307: Casey Apple Pencil
04 Jan 2019John reviews Casey’s stuff, Marco draws on his iPad, and Tim writes a sad letter.
Episode Description:
- Happy new year!
- John reviews the Tesla Model 3
- John reviews Casey's Volvo XC90
- John reviews Casey's iPad Pro
- Casey reviews his Apple Pencil
- Marco reviews Linea
- Screen protector update
- Apple's financial news
- Is falling stock price going to cause a retention problem?
#askatp- What does John think about the Nintendo Switch controller? (via Josh A.)
- How will the new AirPods charge? (via Ankur Oberoi)
- What's up with Apple putting Beats stereos in Volkswagens? (via NEN)
- Post show
- More on Beats
- HomeKit
Sponsored by
Chapters
- Happy new year
- John’s Model 3 review
- John’s XC90 review
- John’s iPad Pro review
- Casey’s Apple Pencil review
- Marco’s Linea review
- Marco’s PaperLike review
- Trackpad + iPad?
- Sponsor: Hover 🎂
- Apple revises guidance
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- Apple employee retention
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)
- #askatp: Switch controllers
- #askatp: USB-C AirPods
- #askatp: VW with Beats
- Ending theme
- Post-show: HomeKit
Happy new year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re live now. Okay, and switch. Okay. Hi, everybody. We are live. Hope you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed your Fish New Year’s Eve show. Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Buehler Oh, yeah. Did you stay up watching that show? That was your New Year’s Eve celebration? Matt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco O’Leary I sure did. In fact, the point of the live stream that the listeners have just heard was about the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Trey and Mike were lifted into the air during a song and played the song like on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rigging in the air, wearing space suits surrounded by balloons. Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Buehler You know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to open this can of worms. So I would like to try to put this to bed as quickly as possible. But let me just posit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that maybe you shouldn’t poke quite as much fun at Dave Matthews Band as you like to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe you should think about pumping the brakes on that a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are just upset that being a Fish fan is so much more fun than being a Dave Matthews fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any other pre-show banter you’d like to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so. Happy New Year, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Happy New Year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The calendar has incremented over in the NS calendar, .Gregorian calendar,.Standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calendar, shared calendar. The year date unit has incremented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the next value.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we hope. Wasn’t it like three or four years ago that that didn’t happen or something happened with alarms because they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used like the capital Ys instead of the lowercase ys or whatever the hell it was? I probably have that wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been so many like humorous, comical, and tragic date and time related
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs in iOS. Hahaha…
John’s Model 3 review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, John, did you drive the Model 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or did you solely ride in it?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Giesinke No, I just let Tina drive it. I figured I drove the Model S and, you know, it’s very similar. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin What were your interpretations and thoughts on the Model 3 as a passenger? And could you perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey channel Tina’s thoughts for the purposes of the pre-show on what it was like to drive?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Giesinke Uh, I mean, they need more physical controls. Like, that’s a real thing. It’s just kind
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of— Steve McLaughlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You made that comment. Actually, John drove Aaron’s car, so I should fill the listeners in. So the Syracusans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and us met at the Underscores house, which is vaguely central between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us. And by that, I mean, way closer to me than them, than the Syracusans, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we are. And so we all got together for New Year’s. The Armands couldn’t make it this year, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was sad, but no big deal. And so John had the opportunity to drive Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Volvo approximately 30 feet. And And you rode to and from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the airport in a Model 3, and then Tina drove the Model 3 briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically around the block. And you had commented on Aaron’s car in the literally 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet that you drove it that it also does not have enough physical controls for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your light. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was based on me being a passenger on a longer trip, because as a passenger, I had the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things like adjust the climate control
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and mess with
⏹️ ▶️ John the stand. There’s just nothing on that dashboard. There’s just the screen, and there’s a little strip of buttons below it. but the dial
⏹️ ▶️ John that I thought might do something having to do with climate seemed to only be volume. And there was like playback.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a waste of, they have room for more buttons, but they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey put them there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John agree, the climate control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in particular is frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so on the Model 3, obviously is that taken to the extreme where you just got the screen and you’ve got the two little balls in the
⏹️ ▶️ John steering wheel. But beyond that, there should definitely be more physical, particularly for things like air vents.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna go for a screen for that. It’s not like you’re saving, and it’s like more costly. It’s not cheaper. A lot of some things
⏹️ ▶️ John are cheaper if you put them on the screens. You don’t have to have all these buttons and switches, but having little actuator motors
⏹️ ▶️ John that are controlled is more expensive than just having a little stick that I can move with my finger that directs the
⏹️ ▶️ John air. So it’s a little bit silly in that regard. The doors are also silly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the first time, when I test drove one, I got yelled at by the car for opening it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you used the mechanical, yep, but same thing with me. I mean, so it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John design because obviously the affordance is telling me to use the handle that I’m not supposed to use. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it has it is because it has frameless window glass. And unlike seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ John every other car with frameless window glass, the way it works in the Model 3 is when you open the
⏹️ ▶️ John door, it wants you to let the car slide the window down
⏹️ ▶️ John about an inch or half an inch and then open the door. And when you close the door, it will slide the window
⏹️ ▶️ John glass up half an inch to tuck it under like the weather ceiling. So what they want you to do when you open the door is from the
⏹️ ▶️ John inside, is press a button. and pressing the button gives the car a chance to do its little window thing and then pop the door open.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is also a mechanical door open, which is like where you would think the handle was, a little thing that you pull on.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if the electronics are bad or something, you can still get out of the car. But if you use that mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it yells at you because it’s like, I didn’t have a chance to roll the windows down. You just basically tore them out of the weatherstripping.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, look, do you want to have frameless windows, which I don’t suggest because it’s not great. Make
⏹️ ▶️ John them work without any electronic trickery. or make the mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John door opening thing much less obvious, because it looks like that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John you should get in and out of the car. So that’s just like needless complexity. One more thing that can break, like they,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t say they fixed, they changed the door handles to not be like the Model S,
