289: Everybody's in the Alliance
30 Aug 2018Diving into cutting-edge technologies: coaxial cable, the AirPort Express, and printers.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- The AirPort Express lives!
- The End of AirPort
- iPhone mockups preview
#askatp:- Why run both Plex and Infuse? (via Adam Porter)
- Why are Apple's ARM chips so much faster than their competitors? (via Will Faught)
- What's your home printer setup? (via Mark Igloliorte)
- Post-show:
- John's 🐝
- Casey's Car Conundrum
Sponsored by:
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- Techmeme Ride Home: The day's tech news, every day at 5 PM, from Silicon Valley's most-read news source. 15 minutes and you're up to date.
Chapters
- The iMac is back
- Handles
- Follow-up: MoCA
- Follow-up: NUCs
- Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home
- AirPort Express update (?!)
- Sponsor: Gray Langur
- iPhone rumors
- Sponsor: Jamf Now
- #askatp: Plex and Infuse
- #askatp: Apple vs. other ARMs
- #askatp: Printers
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Bees and BMWs
The iMac is back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who would have guessed that we would have spent so much time tonight talking about printers and the airport
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Truly, this is why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this show truly is
⏹️ ▶️ John the dog days of summer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is why I love this show cuz every time I’m like oh, this is gonna take no time It takes six hours and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco every time you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know I think this is gonna take 14 hours Then we’ll have we’ll say three things and that’ll be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac has made it back and it appears to have made it back So I mean I’ve only been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for about an hour right now now, but it appears to have made it back fine. I managed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to get any more dust in the bag because I cleaned off the bottom vents before I put it in the bag this time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I decided to avoid carrying the bag by just placing it into a wheeled wagon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which made it much more pleasant to carry and partially removed the need for the bag, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh well. The iMac is back. It seems to have survived the trip. I am once again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly happy that that’s the choice I took on like how to compute this summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because boy did I do a lot of programming and every time I watched those CPU bars and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iStat menus max out all 10 cores I was very very happy I had this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and during the week that I was home and had only my 13-inch with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stupid LG ultra fine display that was nice it was fine but I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very glad that for the rest of the summer I wasn’t using that setup because having the laptop with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that external display and all the stupid bugs and crashes that resulted from it I’m just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad I didn’t have to deal with those rest of the summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is your T2 crashing going? So since 10.13.6 I have not had a single
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the laptops they just came out with a another update presumably to address that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and I the only one I ever had with the laptop was when the LG UltraFine was connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I was not using, and that only happened, I think, once or twice during that week. When I was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it with that stupid LG monitor, there were no problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully these will all be sorted out by the time my Mac Pro with the T3 unit comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I know I’ve said it before, I’ll probably say it again, the iMac Pro is just so awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so, so great. And I’m incredibly happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that mean you don’t have to buy a Mac Pro when it comes out because that would save me a whole lot of booze.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh well you know I’m gonna buy one anyway I’ll find a reason. I can’t not buy one I mean this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey entire show is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro like we is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have you seen the artwork ever?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I have any say in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork? Or last year’s t-shirt?
⏹️ ▶️ John The tyranny of the majority Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Two against one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry. There is no way that this show is not gonna be about the Mac Pro. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never gonna happen. And now you quit your job so you’re stuck with us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know. There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It occurred to me it would be funny if I could somehow convince myself to buy a Mac Pro, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time I open up Final Cut is a pretty good time, pretty good reason or way to convince myself. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how funny would it be if I was the first of the three of us with a Mac Pro? Which, to be clear, I don’t expect that to happen at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, at all, at all. But just walk down this hypothetical road with me how funny would it be if somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ended up with a Mac Pro before you two numbnuts? You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John become a single car family you have all this extra money you all know what to do with. Yeah. No
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I know this is sacrilege to one of the hosts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show at least but if the iMac Pro was it I’d be incredibly happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. It’s awesome. Like the iMac Pro is a Mac Pro glued
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a monitor like that’s what it is and it It happens to be the monitor I would want to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. The only reason why I would really think to get one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is probably what’s going to drive my choice, is what I did this summer. I was on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vacation for a couple of months, and I wanted a computer that I could take with me there that could be as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful as my home desktop, and it made the most sense to have it be my home desktop. And that kind of sucked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring it there and back. Honestly, it didn’t suck that badly, but it was inconvenient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of a risk to bring this whole giant glass screen there and back. I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the Mac Pro be a separate thing from the monitor. That way I could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep a monitor there and keep a monitor here and just bring the little tower. Funnily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, the trash can Mac Pro would have been perfect for this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t expect whatever the new Mac Pro is to be that small and portable, but it’s probably still going to be small-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and portable-ish compared to an iMac. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be a reason to look into one for me. That might be how I rationalize it. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m incredibly happy with the iMac Pro. Right now, I don’t need more performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 10 cores are rarely maxed out for more than about 10 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t do a lot of video transcoding like you do. of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do is like short bursts of extreme power. Things like, you know, what Xcode does when it’s compiling or archiving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or things like that. Like I’ve been doing a lot of that, but I don’t make video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t edit video. Ten cores is plenty for the things I do that are very heavy duty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m actually really happy with this and I actually don’t have a strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to get the Mac Pro right now. But you
Handles
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s that one area of Mac Pro speculation that maybe we never actually touched on
⏹️ ▶️ John For a long time the big Pro tower Macs had handles
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know the iMac had handles and stuff like that the trash can no handles really but it’s so small
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it doesn’t need them. I’m wondering if the handles will come back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you can just put your hand you put your hand like under that lip on the top and just kind of pick it up Like that. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was so small. I think putting a handle on it would have looked weird
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m assuming that like you said that the new one is going to be bigger. And so maybe maybe there’ll be a triumphant return of handles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That honestly, that would be very pragmatic. But I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handles would be something that does not look nice, but is used for ergonomics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are the chances of today’s Apple doing something that makes it look worse but improves ergonomics?
⏹️ ▶️ John not that’s not how they work though uh handles are skeuomorphic right so
⏹️ ▶️ John imitate the form of a thing that is no longer actually the thing and they’re not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John skeuomorphic but anyway the the uh power mac g5 and the mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John have things that look like handles on them but anyone who has ever carried or
⏹️ ▶️ John lifted those computers by those handles knows they are a cruel imitation of handles they look
⏹️ ▶️ John like it but they don’t function like it and arguably they’re like this device
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t not that it doesn’t need handles, but they don’t it shouldn’t really have them in that way because they
⏹️ ▶️ John cut into your hands. They’re very sharp edge that if you can, if you can like plank your hands underneath them so they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then I guess it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John than no handles. But that’s not how you would naturally want to grab them. Whereas on the
⏹️ ▶️ John the old Yosemite case, no, not the operating system, the other one where they were out at an angle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were rounded on the bottom those actually didn’t feel that bad they still could dig in a little bit because the
⏹️ ▶️ John machines were heavy but especially like on the quicksilver where they were but they were rounded like it was rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John on both sides it wasn’t just like sharp edges on the bottom like the the g3 and g4 was they were relatively
⏹️ ▶️ John comfortable so at this point handles are kind of like the the kidneys on the grill of a BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John right it’s just it’s a thing you know you have to have didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to but it’s a branding thing for tower Mac computers for many many years it was
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they got rid of it when they got rid of the tower computers. I’m not sure this new one’s going to be anything like a tower, but if it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it would be really cool if it had handles. So Apple, if you’re listening, scratch all your plans and add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow. Yeah, yeah. All right. Can we move on from the Mac Pro? How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does how does this always happen? And I think half the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s my fault. I believe you brought it up. It was your
⏹️ ▶️ John fault. You’re like, what if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I got a Mac Pro? Somehow, I say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those two dirty words. It’s like Beetlejuice, right? You say it once, though with you two and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of a sudden it’s—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Beetlejuice is one word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. What did I just—no, no, no. I’m saying—never mind. I don’t even know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just said. The point— Beetlejuice.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you were to take a beetle and juice it in a juicer, that’s two words. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not even worth it. I’m not even going to get into it. All right. Let’s start with some follow-up. So here’s the thing.
Follow-up: MoCA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, genuinely, I’m not trying to be stark. I really mean this. Marco is genuinely a tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ John Your introduction is it clarifies something for me, Casey, because I know where you’re going with this. And I was confused about it the whole week.
⏹️ ▶️ John So please explain to me what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 99% of the time, Marco makes very good edits. I probably sound like I’m being sarcastic. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. I really and truly mean it. Almost always, Marco makes all three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us sound so much smarter and so much better than really any of the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us are. But every great once in a while, something hits the cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room floor and we all have to pay the price. So Marco, tell us about what happened last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so in last week’s Ask ATP, we had a listener ask us about options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for extending Wi-Fi throughout their house. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we talked about, like, because they had asked about power line networking. And so we talked about that. We talked about repeaters, talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about mesh systems. And a million people wrote in to tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mocha, which is the technology that allows you to basically… it’s kind of like what power line networking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, but it does it over coax cable. Because you know most houses, especially American houses, most houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are wired for coax. And so you know that’s also an option you have. And coax has a lot of bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to power lines and is usually a little bit better grade cable. So anyway, So these things exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do the same thing over mocha. Turns out, we knew that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least Casey knew that. Because Casey spent about five minutes talking about it during his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco initial response to that question. That episode was running pretty long. It was like, it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kissing that two hour mark and I tried to keep it below that and we had a bunch of good stuff to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than that. So I thought, you know what, this mocha diversion, let me just cut it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this obscure technology, probably no one has ever heard of it. And probably it’s so obscure, no one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever used it. And no one’s going to miss it if we don’t mention this option. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which to be fair, to be fair, knowing what you knew then, I think is a reasonable conclusion to come
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable. It’s not obscure. It was used all the time. Like who hasn’t at least, you know, dabbled
⏹️ ▶️ John in mocha? Because it was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your friends? Where do you hang out?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the US, coax cable is everywhere in people’s houses. Ethernet is not. And power
⏹️ ▶️ John line networking, as you noted in the last episode, is slow and old. So if you need a
⏹️ ▶️ John very high bandwidth sturdy wire that goes from one room of your house to another, chances are good
⏹️ ▶️ John that you already have coax there. And lots of cable companies and TV companies and TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other things have had options to do mocha to get faster networking
⏹️ ▶️ John around your house. This is also like pre Wi-Fi. So I don’t think it’s all that obscure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I understand your point, but I don’t even remember how I found out about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I think a friend of mine just mentioned, Oh, you know, you could get a mocha bridge and that will turn coax into ethernet and ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into coax. And you can just treat your, your coaxes though it’s ethernet. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, man, that’s how you get, you know, you have, that’s how your set top boxes, pull IP addresses and they get their program guide blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah. What? I had no idea this was a thing until somebody told me about it. And so like Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried to tell all of you about it and justifiably Marco thought nobody would care because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly I didn’t think anyone would but oh were we wrong. So we are aware of MoCo. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a couple links about it. It is multimedia over Coax Alliance and just like Marco said it’s basically just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treating it you can treat your coaxial cable that you would would use for, say, cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, at least in the United States, you can run network packets over it. And so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use that, just like Marco said, as a kind of poor person’s way to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your house wired for Ethernet without actually wiring your house for Ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fun! I was going to ask you, too, if you could say what MOCA stood for, because you can kind of—you can date it
⏹️ ▶️ John by the fact that the M stands for multimedia. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then you can further
⏹️ ▶️ John criticize it by the fact that the CA isn’t, like, coaxial
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything the C is for coax and the A is for Alliance mm-hmm
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s in the Alliance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know to be honest I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John put everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody’s in the Alliance it’s aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t you Marco aren’t you in the Alliance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently if I were if I were in the Alliance I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to cut that segment from the show John clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in the Alliance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Alliance currently has 45 members including pay TV operators OEMs CE manufacturers and IC vendors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco directors and John Syracuse and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Sarkeesian, the board of directors consists of Ares Broadcom Comcast Cox Direct TV Echo Star
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel Max linear and Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John Since I had my own house, I ran cat six everywhere, right, but I didn’t always have my own house
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve run cat six throughout the house, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve run it where I need to run and not throughout the house because that would be that would be quite a task given
⏹️ ▶️ John the Age of my house, but it goes where you know, my television is hooked up to a wire my computer is hooked up to a wire
⏹️ ▶️ John my Synology is hooked up to a wire Wi-Fi is just for the lesser devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John hooked up to ethernet and I have the Wi-Fi turned off on it so it won’t even try to use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah fair enough so anyway so yeah so we are aware of Mocha and now despite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s best efforts now you are too. You’re welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s gonna cut that segment when they’re worried about it. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s running kind of long. I probably should.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh god, stop. Alright, quickly, quickly, quickly.
