was a span of a few years where the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 11-inch MacBook Air was the cheapest. And then eventually they stopped selling it to the public,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they kept selling it to education for a while, and I think they’ve even stopped that recently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was so small that it scared away regular people. So my memory is that most of the time in the laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line in the past decade or so, The 13 inch was, there was a 13 inch that was the cheapest one. Like they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to sell you a 12 or an 11 as the cheapest. But getting back to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook One for a second, the reason I don’t like that machine to continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coasting along is that I don’t think it delivers enough value at its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current price point. The value it’s delivering is, look, it’s super small, right? And it’s, you know, it’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a good looking screen but it’s really, really small and really, really light. That is its value that it’s delivering. And especially when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s new, people will pay a lot for that value. But as it gets older, right, and as it just stays

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same size and gets older and older, I feel like the wow factor and utility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of being that small decreases in value over time. And yet the price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stays the same. I think the MacBook One, the way it should be is it should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be an ARM processor with really long battery life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a Retina screen and one or two more USB-C ports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it should be less money, right? Like that’s the future of that line. Because I just don’t think that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that on the one hand we have, here’s the value I’m delivering as a product. I am really light and thin. On the other hand, we have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here is everything that you can’t do with me because I compromise everything for light and thin. There’s less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capability. It is slower and it has less capability. What balances that out? I’m really small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I feel like that equation, the slowness and the capability starts to weigh more and more heavily.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And because it’s so small, and because you have to use super low power chips, getting Intel out of that and putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ARM into it makes it less slow. But the ARM chips cost like five bucks or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hell they cost compared to the Intel. I know, you know, as someone posted in all caps in the chat because they’re very excited,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John costs are not prices, but they are related in some way, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The most expensive thing, it should be like an iPad, the most expensive thing in that laptop should be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen because it is, you know, that should be the cost driver. And that’s historically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has influenced the cost a lot, not just for just it and, you know, an Apple’s parts, but also on what people are willing to pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Like you, you don’t have this stuff that’s not in that you don’t have any of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff to deal with Thunderbolt. You don’t have any of the things to deal with, like, you know, external

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graphics and also like there’s less stuff in there. There’s less capability, less speed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It should be, it should get cheaper. I don’t think you can sustain that computer at 1300

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bucks with all the other prices staying the way they are. So that’s why I’m disappointed that it has stayed that price,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but is not getting any more capable. And you know, I’m not arguing for this to be the entry level, because I also agree that 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inches is too small, and it’s just too compromised to be like the entry level computer. But I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I don’t know if they’re gonna update it in this event. I really think they should do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too, because I just don’t think it’s worth the price they’re charging for it currently. So their choices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are either lower the price on it, which is a problem because I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a problem I was gonna say it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem because it’s conflicting with the with their 13-inch entry-level thing but maybe it’s not because people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can clearly see the difference or Increase the capability somehow and I feel like the only way you can increase the capability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like what are your choices? Is there a better 5 watt chip from Intel that will make a difference? The way you increase its capabilities by putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an arm chip in there. That’s probably gonna be faster than the current Intel chip But anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s a 2020 plan So I really hope that the future of the MacBook One is that it gets an ARM chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it starts to earn its value more Because just I just don’t feel like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know this is not the big problem in the line because it’s the one computer that a clear value proposition. I just think that value proposition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not as strong as it used to be.

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MacBook Air, continued

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⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love these government articles where it’s like either you have no information or you are terrible at conveying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the information

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you have. The new laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will look similar to the current MacBook Air. If you have any information,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say it. If you don’t, what I hear is it will have a keyboard and a screen and it’ll be a clamshell you a folded. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a laptop dude. Look similar to the current MacBook Air. If what you mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that it tapers, say that. If you don’t know that it tapers, then you literally have no information other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than this is just a laptop. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that’s more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John likely. But then why even say it looks so much like the MacBook Air? Just say it’s a 13 inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptop. That’s what it comes down to. When I read this, I say if you choose the phrases by it, it means it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have a taper. Anyway, I am all for a modern interpretation of a red and air. It could share, it could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be an entirely new case, but if it tapers and has a retina screen, people are gonna say, Hey, it’s a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a retina MacBook Air, even though it has a different keyboard, different ports, and in totally different cases on a different screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like everything about it is different. But because it’s taper, it’s like a MacBook Air. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can definitely sell a 13 inch machine. That is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, here’s the question, one of the questions from Gerber’s thing, say there’s no taper and say it’s basically a modernized MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John escape. Are we excited it is about, are we as excited about that as we would be with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a tapered machine that is also all new and 13 inch or is, or, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do we care? Does anyone care about the taper?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think, I mean, I think the taper was really cool when it came out in 2008. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think it really matters anymore. I mean, I think what we see with, with the new generation of USBC Mac books

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it, MacBook pros rather is that you don’t really need the taper to achieve that size

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco class anymore. Like the 13 inch, 15-ish watt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 3-ish pound laptop is totally achievable without a taper now. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just don’t think we need it anymore. Also, by the way, just one thing that I forgot to mention before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the keyboard, yes I know I’m talking about the keyboard, you know, ring some bell somewhere, but like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco butterfly keyboard has got to be more expensive to make than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a regular keyboard, than a scissor keyboard. So again, yet another reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 12-inch and maybe even the Escape, why they can’t probably replace the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air at its price point, and why making a model from scratch that can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the ways it can save money, put a less exciting keyboard in it. Because less exciting keyboards are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheap. You just want to not have the butterfly keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. No, but I’m actually saying, I guarantee you, I guarantee you the butterfly keyboard is is more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expensive to have in those laptops, both in manufacturing cost and in warranty repair costs. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guarantee you, it costs Apple more to put that in the laptops than to have a regular scissor keyboard in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there. So yet another way they can make a new model different and cheaper to make and to sell is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boring old keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You think, but do you think this new 13-inch laptop is going to have a butterfly keyboard or not? No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And do you think it will have any keyboard we’ve ever seen from an Apple product or it will be an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco entirely new keyboard? That I don’t know. I mean, the fact is, scissor keyboards are pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easy to engineer and alter. Apple has done so many different scissor keyboards over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the years, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal if they made a new one, honestly. But I honestly don’t think, first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all, that the market that buys these definitely doesn’t want a butterfly keyboard. And second of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, I think for price reasons, it would be really dumb to put one in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I wouldn’t necessarily think if they’d put a scissor keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in it, I wouldn’t necessarily say, oh, this is the end of the butterfly keyboard across the whole lineup. You know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was saying earlier that whatever they do could signal other changes later down the road. Um, because just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, because I really do think the cost difference is likely to be very large that, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they put a scissor keyboard in it, that really could just be for cost reasons because it’s gotta be a big difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I think if this computer has a different case than the Mac book air, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, different bottom case, then it’s going to have a keyboard that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically the same as the the butterfly keyboard from the outside and maybe the same on the inside. I would be shocked if this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing does not have essentially if you looked at oh it’s a butterfly keyboard again feels like it looks like it travels like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it may literally be the butterfly keyboard I do not expect this computer to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an all-new keyboard. I just like I will be pleasantly surprised if it does I really hope it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I don’t expect it to have one like the MacBook air and I don’t expect it to have an all new one. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just going to be basically guess what is another computer with the butterfly keyboard on it just because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems to me that not that Apple’s wed to it but that the lead time on this computer is not enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for them to get a new keyboard in time and that it would have been designed in an era where they were like butterflies everywhere. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fix it with the little rubber condom thing like so I’m I am fully geared up for a new 13