⏹️ ▶️ John where now they are still flush, but to make them unflush, you would just use your finger to open them instead of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a sensor and a motor, which is cheaper and less problem prone, but I didn’t find particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasing to use. It’s not bad and you get used to it, but I don’t know. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it would be more pleasing to use the handles than it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John was. But anyway, they took all the complexity that there was in the door handles and they put it in the windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, for the record, the Model S also has frameless windows and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has, at least on the interior, regular door handles. And when you open it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every other frameless window car I’ve ever seen, Yeah, the window goes down like a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch, but it doesn’t really matter, you don’t really notice it. And then when you close it, it goes back up a half inch and you know, goes into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather seal. But you can open it normally. Like it’s like, they already solved this problem with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S and then they unsolved it with the three. It’s like, same thing like the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when the X came out, it’s like, let’s have the gullwing doors, which caused them lots of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they were so complicated. Like, hey, you know what? Doors were solved a while ago and they had to go unsolve them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, it seems like it’s like Tesla’s curse. Like every vehicle they make, they take at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one major problem that like no one really asking, kind of like Apple. Nobody was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking them to redesign and reinvent component X, Y, or Z, but they did it to be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that component ended up like having, you know, huge failure rates or being really annoying or unintuitive or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, with the Model 3, I think, I think the Model 3 might have a few of these things, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird door handles are definitely one because the one way that you would expect and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume to open a car door from the inside, which lots of people have to do when it isn’t their car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even when it is your car, it’s like one of the first interactions you have with the car is the car yelling at you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that you might have just hurt the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm. Yeah. You know, what’s also funny to me about this is that the girl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I dated in college, she had, I believe it was a 2001 325 Coupe, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if memory serves, also had frameless doors, which I actually do like, unlike John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it did that very dance. Like you would go to open the handle and they would shimmy the window down just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a smidge and then you would close the door, if you were opening the door, and then you would close the door and shimmy the window back up. And it didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a problem in 2001. But in the vein of odd door situations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dad has a C7 Corvette and it has push button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to open the door, both interior and exterior. So where there would typically be a handle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there is a place for like your fingers to curl around a piece of the body to open the door, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an exterior piece. It’s kind of like inset within the door. Well, anyways, you push a button in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It kind of like what you would do for a tailgate in a lot of cars. You know, there’s like a little push button there and then you pull
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the door open. But on the interior, there’s also just a little push button, like where the grabby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle is to close the door. And anytime I get in that car, despite having been in that car a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times now, I forget and fumble about trying to figure out where the hell is the handle to get me out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of here? And then there’s some god-awful lever that you can pull somewhere to do what the Model 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is doing and mechanically open the door. But I don’t know. Of all the things that we needed innovation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on in cars, I’m not sure door handles was really where I would have put my energy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Doesn’t seem like this is a problem that needs further solving.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I’ve said on past shows, there is one aspect that is actually important for Tesla in that
⏹️ ▶️ John having a car that feels futuristic is part of their selling proposition. So having
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two things where it’s needlessly complicated, but also reads as futuristic to both the
⏹️ ▶️ John buyer and the people they show off their car to make some amount of sense. Like I don’t, I don’t fault
⏹️ ▶️ John them for having features like that. It’s just that, you know, choosing which ones those are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be and making sure that it’s stuff that you can actually pull off is important. Like maybe I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do something as important as the door opening and closing with the X, but yeah, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that worked out. Like, but for the, for the featureless dashboard, I feel like that is less impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John than the other futuristic features and more annoying long term. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of purity, that kind of like we’re gonna have no control, just gonna be one big screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s an interesting design exercise, but it’s the wrong, it’s the wrong trade off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Riding in the car, at first I thought I was glad that it had like the glass roof, like it’s not a sunroof,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just a glass roof because that allows the roof to be very thin. So it’s almost like
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire car has a big sunroof that is always not open. But you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked at where the headliner was and I said, if they had continued that headliner from the front of the car to the back,
⏹️ ▶️ John my hair would be hitting the car. But then I realized I didn’t have the seat in the all the way down position. So I brought the seat to the all
⏹️ ▶️ John the way down position and I had even more headroom. But with that seat in the all the way down position, it’s like I’m in my 92 Civic
⏹️ ▶️ John again. I’m practically sitting on the floor. So it does feel a little bit tighter on the inside, but it’s nice that I I can get
⏹️ ▶️ John to a reasonable position by adjusting the seats. It felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was pretty well put together with the doors and the trunk, both of which I opened and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise the ride felt good. I asked Dave about it and he said it felt a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John lighter and more nimble than the 5, which I can believe because it is lighter. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the S. Oh, sorry. You’re thinking BMW. I called it the 5 when I was in the car. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John S and 5 are very similar shape. Yes. that is lighter than the S and it feels lighter than the S.
⏹️ ▶️ John When my wife was driving it around, she gave it some gas,
⏹️ ▶️ John as they say in the exploding dinosaurs business. And it felt plenty quick to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we were just on like, not on a major road. So it was basically all from zero
⏹️ ▶️ John to 40 miles an hour or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that sprint, it feels very fast. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I had less wine than an S during those acceleration runs. maybe just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to it. I think it does it sounds different. I think it is quieter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s a nice car.
John’s XC90 review
⏹️ ▶️ John And Casey’s giant house on wheels Is ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John like it is just it is so big and so just Overblown,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s it’s nice on the inside. The dashboard is messed up. It doesn’t have a lot of physical controls and we already covered
⏹️ ▶️ John that The tires are ridiculous Tires are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size of the wheels or
⏹️ ▶️ John the wheels and the tires? So he’s got Pirelli tires on an SUV, which is not right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wheels, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are those wheels like? Are they 25 inch wheels? How big are they?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe they’re 20s, if I’m not mistaken. That’s stock, by the way. I didn’t put any aftermarket anything on it. The rubber’s stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The wheels are stock. Everything on that car is stock.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are very ridiculous. Yeah, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Volvo XC90, John Syracuse says, it’s fine. It
⏹️ ▶️ John less white in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not white, it’s a freaking gray car, silvery gray. It’s a very light gray. It is a very light gray, but whatever.
John’s iPad Pro review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fair enough. Well, we should start the show properly with some follow up and we can start by having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John review something else. So, John, what have you used in the last few days that you would like to
⏹️ ▶️ John I finally got to see the new iPad, which I never went to the store to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite saying I should really go to a store and see. We actually tried one time, but the Apple Store in our mall is closed for renovations.