Follow-up: NUCs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Nick Donnelly said stuff and let’s get into the topics. Nick Donnelly said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, you guys need to check out the fairly new Hades Canyon NUX from Intel, which apparently has a model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designation, which is so memorable. Eight lowercase I, seven uppercase H, uppercase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey V, uppercase K. Nick writes, I bought one at launch and it’s amazing. And there’s a YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video that Nick provided. It’s half the size of the current Mac mini with power midway between an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an iMac Pro. what the what. Tell me more about this please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so last episode I when we were talking about Mac minis and the topic of NUCs came up I hadn’t really followed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the NUC market but apparently there are some really fast ones recently and they actually do go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty high end in like the roughly the thousand dollar price range. So yeah, they are kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of right there with what the Mac mini is trying to be or should be. So, yep, turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out because I was saying something like it was kind of like netbook hardware kind of stuff like you know just super cheap low end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low power stuff or like the 5 watt family of chips and nope turns out they make really good high-end ones too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s pretty cool and and also I did want to point it also you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so these are these are super small but while still having you know this kind of power and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the topic came up last week during the Mac Mini discussion of like should they make it smaller and I was kind of leaning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards no because I don’t think it needs to be that much smaller you know it could be a little smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think it needs to be dramatically smaller and if they made it dramatically smaller they’d probably do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that by cutting off a whole bunch of ports and that’s something I really don’t want them to do because that would greatly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduce its usefulness as a kind of like patch over edge cases machine. But one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t think I brought up but I regretted afterwards is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they should finally make it SSD only and this might be what that weird rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was referring to with a pro focus configuration only, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro could just mean it has a T2 and SSD only.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just assuming it would be SSD only. Like I’m assuming every new Mac is going to be SSD only. I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, it’ll be interesting to see what they do with the 5K iMac, but, but yeah, like for something this small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives are going away. Right, exactly. And, and that’s, this is an area where like, you know, in the, in the 50 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the last Mac mini update happened, SSDs have gotten even cheaper. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with With Mac Mini punitive upgrade pricing that they have on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product line, the pricing of the SSD upgrades till now has been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obscene. I know because I got one on mine when I ordered it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But today I think they could offer it reasonably, even with their ridiculous margins on this machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for somewhat reasonable prices to have the base model be a 128 or a 256 SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they did that, if you look at what they did with the iMac, with the iMac Pro rather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by changing out what was a hard drive based enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making it SSD only, it gave them massively more room inside for this huge cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparatus with the iMac Pro that can cool a much higher thermal load and be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quieter. So obviously taking out that spinning disk out of the enclosure made a pretty big difference. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a smaller scale, in a few different ways, but on a smaller scale, the Mac Mini could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Taking out the hard drive, if you look at a teardown of these things, that actually opens up quite a lot of real estate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t really need to be that much quieter, it’s already pretty quiet even under load. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think thermally they could easily fit the quad-core 28-watt chips from the new MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, you could easily fit those in there and have really quiet cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably still have room to make it smaller. Now what I don’t expect is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this Intel NUC did by getting… it made itself smaller by making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it not a square, it’s a rectangle, so it kind of like lopped off the front of the square basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s for a lot of practical design reasons, one of which is that it has all the ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that needs room for. Although also keep in mind, this NUC cheats, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses an external power supply. This is a wonderful cheat kind of like the original Xbox 360.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right with the head that massive brick behind it. That was like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third the size of the Xbox as this external brick. This NUC has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that where the power supply is this huge rectangle that sits outside of it. Mac Mini does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the nice thing and puts the power supply in the computer such that you only need a nice thin power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable on the outside and not like this huge brick to sit somewhere behind your TV and collect dust. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect the Mac Mini, if it’s going to have these kind of components and this class of thermals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, it’s probably not going to be able to get that much smaller. It probably can get a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and that’s fine, but I would not expect a huge savings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in size, but certainly some. Or they could, as you said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week John, thoroughly ruin it and give it no ports and give it the MacBook Air class everything or the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying you have it a MacBook Pro class everything, but still just to USB thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John ports. And that’s it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John have the good and it would be it would be like the the MacBook pros great internals trapped in a case with
⏹️ ▶️ John no holes in it. Yeah, maybe. So for the size thing, I think they could make it this small. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m inspired by the Apple TV pucks, which have always had internal power supplies
⏹️ ▶️ John and have always been very, very tiny, right? another great thing about the Apple TV was, you know, we take that on vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John with us and stuff that internal power supply in that tiny little thing. Um, Nick sent a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John specs of this thing just so people can get an idea of what it is. One clever thing that it does is has an AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John RX Vega GPU on the same dies. I don’t know what’s on the same dive in the same package as the, maybe it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the same day, I don’t know as the I seven CPU. So it’s got a decent GPU not made
⏹️ ▶️ John by Intel. So not until integrated graphics shoved into the same package, possibly also the same
⏹️ ▶️ John die, I don’t know, as the i7. It can drive six 4K monitors at 60 hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has six USB type A ports, three Thunderbolt 3 ports, two HDMI, two mini display port,
⏹️ ▶️ John SD card, two gigabit ethernet ports, audio front and back, including TOSlink. No Mac has
⏹️ ▶️ John that many ports, including the iMac Pro. Probably the Mac Pro also won’t have that many ports. This thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is half the size of a Mac mini, if you recall. We put a link to Jason Snell’s article where he was showing
⏹️ ▶️ John how he replaced his Mac mini with a knock you can see how much smaller it actually is i want to use
⏹️ ▶️ John this vapor chamber cooling uh and has room for a big quiet fan in it and is
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently vr capable so if i was just reading you the specs of the new mac pro and those were the
⏹️ ▶️ John specs about the ports it would be like wow that amazing versatility and power and this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John puck size thing so it’s kind of depressing for the mac mini possibly also depressing for the
⏹️ ▶️ John mac pro apple the gauntlet has been thrown by a stupid $1,000 nook in terms of
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AirPort Express update (?!)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something has come back from the dead, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It turns out the Airport Express
⏹️ ▶️ John More like a zombie really, if you can imagine coming back from the dead. Phoenix is triumphant, a zombie is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, well I was dead and now I’m not dead but kind of undead.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John still dead but improved. Yeah, but now I’m immune to the laws of thermodynamics.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Something like zombies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. So, anyway, so what happened over the last few days is that the Airport Express got a firmware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update, much to everyone’s surprise, that gives it AirPlay 2 and Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app support. Really? I don’t even know what to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you recall, the Airport Express is a little tiny Wi-Fi, tiny is probably aggressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But a small Wi-Fi router that that Apple used to sell about 44 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the what is it the second gen one, some of them can be turned into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey airplay to receivers, which is really, really surprising and cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the home the airplay receiver thing makes sense to me basically, if you’re if you have any device that can airplay
⏹️ ▶️ John and you go to pick your airplay like you want to play audio from your phone onto your home pod or any other airplay
⏹️ ▶️ John cable. Now your airport express is also a thing and the airport express of course doesn’t have speakers in it. So what that
⏹️ ▶️ John means is you’re going to airplay to the airport express and on the airport express is ta-da
⏹️ ▶️ John a headphone jack that you can connect up to a set of speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and also many
⏹️ ▶️ John optical. Yeah, so you have a way to get sound out of this little thing. It’s a way to wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John send sound to this little box and this little box is presumably connected to something that plays sound like a set of speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John or stereo system or you you know, an iPod, high fire or whatever, uh, in the case of Jason’s now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but the home hub thing, what does that mean? I don’t understand. I don’t, I guess I don’t have any,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only home apple, what the hell is it called? Home kit. The only home kit device I have is the home pod
⏹️ ▶️ John and it, you know, I think I launched the app once and it, you know, it doesn’t resonate with me cause I don’t have any lights to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John this mean you can connect a light to the, I don’t, I don’t know what it means cause like
⏹️ ▶️ John the airport express already does wifi. So if you need to connect to one of your devices over Wi-Fi, there’s no firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John update was needed for that. So do one of you know what this means? Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Apparently, you can assign it a room. But other than that, no, I have no idea. And I have precisely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero home kit devices in my house. So shrug. But what Snell did with it was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ridiculous because the iPod Hi-Fi is what, like 44 years old now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Tim Cynova I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think connecting this to an iPod Hi-Fi to make an AirPlay 2 iPod Hi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just about the most perfect thing you could possibly to do with this new ability. Made me laugh for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure. This is so nice, because as somebody who likes to dabble in a bunch of audio weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, it’s nice that we have these wonderful little integrated speakers now. We have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Echo and the HomePod and whatever Google’s air freshener is called. We have these things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want a little integrated experience where you hate speakers, you don’t want to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, you might also hate sound quality, and you want this little thing that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small, integrated as possible and has only one wire coming out of its butt and you don’t want to deal with anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great. We need options like that. But a lot of people also have different needs or different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities or different wants and they might want a line in or a line out or optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in or optical out to integrate with a system they already have or some larger system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some you know some other you know capability that they want or need. And so often when you when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have these you know proprietary locked down walled gardens of these media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems that we have these days with the Amazon stuff and the HomeKit and the Airplane and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that and Sonos. So often you don’t have many or any options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for let me connect this to something else because they want you to buy their expensive hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like Sonos is the like one of the biggest offenders in this area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want a Sonos line out device to connect to basically you know Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable some other kind of speaker or device that can take an input the only option they have for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I think is called the Sonos Connect it’s this $300 I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little like giant box that is about the size of two Mac mini stacked on top of each other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and that’s like you’ve just been like $300 to have that ability with Sonos and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just that sucks you know or like I think like one of their big speakers I I think the 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series might have a line in jack on it, but of course the small ones don’t. It’s just a pain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have an option like this for AirPlay 2 really opens up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doors, even though this is a pretty obscure thing, even though I think, even when this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Airport Express was new, when it was sold, I don’t think they sold very many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And certainly, even if the software update makes you wanna buy one, too bad you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t. I mean, maybe you can go to eBay, like Apple doesn’t sell these new anymore. But still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have any more options for participating in the AirPlay 2 ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just really nice. And what we’re seeing, we’re seeing basically from the early part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this year when the HomePod launched and AirPlay 2 was delayed and delayed and delayed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t look good for AirPlay 2. It looked like it was just never gonna happen or it’s gonna become you know even later and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out really slowly and come out you know in a really buggy bad state and maybe only ever be on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the home pod and nothing else and what we’re seeing instead is AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes it was pretty embarrassingly late but now that it’s here it does tend to work pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s spreading really quickly like you know the aforementioned Sonos they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 2 support on a lot of their speaker models that I don’t own they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s coming to none of the ones I own apparently but that’s that sucks for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, but you know, that’s AirPlay 2 integration with them. There’s AirPlay 2 integration, of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course, with the HomePod when it launched. The AirPlay 2 integration into iOS and into Control Center and the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is really good and really useful to the point where I actually like it way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than listening to either the horrendous Sonos app ecosystem or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty clunky and horrible Amazon Echo app and service for music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management. It’s Airplay 2. I gotta give it credit. It looked like it had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bad start, but once it got out the gate, it has been spreading like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy, and I’m really happy to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of bringing things back from the dead, I have pulled an item from
⏹️ ▶️ John the way down in the bottom of the document from four months ago. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John A topic titled, The End of Airport, in which I wanted to talk about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John deciding that it’s not going to sell Wi-Fi things anymore. And looking at the little picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of the the airport express, Jason again, Jason put a picture of it on six colors dot com.