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inch laptop that is essentially read in the air with a butterfly keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think you’re right. And I don’t know anything about manufacturing, but I have to wonder if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going all in on one keyboard design would end up saving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey money because you don’t have to have like two different manufacturing lines for these two different keyboards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if you can just commit to one keyboard that presumably it’s the identical keyboard used in every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey model, then would that actually end up being a bit of a cost savings overall?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’ll streamline all your warranty repairs

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} as the assembly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} line of broken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboards comes through your retail centers. It’s nice that they’re all the same. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before before we get, you know, too predictive about like streamlining their operations, keep in mind,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco currently in production right now are like four different varieties of this keyboard and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever is in their low end MacBook Air replacement, if they actually do successfully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco replace the MacBook Air with it, will probably outsell every other model. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for efficiency sake, even if it is the only model with the this one keyboard, that’s more efficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than what they do now, where they have these, they have like four different laptops now that have slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tweaked or very tweaked keyboards in them compared to each other. So like, they’re already not having the same keyboard everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I would expect this to be basically the magic keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would expect the new layout with, you know, no more inverted T arrow keys, much to my chagrin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and thin bezels around all the other keys, you know, thin margins, but I would expect under it to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scissor switches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I think the best case scenario is what we were talking about before we read these rumors which is, you know, Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea of like an all new computer. Everything you know, like the keyboard’s new, the case is new, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signals the new design era coming on the heels of the design era kicked off with the 2015 MacBook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That time is over now and now we’re going to do the new era. And this is the very first computer we talked about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John last week, the last week show. The very first computer of this new era of design. That is my best case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scenario because that would be like great. I agree. I just get to see what the new thinking is. But what I’m actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expecting is a 13 inch airish thing with a butterfly keyboard that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah. That’s what I expect. And so hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised. But either

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, the second question that I guess I don’t think was addressed in this article or whatever is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do they stop selling the air?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That’s a very good

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Do they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco drop

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John price?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m guessing the air gets one final price drop and goes education only for like one or two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years. But that’s and that would be it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s an interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, because the air does have things, some things going forward in terms of I’m not going to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John proven reliability or proven ruggedness, but at least known like I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not even sure how rugged airs are. My daughter finally managed to kill ours. We have a 2011

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somehow she like cracked the screen or something so now like there’s these visible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John creases in the screen and then the LCD is all like bleeding with these weird arty green lines

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway she killed it still works but it looks like a mess I’m not quite sure I did it but up to that point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she dropped it she ate food over it she did like everything you can imagine this thing so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and no key is ever broken on it like it seems pretty rugged to me so the reason to keep selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an education is Schools like them, they work for schools,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re, you know, they’re a known quantity. The other reason is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that maybe Apple knows at this point it doesn’t have any replacement computers that can match

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its ruggedness. Whether or not you think it’s super rugged, it seems to me that every other computer that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John currently sell is provably less rugged, especially in a school environment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like anything with a butterfly keyboard seems like it’s out just because kids are gonna, you know, especially young kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just going to be a mess all over that. And I think we’ve seen a couple of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in our friend circle. Was it one or two? I don’t know who had 2018 keyboards and how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John key go wonky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, it was. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steven and John Gruber. His review laptop has a wonky key or at least had one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And Steven Hackett’s laptop has a wonky space bar. And and we and there was a couple of Reddit threads, people saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they did as well. Clearly, the butterfly keyboard is not fully fixed. I think just a quick a sidebar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this. My theory on this is the butterfly keyboards have had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco multiple ways to fail. There has been dust ingress that has caused one type of failure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there’s also just been like you know some of the metal parts have just been super thin and weak and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or maybe manufactured to the wrong tolerance or whatever and so there’s been like kind of like just like mechanical failures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as well as dust ingress causing failures. The new gasket thing has probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dramatically improved the ingress to the point where that’s going to be way less common but we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet know and it looks like the answer is probably no whether it improved the other kind of failures that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know just the metal breaking or parts bending or thermal expansion causing problems or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else so I expect based on what we little information we have so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I expect these keyboards to still occasionally fail for people, but just to be at a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco substantially lower rate than the previous years. So I don’t think we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of the woods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we know the little gasket has holes in it too, so it doesn’t actually solve the ingress problem. It just, in theory, makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} better. It should reduce the occurrence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like the only way that they could, the only way they should retire the air for education