⏹️ ▶️ John And unlike the last time I did this at a different mall, they didn’t move to a temporary location in the same mall. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John just is no Apple Store in the mall. So I actually had a plan, you know, not a planned trip, but I said, oh, when
⏹️ ▶️ John we go to the mall for this thing, we should also look at the Apple store when it was closed. But anyway, I finally got to see an iPad. I got to see Casey’s iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the 11 inch one. Like literally his actual iPad when we were hanging out
⏹️ ▶️ John this weekend. And it’s nice. It’s sad. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John so excited about the case. Well, I guess you didn’t have the case. You’ve got the keyboard thing. I was excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John the accessories, but now that I’ve seen them in person, I’m less excited about them because they seem kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John thick. Although I don’t like the keyboards anyway. So maybe the non-keyboard accessories are nice. I still haven’t seen those,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that was kind of disappointing. Casey’s stickers on his case are awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the fact that there’s stickers there, they’re not placed well. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’ve got one sticker,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got one sticker that looks like you were trying to center it, but you have not centered it, and that’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the layout of the other ones, which are not intended to be centered, but it tended to be kind of like haphazard, are
⏹️ ▶️ John not well placed. So now you just have to live with that. You just get, because they’re stuck on there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy your stickers. I checked and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s iPad is not bent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, so he grabs my iPad from like the couch or the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey table or something like that. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco first thing he does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and runs off with it and starts using it. And then within like 30 seconds, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realized he has taken the case, the folio, or whatever stupid word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple uses for it, takes the folio off. Smart keyboard folio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he takes a smart keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folio. He takes the folio off and I see him doing the ridiculous look that he made Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I do, which I hope you saw in the show art listeners from the last episode, in looking, peering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down every side of my iPad. And oh boy, did I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel vindicated when he confirmed my assessment that it was not at all bent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. And then I did the other. I also tried to pick it up with one hand, which is very difficult, but I was able to do it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then I did
⏹️ ▶️ John the other test, which I was very interested to try, checking whether it
⏹️ ▶️ John rocks when you put no case on it and you put it down on a presumably on a flat table with the camera down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone was saying, oh, with the camera down, I thought it would be rocking, but I was drawing on it with with the pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wasn’t, it didn’t rock. And even a last episode, Marco was speculating, maybe they intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John bend it slightly so it doesn’t rock and maybe that’s why his has a bend or whatever. I mean maybe that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going for but I can tell you Casey’s which does not have a bend that I could perceive if you put it down
⏹️ ▶️ John with the camera bump down on a flat hard table it rocks of course it does how could it not there’s a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John poking at it once I does it rock a lot no but you can both see it and feel it
⏹️ ▶️ John if you press down on one corner of this four corner thing it it rocks a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like that is a, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John refreshed knowing that there’s not some magic going on somewhere because everyone was saying that this thing, this
⏹️ ▶️ John four cornered thing that has a bulge in one corner only doesn’t rock, it totally does.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason people I think thought that it didn’t rock is because the bulge
⏹️ ▶️ John for the camera as compared to the length of the entire iPad, especially the really
⏹️ ▶️ John big iPad, but even the 11 inch, is so small, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the rocking is barely perceptible, but it is perceptible. Like it doesn’t knock or bang or whatever, but it moves
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly. And I think it’s fine. As we’ll get to in a moment, Casey now has a pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got his name on it, so in case he forgets
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who he is, he can look at his pencil and it
⏹️ ▶️ John says, “‘Casey, Apple Pencil.” Apple Pencil is just the product name, that’s not part of your
⏹️ ▶️ John name, Casey, don’t get confused.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, good, good, good. I got very confused. Thanks for the clarification.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, Apple Pencil. You know, seeing the inscription and Apple Pencil makes me think, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really want the Apple Pencil part there. I’d rather it just say Casey, because now it says Casey, Apple Pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can’t just read Casey, you have to read Casey, Apple Pencil. And I don’t like reading Casey, Apple Pencil. I just, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ha ha ha ha. The pencil is really nice. Whatever one says about
⏹️ ▶️ John it is true. The matte finish is really nice as compared to the glossy one. The weight felt good.
⏹️ ▶️ John The flat side was fine. The clipping on the magnet thing is really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John As far as I could tell, it worked like the other one. The double tapping business, I could take it or leave
⏹️ ▶️ John it. What else to say about the iPad? That’s about it. I didn’t use it very long.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did use the keyboard a little bit. I don’t like keyboards on my iPads, but it felt okay. You’re missing out.
⏹️ ▶️ John with Marco. You’re missing out. My wife really doesn’t like the keyboard on the back of the thing, like where you can feel
⏹️ ▶️ John the keys in the back. I don’t mind it that much, but again, I don’t think I would get this with a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, that’s my one month late brief review of the new iPad. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. It rocks. Raves, John Syracuse. Oh man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I will say, I really, really think like after whatever it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two months, three months of using this thing, the only complaints I really have about it are that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do keep covering up the Face ID camera and that the new design of the folios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it covers the back and attaches by the back does make it way bulkier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both the keyboard and the non-keyboard cover. Now we have a non-keyboard cover in the family now because Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has one. Both the keyboard cover and the non-keyboard cover are significantly bulkier feeling than previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart covers because they cover the back. And that’s nice if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rear coverage as a feature of protection for your iPad, but I’ve never cared about that. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had rear protection on my iPads and it’s never been a problem. They’ve never gotten smashed from the back or scratched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything in my typical use. So I would like for future iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make those covers less bulky as an option the way they used to be, because that is the one thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really like about the new physical design. Otherwise, everything else about the keyboard does seem to be an improvement overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is substantially bulkier.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the rear cover thicker than the old rear cover? I do have a rear cover on my current
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro. I have like the one where the rear cover matches the smart cover on the front. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John have to buy two things, right? So is the non-keyboard cover for the current
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad with the rear cover, is that as thick as the keyboard rear cover or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, like the rear covers between the two are seemingly identical. It’s only the keyboard side that is different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s why like, actually, I think that the move this generation is, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna get a cover, get the keyboard cover. because it isn’t actually that much bulkier than the non-keyboard cover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have the option of having a keyboard whenever you want it is really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. Yeah, I totally agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, you still got the keys on the back issue. I’d have to see it in person to see if I could deal with that trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you do have that issue, but in reality, in my actual use, I leave it in the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all the time, and if I’m not gonna be using the keyboard, I will usually just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detach it completely and just hold the naked iPad and then marvel at how thin and light it is without the keyboard, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s so bulky with it. But it really, like in practice, I hardly ever fold the keyboard back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it anymore. Like I just take the keyboard off if I’m not gonna use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I basically do the same thing. It is rare I take the cover off, but I definitely do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly that. So I think, Marco, you and I are pretty much the same brain on this.