⏹️ ▶️ John Looking at that little white box looks like basically a little white colored Apple TV with two ethernet ports
⏹️ ▶️ John in the back, a USB a port and then the audio jack
⏹️ ▶️ John and internal power supply with a little cable plugged into it makes me once again sad
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has decided to narrow its business to quite the degree
⏹️ ▶️ John it has because I’m a person who used to buy Apple Wi-Fi things
⏹️ ▶️ John because they were more expensive and they usually weren’t the best you could buy like you get better performance out of
⏹️ ▶️ John non-Apple things but they had good integration with Apple’s technologies of the day whether that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John printer sharing or bonjour or whatever their software for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with them was nicer than going to some ugly web interface or whatever they were very
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable for for me. And like I it was it was just another decision
⏹️ ▶️ John that I didn’t have to make that I could just buy Apple Wi-Fi and use it in my house until
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wi-Fi standards got so old that I had to replace it. And I would I would go for years and years with it. That’s why I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to get rid of my old one. I didn’t want to have to buy a third party thing. I got a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of used ones on eBay and then Marco sent me his old one. I’m still using the one Marco sent me, even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John And we talked about before with USB hubs and Apple has never really made those, but it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ John me kind of sad that Apple just wants to sell you the things with the highest margin
⏹️ ▶️ John that sell in the highest number and is less interested in providing the
⏹️ ▶️ John overall Apple experience. They don’t even want your money. I don’t care how much money you give us, it’s not worth our time
⏹️ ▶️ John to upgrade the airports to be like mesh network things. Apple could have made Eero, right? Eero is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple-like product. Apple didn’t make Eero. instead let its airport line languish
⏹️ ▶️ John until they were completely obsolete, ridiculous, and then just can the whole business. But this little box, like Mark was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, a little thing like this, there’s plenty of third party things you could buy that do this. But are they flaky?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do they work with all your Mac stuff? Do they have airport to support? Like it was nice when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John made these type of things. There probably weren’t being profit centers, but it’s not like from a customer
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, it’s nice to be able to go into an Apple store and say, here’s the situation I want to do X, Y and Z. And for them to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John We have some products we can sell you. We know they’ll work with your max. They’ll be supported apparently forever, even
⏹️ ▶️ John after we stop selling them, they’ll get new features and they’re generally reliable and sturdy and have warranties
⏹️ ▶️ John and look nice. Like the reason you buy Apple stuff. It’s part of it’s a it’s a smaller version of why I was so upset
⏹️ ▶️ John about Apple not making monitors anymore because I was a monitor is way more important than USB hubs or
⏹️ ▶️ John dongles or printers for that matter. You two don’t remember when Apple made printers, they did to varying degrees of success.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey airport, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see, Apple made, Apple made great printers in the beginning. Then they made terrible printers. Then they didn’t make printers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So most people aren’t sad about Apple not making printers anymore because they just remember making the terrible printers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they did make great printers at one time. Um, and I’m not saying Apple needs to get back into the printer business and that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John sold scanners. They had CD ROM drives like Apple sold external hard drives like they sold everything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It, it makes sense to narrow it, but I guess they’re expanding it again. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells a cylinder that you can talk to, right? But the WiFi stuff just seems,
⏹️ ▶️ John I love the Eero stuff, but Eero doesn’t sell anything like this Airport Express, and Eero doesn’t sell anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little, the equivalent of a Sonos dongle type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could sell a dedicated HomeKit hub for less money than an Apple TV, or for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who didn’t want an Apple TV, or people who didn’t want to have a, I don’t know. I just, I really miss
⏹️ ▶️ John airport. I really miss the whole product line and everything about it, and I’m gonna be sad when my
⏹️ ▶️ John awkward skyscraper thing that Marco gave me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco finally dies and I have to buy some
⏹️ ▶️ John non-Apple Wi-Fi thing. And by the way, I’m using Eero for the Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just using the Apple thing as a router. I have the Wi-Fi turned off on it. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because all my settings are in there for all my configuration, and it’s nice to use the airport utility app to manage
⏹️ ▶️ John it, even though I’m not even using the Wi-Fi in it. That’s how dedicated I am to the airport
⏹️ ▶️ John product line. So, yeah, I just wanted to follow. This is from April of this year, four months
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, that they killed that business, and no one seemed to care except for maybe me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, when the, I don’t remember when it was, but at some point I started using,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was one, and then for a while, two airport expresses, and I’m talking the original airport expresses that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked like a slightly elongated power adapter for a laptop, which is the one that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictured in the TechCrunch article. I used that as my only in-home Wi-Fi for a while. And I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was still using the Verizon router, but that one or two Airport
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Express or Expresses, those were my WAPs, my Wi-Fi access points
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the longest time. Then eventually I got an Airport Extreme, one of the ones that looks like a Mac mini. So again, pretty old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I used that for a really long time. In fact, I think I used that until eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got sent some Euro stuff for free since they were sponsoring the show. And I think that’s when I finally replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because I just didn’t have a need otherwise. And I remember for the longest time I had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was it? Linksys? Is that right? Linksys routers and through like college and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the beginnings of being in the house and they were always flaky. I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cool kid thing to do would be to run like DDWRT or what was it like Tomato or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, John, you never bothered with. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know about
⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff. You’re right. I didn’t bother with it. But I certainly knew about this is part of what made me so happy to have an airport. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco never wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to mess with the firmware on my Wi Fi router. I wanted it to be an appliance. And it was I plugged in, I set it up. I never
⏹️ ▶️ John thought about it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, what was it like the WRT 54 G or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drilled into my head because that was the one that would work that you could like flash and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John do traffic shaping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, you could do all sorts of real, real cool stuff with this. This links this router. You really could, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was fiddly as crap. It was, you know, it was basically the Linux equivalent of a router,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will. You know, everything was fiddly. None of it works for more than 10 minutes at a time. It was rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so eventually I saw the light and I used AirPorts and I loved it. And now I use Eros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, you know, I love that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think ultimately, like, it is sad that Apple exited that market because they were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for so long, but even when they were in it and even when they were current,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was still, like, they were never, first of all, they were never, of course, price competitive, not even close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s to be expected, really, from Apple stuff, especially from accessories. But they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also never competitive on power user features. They were originally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then not later, competitive on things like range and even throughput.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what happened was, you know, when Wi-Fi was less mature and earlier, very similar, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to printers, when it was like a new market that was not very mature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s version could be better than everyone else’s. And then over time, the amount of effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple was willing to put into it and the types of products Apple was willing to make and sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were less and less competitive. Because the market matured, things got more sophisticated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they moved, they started moving faster, and other people started making really good ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. And Apple just, you know, it wasn’t in Apple’s DNA to keep up aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that and to really, and to make the kind of products that would appeal to power users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keep the price race to the bottom going, you know, and get updated very frequently with all these new standards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more and more antennas and things like that. And then now, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Wi-Fi market now has taken a direction with mesh systems like Eero that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple could have competed in if they wanted to. Like there was, like the entire span from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years after it started until about last year, Apple didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have much to do. If they wanted to put a lot of effort into this market and get back into it again, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do what Eero is doing. But first of all, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less need for it because even though Eero is a sponsor, here’s a disclosure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems like Eero are really good and really solid and really easy to use and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice designs. So there’s a lot less need for Apple to do it because if you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how would Apple do this? Basically, look at Eero. That’s how they would do it. In an ideal case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s already being done, though, by somebody else now, so we don’t really need Apple to do it. But also, that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require a type of investment into an accessory category that I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t see today’s Apple getting into and caring about and prioritizing that strongly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like I said, they’ve narrowed the line, and a lot of the narrowing makes sense, But I think they’ve gone a little bit too far.
⏹️ ▶️ John The HomePod and the Monitor are evidence of that, of the re-expansion. HomePod is a new thing that they’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John made before. Like now we’re gonna make a new kind of device. Why would Apple make a thing like that? Well, because we can. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John have technologies that would work with it, and we can integrate it with our stuff. And the Monitor, take it away, and
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually why would we make a Monitor? That’s a mature market, you know, to your point about being commoditized and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. We have no particular innovation. We don’t make the panels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing though, the Monitor is different. Because as we saw with the LG, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market can’t be trusted to make something great. Like in Wi-Fi, we have lots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi now has great
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco options. We have,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have, we have Eero, but that’s like, if we pretend Eero didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John many great options. Like Eero is the shining light in the mesh network world. Recommending
⏹️ ▶️ John things on Twitter, everyone’s complaining about all the other alternatives that apparently have good performance and test well, but are not
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable. And if Eero goes away, or if Eero suddenly makes a bad product, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re relying on Apple to do. It’s like the USB hubs if there was or the power adapters anchor is our savior there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you know you probably name like one good slightly more expensive brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t you know that’s that’s the risk of letting it allowing third parties to do it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple if Apple had to pick one thing that is synergistic with its other stuff that it’s doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John should have been mesh home networks because they’re doing home kit. They’ve got home kit. They’ve got the home pod.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every one of their devices uses Wi-Fi. That is the one thing that works with the rest of their products. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John CD-ROM drives or printers or scanners or external hard drives or all the other things that they
⏹️ ▶️ John used to make. Those you should definitely leave behind. But even though a lot of those markets are commoditized,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, or iPhone cases for that matter, talk about a commoditized market there. If you make
⏹️ ▶️ John products like that, if they work well with the rest of your stuff, you can still charge a reasonable fee just because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re color coordinated and support Airplay to before anyone else and are you know like
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to make an argument for one line that they could they could they shouldn’t have canceled and they should they should have either bought
⏹️ ▶️ John Eero or been Eero which would have been bad for Eero because then Eero couldn’t be Eero but if like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could have done Eero you know in its best days Apple could have done
⏹️ ▶️ John Eero the same way that Eero did only they’d have an Apple logo on them they’d probably be a hundred dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive but y’all would have bought them and love them. Instead, they just they just sat this
⏹️ ▶️ John one out. So I like I don’t know if they’re not saying they’re going to come back into this market because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they probably don’t see a need for it. But I think like if you if you’re a went away,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I didn’t have your to recommend to my sister, as I discussed on yesterday’s show, I don’t know what I would have done because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I would have recommended a net gear or be or or some other mesh system
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just not quite as nice as the euro. I don’t think she could have set them up herself, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So and I wouldn’t have felt as good recommending something like that. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sad about airport and also was a good product name
⏹️ ▶️ John me made Phil show a jump off a thing onto an air
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. It’s a lot to recommend airport.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also maybe maybe another problem of this market is it’s kind of like the Tiva problem of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every ISP now makes it really really like you have to really try to not use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their Wi-Fi router like they really push them hard because they learned oh we can charge another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional monthly fee if we rent you this terrible Wi-Fi router of ours and then we can control everything and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else so like now like it’s really hard to get an ISP in the US at least to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install something in your house that ends in an Ethernet port that you can plug your own router into
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah well it’s like you said though this this is a time we’re still in that time where
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a burst of innovation during which Apple could charge a premium and have fancy products.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually all of the cable companies and ISPs are going to have mesh network stuff. Now I bet some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John already do, but it’s most of them don’t. Most of them you get one up wifi thing. It makes one network. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John reach into your far bedroom and then you’re then you try to find some sort of extender thing and it never quite works right, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you get something like euro and turn off your thing like eventually mesh network wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John will be everywhere. It’ll come with all of your ISP stuff, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John time of potential innovation and being able to charge a lot will be over, and the only people still buying Euro will be the people who appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the better speeds and certainly the better interface to it, right? But we’re not there yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this was the time for Apple to strike, and they just 100% missed it. And if they wanted to shortcut it, they could have just bought
⏹️ ▶️ John Euro, as the quote that Panzer just retweeted earlier today says. Apple buys small companies
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. I’ve got to find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What is that quote? time
⏹️ ▶️ John to time yeah from time to time we usually don’t talk about why but by the way here are some beats headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and some Euros rebranded and put into different white cases with Apple logos on them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess yeah a row is way better than beats I’d much rather they’ve bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well they got sorry they got a for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Johnny I have mine that’s going well right
⏹️ ▶️ John they got the yeah they
⏹️ ▶️ John the whatever music thing stuff I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John reminded occasionally that I now subscribe to Apple Music because I have a HomePod. I listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to some playlists today, try to let it recommend stuff to me. By
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, so I use the HomePod a lot because I brought the HomePods to the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I figured I’d be doing AirPlay 2 this summer. Spoiler, I didn’t, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out I had a lot of other stuff to do and I didn’t get to that. But I did end up using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod a lot for music and my opinion of the HomePod remains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of lukewarm to positive like I Still really like the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds and I love the integration with my music collection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s in some it’s an occasionally It’s a downside because like if I ask it to play so in for instance if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say play Foo Fighters I think by default it kept playing only the Foo Fighters albums
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have and there’s some I don’t have like some of the newest ones and and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never play those. Or I think by default, it thought I was asking for my collection. But regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, the integration of it with both my music collection and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the killer app, as I mentioned earlier, it’s so nice to have the AirPlay 2 music controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Control Center and be able to hand that to the music app. Because then what you do is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you have an AirPlay 2 session going on something, it’ll show up. If you go to Control Center on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scroll down and it’s in it’s like a separate little blob for each AirPlay 2 group that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have going and if you tap on that it opens it in the music app and then your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has full control over it so you can make it play something else you can skip the track you can adjust the volume with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone’s volume buttons in your pocket it’s so nice like to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that integration with iOS even though Siri is still annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I think I’m liking the HomePod more over time because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration with iOS and iTunes is just so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm, that’s surprising.