⏹️ ▶️ ^John customers and so on, is if, in the optimistic scenario, if their new low-cost laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is all new, like that they have some reason to believe that it has a chance of matching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reliability. You know, because they say we design this all new thing, it, you know, we’ve learned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from our mistakes with the butterfly keyboard. Here is a new keyboard that again may look and feel exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same as a butterfly keyboard, but internally be 100% different, you know, for reliability purposes, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can maybe feel comfortable retiring the air or retiring it sooner. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without that, I don’t, there’s, I wouldn’t, you know, we were talking about like, oh, what laptops we feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comfortable recommending to people. And I think, again, a success criteria for the new laptops would be like, when this new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 13 inch laptop comes out, is it the one that we finally feel comfortable recommending to for people who want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a laptop but don’t want to spend three grand or something? We’d be like, finally, I can recommend this one without reservations to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a certain set of customers. Can you recommend what kind of laptop we’ll be able to recommend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for education customers without a bunch of caveats? There’s no way I’d want any of the butterfly keyboard laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be recommended for schools. There’s just, there’s just no way. Like, there’s a million reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why you wouldn’t want that to be the case. And so, Apple would be foolish to get rid of the Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at this point, unless they, unless they have a new laptop that will, that will take its place.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is a sad thought. I mean, it really does seem like this keyboard stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is still up in the air. And I, I feel like everyone was pretty confident. No, they really got it this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time and maybe not. Sorry. All right. Any other thoughts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am optimistic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s a good sign that this is being rumored and being rumored strongly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It does seem, and I think it was Marco that said this earlier, it does seem that much later than we all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wanted, Apple is starting to hear us and hear our complaining about the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lineup. And I’m a little sad, but not surprised, that they’re taking it in chunks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But this is definitely positive motion, if this is all real, or if some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey subset of this is real. This is positive motion that Apple is starting to pay attention again. Or,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, presumably, they’ve been paying attention for a while, but we haven’t seen the results of that labor. And so now we’re starting to see the results,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hopefully. And certainly, the new MacBook Pros from, what was it, a month or two ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a good step. There’s obviously a lot of stuff that’s yet to be updated, And so I hope to see that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey updated over the remainder of the year.

Fall expectations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It certainly seems like the more we hear about new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things that are coming, the more I think this is probably a two-event fall, which I wouldn’t have said just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey couple of weeks ago, I don’t believe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, because look at what you have on the table, right? What is rumored or likely to come out this fall?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have at least one Mac, but chances are it isn’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this new budget thing. Chances are it’s the budget laptop, iMacs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably maybe a Mac Mini. Am I forgetting anything else? Is the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One have anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} new? Oh yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, yeah. The 12-inch MacBook One. So you have MacBook One, budget laptop, which I do think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are two different things. iMac and maybe Mac Mini. So that’s four Macs. Plus you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the introduction of what sounds like three iPhones. Although to be fair, I do think this this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone launch is going to be a quieter one. You know, last year in like the typical like, you know, TikTok cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of iPhone launches. Last year was the big It was like the big update. And then so this year is gonna be like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of S revision. It’s gonna be some kind of new technologies here, there, faster, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think it’s gonna be mostly a quieter year for the iPhone, which creates space for these other things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be promoted and everything. You also have iPad Pro, very likely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it might be a big year for the iPad Pro because it might be getting that thin bezel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possible notch kind of thing. Let me see, Face ID, right. So there’s that. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an update to the HomePod, probably. There is new Apple Watch, which is also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rumored to be a fairly significant update to the Apple Watch. New form factor, maybe. Yeah, exactly. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s gonna be probably a big fall for the Mac, the Watch, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad. And maybe a medium to small one for the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So they could do this all in one big blowout event. But boy, that’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of stuff to cram in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think it’s one big event for the iOS devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one small event for the Macs. Maybe. Probably. A couple things we didn’t touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on just to get them out of the way. We all just assumed that the new low-cost laptop, no touch bar, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh no, definitely no touch bar. Because again, that’s something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you look at the lineup, the MacBook Escape is weirder and weirder. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I honestly, here’s one thing too. I think the MacBook Escape might be discontinued because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was trying to be the Air replacement, but it just did a really bad job at replacing the air because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it replaced the air in core component class, but it didn’t replace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the air in low-cost or versatility. So, ultimately, I don’t see a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big future for the MacBook Escape, as much as I loved mine before the keyboard got bad. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think the lineup would be a lot cleaner if every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Pro had the touch bar and the other things don’t have it or don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it and maybe lack some other stuff as well, like the True Tone and stuff like that. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a clear dividing line, I think. And in the lineup that I foresee where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this new budget laptop replaces the Air, I don’t see a place in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this lineup for the Mapwick Escape.

12” MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s another thing that grinds my gears about the MacBook One at its current price. It’s priced like it should have a touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bar, but there’s no way you can put a touch bar on that thing. Because you just don’t have the power and the space and you’re not going to put a little, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, the T1 or whatever the hell chip is powered. Like, it just doesn’t fit on that, but it’s priced like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it should have one. So it’s, I find the computer upsetting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The more I think about it, because I spent a lot of time thinking about that and Casey with his and how everyone always wants to buy another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one because they’re a little bit slow. I’m like, put an ARM processor in it and make it way cheaper. Like what are you even doing? It’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t feel like it’s holding up its end of the bargain anymore. It used to, when it was first introduced, you can get tons of money for it, but a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couple years later, I’m sour on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, the MacBook Air had the exact same progression. Like the MacBook Air started out at around that, you know, $1,700 price point when it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was the new slim thing, but then when it started becoming like the mass market thing, it just slowly came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down, down, and down. I don’t know if they’re going to do that with the 12-inch, because I think as much as we complain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about it and as much as limited as it is, it does have a pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fan base. It’s just not entry-level buyers. But there are lots of buyers who love the 12-inch the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it sucks so bad, they have to keep buying it every year. It sells really well because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s never good enough to last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more than a year for anybody. I say this, maybe I’m getting more angry about it because I may soon be in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the market for we have to mention that my daughter destroyed

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} our 2011 MacBook Air. Oh no! Now the kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computers for school and my wife is sick of them using her computer and so we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to get them something and I’m like so what am I going to get? I mean a lot of my hopes are pinned to this new low-cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptop as I’ll buy this instead of the MacBook One. First of all I think about my kids bending the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One in half because it is so thin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happen. They can

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} bend. I’m not Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and second is I don’t I don’t want to buy a computer that expensive for kids that are gonna destroy it But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s it’s the least powerful Mac and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah, anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I told everybody if I had to buy your children a laptop today, it would be another 13-inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know that’s the worst I like a refurb You know MacBook Air and I’m just like it can I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really gonna I really gonna give her the it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be like half The price and probably better for their actual use. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, it’s still maybe what we end up buying. Hell, maybe I’ll buy another 2011. I just, the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is gross. Like my son is getting a Chromebook next year at school, which, you know, blah, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. But for this year, we need to get him something. So when these laptops come out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re getting something probably. It’s just, will it be a used one? Will it be new? Will it be refurb? It all depends on what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John introduce. And I think this is probably, I’m suddenly in like the normal market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for computers because I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this computer because my kids are going to destroy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And it doesn’t need to be powerful, and it does need to be rugged. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I’m shopping like a normal person who’s not a computer nerd for a brief moment in time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’ll be sad if my best bet is to get a refurb model or a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used model or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something. I would, honestly, I would get like a clearance or refurb MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. That’s a tough call. But Marco’s probably right that just giving her another