Casey’s Apple Pencil review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, John deliberately took some of the wind out of my sails because I did receive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple Pencil since we last spoke. And I mean, everything John said, I mostly agree with. I’ve never had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple Pencil before, so this is new to me. I do quite like using it on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad for drawing things. I definitely don’t draw very often,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I don’t really—I’m glad I have it. I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a gift because I think it would have been a waste of $130 or whatever dollars it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had I paid for it myself and that is like the perfect gift to my eyes. Something that you want but you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to buy with your own money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You must be very easy to shop for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t know. I like stuff a lot and I’m very cheap so I like to think I’m easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, my parents bought it for me and I think they engraved it which isn’t a literal engraving. It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it’s printed on there. It’s not like etched in or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen print. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn’t engrave it, I think, just because they thought it would be fun to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess. I don’t really know why. And that’s why it says Casey on it. As I said on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I received it, I was slightly fearful that my parents might have been in on the joke and it would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said Mike was right on it, which would have really ruined my holiday. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco would have been amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would have been amazing and terrible all at the same time. So thank you, mom and dad, for not doing that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enjoy using, what is the, I’m gonna have to stall for time as I find it, the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can color that Mike had recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. Yeah, what was the one that Mike recommended? It is Pigment. And Pigment is super fun with a pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also did just a teeny bit of retouching on a photograph using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pixelmator or Pixelmator. And I did that with a pencil, which was really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Sketch Party TV, which I have had for years, but had completely forgotten about until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the recent sponsorship of the talk show. And we were playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a lot when we were at the Underscores, and that was tremendous fun. And obviously with the Apple Pencil is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, much, much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not, wait, can you just like pass the iPad around with you multiple people? Like you don’t need multiple iPads or anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct, so what we did was we had, you can do it either with, I think, two iOS devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, I’m not 100% sure, but the way I’ve used it in the past is with an Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it does the kind of AirPlay where it’s using the Apple TV as a second screen. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, it’s super great. And I think it’s only like five bucks. I, they, they haven’t sponsored, sponsored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this episode, but they basically should. So have your people call our people, but anyway, it’s like Pictionary, super fun, really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And great party game. And we were doing that with the Apple pencil, which was super awesome. Um, additionally, we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the icon factory and a friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry’s app, uh, Linnea, Linnea,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I asked him how it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pronounced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I asked him how it was pronounced. and then I think I just pronounced it improperly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s either Linea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We’ll just keep saying them both. We’ll cover either way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s Linea because it’s from the Latin word for line. L-I-N-E-E-U-H
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was his phonetic pronunciation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But nobody knows how to pronounce Latin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, there’s that too. But he speaks near fluent Italian, or did at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. He is relatively closely qualified to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Anyway, that app is like… I will characterize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it probably improperly as a drawing app with a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layering and Photoshop-y stuff on it. Now understand I know nothing about drawing and I know nothing about Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Linnea is really great because among other things it has different templates,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, so you can have lined pieces of paper. There’s a template for storyboarding, which I plan to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next time I do a car review in 15 years. backgrounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for templates for mocking up iOS apps. It’s really, really cool. And the layering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI works really, really well. I can’t say enough good things about this app. But I bring this up in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because I wanted to mention that using that as like pen and paper is really great with the Apple Pencil. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s daughter is a exceptionally good to my to my eye artist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so she took my iPad with permission for a while and, and drew a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different things on it. And it was super fascinating watching her, and I don’t think she’d ever used this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app before, but watching her use Linnea to create these really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, intricate drawings that were really, really pretty and shaded and colored really well. And she was using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layers to add and remove stuff, which is exactly what layers are for. I don’t know. It was just fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching John’s kid do this, and it was really, really cool. And those are easily the best drawings that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will ever be made with that Apple Pencil during its lifetime. Hahaha
Marco’s Linea review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I gotta say, I also have to do a shout out to Linnea. Linnea, Linnea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Linnea? Yeah, Linnea. Anybody who has an iPad and an Apple Pencil, just buy this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. Don’t waffle about it, don’t think about it, just buy it, you will thank me. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like five or ten bucks, it’s really inexpensive and it’s amazing software. So, what I like about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, I am not an artist like you. I am not like a drawing artist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. at all, but it is useful in the universe in life to occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco draw something to occasionally dot, you know, draw a diagram or, you know, annotate a photo or something, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just do like a line drawing or something. And it makes it really, really nice, even for people like us who are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artists. So what I so like I had linear installed on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, I don’t know, most of the last two years since I’ve had an iPad pro three years, whatever it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because my pencil was never with me because I had the old Apple pencil. I almost never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it, so I didn’t really know how to use it, but I knew I had it on my home screen for three years, even I never used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like someday I will be glad this is here, and so within the you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this first couple months of having the new iPad, I’ve already used it like four times, and each time like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time I used it, I I pasted into the chat here this tweet from the Playing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fun account for Tiff and Mike’s podcast about video games. It’s really really good. Everyone should listen. Playing for Fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FM and anyway so the little wreaths in the corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that image that have like the the playing for fun relay coin pixel art
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Christmas wreath and bow added to it I drew that in Linnea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was like like Tiff needed this to be you know redrawn with it in this style and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had just seen they just done an update days earlier and I just read their blog post where they had like this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grid template mode that you mentioned they had like certain like you know grids or or whatever they are, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had one that like, if you squint and write, you can make pixel art with it. It’s not, it isn’t like designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that purpose, and you know, there’s some holes in the functionality, but you can do it. And this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time I had used Linnea for more than 10 seconds, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally had a use for it, I had a need for it. And so, it was like an Apple commercial. I come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, Tiff’s in front of her computer, all frustrated with Photoshop. I come over with my iPad in my arm, I take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pencil off the top, I thought it was already there and fully charged, And I opened up this app that was this amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indie, inexpensive app that has all this functionality in it. And this is literally the first time I’ve ever done anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really with the app. I was able to figure out how to do that. And I did that entire thing in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 10 minutes. It was amazing. Like, Apple should have been filming that and made a commercial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of how inspiring it is. Like, that’s how good, it was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have since used it, I think two or three more times. Like one time, we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some work on a house, and so we had the architect over, and I took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad out and was doodling, and was trying to draw on top of a photo, and then trying to draw what I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking of how we should do things, and so I took the pencil and I drew what I wanted, and then she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took the pencil, we tapped a new layer, and she started drawing on her own layer with what she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted, and then Tiff took a pencil and drew on another layer with what she wanted. It was amazing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have all this functionality that it was just so incredibly intuitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we are friends with Craig Hockenberry here, and they have not asked us to ever say anything about this app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are not sponsoring, we’re doing this completely on our own volition here. It is that good. Like, it is just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is the perfect sketching, doodling, illustrating app for the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pencil. It is made specifically for the Pencil. It has, it had like day one support for all the, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the double tap on the new Pencil and everything, like you can customize that to be what you want it to be, You can switch between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools, you can switch between eraser, whatever you want it to be. The Ink Engine seems very responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t, because I’m not an artist, I haven’t used a lot of these apps, but I’ve seen Tiff use some of them, and some of them are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sluggish, or choppy, or just not very smooth. Linnea is totally smooth and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. So it’s just, it’s a great app. It doesn’t feel like it was made by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some big company who mostly writes Java software, and they kind of crapped out this iPad app. No, it was made by people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who really know what they’re doing, who love the platform and who really get the platform and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it to its full advantage. So it is a fantastic app, very easy to use for casual people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me. And you could see from their promo shots and everything, like if you are a more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talented person, you can get amazing results out of it, but you don’t need to be a talented person to use it. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say that about very few iPad drawing apps, especially very few that are optimized for the Apple Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is one and I strongly, strongly recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree wholeheartedly. And again, you know, Craig’s a friend of ours, but, um, but we’re saying this because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we mean it, not because he’s a friend of ours. And the thing that I liked about it just to, to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bow on this, not sponsor, sponsor read is that, uh, the UI was extremely intuitive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even for someone who has no idea what I’m doing. Like I’ve, I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve ever owned Photoshop. And I don’t think I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even ever pirated Photoshop, which might make me the only human alive that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe at some point, but… You were a teenager in the 2000s. How did you not pirate Photoshop?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. So I vaguely understand what layers are for and how they work and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth, but with Linnea, it’s extraordinarily intuitive and really, really cool. And you can use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for note-taking pencil and paper type stuff, which is great.