Sponsor: Gray Langur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Grey Langer and their Kingdom of the Clouds tour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a new sponsor for us. It’s a pretty interesting one. So what this is, the Kingdom of the Clouds tour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a once in a lifetime, all-inclusive, two-week exploration of one of the world’s least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessible yet astonishingly forward-thinking countries. It’s Bhutan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bhutan is the only place where gross national happiness is a more important factor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than gross national product and tourism is actually regulated there with great care to preserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. So this October 16th, 2018, Grey Langer Tours will return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the fascinating Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for the third annual Royal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Highlander Festival. Last year’s tour was a smashing success. Guests even got to meet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the king of Bhutan. This is pretty awesome. So Grey Langer was founded by Gabriel Kubbage, former
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CEO of Adblock, who founded the company out of a sincere love for Bhutan and the desire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to share that with others. So availability is very limited, there’s only a few slots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left. This once in a lifetime adventure will include two weeks of everything Bhutan has to offer, from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five star lodging in Bhutan’s capital city, to trekking in the northernmost reaches of the kingdom where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will spend their nights as personal guests of the Laya villagers in their homes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re into really cool travel, this sounds like something worth checking out.
iPhone rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to see for yourself, visit graylanger.com, it’s named after the monkey, g-r-a-y-l-a-n-g-u-r.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and look for the Kingdom of the Clouds Tour. This happens this October 16th through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 29th. Thank you so much to Gray Langer for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to get into the new iPhone stuff? That’s going to take 14 hours. Is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we don’t know anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like… Okay. I do want to get into it. in there a while ago, and I want to get into it
⏹️ ▶️ John at the broadest possible level because we haven’t talked about it at all. So this the context of this is a mkb HD
⏹️ ▶️ John video where some he got like physical mockups of what the iPhones are supposed to look like from like
⏹️ ▶️ John part leaks, parts leaks. I’m assuming the reason I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in this is because parts leaks happen all the time and they end up being really, really accurate. So
⏹️ ▶️ John these aren’t actual iPhones. I don’t think they’re actual iPhone cases. They’re like mockups, they’re probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, they’re probably sized down to the micro millimeter, micrometer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry. Um, they’re probably perfect. Like I a hundred percent assume that when
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhones come out, they will look exactly like these things. Plus or minus surface finishes. Right? That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m interested in this video. I’m not interested in someone’s idea of what an iPhone might look like, but I’m just assuming these are all,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, stolen designs and all of the stories I’ve read about the phone say
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is that this is what they’re gonna come out with. Three phones, a really big one, one the size of the 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then one in between that’s cheaper and not all that. And that’s all I wanna talk about. The idea of there being
⏹️ ▶️ John three phones, the idea of them being these sizes and these prices, and what
⏹️ ▶️ John that means for the iPhone and whether we think it’s a good way to go. So because this past year was weird, where
⏹️ ▶️ John they had the 10, but it was super expensive and it didn’t have the home button and had the face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then they also hedged their bets with the eight, which was much more traditional and safe, but they had the same internal. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John was a weird year. And so we were wondering, like what are they gonna do next year? Are they gonna still have
⏹️ ▶️ John an eight type thing around? Are they gonna all look like the iPhone 10? If they do all look like the 10, how do they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a cheap phone? Are they gonna have, what are they gonna replace the plus size with? What are they gonna replace the
⏹️ ▶️ John SE with? Like we don’t know all the details, but I think I’m pretty confident that
⏹️ ▶️ John this three phones in these sizes thing is gonna happen. And I’m not sure how I feel about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to hear what you guys thought about the prospect of a three iPhone 10 future.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them not being OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched this video two or three times. So the video in question is MKBHD. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, he got mock-ups that man, to my eyes, they look like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real. I mean, they’re not, I’m not saying they’re real, but gosh, do they look real? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard for me to tell in this video, not because the video is bad or anything. It’s just hard to tell on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a video exactly how big these are in real life, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes sense. I see them in his hands, but he mentions that he has very big hands. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard for me to visualize, and maybe that’s just a casey problem. But— Oh, God, he uses Pocket Cast?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, he needs it to be on Android, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marketing. You’ve got to get in on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Yeah. Just do some product placement. Sure. Here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, over the last couple of weeks have noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the iPhone 10 is too big for me. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given the options that Apple currently sells, the iPhone 10 is still the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. But in a perfect world, from simply a physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standpoint, I still think the iPhone 10 is a little bigger than I want. I find reaching across the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really difficult, frustratingly so. I am not willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give up enough real estate to go down to like the SE size like that’s just I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll take the discomfort over the lack of real estate, but the 10 just feels too big to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that being said I will continue to buy tens because I think it’s the best overall compromise for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me Yeah, it’s a little bit too big, but I love the OLED screen I love I don’t know if I said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love face ID But I generally quite like face ID and I do think it has gotten a bit better in iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Presumably it will be better still with new hardware this fall. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not as bothered by Face ID as a lot of people. Well, maybe not a lot, but many people seem to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t fathom wanting to go any bigger than the 10. Now this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in contrast to all of the former Plus Club members like Mike Hurley,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Stephen Hackett, like Federico Faticci, and others that all swear by the big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones. And that’s fine for them, that’s fine for them. But I just, I can’t imagine wanting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a plus size version of the iPhone 10. So, but in and of itself, that makes sense, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a bigger phone and you have a regular phone and that’s what we’ve had for the last several years since the iPhone six.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What really kind of confuses me is this in between model that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently is bigger than the iPhone 10, but has an LCD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen and has a single camera lens. What is going on with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller than the Plus. And it’s, yes, sorry, you’re correct. It’s in between the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone X and the iPhone X Plus. Obviously we’re using incorrect names.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what the names will be. Yeah, we don’t know what they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be called. So don’t take this as any implication that we think this is what they’ll be called. But for the purposes of description,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’ll be, according to this video, there’ll be the iPhone X, there’ll be the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone X, but bigger than the iPhone X, and then the biggest still, the iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus. And that middle one just seems so peculiar to me. Not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, mind you, it just seems odd. So I don’t know what to make of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So think about this, think about, you know, the iPhone 10 is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of between the former, like, you know, six and six plus sizes, and we can, are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold. Yeah. It’s kind of an in-between size there. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus size phone has been very successful, and it would not surprise me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the plus phone, like the current generation, so the 8 Plus, it would not surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me if the 8 Plus outsells the 8. I don’t think Apple’s ever said that, although I think they kind of alluded to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in certain data things they’ve noted, but it would not surprise me at all if the 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus outsells the 8. I think the fact is, people really like that plus size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of the people who were holding on to the previous 876 size moved on to the 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People for whom that was too big are either tolerating it or using the SE.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s worth keeping around the 678
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size as long as the SE is there because people who want super small phones to hold,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they use that one. The 678 size is like big-ish, but pretty small by modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards actually. And now a lot of people have upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 10, which is bigger still, and a lot of people want the biggest phone size they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, which was the Plus before, and now it’s sort of the 10 in one dimension, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the other. And when we have whatever they end up calling the 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, and this 6.1 inch supposedly cheaper one, those are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be the big phones to have. Those are going to be the mass market phones. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we’re coming at this from like the old perspective of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smallest slash mid-size phone they sell is the default size that sells the most, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s true anymore. And I think if they’re only going to have one model that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of legacy in certain ways and trying to target a lower cost market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it does make sense to have it be closer to the plus size. And if you, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listed all these like mockups and everything, but I would imagine the, uh, the 6.1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably very close to the size of the plus size phone before. It probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just has, you know, it’s a larger screen because it has the edge to edge design, but it’s probably very similar in size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the six plus. And so I don’t think that’s a bad thing for them to target it. Cause that’s, that has proven to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be incredibly popular. So, if you look at it from that, it’s like the X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever the new version of the X is, the base size of the X as we know it now, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the new six, seven, eight size. That’s the new mid-size phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people who don’t want the biggest phone in the world, but still want a nice new phone. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE, I think, is going away. I frankly, I don’t see the SE continuing. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they were going to update it, they would have. I don’t see that continuing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, I think Steve T.S. or somebody uncovered something about there being like an SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iPhone 7 internals. That sounds totally wrong to me, because the SE already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has iPhone 6s internals. So to bring it forward only one phone generation after what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years? That doesn’t sound right to me. And I certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they don’t do that. And honestly, I know SE people, this is gonna drive you nuts, I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as a developer trying to make interfaces that work on phones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco span this wide range, I can’t wait for the SE phone size to be discontinued. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making interfaces work on that screen is horrible. Because to make the same thing work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a six plus size screen or whatever this new iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus that’s like 10 inches wide is gonna be, making that scale of that and also run on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tiny little iPhone SE screen, ah God it’s a pain in the butt. I really, I can’t wait to drop support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that screen size, however long that takes. But anyway, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup makes sense when you think about, again, just like last week’s episode, the smallest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model doesn’t have to be the cheapest, and the smallest model doesn’t have to be the mass market one. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at also the rest of the market, look at, if you’re considering, if you’re trying to get like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent phone from anybody, look at what your options are if you’re not looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones. Your options are a bunch of Android phones that are all about this size. You’re not looking at things that are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size of the iPhone SE as your competition. You look at a bunch of Android phones that are all pretty cheap and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly six inch, five inch, whatever they are screens. And then you look at the iPhone and it’s like, oh, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you have, 400 bucks? Oh, you have this tiny little thing that looks positively ancient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though it looks good, it looks ancient. And that’s not very competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when somebody’s looking at Android versus iPhones. And so it does make total sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the basic model iPhone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look a lot more like the basic model Android phones, to be more competitive with them. And you need to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger than four inches to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as someone who’s still using a seven now, I kind of feel where Casey’s coming from, and that I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t used a 10, but my wife has 10, so I have encounters with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of wish they had, because the 10 is not that much bigger than the seven. Like if you put them one
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of each other, you see like it’s like mostly taller and it’s just a tiny bit wider. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at it like, oh, it’s basically the same size. But it just feels a little,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it crosses some threshold for me with my size hands. Your mileage may vary, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I look at my seven, I think if they just made an edge to edge screen seven, right that would be a lot more pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would be almost as much as a 10 but anyway that’s you’re never gonna get a phone that’s like exactly the right size
⏹️ ▶️ John for you know they don’t make a phone in in gradations of one millimeter until you pick an exact size you want
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone maker has to pick a couple of sizes you know small medium large tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John small medium large or whatever you know so i think the 10 is is a reasonable compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John for the big giant phone i do not think that will be the best selling one out of these three models because it’s gonna cost 1300
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks. Yeah, right. It’s just gonna be too expensive. I think the reason that the eight plus
⏹️ ▶️ John might have been best selling is because there’s no that was the only big phone option, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the only big phone option and because it was the step down line, you know, because they’d have the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. It was relatively cheaper. So it makes sense for the eight plus to be the best seller. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not think what this behemoth is going to be the best lot. It’ll just be too damn expensive. The one I find most intriguing,
⏹️ ▶️ John though, because that does all make sense to the X is being the new replacement for the X the 10 being the new replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for the 7 you made that mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah you read it all the time um and then like the big giant phone replacing
⏹️ ▶️ John the plus like those those models make perfect sense like i they’re not gonna make the 10 slightly smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John to to satisfy my desire to keep the 7 size right um and of course they’re gonna replace the plus
⏹️ ▶️ John with an edged edge and that’s all good it’s the middle one that’s weird to me and I don’t know how it’s gonna work out
⏹️ ▶️ John right the middle one is a size that really hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ever existed before they’ve just had the small big and the tiny now they’re gonna have tiny with the SE
⏹️ ▶️ John which may be going away regular size which is like the 10 big which is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone that people want big phones and then this in-between size and I think to Marco’s point
⏹️ ▶️ John the in-between size of this middle phone here is most this the size that is the most like
⏹️ ▶️ John generic Android phone you see around right because the generic Android phones aren’t giant but most
⏹️ ▶️ John generic Android phones I seen are also not as small as the 10 they’re the size of this middle phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and this will be cheaper it’s got a single camera instead of dual it’s got LCD instead but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at it in someone’s hand we’re back to the world where all the iPhones look like iPhones and only if you know and cared you
⏹️ ▶️ John know which one is like the fancy you know if you had a six or a seven no one can tell unless you really know
⏹️ ▶️ John what to look for And now if you have any of these models, they all have notches. They all have the little you know They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all have the edge to edge screen. They all have face ID They all look kind of the same so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what this middle phone is going to do Is this gonna be the runaway bestseller just because
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t want to like why would they pay extra? For the one that’s slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John too small and the one that’s slightly too big. This is the perfect size. It’s just right It’s in the middle and it’s cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the camera is not as good but It’s still a good camera
⏹️ ▶️ John Or will people look at that and say, Oh, just so you know, the new iPhones are out. The one in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle is the bad one. The other two are the real ones, the real iPhone, whatever’s right, no, just just by
⏹️ ▶️ John them, right? Because there is that thing, you know, Apple’s customer base has changed a lot. But
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it, like the history of the iPhone 10 is that Apple’s customers usually
⏹️ ▶️ John want the best one, if they can figure out which one that is, and they’ll pay for the more expensive model, the iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ John is consistently been a good seller, like in the beginning was like, Oh, they’re not selling enough of them. And now it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been a strong seller through its entire life because it was so clearly the best iPhone. There