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBook Air may be the best answer, at least for now. Well, I guess the best is to answer is to wait a month

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or two if you can, but if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, that that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John best. I’m totally waiting. I said we’re not we’re not doing anything until we see the new laptops to come out. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, you can get a refurb 13 inch air from Apple right now for 850. Like you’re not going to do better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that. In the 12 inch lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That screen is so gross. I do feel bad with my kids having to look at, you know. But they don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nope. I’m not entirely sure they don’t care. I’ve been thinking about this. Like, they watch YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on their iPads and practically speaking, their iPads have better screens than the MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like their retina, the color reproduction is better, the viewing angles are better. And I don’t know if those two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things are connected. Maybe they just, you know, they do it because they don’t need a keyboard to do that. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know, we’ll see. We’ll see if that, like, I’m not sure I’m going to give them any input into it, but I may,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once I think I’ve come to a decision, I may actually let them voice an opinion, like going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple store and say, uh, if you had to pick a laptop, which one would you want? Just to see what their answer would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be because they don’t know how much things cost because they don’t understand money because they’re kids of rich people or whatever. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you see like, what do they end up picking? Do they immediately go to, you know, the iPads

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and say this is what I want for school with the keyboard attached. Will they, will they pick an air? Will they, Will they pick the MacBook one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they come in like, you know, green or pink or whatever the hell colors they come in these days? It’ll be a fun experiment.

Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my web host of choice. Go to linode.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP to learn more and get a $20 free credit. Linode is quite simply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco awesome web hosting in the cloud. You get these fast, really price competitive virtual

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that. I have all sorts of different sizes. I have something like 20 Linode instances for all my various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. My blog runs on one of those super low-end ones because they’re super fast, even at $5 a month. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my blog runs on something about that size. Overcast has servers that span from I think $10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a month all the way up to $300 a month for my super big ones. They have every plan you might need,

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me want to run screaming and never touch it again. Linode’s is downright pleasant to use, and the functionality it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offers is also really nice. You can do things like resize your disk images. All you gotta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do is shut down the server, hit resize, boot it back up, and it actually works. Like, I’ve done this on database servers. This is something

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#askatp: Weak Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Once again, Linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP2018. Thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ask ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sounds good. All right, starting with Luke Bennett, who asks, in the house that I rent, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have the modem and Wi-Fi router set up in a room at the front of the house, as it’s the only place in the house that we can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it set up. Unfortunately, the house is fairly long and is not wired for Ethernets. The Wi-Fi signal at the far end of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey house is quite weak. Currently I have a cheap Wi-Fi repeater plugged into the wall near my desk. My question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is short of running Ethernet, what is the best way to upgrade my network? A power line networking adapter or a mesh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey network? And Luke cites the Netgear Orbi. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have never used power line networking, but I’ve heard good things about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you’re not looking for, you know, the fastest connection in the entire world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Obviously, as you said, the best answer is to run Ethernet. I have an Eros set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up here at the house. My dad just got an Eros set up, actually my old Eros set up for his house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They are sponsors, although not this particular episode, and both the old and new Eros

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey set ups were comped, so I paid nothing for them. But I’ve had nothing but good experiences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with them. It’s pretty plug and play, and I have a feeling that Marco’s going to end up talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ubiquiti and everything I’ve heard about Ubiquiti is that it is phenomenally good, but far from plug and play.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But the arrows work great. And I would recommend at least trying that based on my very limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey experience. Before we have Marco going on about how wonderful Ubiquiti is, John, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have one. I asked Marco, did you use power line networking? Because that’s why I put this in here. I thought one of us actually use power line networking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did indeed use power line networking. And I’m not going to talk about Ubiquiti because it’s not going to solve your problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I’m surprised. All right. Well, now, John, I don’t care what you have to say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did use power line networking for something small. I think it was like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smart light switch. I forgot exactly why I use it. I used it a few years ago and it’s way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better than it used to be. Like when it first came out, like what, maybe 15 years ago, it was super slow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and, and it was, you know, really, it was, you know, you’d get like terrible speeds and the new, the newest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iteration of it, which isn’t that new, um, is inexpensive and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that slow. If you look at somewhere like the Wirecutter, they review them sometimes and you can see, like, that’s what I did when I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bought mine a few years back. I don’t use it anymore though. It was just too slow for me and I just upgraded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my Wi-Fi and it was better. So, your options here, so again, to recap, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to cover a very long house. The house is rented, which means modification is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not allowed, at least heavy modification. So that probably rules out things like actually running Ethernet very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco long, unless you want like just run on the floor which kind of sucks and currently the setup is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Wi-Fi repeater. Wi-Fi repeaters suck. They suck

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably a little bit more than powerline networking sucks but all of those things suck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ultimately the best system here is either find a way to run Ethernet and just have two APs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and that can be then whatever you want that could be something like an Eero or an Orbi. Not all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the configurations of these systems support wiring the endpoints like with Eero the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the main base station is wired but the beacon unit is not wireable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not wired as far as I as far as I know but you can get a second one of the regular base stations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they can work together and you can wire the second one. Either way even if you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a system like this if you just use the wireless repeating functionality the way they work is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way more sophisticated and usually way higher performing than the old kind of Wi-Fi repeaters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s an advertise that and again as case cities are sponsors however I have actually paid for Eero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco systems twice actually and they’re yeah they’re they really are the real deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve never used the other systems like I’ve never like the neck gear or be or actually ubiquity has one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I’ve never used but I have used Eero and I can say it’s wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it really does work this way if you want just good coverage and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay speeds that’s the way to go. If you want good coverage and good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speeds you’re gonna have to run Ethernet to a second AP. Whether that is a second Eero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco base unit or whether it’s some other system like my beloved Ubiquiti ProGear,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s up to you. But any kind of wireless broadcasting, rebroadcasting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mesh kind of thing, Wi-Fi repeater is at the very bottom of the spectrum. Powerline networking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a small step above that, a very small step above that. that. Above that you have systems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Eero and maybe Orbi, I don’t know how it works. And then above that you have when the things are actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all wired. That’s ultimately what you want for performance. But you might not need that kind of performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You might be totally fine with just wired mesh networks. And if that’s the case, then just get something like Eero or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Orbi.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll just give one more Eero success story. My sister has one and I was like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you get it, like call me on the phone. I’ll help you set it up. So on and so forth. She didn’t call me. Oh, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s super easy. That’s always been my my vision for the thing is like if you have to pick one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that you people How do you think someone will have who’s not into computers will have the highest chance of successfully setting up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Euro is it but I was always like questioning like yeah But is it actually that easy like it’s easier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than anything I’ve done before but it’s still there’s a lot of stuff to know But you know, she I don’t even I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t even tell her the way you do it is by downloading the app This is like but from her opening the box