Marco’s PaperLike review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we should move on. Marco, how is your matte screen protector going?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far so good. I’ve actually, so we heard from a few people, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we heard, because I had asked basically, do any matte finish screen protectors exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t have the rainbow noise, kind of like more looking pattern, whatever it is, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refraction of the matte surface above the glass screen makes kind of like a rainbow noise look, and it kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes retina screens look kind of crappy, and so, especially when displaying white content. So I basically asked, does anybody know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does any matte screen protector exist that doesn’t have this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kind of leaning towards, I wasn’t sure that it could exist. And most of the responses were, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t exist, or it can’t exist. A few people recommended that I try tempered glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen protectors. And so I got a couple of brands, so I got one coming, I think, tomorrow, so I’ll try that out and I’ll report back next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I still like it a lot, and I’ve mostly stopped noticing the downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. I mostly stopped noticing that weird, uh, you know, rainbow noise effect most of the time I’m using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m just enjoying the nice finish of it. So I’m, I’m kind of happy with it, honestly. And, and it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed feel very good with the Apple pencil. Um, it is the, um, the paper like one, the paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot me, I think paper like.com, one of those. Um, so it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, I’m, I’m still as happy with it as I was last week. And, but at the same time, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get one that doesn’t have that rainbow noise, I am certainly interested in trying out alternatives. So I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try out one of the glass ones, see if it’s actually any different, or if it’s any better or worse, and go from there.
Trackpad + iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it just occurred to me, I have some more pencil related FU and through the magic of editing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’ll just slide this in earlier, but either way, one of the things that I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the pencil is that I do not generally do the mic approach of manipulating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the UI with the pencil, you know. So obviously if I’m in a drawing app, I’ll tap buttons and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things like that with the pencil, but if I’m just using the iPad, say looking at, I don’t know, a tweet bot or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t typically do that with pencil. I typically do that with my finger. However, there have been occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I’ve maybe selected text or maybe I am on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thread in Twitter and you know, it’s like it’s at Casey list at Mark Warman at Syracuse at some random person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some other random person. And I’m trying to tap on one of those usernames in order to figure out who this person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Having a precise pointing device that works with the iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really nice Because by no fault of tap bots who make TweetBot, when you have this list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all these different accounts, especially if they’re like, you know, through a new line, so they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one on top of the other, maybe it’s just me, but it’s hard for me sometimes to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap on the exact account I want to hit. And sometimes I’ll grab the one below or to the right or to the left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t ever have that problem with the pencil and goodness, text selection. If you’re not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that with the keyboard, say you’re in like Safari or something like that. So you’re selecting read-only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey text. That is even more incredible with the Apple Pencil. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that, I’ve really liked it and it made me think, huh, it would be really cool to have a really precise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointing device for this iPad. I wonder what it would be like to have a touchpad. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So somehow I’ve now backed myself into kind of sort of wanting a touchpad or a trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say, I’m sorry, on an iPad, which is something I think Steve Trout and Smith has been barking up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that tree for a while, if I’m not mistaken. So yeah, that’s a thing. That’s a thing in my world now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad started out with mostly no good input accessories.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they actually shipped that weird dock that held it in portrait mode from the beginning and had a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that existed, but I’d never even seen one in real life. Like I don’t know anybody who ever bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. It wasn’t really made to be used. I mean, heck, the first iPad didn’t even really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any design accommodations for a case. That’s why that first iPad case was so horrendous. The big like rubber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco condom thing that went over it. But you know, over time, the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco despite everybody who is like, you know, kind of like a tech commentator or like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad enthusiast or purist saying like, we don’t need a keyboard, we don’t need a stylus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and then over time, keyboard and stylus were both added and it turned out they’re awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for a lot of people, that made the difference between the iPad being a really good, useful device for them more frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it not being. I think trackpad support is one of those things where at first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, who needs that? You have tucks, you have your fingers, it’s not made for a mouse pointer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of arguments you can make for the trackpad not being necessary or being somehow against your religion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ultimately, adding better and more precise input devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the iPad has helped the iPad tremendously. Because while it is awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have something that you can detach from everything and just have a tablet and just use touch for everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great to have an option. But what we also keep seeing from actual experience with these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and market demand is that if you give people ways to make it more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop, they like that and some portion of those people will buy that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not only will you then have those extra accessory sales, but you will have more people using iPads more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time because they’re able to fit them into more places in their life. So a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just continuing that process of the iPad slowly becoming more laptop-like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s only a matter of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really surprised me. I don’t know that I want a trackpad, but man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are definitely times where I think it may not be so bad, And that was a startling conclusion for me to come to.
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Apple revises guidance
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have had the extraordinary luck of having extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting news happen just hours before the show. And we are recording on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Wednesday evening and right around the end of trading, Apple froze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trades on their stock and announced that they are altering their, I’m sorry, revising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their guidance for Apple’s fiscal 2019 first quarter, which ended on December 29th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess the TLDR on this is that they’re expecting to earn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot less revenue than they initially thought. And from what I’ve understood from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the initial response from this, the last time this happened was 2002 or thereabouts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’ve said, uh-oh, things are looking way different than we expected. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know a lot about this. I know that there are a lot of rules in the United States from the Security and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exchange Commission about when you need to report things, how you report them, and so on and so forth. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume some of this was compulsory, but one way or another, Apple has made a formal statement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including a letter to investors written by Tim or signed by Tim anyway, saying, Hey, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are not looking near as rosy as we thought they would, and we have some plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix it, but whoa. So that’s kind of the quick summary. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s start with John. And what is, anything else you want to add and what’s your initial take on this?
⏹️ ▶️ John See, it’s easy to get lost in the details of the financial stuff here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like we tend not to cover like earnings calls on this show and get lost in the
⏹️ ▶️ John business minutia and all that. But this is noteworthy for the reason you just said that like
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, Apple tends to give guidance as they call it to say, our next quarter,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what we think we’re going to do. ranges, you know, but fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow ranges. Say, here’s how much we think our revenue’s gonna be, here’s how much we think our profit’s gonna be. They give all this information.