⏹️ ▶️ John were no other options that were in contention for the best iPhone. Even if you liked a bigger phone, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no one who’s getting an eight plus and thinking they got the best iPhone because the 10 is sitting right there with its OLED screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s edge to edge and it’s reading your face and no one is confused. But that all those advantages go out the window.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I’m staring at these phones, which one is the best iPhone, not the one in the the middle. We know that because it’s got the one
⏹️ ▶️ John camera and the LCD screen is the big one the best because it’s the most expensive is the small one
⏹️ ▶️ John the best because it’s the same speed as the big one, but it doesn’t, you know, take up your entire
⏹️ ▶️ John jeans pants pocket. I don’t I don’t know. We’re back to the the seven and seven plus
⏹️ ▶️ John and six and six plus world where it’s hard to tell. And then and then the middle one is
⏹️ ▶️ John just I just feel like it’s a wild card. So I guess it really depends on pricing. If that middle one
⏹️ ▶️ John is just slightly cheaper then I think everything will work out. The middle one is a lot cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that we’re going to have some troubles and in particular it’s going to be troubles for the 10 sized one
⏹️ ▶️ John because the people who want the giant phone and the super expensive one will get it. The people who want a 10
⏹️ ▶️ John sized phone but don’t want to pay as much like I mean Casey I don’t think you could stomach that middle phone because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like size sensitive like I am where you already think the 10 is a little bit too big but other people if they look at the 10
⏹️ ▶️ John and that they might think oh this one’s cheaper and the screen is slightly bigger yeah I’ll get that one
⏹️ ▶️ John so you know I’m sure Apple knows what they’re doing I’m sure they’ll they’ll price these things right or name them right or market
⏹️ ▶️ John them in the right way but I find this lineup of phones to be the most interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing they’ve done like even more interesting than last year leaving the the 8 and 8 plus because that was explicable
⏹️ ▶️ John because they had this one new special weird phone the 10 right now instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of evening out the whole line and just doing what we expect them you got a big one in a small and they both look like tens
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up the middle phone and the middle phone I find fascinating or this could all be BS and the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately I think it makes a lot of sense and and look I’m with you guys on on my own personal sizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferences here like the 10 is like I got used to it pretty quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is a little bit big for me I’m fine with that you know if if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were like a like a I don’t know 10 SE that were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar size as the iPhone 7 but edge to edge so that like it was like you know a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I wouldn’t keep the same resolution to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right I wouldn’t switch down to it because I like like the 10 even though it feels big to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I like it overall but I don’t want it to be any bigger and like when I when I look at this MKBHD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video first of all he must have massive hands like when I compare like he’s holding these side by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side and I compare how the how the current 10 looks in his hand to how it looks in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand like and then when you when you see the mock-up of the new you know 10 plus whatever it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be called my god it looks massive compared to the current 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean look who knows what other capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that phone will have like Like, you know, they mentioned, I believe it was on upgrade this week. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like, when we had like the, before the 10, when we just had like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone and phone plus with 6, 7, and 8, the plus versions always had something better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the basic, than like, you know, the regular 6, 7, 8 versions. Besides just the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size, there was always some other kind of advantage. So originally, like, the pluses had higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution screens, like, it had more pixel density with that weird like 1080p kind of screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the way it rendered like so it was like a slightly sharper screen in addition to it being larger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also they had better cameras in all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John faster CPUs at some point to know higher clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed. No, I don’t know. I don’t think so, but although I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the six plus is actually kind of a bad deal because six plus had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pretty bad. You couldn’t handle the big screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Yeah, I think I think Ram like had the same amount of RAM as the as the smaller phone, but it needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to fit all the bigger pixel buffers because it was like kind of rendering a three X kind of thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s the thing about the plus phones. They’ve always been like the non native res has bothered me on a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, on a idealistic level, but obviously in practice is fine, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John performance you mentioned being slow. That’s that’s a real world thing. Like I always felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John that line needed to come out of weird place. And this, as far as I can tell, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to have the non native res and presumably they’ve sorted out all of the performance
⏹️ ▶️ John issues. So this may be finally the first I’m not going to say non compromise plus phone because
⏹️ ▶️ John to your point, very often they also have something about them that is better like the cameras. But I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John will have the same cameras as the as the 10 size one. I think it will have a native
⏹️ ▶️ John red screen. I think it will have enough ram and CPU to handle it. Uh, and I don’t know what you were going for,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re going to say, like, what will it have to recommend? What will what could they put in the plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because, like, I mean, you know, again, you could you could reuse one of the previous things they’ve done, which is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a slightly better camera in some way. So, like, what you know, previously, the plus phones, they would either have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a camera that was stabilized, whether that one wasn’t stabilized, or they would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better camera entirely, or they would have a set a second camera, like in like in the seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series that had a second camera, we’re doing five cameras. Right so like so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what might this be if it’s gonna be is it just gonna be like the 10 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the 10s whatever it’s called is gonna be like the 10s with a bigger screen and this weird like split view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode which is basically what the plus phones had before which sucked I was horrible like we’re like you’d rotate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone and then you’d have a mini iPad split view mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’d have a tiny little column of your emails or chat messages or chat recipients in the left side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and also uselessly tiny right side detail view so like to simulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the split view an iPad and then as developers you have to disable that because it would break everything and it was horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so they’re gonna bring that back it sounds like from this rumor that I consider a negative not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a feature as somebody who briefly used a plus phone that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugged the crap out of me but anyway but you know I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do something like I don’t know whether it will be better camera stuff in some way whether it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be maybe pencil support which we can talk about if you want but like if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet they’re gonna do something they’re not gonna just have it be the same phone as the X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry the 10s but it’s catching Sorry, yeah, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not gonna be the same phone as the XS, but bigger screen. It’s gonna, there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something else about it, because Apple wants to push people who want the best of the best to get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive model. Even if, like, even if you are totally happy with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X size, they want people like me and our podcaster friends who want the best model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want us buying the most expensive one in the lineup. And they’re really good at finding ways to make that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I could go back in time four years or whenever this phone was being designed and tell them here’s how you do that, here’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ John put stuff in it to make it. Well first of all I would make sure that they’re not doing compromised res and everything and so it’s an even playing
⏹️ ▶️ John field. And now here’s the extra thing you add to make this more valuable. I wouldn’t actually recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil support just because I don’t think the world is ready for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, look at the Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Note series. Oh I know, I know. It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successful and it has some really good
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas. I know. I meant the Apple world. that made the apple world uh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i will say like the current apple pencil no that would be ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because the current apple pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John plug it into the lightning port to charge it yeah first of all yeah that that is
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing it becomes a thing to fend off muggers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right but and also like the current apple pencil like it isn’t it doesn’t even fit in a pocket it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah but no the thing i would recommend that they add uh is a better front facing camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John People use front facing cameras a lot. Like selfies are a thing. Instagram is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The front facing camera has been improving, but always the back facing one is better. If you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the extra space you have in a plus phone to some effect that people will place value on,
⏹️ ▶️ John people value the quality of the front facing camera. So I would say make that a better
⏹️ ▶️ John camera than in the 10 size and that will be unambiguously superior. Obviously they could also make the back camera
⏹️ ▶️ John better Because again, they have more room. I’m not sure how they could do that now that everything is all stabilized Maybe they would
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean you could add a third camera, but it seems like that’s not what they’re doing So I guess it just comes down to adding better
⏹️ ▶️ John optics a larger sensor, you know, whatever But the front-facing camera is a good
⏹️ ▶️ John place to differentiate for the largest phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John Beyond that if you have room to make the clock speed higher or add more RAM or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that You can always do that stuff but honestly I don’t think that’s more of a selling point for tech nerds and less of a selling point for regular
⏹️ ▶️ John people who will be able to appreciate the extra quality of the
⏹️ ▶️ John better front-facing camera that makes their selfies look that much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You really rocked my world in saying that that’s the size of your average Android phone, because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. I’m talking about the middle one. I think that is about right, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly makes this make a lot more sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because the thing about like, Like that’s the size of both the 678 Plus, which has been very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successful, and also the size of a lot of Android phones. So that’s, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think about what Apple needs from the market, like they need to do two things with the iPhone market. They need to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to grow, even though it seems fairly saturated, try to grow their market share. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna attack Android phones, and they need to push the ASP, the average selling price, higher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for their high-end buyers, which is a lot of their buyers, they’re releasing these more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones that go even higher and even higher and even higher priced. And for the Android people, they’re releasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this other one that’s gonna attack that market. Like, it makes total sense from a business perspective. Like, this is literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the most important part of Apple’s business. And it has been hard to grow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in recent years as the market has matured and slowed down and saturated and everything. This is what they have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drive the average price up and somehow increase their market share. And that’s really hard to do. So of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna put, first of all, a lot of time and thought into it. And second of all, they’re going to try their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damnedest to actually make big differences there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the question. Um, I’m staring at these phones to make me think about
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been assuming obviously that the middle one will be cheaper because it’s LCD. It’s got one camera. You can see that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the cheapness right there. You just look at it and you can tell we saved money, right? Um, the question
⏹️ ▶️ John is, does it use the same family of system on a chip as the 10
⏹️ ▶️ John size and the plus size
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or does it use
⏹️ ▶️ John an earlier generation?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good question because with with the current generation of 10 it is the same internals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost every way between the 10, the 8, and the 8 plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though there is a large price difference between them. So it wouldn’t be a you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be not surprising at all and in fact probably I’d say probably the most likely option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all of them would have the same internals. But, the purpose of the 8 and 8 Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were not to be cheap. The purpose of the 8 and 8 Plus were to continue the traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone line during this period of transition and offer something at the same price it always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, actually a little bit more, but you know, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like 30 bucks more or something. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was price anchoring for the 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well yeah, right? And so, it wouldn’t be unheard of, you know, now that the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has shown that they will accept a $1,200 phone or whatever it is, it wouldn’t be unheard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of for Apple to say, all right, well, it’s no longer necessary for us to maintain that old price point. We can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move up with that, and then maybe this other one kinda comes somewhere between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone SE and the iPhone 8 pricing, somewhere between four and $800.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at the same time, this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on rumors and leaks and stuff like that. Rumors and leaks are usually horrendously horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at predicting pricing and marketing. Like they’re terrible. Even Mark Gurman and his great sources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are terrible at predicting marketing and pricing. So, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like the iPhone 5C situation, where like, you know, the rumors, it might even have more parallels with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the colors, but like, the rumors of the 5C before it launched were that Apple was gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really inexpensive phone to compete better in Brazil and India and China. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what ended up happening was they released a phone that was cheaper than their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main flagship model by I think $100. And it didn’t make it as cheap as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumors, and analysts, and everything wanted it to be. It just made it the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the new line. That could be what this is. This could just be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not $1,200, so it’s cheap. And the rumors are all saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is made to be even cheaper to maybe replace the SE or whatever, but no, I don’t think so. I think this is gonna be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what replaces the 8 and 8 Plus. Like this is, it takes that role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the lineup, not the role of something like the SE or something a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit higher than the SE. So I don’t expect this to be cheap. I expect this to be the price iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always were until last year, plus 30 bucks. And because that’s their strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently. And so because of that, because they did the iPhone 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 8 Plus this past year with the same guts as the 10 in most ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re gonna do the same thing here. I think this phone’s gonna have the same guts as whatever the 10S ends up being called,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just with these other ways to save money, the different screen, the different camera, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason I think I can get away with having the same internals across all three of these phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John same system on a chip, I mean, is because that’s not the biggest cost in the phone. The OLED screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most expensive component, so they ditch that for an LCD phone, which is presumably cheaper. the cameras are expensive and they
⏹️ ▶️ John ditch those right. I mean, the system on chip is probably similar price to one of the cameras or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the exact part listings, but uh, but that’s not like you don’t get actually that much savings.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do get is differentiation. Uh, but it really like, what I’m thinking when I look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this is if they want to, if their goal is to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them, they would put the previous generation system on a chip in there and sell it for
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot less. But I don’t think to your point, I think their goal is to sell a lot of the expensive one, not to sell a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the cheaper one. So why wouldn’t they keep the system on a chip? Because it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the lesser phone seem more valuable, right? That it’s that it’s just as fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has one camera instead of two. Like that’s basically the pitch in the Apple store would be that the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John store is not going to try to tell you about the difference between OLED and LCD, and they’re not going to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, try to tell you about the, uh, you know, megapixel differences. or if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a RAM, like the only thing they’re gonna say is you can see that there’s one camera instead of two. We can all see that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just as fast as the other ones and then it can be at the iPhone 8
⏹️ ▶️ John price, right? Which to your point is not cheap, but it is less expensive than
⏹️ ▶️ John the other two phones they sell which are the better ones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple being Apple, they could have it be expensive as the 8,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also put the cheaper system on a chip on it Most people probably wouldn’t mind so I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know which direction they’re gonna go with that I wish obviously we all wish we knew the product names because the names will tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you everything about how Apple sees the positioning these Things but if you just have a bunch of case designs
⏹️ ▶️ John You really have you know, Apple can go a lot of different ways with what they stuff in those cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think that I come down with you guys that it would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the same system on a chip across all three phones But let me throw a possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curveball at you. Is it the same amount of RAM across all three phones?