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I guess seeing that little card that says hey guess what download the app? And so she did and went through it the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part that she got wrong which she can’t be blamed for it Cuz took me a while to figure out how to do it in person and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I 100% forgot how to do it in person I had to refigure it out over the phone, which was fun Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she has like a cable box thing and it has its own or cable modem and it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it makes its own Wi-Fi network So she set up the euro successfully, but now she has two Wi-Fi networks in the same house both running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on 2.4 gigahertz So I had to turn off the one in the cable modem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s never easy You gotta like connect to the cruddy web interface on the cable modem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and find where the thing is and turn it off and you know anyway so there was the only part you got wrong but she was able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to set it up herself so I would I agree with Marco’s advice that unless you’re doing something that you think you need Ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bandwidth for the current crop of mesh network things really do work as advertised and they’re way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better than repeaters.

#askatp: OLED TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, Arien Aneja writes, what does Marco think of his OLED TV?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I recently bought a set and listened to the episode where Marco bought the LG C7 TV. I wanted to know how that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was going for him and whether there were any particular feedback you’d like to give regarding the same. And then there’s an additional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey follow up for John after. So Marco, how do you like your TV?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I absolutely love it. It is fantastic. It has ruined all other TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me. So it is is indeed the LG C7. It’s an OLED 4K. I was waiting to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 4K until I could get OLED 4K, and it is just amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It really, like, it looks so good, and both in color

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and brightness and contrast, and also just like how just incredibly deep the blacks are and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s so good that not only do I have no regrets, I don’t even, like, I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no temptation to, for instance, play the Nintendo Switch in portable mode because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just want to see it on my nice big TV. I don’t wanna like watch good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco TV shows away from my TV or watch movies away from my TV because they look so much better on my TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like when I’m on vacation, I won’t watch good stuff. You know, like I just wanna watch everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on that TV at home. It’s just, it is that good. And so I have no regrets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t follow the TV market the way John does. So he’s, I’m sure he’s gonna say all the ways it sucks and what’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I should have waited for, but I’m extremely happy with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Has John used no lead panel recently? Is he thinking of upgrading? How does it compare to his plasma?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I haven’t used one in that I don’t have one in my house, but I’ve certainly seen them plenty in stores and stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been looking at them. I am thinking of upgrading maybe next year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe the year after, but I’m in the mode now where I’m looking at models with the with the intent that I’m trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find one that I’m ready to buy and I’m gonna have to buy a bunch of other stuff. How does it compare to my plasma?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are still the reason part of the reason I’m waiting is there are still a couple of minor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compromises with OLEDs as compared to plasma. Overall they’re way better so there’s it’s not like waiting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for something has a better picture than my plasma. OLEDs do but they have a different set of compromises so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know motion reproduction and showing 24 frame per second content,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current crop of OLEDs, even like the C8 and like the current year, like the 2018 ones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still have some minor issues with motion. Frustratingly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the models that does a really good job with this, I didn’t even know this until I started getting more heavily into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the YouTube channels, Panasonic sells OLEDs, just not in the US.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of pisses me off, because I’ve had Panasonic TVs, that’s what all my plasmas have been. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wow, they make OLEDs, and they’re really highly rated. They’re all using the same panels. Like, it’s all using the same LG

⏹️ ▶️ ^John panels. So it’s not that much variety, but where it comes up is in the processing and basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the computer part of it. And so there are minor differences, because if they’re all using the same freaking panel, like how different could it really be?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And all OLEDs have the ability to have infinite blacks and all that other stuff. But dealing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with motion is actually surprisingly tricky, partly because of the way OLEDs work, where it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a, if you ever see a slow motion picture of how plasma, not all plasmas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like, you have to look at particular model. You have plasmas draw their picture on the screen. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like they just light up a bunch of pixels in the colors. Plasmas show a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John series of lit up color pixels, one after the other, that combine to form the final image.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they have refresh rates that are more flexible than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of the current OLEDs. And it’s like the current OLEDs part of the problem is that they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show one frame and then instantly show the next frame, which is, isn’t that great? Isn’t that awesome? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you see that, especially like 24 frames per second, it can look a little weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and jerky because 24 frames per second is a standard that was created at a time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where we displayed an image on a movie screen and then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, went black and displayed the next frame, and went black and displayed the next frame, right? And so now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLEDs have a thing where they call black frame insertion, where rather than showing frame one for the entire duration

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until we instantly show frame two, they’ll show frame one and then insert a black frame,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then show frame two. And they do that to make the motion seem more smooth because the sort of persistence of vision makes your eye interpolate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between them. So, I mean, these are very minor computer nerdy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that most people won’t notice, but there’s a couple of good videos on YouTube where you can watch and you can see some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motion reproduction, like it looks a little bit stuttery. It’s not. It’s accurately showing 20 frames per second. It just does it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in such a sort of unnatural way as compared to all display technologies before it. And the problem of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John black frame insertion is you can sometimes see a little bit flickery. You can see the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frames being inserted. Some people are more sensitive to it than others. So there’s no, and basically what I’m getting is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my plasma does motion better than a lot of OLEDs do. And color reproduction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is obviously better on the OLEDs as well. So I’m still kind of waiting. And the final thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is burn-in. Marco hasn’t mentioned it. Hopefully he never looks for it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’m going to guess that he may have some hearts in the upper left-hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} corner of the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Depending on how much Zelda is played there. You know, ignorance is bliss, but bottom line is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLEDs have burn-in problems just like plasma did and does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still deal with burn-in or whatever, image retention, whatever you wanna call it, on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my plasma. I kind of am not looking forward to getting another television that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to worry about this about. That’s why I’ve kind of been looking at some LCDs to say, could I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deal with worst picture quality with just not having to worry about image retention anymore? I probably won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it, because obviously I’ve lived with it through multiple years with multiple plasmas. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just gonna keep doing it. It’s just kind of, I’m just kind of tired of having to worry about image retention and kind of tired of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, because I played Zelda on my TV. I burned in the hearts. They’re slowly fading. It’s like, it’s worth it for me. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the compromise that I choose to do, but I don’t play Destiny on it. So that’s something to be aware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of. OLEDs have image retention. If you’re used to LCD TVs and used to not worrying about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, you may be unpleasantly surprised by your awesome looking OLED TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you like watch CNN all day and then notice the CNN ticker is there and it takes a year for the CNN ticker to fade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So not everyone is ready to sign up for that kind of babying, or maybe not everyone is sensitive to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of thing, or don’t watch shows with persistent images.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, with the modern TVs, they have features that try to find static images