⏹️ ▶️ John For many, many years, traditionally, Apple would always beat its guidance. They would say, here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna do, and they would always do a little bit more than it. Like, so much so that it was clear they were always low-balling, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it looked so good. Like, we told you we were gonna do five widgets, and we did seven widgets, isn’t that great?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we were like, wow, they did seven, and they said five. That went on for many, many years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, I don’t know, five years ago, I’m so bad at measuring time. Sometime
⏹️ ▶️ John semi-recent past, several years ago, they changed to say, we’re not gonna do that thing where we lowball our guidance anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we’re gonna give you actual guidance, where we’re gonna give you a range of numbers, it’s gonna be between
⏹️ ▶️ John five and seven, and then when the time comes, we’re probably gonna get a six, for all the numbers that
⏹️ ▶️ John we did. And they’ve been doing that for many years, and they changed their accounting, and there’s a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John details there. So we’ve been in this, the current period we’re in is the period in which Apple says what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do within a range. And they mostly hit that range. Occasionally they’re at the high end of the range, occasionally they’re at
⏹️ ▶️ John the lower end of the range, but usually they’re at the middle or high end of the range. Well, every once in a while, they
⏹️ ▶️ John exceed the range by a little tiny bit, but not so much that you think they’re low-balling everything. And this event
⏹️ ▶️ John is noteworthy because they had to, and again, I don’t know the details, maybe they had to or they did,
⏹️ ▶️ John either way, they did announce that, remember that range we gave you? Yeah, we have to give you a new
⏹️ ▶️ John range. We actually think it’s gonna be less than even the bottom end of our range, which has never happened
⏹️ ▶️ John in recent memory. Again, we’re going all the way back to 2002 is the last time that happened. It’s ancient history.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a very long document detailing all, basically, if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire room of people, including every tech podcast, come up with as many reasons as you could think of why
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple might not hit its revenue target. Like, they’re all in this document. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you name it. They could think of it like, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for like, also we had
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing where we let you replace your battery cheaply. That couldn’t have helped. And they’re right. That
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have helped revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers, but like, all right, okay. Like the shortfall is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s some astronomical number because all of Apple’s numbers are astronomical, but it’s like, you know, billions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars, right? An absolute value. Percentage wise, it’s like five to 10%, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on like, they’re like 5% off their low end and like 10% off
⏹️ ▶️ John their high end of the previous estimates. Right, so percentage wise, it’s not like they have 50% drop or something. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s apparently only revenue, like all the other numbers they gave are correct, but it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, revenue is the numbers that they’re missing. And they tried to more or less blame
⏹️ ▶️ John it all on China, which is probably easy to do, the iPhone in China specifically, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to do because again, the numbers are so big. But without us knowing, and we probably won’t know because they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John report unit sales anymore, without us knowing all the details, you can say, they basically said like the entire shortfall could be accounted
⏹️ ▶️ John by the shortfall in China. All right, but that doesn’t tell me whether
⏹️ ▶️ John non China locations went up or down. You know, is the US, which is basically the only thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John we know about is the US the same? If the world was just the US would they have hit their numbers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Would they have exceeded their numbers? Right? Or is it that us went down to but China
⏹️ ▶️ John went down by more or is like, we don’t know those kind of details. We all
⏹️ ▶️ John know that they blamed it on everything they could think of to blame it on including economic conditions
⏹️ ▶️ John in China, tariffs, trade, currency, like I forget,
⏹️ ▶️ John this huge list of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s the story. And they, they did a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit in in saying what are we going to do about it? Like, that’s the part I chose to put into to the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes, like they’re not gonna, they don’t make announcements about future products and blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, but they did say something, which I don’t know if they have to say something, but they did. They said, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t change macroeconomic conditions, which is true, but we, this is Apple speaking, are undertaking
⏹️ ▶️ John and accelerating other initiatives to improve our results. So undertaking, obviously they should always be undertaking initiatives
⏹️ ▶️ John to improve their results because that’s what a company does. They are accelerating those initiatives, right? One such initiative
⏹️ ▶️ John is making it simple to trade in a phone in our stores, finance the purchase over time, and get
⏹️ ▶️ John help transferring data to a new phone. Making it simple to trade in phones, we saw that and we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John it a show or two ago. Marco pointed out, I think it was last year or maybe the show
⏹️ ▶️ John before, that Apple was making a serious push to tell you, hey, come to our stores and you can get a new iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John for 400 bucks, asterisk, asterisk, only if you trade
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in one of the other phones. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been changing their homepage to have more, you know, more urgent come ons. They’ve been sending more
⏹️ ▶️ John emails and spam push notifications, like looking kind of desperate. This is different
⏹️ ▶️ John than all the other times that everyone said, oh, iPhone sales might be bad because Apple’s behavior, Apple itself
⏹️ ▶️ John was behaving differently. There’s always been stuff where they’re like, oh, this parts supplier says iPhone orders
⏹️ ▶️ John are down and iPhone is doom and gloom. Like there’s tons of people who are motivated to say that about Apple. And that’s a lot of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ John people are ignoring it. But in this case, Apple’s behavior was different. And that’s how you can kind of tell that
⏹️ ▶️ John things weren’t going great. All right, so making it simple to trade in phones in our stores.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it hard to trade in phones? I mean, they should have said, upping the marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John budget, telling people, you can get a new phone for less than you think if you give us your old phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Finance purchase over time, great. Buy your iPhone on a layaway plan because we know they cost as much as a house. Get a mortgage,
⏹️ ▶️ John get a second mortgage for your phone. Probably not gonna really move the needle too much. Get
⏹️ ▶️ John help transferring data is the one that pissed me off the most. because I’m like, get help transferring data to the new phone? How about you
⏹️ ▶️ John just make that easy enough that you don’t need to go into a store to get help? Like, is someone not buying an iPhone? Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna get a new thousand dollar iPhone, but it’s so hard to transfer data. It is kind of annoying to transfer data, but the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is not to say, we’ll make it easier for you to get help transferring data. That’s just make it better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like that one. And going through more of the litany of reasons, like, can you think of some other reasons Apple might
⏹️ ▶️ John not have made as much money? Like, they were listing things like, customers
⏹️ ▶️ John adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, which is a transition that we are at the tail
⏹️ ▶️ John is common, like that’s probably true if you compare it to many years ago when subsidies
⏹️ ▶️ John did hide the cost of the iPhone, but like you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel. If you’re gonna throw that out to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s another reason why we might not have made as much money. That is probably one of the reasons. These are lots of reasons, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John you put them in a big pie chart, they’d be those little wedges that you can’t fit the name in, right? It just has to have the line
⏹️ ▶️ John going down to it. Yeah, and there’s lots of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of stuff in the China section are like coded language, basically blaming US government trade policies
⏹️ ▶️ John without calling them out by name. Economic conditions in China,
⏹️ ▶️ John less traffic in stores in China, you know, just lots of reasons that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, expensive phones are not selling as well as they were in China. Now, everyone in the US, probably including us,
⏹️ ▶️ John sees these results. Hey, they’re not moving as much money through Apple. Not as
⏹️ ▶️ John many people are giving money to Apple. Not as many people. Not as much money is coming from customers into Apple. That’s what revenue is. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John customers gave this money to Apple for their things. It doesn’t take into account how much it cost Apple to make those things
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. It’s just like people have money, they give it to Apple, goes into the Apple machine, that’s revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s less of that. And when we see that story, it fits right into our narrative that we’ve been talking about for the past
⏹️ ▶️ John six months or whatever, that Apple has been increasing the prices on its products,