⏹️ ▶️ John hmm Hopefully the big one has more if anything But if
⏹️ ▶️ John not, then yeah Just because like I don’t I don’t see how you could get away with like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly generous with RAM So it’s not like the the 10 size one is gonna have this abundance of RAM that they can skimp
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 10 size one is gonna have enough RAM to be a 10 and And the one that’s slightly bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna have the same amount because it needs that much RAM to be a slightly bigger than a 10 thing like I don’t think they I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t and I don’t think they’d save enough money to be worth like those RAM chips again with the with the parts pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John Making if you were cutting in the RAM in half, yeah, maybe you save a couple bucks If you’re making it slightly smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make any sense. They’re not gonna cut it in half They’re not gonna make a slightly smaller I think they will all have the same amount but the possible
⏹️ ▶️ John exception of the big one and it could be that one has a little bit more, but Apple being Apple probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like, you know, first of all, like, consumers don’t know what RAM is, and second of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, Apple doesn’t tell them. Like, this is not something Apple uses for marketing, so, like, they wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wouldn’t be able to say, one of the reasons you should get the bigger phone is because it has more RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Apple would never talk about the RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they would only have more RAM if it needed the RAM to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I don’t, I don’t think that’s an area that they would distinguish unless they, like, Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in the sense of like they wouldn’t they wouldn’t make the 6.1 have less RAM as like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose, but they might need to make the 10 s plus have more RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for practicality sake.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean it could just window buffers or who knows like there could be some reason or some feature that we don’t know about that
⏹️ ▶️ John requires extra RAM or keeping things in RAM more often or to do simultaneous front and back facing
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, you know, 360 degree selfies or whatever the hell I come up with. You can imagine scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be exclusive to the plus size phone that would require more ramp that’s been Apple’s mo for
⏹️ ▶️ John all iOS devices RAM is not a thing that people care about they put in Apple puts in what they think
⏹️ ▶️ John is enough RAM they’ve Apple’s thus far has even on the iPad Pro which is
⏹️ ▶️ John which is an iOS device with pro right there in the name they have resisted
⏹️ ▶️ John using RAM capacity to charge pro users more money
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they could I think
⏹️ ▶️ John because if anyone’s gonna know what RAM is and what it means to them at somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ John does like the teacher who does a serious work every day on an iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ John and who sees the RAM limits like has lots of applications in flight at once and is frustrated when one of them gets booted
⏹️ ▶️ John out of memory. Vitici would pay 200 extra bucks for another gig of RAM. Are you kidding?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s a way to make money. You know, again, you can make money off pro users by selling them things that only they
⏹️ ▶️ John know and care about at an exorbitant price. So far, no options for that, right? You know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it makes sense. It’s fine. have been adding more RAM over time, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John they are going to move in that direction, it’s going to happen on an iPad type device. I don’t think phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as the teacher may use his stuff, the iPad is where he probably wants more RAM, not
⏹️ ▶️ John in his phone. So he can do seven phone things. You can’t even do the weird drag and drop multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on the same extent on phones as you can on iPads. So I’m looking to the iPad line to add
⏹️ ▶️ John an extra RAM option, or to add a model with tremendously more RAM for tremendously more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they will sell to a small number of people just like the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also, RAM, it costs some money, but the amounts we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking, like one or two gigs here and there, it’s not a lot of money. It mainly costs power in devices this size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in phones, because all the RAM, you have to keep RAM powered to keep its data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, it’s actually a non-trivial amount of power drain to have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM added to something like a phone. It’s way less of a relative power drain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the battery size on an iPad because the battery in an iPad is way, it’s almost a laptop size battery in an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s the same chip really, or like a slightly higher powered version of the chip in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the iPad. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have the giant GPUs usually in the iPads too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but most of that power is going to the screen, not the CPU. So adding another gig of RAM to the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a big deal. The trade-offs aren’t that big to do that, whereas is adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to a phone, you have a battery trade-off there that might not be worth it. And also, the way iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manages RAM and manages apps not staying persistent in RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much, and it’s so good at managing RAM that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need gobs of RAM the same way you do on a Mac or a PC. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the OS works is totally different. So adding RAM for a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s honestly not that important. there’s not a pressing need to do it very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often. And oftentimes, the trade-off is better to not add it if you don’t need to, to save the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, with the big phone, if you wanted to add it somewhere for some feature, you can afford to do it with the big phone because it’s got the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest battery. So, you know, and like the application where it, applications where it might come in handy on a phone is phone
⏹️ ▶️ John games, because people do play games on their phone and phone games are surprisingly demanding and phone games will eject everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else from memory. Like they will, because they’ll either leak memory they’ll just use a tremendous amount on their own.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, you know, not a great experience for all these teens who are just playing. What the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John is that clash of clans or whatever on their phone constantly, and everything else is out of memory. And then they get a message
⏹️ ▶️ John in the notification cups, I think I don’t launch messages from scratch. And they do that cycle constantly back and forth from game
⏹️ ▶️ John to non game application. And it’s launching the application fresh every single time they switch and
⏹️ ▶️ John further killing their battery as if playing the game wasn’t killing it enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’re doing that anyway, because they’re they’re either launching the big social apps which are all tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that use up all your memory because they’re full of garbage and or they are quitting all their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps out of the apps which are constantly so they’re they’re relaunching all their apps from scratch most of the time anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what they’re watching
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah if i if i was uh 13 made uh you know flicking
⏹️ ▶️ John up on your applications made kept the animation there and did exactly the same thing only didn’t have any effect
⏹️ ▶️ John on what applications were in ram how long would it take us to notice like i suppose Steve Trout and Smith
⏹️ ▶️ John would figure it out eventually but like there’s first of all there’s no way teams would notice right like we
⏹️ ▶️ John just had no effect whatsoever like eventually there’d be rumors and like it seems like when
⏹️ ▶️ John I force quit things sometimes I have to do it twice or like that could be the mechanism like the first
⏹️ ▶️ John time you do it it does nothing except for like remove the picture from your screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if you go do it a second
⏹️ ▶️ John time it counts that as forced quit or it’s like freaking thing don’t disturb
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody would know for like years unless some nerd dug into it. Because all they want to do is flick
⏹️ ▶️ John things up. They want to be the janitor in Steve Jobs’ parlance. They want to make things neat and tidy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco compulsion. So
⏹️ ▶️ John let them have the compulsion. Best selling game on the iPhone, Force Quit All My Apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has anyone made that name? I guess Apple wouldn’t allow it. You can’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like an interface. People would love that. A free to play game with like force quitting apps on a
⏹️ ▶️ John speed trial where you have to do some activity, quickly force quit apps and do some activity and force quit apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Would like the big boss be Facebook or ways?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like you’d have to be doing some other activity, but like cooking mama or something where you have some busy work activity that you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. But periodically, you have to stop what you’re doing and quickly go force quit a bunch of apps and then
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to what you were doing. And then like the level loading screens, if you don’t force quit all
⏹️ ▶️ John your apps when they bring the level to load, it doesn’t successfully load. This is what kids have been training for us like the last starfighter
⏹️ ▶️ John but for force quitting apps
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#askatp: Plex and Infuse
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Adam Porter writes, John, on the last ATP you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having both Plex and Infuse installed on your Apple TV. Why both? What do you see as the pros and cons
⏹️ ▶️ John So Plex, we don’t know what Plex is. It’s a server thing that organizes all your media and it serves them up with like
⏹️ ▶️ John nice cover art and metadata and lets you, and groups them into TV and movies and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll transcode on the fly and you can get to all your media from outside your house if you set it up correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and so in my application, I have Plex running on either my Synology or on my Mac, but my
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology has a wimpy CPU. And so we can transcode some stuff, but some stuff it just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t transcode. And my Mac isn’t always on or isn’t always running Flex. So it can transcode anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not always on, always available like the Synology, right? So I have Flex in there because it’s a really nice app
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s how I like to view my stuff. Why do I have Infuse? Infuse just
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to be pointed at a file server. So it’s pointing at the SMB share on my Synology. It’s not pointing at my, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it can actually read stuff in the Flex thing too, I think. But anyway, it just says, just give me
⏹️ ▶️ John a file. and it pulls that file into the Apple TV and decodes it on the Apple TV. And the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV 4K has a surprisingly good system on a chip in there. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV can decode and transcode stuff that my Synology can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I have the two applications. Plex is my preferred, but if Plex looks like it’s chugging because my Synology can’t transcode
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I let Infuse do it locally, and I just like having the option for both.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Infuse works really well. And yeah, so I basically, Plexus is my
⏹️ ▶️ John first go-to. And if it’s having problems, I go to Infuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I have my Plex server running on my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of the files, like you, are on the Synology. And my iMac is pretty much always on. So I don’t ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have this particular problem, But it does make sense what you’re saying.
#askatp: Apple vs. other ARMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will felt writes, why are apples arm chips so much faster than their competitors? Aren’t they just licensing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same arm design? Why can’t anyone license arm manufacture with TSMC and wind up with the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance as Apple? What gives?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why can’t they do that? That’s such a great idea. So much to that. No. So arm
⏹️ ▶️ John is an instruction set, right? Just like there’s lots of x86 64 compatible CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of arm compatible CPUs. There’s actually lots of different instruction sets within arm that as with your details,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about unless you’re picking options in Xcode to build your thing. But anyway, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John used to license ARM chip designs, but starting with the iPhone 6,
⏹️ ▶️ John help me out here, what was the Swift CPU?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think it was the 5S.
⏹️ ▶️ John 5S maybe? Yeah. So starting several years ago, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than taking an ARM CPU design from ARM the company and maybe tweaking
⏹️ ▶️ John it or modifying it or like you know putting it in a system on top of the bunch of stuff they started making their
⏹️ ▶️ John own CPUs that yes use the ARM instruction set but otherwise share
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing with anything ARM offers to anybody so it is an ARM compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU entirely of Apple’s design that’s why they’re better because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John you know bought PA semi and hired a bunch of great you know semiconductor engineers
⏹️ ▶️ John and spent many many years and have ramped up to now be basically the best
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile CPU designers in the entire world by a large margin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Real time follow up, it was the iPhone 5, not the 5S.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, it was codenamed Swift, confusingly. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no one else can buy those. It’s all Apple proprietary. Apple is the only one that can make them because they’ve literally made the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU design themselves. And Apple’s doing something similar with GPU. They used to license GPU designs
⏹️ ▶️ John from, what is it, Imagination?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco PowerVR? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Power VR and imagine anyway, they’re they’re trying to go their own way with I forget if the if the current ones have all their own stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. I don’t know. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like we know that they that they said that somehow or somehow we heard that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are not shipping power VR designs anymore, or like, like at least pure power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VR designs, but I don’t think we really know what they’re shipping instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, yeah, so they do it themselves. And it’s really, really hard to do it yourself. And it takes many, many years
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots and lots of money. And that’s exactly what they did. They They spent lots and lots of money and took many, many years, and now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the best mobile processor designers in the entire world.