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and on the screen, like the little CBS logo or the CNN ticker, and try to fade them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in intensity. That’s more image processing stuff. Again, the computer part of the television,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current features that do that aren’t great. They’re better than nothing, but they can, you can get false positives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they fade parts of the picture that aren’t really bugs, and fading them doesn’t really keep them from burning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, you know, period. It just makes them burn in more slowly and less.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there’s still compromises, but bottom line is I’m probably gonna buy an OLED.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you’re in the market for a TV, you should consider whether you care enough about OLED

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to pay the very high price premium and to deal with burn-in or whether you can get away with one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John increasingly capable LCDs with local dimming that is not going to look as good as an OLED

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but will be cheaper and will let you not have to worry about all these weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John issues.

#askneutral: Jaguar I-Pace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Finally, Wayne Robinson asks, given Marco’s lease with the Model S is up in April, has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he considered at least test driving the Jaguar I—er, I’m sorry, everyone, Jaguar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I-Pace, which is similar performance but seemingly much better interior fit and finish to the Model X?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nope. Because it’s an SUV, and I don’t like the way it looks. I have no interest in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s too bad. I watched a, uh, like, five-minute Top Gear, not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey main host that you’re thinking of. remember that Top Gear is a media empire, and so is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the many other people on staff. I think it was John that actually pasted it in the Slack. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anyway, they did a five-minute feature on the iPace. And granted, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bunch of Brits talking about a British car, and naturally they’re going to be effusive about it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it genuinely seemed really nice based on that five-minute YouTube video I watched, which we’ll put in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I thought it looked aesthetically just fine. I mean, it’s a little bit different, but I I thought it looked good. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Model X looks bad, but I don’t think it looks good at all. Whereas I think the I-PACE looks good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the interior looked like an interior should. There were buttons and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey switches and dials. Imagine that. So it looks good to me, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey obviously I’ve never driven one. And I did price one earlier tonight and I priced it in such a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like, hey, if I was really considering this, which I’m not, but if I was really considering this, how much would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this cost? You know, not the let’s, you know, throw money away for the fun of it build the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey legitimate what would I want build. And so let’s see here the total cost $83,140 not cheap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco although to be fair for what it’s competing against that’s actually a fairly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, in line price, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John undercutting the competition because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get an eye pace for like 60 grand or something can’t you or 70 like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But it wasn’t particularly well appointed, but, or that’s, I don’t know if that’s what I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for. But anyway, it was not a beater, but it was not fancy either, if that makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sense. Yeah, I have no interest in this car. I mean, first of all, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really happy with the Model S. And so when my lease is up, my current plan is to either buy it out or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get another Model S. So I’m really, because I’m just that happy with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I’m not really looking around. If I were looking around, this car does not appeal to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Neither does the Porsche, whatever, the Mission E, is that it? What’s it called again?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Taycan? Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it is. Yeah, that’s a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that’s replacing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code name. That also doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t like the way it looks. It’s really expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m just not into the Panamera style, and so that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco appeal to me either. I’m very, very happy with the Model S. It’s a fantastic car. Even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they ruined it with the, you know, with the weird new, like, you know, all, all center panel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, like in the model three, like was rumored a couple of weeks ago, I would probably still buy it anyway. Cause I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would, I still would probably like it better than all my other choices. It’s a fantastic car and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I intend to stick with it for the foreseeable future or at least for the next, whatever the next car I get is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think what the I-Pace has going for it is that it is good looking for an SUV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really I really hate the the Model X the way it looks and most SUVs are not and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at the I-PASS And you’re like that’s almost attractive for an SUV, but in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no way is it mistaken for a car?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, by the way, and I also think the Model X is ugly. I don’t like the Model X. I like the Model S I’m a sedan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco person and the Model S is just a ridiculously awesome sedan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s looks like a whale Looks like a fail whale upside down. It’s just like too tall and fat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I walk by somebody’s house when we go out walking the dog all the time. He’s got a whatever p100d model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John x like the most Expensive x you could buy it’s like you spend all that money and you got this big fat whale

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure it’s fast, but it’s like Not like it. I mean, I don’t like SUV So obviously I am not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the target audience for this type of car But then I see the I-base like see an SUV doesn’t have to be that ugly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ugly. Yep, I agree. Marco, have you seen any appreciable difference in range since you’ve had the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car for, what is it, almost three years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now? Yeah, it’s gone down, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 15 percent in that time, something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let’s check

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cycle count.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Also people in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the chat are pasting in the lucid air. This was, I saw a couple links to this float by this past week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not the first time I’ve heard of this, but it’s like one of the original designers of the Model S went to go start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his own company and their car is the Lucid Air and it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like an extra luxurious competitor to the Model S.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this to me, I mean, it looks cool I guess, but I’m not interested

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in it because it is a level of luxury that is, first of all, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way more than I want to spend and second of all… Not compatible with five-year-old children. Right. Like if you look at the back seat of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, it’s like there is no middle seat. It’s It’s just like two giant executive bucket

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seats. This is the competitor to if you have a driver and you’re an executive who sits in the back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the kind of car, that’s the kind of people this is for. And yeah, I’m gonna put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a car seat in the back. And so, yeah, this is not for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Also, is this vaporware? Is this, this is a car and there’s pictures, but this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John imminently for sale, is it? Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s the thing too. With all these super brand new models that are being released, some of them from super brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new companies, I honestly am not that interested in being their beta testers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not the beta tester for Tesla. By the time I bought the Model S, it was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco four years old or something and had gone through a bunch of revisions. And yeah, the first ones were actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of rough. And I’m glad I wasn’t in there for the very first ones. I’m also, because I’m on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lease schedule, I can’t wait if a release is late. I’m not gonna reserve one and see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it comes in estimated 2019 or whatever. Like, I can’t do that. I have to make a decision in April.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I’m not gonna wait for any of these weird vaporware cars and I have the feeling by the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my next car is up for lease renewal in like in three and a half years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s probably gonna be a lot more options then that are actually in the market that can actually be reviewed and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can go test drive and things like that. But until then, again, I’m in no rush to leave because Tesla does a really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really good job. I’m very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} happy with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did, I don’t know if this is, I guess this is becoming neutral anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Tiff and I were talking like, what do we replace her car with? Because her lease is up about nine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco months after mine or so. And so the question became, do we maybe go down to one car?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Similar reasons as you Casey, right? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s one option being considered. Or do we maybe reduce her car to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some kind of small, short range electric car? or at least shorter range,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smaller or shorter range. And I looked around at what was out there and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco read a few roundups and reviews and stuff and there’s not that many good choices. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a whole bunch of mediocre choices. There’s a whole bunch of choices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are kind of in the middle and not a lot of really good ones that are meaningfully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smaller or less expensive than a Model 3 would be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How are you defining good though? because I have heard universal praise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and universal’s too strong a word, I’ve heard a lot of praise about the Chevy Bolt, for example, the Nissan Leaf.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, they’re not nearly as fancy or nice as what you’re used to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey both in terms of her BMW and the Model S, but I’ve heard very good things. Additionally, I’ve heard very good about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey e-Golf. I would love to test an e-Golf, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to see. So funny you mention that. So actually, my conclusion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was, after doing about a day’s worth of research on this, because I was procrastinating doing UI search controller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Which is an infinite number of things I’ve done instead of trying to wrangle the incredibly buggy, horrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UI search controller. The conclusion I came to basically was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the only models worth getting in that segment right now, if you want what I want, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a backseat for a car seat occasionally. A friend of mine has the Kia

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Soul EV and it is surprisingly good. It’s a great value,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has really good specs, really good comfort options, stuff like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s just really not very expensive for what you’re getting. That’s a really good option. The Chevy Bolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does indeed win a lot of the review specs. Ultimately, I find the Bolt really ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I don’t love the idea of owning a Chevy. Maybe that’s just me harboring old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prejudices, but I just don’t like Chevy. And also, and then the e-Golf.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So basically, the one on paper that you should probably get is the Bolt. The one that is by far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the best value for the specs is the Kia. And the one that I think I would feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most comfortable with, although I’ve never driven any of these, is the e-Golf. It was the one that looked,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it looks like a regular Golf, and I’m not crazy about the Golf, but I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better looking than the other ones were. And it reviewed pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seemed like a good balance of size versus capacity versus cost. And so yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it actually, that would be very high on my list to go test drive if we ever, if we decided to go that direction for TISCAR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Given TIF’s current hunchback car, maybe she would like an I-Pace. She’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} not opposed to hunchback cars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh man. Hey, does Subaru have a electric Outback? It’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trading one for another.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, deep cut, deep cut.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I might’ve mentioned this. I don’t know if this ever made the show, but my dad has the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What is it called the Prius Prime?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I believe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is super ugly. Yes, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} very very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let’s take a Prius and make it somehow even uglier and not even by a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit. Yeah, it’s it’s bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real the leaf started off ugly and then the new leaves are even uglier like it somehow leaves John

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leaves Steve McLaughlin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, he has Prius Prime and he decided to put in a, what is it, 50 amp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey outlet in his garage to charge it because the Prius Prime is a plug-in hybrid. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then he had most of the parts to do it in my house and so he did it in my house. So my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey house is primed and ready to rock for an electric car and has not yet burned down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because of the electrical work that dad did and has even charged underscores Tesla once or twice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So in theory, it should be good to go. But I don’t know. Without question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the kind of car I should be buying, without question, is an electric car. But none

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of them really, wait for it, rev my engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like a traditional car does. And so I think that time will come for sure. But even the e-Golf,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey having never tried it, it doesn’t strike me as though it would be exciting enough for me to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be like, no, no, no, Golf R or a Golf GTI or I guess really just GTI. No, thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, gasoline powered cars with standard transmissions. I would like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to run on electricity, please. I just don’t see that happening yet. I think that time will come, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s yet. Well, I mean, look, you’ve reviewed all the other golfs. You might as well give us a review that one too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Why not? And I will say that the conclusion I’ve come to is I still don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey particularly love the look of hatchbacks, but the Golf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is unreal value for money. And as you said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, I forget how you phrased it, but you’re exactly right. Like it gives you a tremendous amount of space and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not that big a package. And it is stunning how good a job the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Volkswagen designers did at using all of the available space so that the back seat doesn’t feel tiny. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trunk with the seats up is smaller than I’d like, like, but the back seats feel great. You know, there’s the, they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey squished. If you’re not squished, if you’re back there, the front, the front of the cabin is spacious. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey golf is a really great platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Molekule, Handy, and Linode. And we will talk to you next week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, check podcast so long.

Post-show: “Bees” update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I’m sorry to say guys that we don’t have time for John’s bees update. So we’ll talk to you next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey week Just kidding John tell me about your yellow stripey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things what’s going on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John oh, no, they got him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Well moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I was muted So be update be in scare quotes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they weren’t actually bees Yeah consensus on Twitter about what they are because I tried to take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a blurry picture of a couple of dead ones is that they are yellow jackets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no barbs on the stinger, so gotta watch out. I have still been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing battle with them in shorts and a t-shirt, no stings so far. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John closest they’ve come to winning some kind of victory is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in one of my, what would you call it? One of my brave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John retreats from the swarming animals involving involved me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a ladder as always, because they’re up out of reach. And me departing that ladder very quickly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that ladder going out from underneath my feet sideways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, as you push off in the ladder, you expect I’m going to leap from this ladder and run away. But instead of the ladder staying with all of its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feet on the ground, the ladder decides to tip over sideways. And so that could have been very bad because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have, you know, hard stone underneath the thing that I’m doing. But I landed on my feet and I was fine. I may have pulled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something because I’m old. I can’t tell. Anyway, no stings, no injuries. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mentioned in the last show that it was like, oh, I feel like I’m going to, I’m going to deal with these guys because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can see their entrance and exit and it is small and I will deal with it and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be that. And as it turns out, there are many, many entrances