#askatp: Printers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Mark Iglioliorti, I’m so sorry Mark,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, what’s your home printer setup? All in one slash simple, jet or laser, color black and white,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey networked air printer USB? What’s going on? And the only reason I put this in is because I just got a printer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Saturday for the first time in probably 15 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw Declan playing in the printer box. I’m like, why the hell do you have a printer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box? Uh-huh, that is the truth. I replaced a hand-me-down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lexmark Optra S1625, And I, you should, I will put a link in the show notes. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when this thing was new, but I genuinely think it was probably 15 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was a, it did, it does have an ethernet jack on it. Um, it was something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad bought for our house. I’m pretty sure back when I was in high school. So that is 18 years ago, more than 18 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. And, um, then it was, it’s a, the particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup we had, it was dual duplex, uh, black and white laser. And it still ran up until a few days ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we donated it to, I think Goodwill or something. Anyway, um, it, it, the thing was a tank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it weighed as much as a tank. And I really wanted to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a scanner at home for occasional scanning of things. I don’t do a lot of scanning, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t need a Fujitsu, whatever it is that Marco, I’m sure we’ll bring up in a moment, but I do occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scan things. And I also wanted something that could do color on occasion, because now that I don’t have an office to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do these things. I need to do that at home. So I replaced my ancient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lexmark printer with a, let’s see here. Let me get ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Hewlett Packard LaserJet Pro M281FDW all in one wireless color laser printer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon, Amazon dash replacement ready, T6B82A. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a lot. Uh, basically it’s a, uh, scanner printer. I think it actually might even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fax. Yeah, there was a phone line on the back. It faxes, it does all the things, and in the last five days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve been using it, it works great. So that’s what I do. And it’s a color laser. I don’t know if I said it was color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not, but it’s a color laser. John, what are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have a couple of constraints. I have space constraints, so I don’t have a lot of places, convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John places to put a large thing or a lot of multiple things. So we’ve always gotten those
⏹️ ▶️ John all-in-one devices that are printers and scanners. because we do scan and can
⏹️ ▶️ John use it as a scanner and a copier uh… but also as a printer had a series of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John none of them have been particularly good uh… this one uh… i had to go to system
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences to look up what it is because i don’t even know it’s old canon mx-870
⏹️ ▶️ John printer scanner copier probably also does faxes i’ve found it very frustrating since the day i got
⏹️ ▶️ John it because this was before what is it air print whatever apple’s uh… current
⏹️ ▶️ John printing simplification technology, it predates that. So you are at the mercy
⏹️ ▶️ John of the proprietary drivers for Mac and, you know, forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, proprietary Mac drivers offered by Canon. This printer, in theory, has
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to do Wi-Fi printing. In practice, I got it to work like once briefly with one
⏹️ ▶️ John computer and it has never worked again. I used to have it plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ John my airport, getting back to the airport thing, because the airport had this USB port on it that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you could plug in a printer, do
⏹️ ▶️ John a new printer sharing. That worked for several years and eventually stopped working
⏹️ ▶️ John completely inexplicably. Or it would work, but then like every time you’d go to print after a two day gap,
⏹️ ▶️ John like your computer couldn’t see the printer or just hang forever, so you’d have to unplug the printer from the USB port
⏹️ ▶️ John and plug it back into the USB. Like there was something about it that was weird. The printer decided it didn’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So at this point, this stupid behemoth printer is connected by a USB
⏹️ ▶️ John cable to my wife’s iMac, which is the only computer in the house that you can print from or scan from,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not ideal. I really wish, you know, it’s the office space scene all over again. I would smash this thing to bits.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the print quality-
⏹️ ▶️ John Finally, a reference I get. Yeah, the print quality and
⏹️ ▶️ John the scanning quality are actually pretty good. I’ve done a lot of scanning on it, a surprising amount of scanning. And the print
⏹️ ▶️ John quality, I mean, it’s an inkjet, so like, don’t expect miracles, but it’s fine for, you know, printing kids’ documents,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s pretty fast. I would love for, I would love to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that uses all the modern printing stuff that could be Wi-Fi printed from everywhere, including iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that is smaller than this, that is a laser instead of an inkjet, and that has a scanning thing. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I should look at Casey’s thing, although I have a suspicion that it falls down badly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not huge, but I’m coming from, like I said, a tank, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have different views. Do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in your garage? No, no, it’s sitting next to my desk. I’ll send you a picture. Remind me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ll send you a picture. I’m looking at your printer now,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Anyway, but the thing about this one is, so far,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been like, it hasn’t broken, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing, it’s like, oh great,
⏹️ ▶️ John it must be good quality. It hasn’t broken over many, many years, but now I’m kind of like, I really wish that thing would break. So I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John used to get a new printer. Because it’s working fine, like nothing wrong with it, and it is annoying to have
⏹️ ▶️ John to print from one computer, but we don’t print that much anyway. So anyway, that’s my situation, not ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I should mention with regard to this new printer that I got, it has both wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ethernet. I have it connected via ethernet. It does have some cool features I set up in its like web-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management system. I actually have it connected in a sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Synology. So what I can do is I can use the little tiny LCD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the printer and say, scan to a network drive. I have like an incoming folder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within the Synology that it will just drop scans, which is kind of cool. So I can go in later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually, you know, quote unquote process. And by that, I mean, you know, move that PDF somewhere else. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does support AirPrint, which I didn’t think was that important because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I ever really want to print from iOS, but I kind of mentioned that offhandedly to Erin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin occasionally prints from her iOS devices or would, I should say, would like to print from her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS devices, but can’t. And when I told her this, she was really, really excited. And I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect that in a million years, but she got really enthusiastic about it. And she’s tried it once or twice and works great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, some real-time follow-up from Roland00 in the chat room. Apparently my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey previous printer, which is shown in almost the configuration that I had it in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like extra duplex attachments and extra trays and all that. Anyway, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advertised in APC Magazine from May 26th, 1998. So this thing was- What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it? 20 years old? Is that right? Um, it’s 20 years old, still working just fine. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who knew? Anyway, Marco, tell me about your beloved Fujitsu ScanSnaps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so we’re talking about a few different things here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We’re talking about scanners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re talking about printers. And while these are often the same thing, they don’t always have to be. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my suggestion, which is an old, you know, like back when productivity blogs were a thing, one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would write about would be the Fujitsu ScanSnaps series of scanners. These are document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed only scanners. They don’t have a big flatbed part. It’s only a document feeder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they scan the top and bottom of any paper you put through them at the same time, and they shoot them through really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. So it’s a very fast way to scan a stack of paper into a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco searchable text PDF. And it looks pretty decent for that. Like I wouldn’t use these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for like scanning your family pictures because they’re not great on photos. They’re made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for fast, very reliable, very, you know, just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, work grade scanning of paper documents. So I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as kind of, you know, a paperless thing to just scan any paper that gets mailed to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might ever be important. I scan it, it gets indexed to a PDF by the built-in software and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets saved to a folder and I don’t do any other sorting of it. It’s simply by time. And if I ever need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look back, I either use spotlight searches or I just flip through when I know the time was and just flip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a flip, you know, and quick look until I find the file. Um, and it’s wonderful. It’s a fantastic document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanner if what you need is document scanning. I also maintain a flatbed scanner and I’ve tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because as I mentioned, the, this thing is terrible for photos. And sometimes you want to scan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that you don’t want to put through a document feeder, like maybe like a, an old family photo print
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t trust to the rollers. Um, or maybe something that’s not quite flat that you know, that you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scan or something like that. So I’ve maintained flatbed scanners over the years going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through various Epson and Canon ones and they’re all garbage. They’re just terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know occasionally I need one and so I’ll end up buying a flatbed scanner maybe every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four or five years using it for about a year or two and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking I don’t need this anymore so I give it away or it breaks or its software stops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on the newest version of my OS or whatever else. And then eventually I need another one, I buy another one. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the latest one I bought, this was actually a surprisingly good deal. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Epson WorkForce WF-7710.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason I bought this one is because Tiff’s family had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collection of these large, like 11 by 17 roughly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really old family photos, family photos like from like I don’t know from like the 30s or something like really old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know it looks like they were paintings like they were that old and we wanted to scan them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they because they were like roughly 11 by 17 they wouldn’t fit on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know eight and a half by 11 or 8 and a half by 14 scanner and if you look at the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 11 by 17 scanners there’s basically nothing under about a thousand dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s any good at all except this Epson all-in-one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a hundred and seventy bucks and it’s an all-in-one printer scanner fax copy or whatever I don’t know if it has a fax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah it does have a fax god who uses that anymore but it’s still it has it if you’re one of the people who uses a fax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it happens to be 11 by 17 and it has a it has an 11 by 17 scanner in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge printer thing and I should you know disclaim inkjet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printers are the worst they are just terrible unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your printing photos with high quality photo paper using high quality photo ink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that case inkjet is the best print you can get outside of a pro photo lab like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know by mail or something but if you want photo prints inkjet printers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re willing to pay for the nice photo paper and you’re willing to use a lot of ink and pay a pretty high cost per page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ink jets are by far the best especially Epson ink jets and especially the ones that aren’t this one that have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the five different tanks. Like because you can get like some of the advanced Epson
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that there they have like six different ink tanks and it’s like two different shades like there’s like a light cyan and a light magenta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to the regular sign the regular magenta some of them have different have it have a gray ink so you can print
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grayscale combining the gray with the black to get even better grays and blacks like there they get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really advanced now and the prints you get out of those when they’re working right when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of the heads are clogged when all the ink is full and when you have the right paper and everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aligned, they are phenomenal and way better than you can get from even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best of the best color lasers. That being said, inkjet is frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of other reasons. Like for prints, I really don’t like inkjet. I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way paper documents look like when you print like text by inkjet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen it look right. Like unless it’s on glossy photo paper, in which case it looks weird. But like otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like because of the way ink kind of bleeds into the paper a little bit as opposed to toner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is melted plastic on top of the paper, it just never looks very sharp. It always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks a little bit fuzzy with inkjet. You can always tell. And if you get a drop of water on inkjet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prints, it smears immediately. Whereas you get a drop of water on a laser print, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, it’s just melted plastic. That’s what toner is. So I love laser printers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention the fact laser laser printers are usually faster and way lower cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per page. Now the cost per page thing has gotten a little bit narrower as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve gotten into both super tank inkjet printers, which I don’t ever recommend because they clog up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like crazy and they’re very expensive. And also as lasers have gotten cheaper, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve had lower and lower end lasers, the lasers are now playing tricks with like how much toner you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get per cartridge or sending with starter cartridges and the cost per page advantage of laser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is getting smaller basically as time goes on as laser printers get cheaper and smaller and worse. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re willing to buy a decent laser printer, they’re amazing. Now the downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they’re huge and they can be fairly expensive relative to these other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My current setup, which I’ve gotten to after a bunch of years of using crappy old smaller coloring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jets, you can get, sorry lasers, you can get a color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laser with AirPrint, with networking, by the way another rule, sorry I’m all over the place with this, another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule is no printer or scanner I buy can require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software on my computer, with the exception of the ScanSnap, that’s for legacy reasons, but otherwise like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not buying a scanner or printer that requires software. If the Apple built in drivers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t support it, and And if the built-in Apple scanning app does not support it, I won’t buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know that’s it’s you know relying on other people’s software is terrible. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been burned many times in the past for that. Even the Fujitsu software run on the Mac mini under my TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is funny because by a various combination of Apple scripts and weirdnesses, every time I scan a document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my scan snap, I know it’s done because the speakers in my living room play the ding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound from MacOS. way. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recommend you know something that is networked and whether that’s Wi-Fi or Ethernet it’s up to you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really care that supports air print which now all pretty much all printers you could buy today support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air prints that’s no big deal and I do recommend if you’re only going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one printer make it a laser if you’re willing to have two and you ever print photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get an inkjet for your photo prints but still use the laser for everything else. If you want an all-in-one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has a built-in scanner and everything, you’re probably gonna be looking at an inkjet for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All-in-one lasers do exist but they’re pretty large and there’s not that many of them that are any good and you know they’re made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like offices and stuff so they’re not that great. My printer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happiness was achieved not when I had my little like you know hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollar brother laser printer that was monochrome, not when I had my $220 HP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, 2000 series color laser, which is fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great. It was achieved when I decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what I want? I want the kind of printer that my college computer lab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to have, because there is this wonderful experience that you have with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those printers that you don’t get with anything else, where first of all, it has a big enough paper tray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you almost never need to refill it, step one. Step two is I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hit print on my computer, get up, walk over to the printer, which is about 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feet away, and have it be done when I get there. And you can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get the larger HP lasers. So what I have now, which I’ve had for a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of years, which I absolutely love, is the HP Color LaserJet M553.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was something like four or $500 when I bought it a few years ago. I’ve never changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the supplies because it’s made for, you know, business as a computer lab, so it’s made for heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, way heavier than I ever use. And I hit print, and I get up and I walk over to it, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. It’s sitting in the paper tray, warm and done. And that is the most satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing you could possibly get from a printer. So I’m very, very happy with my giant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four, $500 HP Color LaserJet M553 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything but photos, but I hardly ever print photos, so it’s no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you tell whether it requires drivers? That’s always the problem, is that you’re looking at printers and I’m like, I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John know how this will interact with all of my Macs, and I’ve never found a good way to tell. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John the manufacturer’s not gonna tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. There, if you search, I usually just search the web for this page, Apple maintains a page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere on their support site of, it basically lists for each version of macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what scanners and printers are supported. Really? And so I usually just look down, yeah, I looked on that list and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually I can find one of the ones that’s on there. Ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they tend to support pretty much every printer or scanner that exists when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS is released. This is a little hard to find because printers and scanners and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff get new models all the time. Every six months or every year there’s new revisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at this list and you can usually find, oh here’s one that was maybe last year’s model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still for sale or something like that, you can usually find one there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and occasionally if you if you see one where like the model number is not quite a match
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s close, a lot of times that works anyway because like it was it was actually the same guts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like this model has a duplexer or something or that you know this model has networking or whatever so something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. But yeah, but yeah, no no software and nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets nothing nothing gets plugged into my computer via USB either. It sits on the network in a closet and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see it, I don’t hear it, and there’s no software. That’s the route to printer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happiness right there and giant lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the problem I ran into with all my all-in-ones is even if the printer is supported, does
⏹️ ▶️ John that mean it’s supported only if you plug it in with USB? Does it mean it’s supported over Wi-Fi? Does it mean it’s supported for printing
⏹️ ▶️ John only and not scanning? Does it mean you can print? These are all things that happen with my printer that I can print to
⏹️ ▶️ John it wirelessly, I can’t scan wirelessly right does it mean that I can print when when it’s connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to my Wi-Fi router but I can’t scan when it’s connected to my Wi-Fi router both of those things are true of this stupid thing
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s very difficult for me to determine I guess I could buy it and like just return it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever I can tell you my Epson WF 7710 that’s 11 by 17 giant inkjet all-in-one is totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supported wirelessly or yeah it is wireless I only had one network port back there so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run that on Wi-Fi I run my awesome giant laser wired because I don’t think even has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi, but the Epson one I can tell you is supported with no software installation whatsoever, scanning included,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even using the paper feeder on top, which is like a small automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco document feeder on top of there. Even that I can do with the built-in Apple scanner, because I just did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the cheap $170 thing? Yep. Maybe I should buy that to replace this stupid thing, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s actually smaller. I think I looked at the picture of it smaller. And Casey, your giant thing, that has
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a scanner on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? because keep in mind it’s 11 by 17. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small. And keep in mind as a printer, it’s mediocre because it’s an inkjet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, yeah, well, I already have a mediocre printer. And like I meant small in terms of height, length and
⏹️ ▶️ John width, it might actually still be smaller than mine because my thing is not the size of you know, the scanning bed is not the determining
⏹️ ▶️ John factor. There’s lots of margins. Casey, does your thing a scanner to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it does have an an a document feeder up top. It does not do duplex on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the document scanning. It will do duplex on printing, but in every other way, it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what Marco described. It’s a color laser. It scans. It does everything via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does it all without drivers. It’s been, again, I’ve had it for five days, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider what you’re dealing with here, but I have been overjoyed with it. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fluctuate a lot in terms price on Amazon. I spent something like $330,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but go ahead and hit up Camel Camel Camel and see what they say, because it can be up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like $500 or it can be as cheap as, you know, again, about $300.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m sure it’s not as nice or as fast as Marco’s ridiculously awesome enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey printer, but it is an all-in-one and it seems to be doing all of the things, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably well. But again, it’s only been about a week. So, you know take that with a grain of salt
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of the first conversations I think I had with Jason Snell was how I missed the days when Macworld’s Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John user magazine did multi-page printer reviews focused on how those printers work with the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Because nowadays like you’re just thrown to the wolves if you’re lucky you can find some kind of wire cutter
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about you know The best printer for most people but it’s not gonna be focused on Macs It’s not gonna have all the details that Marco was
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about So you one of the safest bets with printers again being thrown to the world is like well Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a friend who has this one and they say it works for them in these ways. So I’m just going to get the exact same one because
⏹️ ▶️ John at least it’s a known quantity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Oh, and another thing I should point out, which is not the most reliable thing in the world but has worked well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, is if you’re wondering whether or not you need drivers for something, oftentimes Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like reviews and Q&A and whatnot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, it’s not the best source. I’m not going to say it’s the best source and you could always get steered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong. But generally speaking, if you see the same question asked 44 times as you often do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Amazon and if you see the same answer, you know, 42 of the 44 times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you’re probably going to be okay. And I think that’s what I did with this printer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that went a lot longer than I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco We had so much to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John Printing is complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like this is, you know, as we were talking earlier with, you know, tying all that together to like the Wi-Fi stuff earlier, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out no one makes great printers consistently. There is no Euro of printers.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into 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 Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts so
Post-show: Bees and BMWs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, since the people want to know, can you give us a very brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bee update, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m ready to declare victory. Oh! Mission accomplished banner behind you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I haven’t seen one in days. Many people are concerned that they would be entering my
⏹️ ▶️ John home. They have not, although there was one report at one point
⏹️ ▶️ John of someone seeing a bee in the house where I’m pretty sure it was just a big housefly because I killed a housefly later that day.