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and exits in this particular area. So I deal with one, which takes a while, right? With all the masking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the the filling and the unmasking and then the trimming. You’re like, ah, problem solved. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come back the next day and suddenly you see bees flying there. You’re like, where the hell are you going? Good thing bees are stupid because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they don’t hide. They show me where the next entrance and exit is. It’s like, I just see where the bees are going now. Ah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re going in there. So mask, fill, unmask, trim,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know. And so I feel like how many ways in and out can there be? Like now I’ve got them all. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s all sealed up. It’s all beautiful. There’s no bees, right? Everybody’s, I keep calling them bees, but you know, yellow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jackets, whatever. I’m just gonna call them bees from now on. So everything’s fine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And yet now I think they’re, either the bees are mostly defeated or they’re trolling me because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current place, first of all, they’re not all gone. And the current place where I see them going, like, see if this makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to you. You know, like I have asphalt shingles, right? And there’s asphalt shingles near where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they are. And asphalt shingles are overlaps. You put one down and then you put the next one down, mostly overlapping the previous sheet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so on, right? And near the edge of the roof,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the overlap between the two sheets that are on the edge, like the first course you’re doing at the edge,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sometimes you overlap 100%, right? So there’s a gap between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the top layer and bottom layer of asphalt shingles, like they’re pried apart a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now I see these stupid things going into the gap between the top and bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John layer of the most outermost asphalt shingles. And I’m thinking to myself, that can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lead anywhere. Like, yeah, sure, maybe the asphalt shingles are like pried apart a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s going to very quickly taper, like they’re not, it’s not like a hole through there. Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there a hole at the bottom of the asphalt shingle? Like where are they even going? And here’s the problem. The small group of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bees that I see now go in there, and I also see bees come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, again, not bees, But since all bees look the same, I can’t tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are these the same stupid bees that are going in there and going, well, no place to go, I guess I’ll fly back out again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Or are they going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in and one of the thousands of other pals are coming out because there’s a hole in the bottom of the thing and they’re going in and out. And now I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faced with a quandary. Do I try to plug up and fill

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the gap between my asphalt shingles as if it leads somewhere? I don’t want to put any kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of filler there. I could try to smush the shingles close to each other, but I’ve done that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a couple of times, but A, if I do that, I’m going to crush a bunch of bees and anger a bunch of other ones, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John B, I don’t know how I would hold them together because they just spread back apart. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a mystery. I’m right now thinking that I have actually sealed up all the entrances and exits that I know about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then these are just stupid, sad bees that are trapped outside that are being like, maybe I can go into the shingle gap. Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe I can go into the shingle gap. Nope. You know what I mean? The same stupid ones going in and out. That could be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the case, but I can tell you that there’s still, at least five, six, seven, eight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of them flying around there doing that. So I’m waiting them out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve done a lot of filling and a lot of masking. All those excursions have been successful. I’ve in fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John run out, not run out of, this is the problem with that expanding foam insulation. They tell you that those things are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reusable, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} length that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to go through to be able to successfully reuse one of those are ridiculous. And I reused one can about like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John five times, and now I’m pretty much at my limit I think it’s like dried up and clogged like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} can. Yeah, it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you’re lucky you can reuse it at all. Like usually it’s like those cans are basically single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use. Yeah, they should be single use. But for my application, since I’m using so little of it and since I don’t know where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new entrances and exits are going to be, I can’t do that. So I’m using my my years on skills of making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those things last through five or six uses, which is not easy. And you know, it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, eventually think they get clogged way down in the little thing that goes into the can. And I don’t know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to unclog that. So I have a second can of stuff that’s not as good. So anyway, I may need to resupply and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John regroup. The weather actually got cold here a little bit a couple days ago and that has really tamped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them down. So in the end, winter will solve this problem for me. But for now I’m gonna say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the battle wage is on more quietly than before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I’m winning. There are far fewer bees than there used to be. I still have not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gotten stung or injured and I’ve I’ve sealed up a bunch of holes, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still there and they’re still doing something. So you know further

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updates as events

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco warrant. I’m curious we got a bunch of listener feedback and suggestions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m wondering if maybe you followed any of them. My favorite one that was suggested was the guy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who suggested squirting a bit of gasoline

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} into your house that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the fumes killed them pretty quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could possibly go wrong squirting gasoline into your house?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. To this person’s credit, he did say, but maybe that’s not something you maybe you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to squirt gasoline into your walls. You are correct, sir. I do not want to squirt gasoline into my walls.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That said, it’s not like that. I’m even sure that like the the wasp killer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff is any more or less flammable than gasoline. But I know for sure gasoline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty flammable, pretty stinky. I’m not putting that in my house. So thanks for the suggestion. But I think I’ll pass.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’ve got some more dead ones. I’ve got quite a collection of dead ones going because sometimes they get stuck in the foam as it’s curing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then are they they get caught in the fumes of the foam and just fall to their death? And so I’ve got a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of B bodies hanging around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are actually yellow jackets, which are not even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bees. I know. I just it’s easier to call them bees.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like, yeah, I mean, at least like yellow jackets. I feel like you lost the lottery. Like they’re like that’s the worst kind to have because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re like the biggest jerks that are commonplace to form

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hives and things. They’re absolutely jerks. Like the time I almost fell and killed myself was like, they just, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like, you see, just exactly as in your nightmares that you’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do something to this small area and all of a sudden they flood forth in a giant,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you thought you were fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re mostly gone, you’re carefully putting masking tape around and you just like poke something the wrong way and like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hundred of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} come out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vroom, and just like, you know, out of there. Yeah, that was close. I can’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s how I hurt myself because like my shoulder and my neck hurt. I didn’t fall or anything. I landed on my feet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but maybe just the shock of it and leaping off the ladder. Who knows? I’m old. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no stings and no sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John injuries to speak of. So I think I’m doing pretty well. And I like the fact that I haven’t had to get up in a B-suit or anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m actually kind of impressed with the amount that you’ve done that you haven’t gotten any stings and the fact that you’re all

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} jacked up. Me too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was, after I realized that I had to seal up five different places, I’m like, Now you’re just pressing your luck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like you get away with it once, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now, like how many times are you gonna go up there where these things buzzin’ around and you carefully, like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, maybe I’ve become one of the tribe. But I doubt it. And also, I think the cooler weather is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John helping. I think they are less active in cool weather.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s not freezing, though. I don’t think it’s cool enough for them to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you know, fix the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John matter. Well, I guess since it’s the 70s, after the weather we’ve been having, it’s like 70 degrees. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the windows. Better pack up for winter. Yep. Huh.