⏹️ ▶️ John No bees in the house. No bees outside. They are good and gone
⏹️ ▶️ John and dead, as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell. So, what about the yellow jackets that you actually had? Hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Are there any of those around? People are very angry about me calling
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco them bees. Oh my God, so angry.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people will just need to get over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But John, you’re so meticulous about everything else in the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything else in my life, you’re right. You’re right. People who know every aspect of my life and exactly what I’m meticulous about and not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, I love you, John. So I have a boring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story about how my BMW is screwing me even from the grave. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you still own it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not really like, it’s not in the grave yet. It’s kind of like hovering around. I mean, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no good joke to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey here. Yeah. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s close. I went to sell the car today or at least get it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appraised. And I took it to the local CarMax and CarMax is actually headquartered here in Richmond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve actually done work for CarMax in the past. But anyways, I went to CarMax and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked me a series of five to ten questions. Is this your car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have the title? Do you have all the keys? Blah, blah, blah. Has there ever been an odometer rollback?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what else. Is the title clean? Has it ever been in an accident? Blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They spend 20, 30 minutes. They look it over. They drive it. They do whatever computations they need to do to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much they think the car is worth. They brought me the appraisal and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said, okay, here’s what we found. It’s in good shape, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the odometer’s been rolled back. What? I’m sorry. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. The odometer’s been rolled back. No, it hasn’t. No, no, no. Look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in July of 2015, apparently my world-class BMW dealer, Richmond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMW on West Broad Street, don’t ever go there. Anyway, in 2015, I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey July 21st, I brought the car in with something like 58,000 miles on it and got something done to it. I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what. On the 22nd, my car had 296,000 miles on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then fast forward three months and it was back to like 60,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles. Apparently the dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people at Richmond BMW on West Broad Street decided to enter, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming a incorrect service entry or enter a correct service entry, but enter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it against my VIN instead of somebody else’s VIN. So now the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto check or whatever it is, it wasn’t Carfax, but it was an equivalent of Carfax is saying, well, no, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car’s had a odometer fraud. So that dramatically reduced the value of my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I drove down to BMW and very politely, but very angrily said, you need to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. the best they could do to fix it was write a repair order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherein, I wish I had it in front of me, but it basically says, we are certifying as Richmond BMW of West
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Broad Street that the correct and true mileage of this car is 74 whatever, whatever, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it was three hours, seven hours ago. And the purchase or the repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven from July of 2015 was incorrect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I then needed to call AutoCheck to tell them to expunge, or whatever the right word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, that record on my report so that this way I could go back to CarMax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get a fair value for the car. Of course, however, there is no phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number for AutoCheck because, turns out, it’s Experian. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, good. Oh, yeah, I’m so excited. So there’s no phone number to call. I try their little automated chat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t go anywhere. I fill out a form wherein they will eventually email me, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in six months, to say, oh, we heard you had a problem. Would you like to talk about it? And it turns out what I did was I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Googled, or really ducked up to code, for their phone number and came up with it instantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called them and pleaded with them to fix it. And then they said, sure thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sent them a PDF that I scanned in my fancy new printer that we just talked about. I sent them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a PDF of the thing that Richmond BMW did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they fixed it. Then I went back to CarMax, and they offered me an additional $2,500 for my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all is seemingly well, and I think I’m going to be bringing the car to CarMax tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sell it. I didn’t do it today for various and sundry, uninteresting reasons. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that was a whole big adventure that I was not planning to have. And even as I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get rid of this piece of trash, which really isn’t a piece of trash, I’m just so sick of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is still causing me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. Is the current plan to just go to one car for a while then? Is that where you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey landed? I negotiated with a dealer in DC. I got them to a price that I think is reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is for the Golf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Interesting. Not the GTI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Alfa Romeo, not a Jeep Wrangler, not a Model 3, not an M3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey not another BMW?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not getting another BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You sure? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely not. And the reason that I landed on the Volkswagen is, and I was talking to Aaron about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit, I want something that is basically, basically what I want is a BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t want another BMW. I want a sedan. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that’s preferably four-wheel drive with the six-speed, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably quick. And John is going to start chiming in about the Accord, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would prefer something quicker and a little bit nicer than that. And I like European cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have anything against Japanese cars, but I like European cars. And the only way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and not end up in financial ruin because of catastrophic engine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey failures, like when my Valtrain tried to grenade itself, is to have a car with a six-year warranty. So yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though Volkswagen is terrible in the sense of diesel gate, it’s great in the sense of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would potentially have a six year warranty. But the more I thought about it, the more or the more and Aaron and I talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sitting here tonight. I don’t think I’m going to buy it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we really should just try being one car family for a while. That is not at all the answer I want, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably why I sound deeply depressed about it. But it is the correct answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So by the time this episode gets posted, for all I know, I might have a Golf R in the garage, but sitting here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, my intention is to just let it go and at least wait a little while and see how bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really is to be a one-car family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you think you might buy a Golf R in the next nine hours. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on posting it? Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize. No, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. As much as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advocate for leasing as a keep-problems-off-my-plate strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one problem leasing puts directly on your plate is timing of when you make purchase decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because you are not leasing and you have another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, you have great flexibility in this. You can just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace it for a while. You can get it out of your garage, get it off your plate, get it off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your repair liabilities, get a bit of money for it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then just bank it. And then just sit around and don’t buy a new car yet and just wait and decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need one. I mean, look, the cars that you’re looking at are not hard to get. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited production. They’re probably going to keep making them for a while and make them new ones every year, make them a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit better every year. So you can pretty much buy one whenever you want to. So like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice that you have the freedom to be flexible on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the theory. I mean, again, we’ll, we’ll see what happens. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going so deeply back and forth about this that I’m not even sure tomorrow what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to happen. I think what’s going to end up kind of forcing my hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably in the direction of not buying is that the negotiations that I’ve done with this dealer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the D.C. area were kind of predicated on doing it before the end of the month because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s how this stuff always works and Friday is Erin’s birthday and I’m not about to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin a golf R for her birthday present. So basically I would need to execute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow and I just don’t think it’s going to happen. And that doesn’t mean to your point, it doesn’t mean I can never buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Golf R ever again. It’s just that the deal may not be quite as good as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Oh, don’t fall into that. There’s always a better deal to be had. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s typical sales pressure. Like look, there’s every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco salesperson worth their salt will try to make you think that every deal they give you is a limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey offer. You You better hurry up. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to see this again. It’s the last one in the country, whatever it is. There’s always some BS reason why you have to act now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is they want you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to act fast and create urgency so that you get convinced to do it. But the reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can let this deal slip by because the conditions that led them want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer you whatever deal they offered you are probably going to be the same, if not better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point in the future. So you can get—and look, it took you like two seconds to negotiate this deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It wasn’t two seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but your point is fair. Like you can go to them in six months or a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spend a new two seconds to get them to give you another deal. Like, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that there’s no urgency here at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So we’ll see what happens. I mean, the most—well, the most adult answer is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not do anything, which I hope is what I’ll stick with, but we’ll see. The second most adult answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I stick within the realm of Volkswagen, so if I’m a shooing Civic or an Accord or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, the second most adult answer is to get a GTI because you can freaking steal a GTI these days. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco absurd how cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are. Well, that you shouldn’t do. That’s not the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adult you want to be. Well, yeah. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most fun thing to do is to get the Golf R and get it immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more I think I shouldn’t, even though I desperately, desperately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to. So we’ll see what I end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing. The even more adult option is to just keep getting review cars and try to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. And then you don’t really need your own car because you’re always driving someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else’s. Aaron actually pitched exactly that to me. And yeah, if you if you’re a listener
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you have any contact of any sort with the PR department of any kind of magazine, please let me know. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am not kidding when I say that I would love to test any of your cars, even a piece of colossal garbage. Let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, in principle, that would be magnificent and I would totally live that lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the problem is it’s deeply unreliable and it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good permanent solution. The other side of the coin though is how often are Aaron and I really needing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be in two places at the same time? Could I just lift or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I need an extra car? You know what I mean? Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not very much fun, but probably doable. So, we’ll see what happens. We’ll try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live the one-car life for a while and see if it makes us totally hate ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and each other, and if it does, we’ll fix it. If it doesn’t, then sweet, I’ve saved myself a whole pile of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problems you have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was just about to say, this is like the first worldiest first world problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you know, I forgot to mention, there’s one thing I’m excited about, about these iPhone rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than anything else I’ve heard and it’s the USB power adapter rumor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you heard this? I didn’t see this I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a rumor a couple months back that I think has been re-rumored recently that they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship this with a USB-C cable to lightning and that the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapter in the box is going to be a new design that is basically a really compact 18 watt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C quicker charging adapter. And the reason I’m excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is that I I have tried since getting this new laptop, I’m trying to simplify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down my travel cable setup. To be only USB,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, there’s a reason, to be only USB-C. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing, like I have so much covered, the one thing that doesn’t seem to exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is tiny USB-C power bricks. Like the USB-C version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad power bricks that we’ve had forever, these little 10 watt little white bricks. I can’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find USB-C versions of that. Or, especially the ones I would love also, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anker makes what looks just like the iPad power brick, but has two USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports in it. Why doesn’t that exist for USB-C yet? It doesn’t have to be massively high wattage. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just two USB-C ports in one adapter. Is that impossible to make? Because no one’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And so, I would love to just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple make a good little white brick that has a USB-C hole on one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side and a power prong on the other side, and have it be smallish, and have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nicely made and reliable, and not gonna start fires, and not gonna flake out, which I can trust Apple to do with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their power stuff, and I can trust no one else in my experience, that’s like the one thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want, is small, white, Apple USB power supply. And so I’m actually more excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the rumor that that’s about to exist than I am about anything about these new phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of sad. I know, but that would actually be more beneficial to me in a lot of contexts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe that rumor because the stupid, whatever they are, the five watt things are just not up to the task. What do they
⏹️ ▶️ John ship with the 10? Do they do the same stupid five watt thing? Same stupid five watt thing. Yeah, so that’s useless.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the iPad ones are old and big, so it’s totally time for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it, I believe the rumor. I really hope they do. Because no one else seems to be making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I want. And even if someone else did start making it, I probably wouldn’t trust them. Because my experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party power adapter manufacturers, even Anker, even everyone’s favorite Anker, has been so mediocre and so spotty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the last thing I want is to pare myself down to a really small set of travel things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have the one I’m relying on flake out and fail because it was some weirdo brand.