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly but surely, because they could. I forget,
⏹️ ▶️ John we never knew the correct economic term and never looked it up, but the idea is that if they increase
⏹️ ▶️ John the price of their products, whether it be Macs or iPhones or whatever, fewer people will buy them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John will it be so much fewer that they will make less money or will they actually make more money? Because 5%
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer people will get them, but we’ll sell it for 10% more, and so we come out ahead. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, when you’ve, when you think you’ve saturated the market and sold as many iPhones as you’re going to sell, increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John the price of each iPhone sold is one way you can try to get more money out of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the narrative that fits with that and these results together is saying, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John they found the limit. They found how much can you raise the price until it starts to, it still
⏹️ ▶️ John starts to become a net loss? They found the limit. That may be true,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s hard to tell without knowing, because again, we’re commenting from the perspective of the US market, which is the only thing we really know and have
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of intuitive feel for because we live in the US, right? And intuitively, we
⏹️ ▶️ John have all sorts of anecdotal stories from people and you know, that the phones are really expensive now. We know people
⏹️ ▶️ John who aren’t buying them and didn’t upgrade because they’re too expensive and so on and so forth. But if all of this
⏹️ ▶️ John shortfalls in China, we have no idea what the heck is going on with China, except for what we’re told in these types of stories.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just to give you an example, Ben Thompson had a story last year in March explaining yet another reason
⏹️ ▶️ John why Apple might be in trouble in China. And it had to do with the fact that iOS is not an important differentiator
⏹️ ▶️ John in China, because the most important thing in China is not the operating system or the apps available, but one particular
⏹️ ▶️ John app that dominates massively, which is WeChat, which is used by 900 million people, which is astronomical.
⏹️ ▶️ John And iPhones run WeChat, but so do Android phones. And so the iPhone has
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell itself based on the pizzazz of the particular form factor in hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if the pizzazz is gone, like from year to year, there’s nothing keeping anyone on iOS. It’s like, well, WeChat
⏹️ ▶️ John is available on Android too. And that’s the application that means the most to me and the only really important
⏹️ ▶️ John application. So if Android phones look cool this year, I’ll go to them. The idea being that when Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John a cool phone like the X, people will flock to it. But when they have a less
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting phone like the XS, it’s like, oh, it looks just like the X. I saw that already. They don’t have the platform lock
⏹️ ▶️ John in. That makes sense to me too, but I have no idea if it’s that factor, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the tariffs, if it’s economic downturn in China in general, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because the phone prices are increased, if it’s all those things combined. But the bottom line is any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of situation like this where Apple is doing worse than it expected to
⏹️ ▶️ John makes Apple look bad. Not so much that their numbers are down, but that they were surprised by it and had to revise their guidance that
⏹️ ▶️ John Wall Street hates it when they see uncertainty. Apple would have been punished if they said our revenue numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be lower, uh, are going to be this amount and this amount is lower than you might’ve hoped. But if they met
⏹️ ▶️ John that guidance, people would think Apple knows what they’re doing. They know exactly what numbers they’re going to get when they announced numbers have to lower than it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes everybody a little bit scared. And so Apple’s stock price is being punished for that. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when things go badly like this, every part of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John product strategy is suddenly reopened for debate within
⏹️ ▶️ John the company. So that whole thing about increasing the prices of your products slowly and putting less stuff in the box
⏹️ ▶️ John for that price, that’s now more up for grabs than it used to be. The
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of giving people minuscule amounts of iCloud storage, right? You know, we need that service
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue or whatever. That may be more again, more up for grabs than it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because when things go badly, people are much more open to new ideas, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ideas that would never be discussed before. Like, why would we reduce our service revenue? That’s the most important part of our business is growing
⏹️ ▶️ John so fast. It went up 20% blah, blah, blah. Why would we give people more iCloud storage for free? I
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping that this crisis attunity makes that
⏹️ ▶️ John topic come up again at Apple and say, you know, we could,
⏹️ ▶️ John we maybe we’ve passed the limit on the price of our phones. Maybe Maybe we need to have a more affordable
⏹️ ▶️ John phone model. Maybe we can keep our prices exactly the way they are, but just make the perceived value higher
⏹️ ▶️ John by, you know, doing something different with the products. And, you know, I don’t know, like everyone has their
⏹️ ▶️ John own pet peeves. They think that, you know, this now Apple will finally do the thing that I wanted them to do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re going to have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something. And the things they list are not going to cut it. Making it simple to trade in phones and
⏹️ ▶️ John finance the purchase over time and get help transferring data, none of those things are going to help this situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I hope they have much grander plans. Unfortunately, Apple’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John ship and takes a long time to turn it. So whatever plans they have, we’re not going to see the results of for probably a year at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John if at all. But yeah, that’s this is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably bad news for Apple, but I think good news for us for consumers, because it’s not like Apple’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John out of business, they’re doing just fine, right? They’re making bazillions of dollars, everything will be great. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to see them sort of on their heels a little bit because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John when real change can happen. And as anyone who listens to this program knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John we think that some real change is overdue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You covered everything pretty well. And I think the only thing I will add is what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed from Apple in recent years besides good laptop keyboards and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe some maybe some whimsy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what I need to get a bell for you it’s coming to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a bell for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be like a clack but it should be a butterfly keyboard class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound they make anyway what Apple has really been missing is hustle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve mentioned this before it just seems like they’re not trying as hard as they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to in certain areas it seems like they’re coasting a lot and they’re relying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the fact that they’ve been the best for so long in certain markets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that they have customers who will buy anything they make like us who will buy anything they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how much they charge for it will buy it all and it just seems like in a lot of areas they’ve been coasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last few years and yeah sure I’m sure we’ll hear from people saying that the team’s worked really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great good for you. But ultimately it feels like there’s no hustle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain areas. Like for instance, you know, the aforementioned laptops, like the laptop line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not been very competitive recently. And I don’t mean just about price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the laptop line has not been very competitive recently for like three years in a lot of areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to competitors laptops. Like you look at what Microsoft is doing, what a lot of the PC makers doing, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sometimes even what Google’s doing. The laptops and the PCs and the things they’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re hustling, they’re really trying hard, they’re moving fast, they’re making great hardware, and yeah, it isn’t always perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yeah, Apple’s still ahead in certain areas, but they’re trying really hard. You look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s doing in the laptop line, you’re like, are they trying really hard? Is this the best they can do? I don’t think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it doesn’t feel like that. And if it is, there’s a problem. If this is the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can do, there’s other problems that should be addressed. but like you look at some products and it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s not a lot of hustle. Now, this isn’t always true. The iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly zooming ahead constantly, way ahead of even where it needs to be, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one even in sight. Like, the hardware is doing great. The software on the iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little lacking, right? The Mac OS is having a lot of problems recently. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, I think this year might have some big changes there, so we’ll see what happens there. But like, it just seems again, Mac OS, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no hustle there at all, and there hasn’t been for quite a while. iPadOS, it seems like there’s no hustle there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re taking their sweet time doing even the smallest improvements to make it more amenable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pro work and multitasking and everything else. The iPhone, I think, does well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they clearly focus a lot there. I don’t think they need too much more hustle in the iPhone area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does seem like their other product lines are kinda slow. Again, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not they’re actually taking their foot off the gas, I don’t know, we’ll never know. We’ll hear we’ll hear people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will hear reports from people on the inside saying it both ways. We’re going to hear from people saying yeah, you know what ever since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know some manager took over then they everything has been slow and you know so and so ruin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company and we’re also going to hear from people who are going to be like you know my team worked really hard on this or I knew people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked really hard and that they’re doing everything they can. It’s limited resources about it. So we don’t know what to believe, but what it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like from their customers from our point of view looking at what Apple’s doing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at what their competitors are doing in the meantime. It sure seems like Apple has very little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hustle in some key areas that a lot of us care about. So I would love to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something light a fire under them. Like John said, we do tend to have better output from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they have some competition or some challenges. And we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen that feeling from them in a lot of these areas in a while. So I’m hoping this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to push in that direction in a little bit and I guess we’ll see what happens. I wouldn’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to turn on a dime and to immediately change everything, but to have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail once in a while and to have something like this happen where they get egg on their face in a pretty big way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the financial results of their largest, most profitable product by a long shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty big failure. Like, I know they’re not gonna go out of business or anything, but like, pride-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty big failure. And they haven’t had one of those in a long time and I think they really, really needed this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve just gotten too complacent and they’re not pushing, they don’t have their foot on the gas enough and I really wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that change and I hope this will nudge them in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wouldn’t describe it that way in terms of hustle and effort. Like I think they, I know this is gonna sound terrible, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like actually vaguely true in this, you know, the work smarter, not harder thing. Like I think they work too hard
⏹️ ▶️ John in, like they have too much hustle in certain areas. It’s kind of like when we were talking about the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, that it’s not that they’re not trying to make a great product. Like that’s part of, people throwing around that Steve Jobs quote, I think in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Marco, you retweeted somebody mentioning it, like that you shouldn’t chase profits. Steve Jobs is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you shouldn’t chase profits. You should just try to make the best product you can make. And if you make a really good product, profits will follow,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And everyone’s like, nods their heads, like, yeah, I totally agree with that, right? And everyone in Apple will say it or whatever. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s not said, the unspoken, very important assumption
⏹️ ▶️ John in that statement is that you, the creator, or that
⏹️ ▶️ John there exists, or that you, the creator, have a way to measure the goodness
⏹️ ▶️ John of a product. And that is where I think Apple’s falling down. They seem to have a tremendous amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of hustle into the minute details of fit and finish
⏹️ ▶️ John and object purity of the things they make, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t actually make a good laptop, a good phone, a good whatever. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so obsessed with certain details and they’re blinded to the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John good product doesn’t mean amazing tolerances, beautiful finish. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all part of a good product, but there are other parts that make a good product and they’re losing sight of those products
⏹️ ▶️ John by putting too much hustle into having the minimum number of screws and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey number of moving
⏹️ ▶️ John parts and incredibly small gaps around all the keys in their keyboard and other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at how stable these keys are. They’re so stable, because we wanted that so
⏹️ ▶️ John badly. I actually think key stability is a valid thing to apply to, but like, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John so… Yeah, but at the expense of everything else. No, but I’m saying that I think it’s, I think it’s more valid than
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re thinking. But the fewest number of holes on the outside of it, because simplicity is the ultimate, you know, sophistication,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, right? Tremendous hustle, as you would say, tremendous effort in areas
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But not nearly as much effort to thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know, other aspects of the product, they think about the other aspects, like they’re ignoring them, right? It’s a balance, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s gets back to the statement of we just make great products. It’s premised on the idea which Steve when
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs was around, he just he also just assumed it’s like, well, I know what’s good, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the time he did occasionally didn’t he didn’t, you know, the iPod, hi, fi wasn’t that great. Power Mac g4
⏹️ ▶️ John cube, not that great, even though it was super cool, right? But that’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important thing. We’ll just concentrate on making great products. If you lose sight of, if your
⏹️ ▶️ John opinion of great product is different than your customer’s opinion of great product, you start to have this kind of disconnect.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think it’s because of lack of effort. I think it’s because of misdirected effort. So you’ve got this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John company of very smart people working really, really hard on ever so slightly the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John balance of things. And you do that long enough, you end up in a situation where you have products
⏹️ ▶️ John that are amazing in many regards, but your customers find vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John unsatisfying. And you’re increasing the price because to make a product as
⏹️ ▶️ John fine and as beautiful as, insert current Apple product here, it costs more money to make and is in fact
⏹️ ▶️ John better in exactly the way the ways that you thought it would be better. Like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer and more solid and even stuff like has amazing battery life and you make the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s many areas where they are excelling and it’s worthwhile, but many areas where
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re excelling and it is less worthwhile. And so that’s I think, you know, the phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it was just bad luck that they happen to be pressing up the prices on their phones at the same time that
⏹️ ▶️ John a market that that’s super important to them because it’s the only place where they can have any substantial growth takes a downturn.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the worst time to have $1200 phones that suddenly become $1400 phones because of tariffs or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But on the other hand, it’s kind of their own fault for abandoning the low end of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, of the phone line and saying, we’re just going to sell old phones to fill that gap, which is less satisfying to consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John because old phones just feel old because they’ve been seen before. Even if you just put out a new phone that is no better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the old phones, uh, you know, even though they can be, but looks and feels different and has a new name,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just basics like that. And we’ve talked about the laptop line and the Mac, and this is not about, this is just about the phone. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to think that it’s not lack of effort, effort, not lack of hustle. It’s a slight misbalance
⏹️ ▶️ John of the prioritization. It’s in the end, it’s a crisis of taste. It’s like, how do you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you tell when a product is good? We’re just gonna make the best, we’re just gonna try to make a good
⏹️ ▶️ John product. You better make sure that what you think is good is what everyone else thinks is good,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s, that was another Steve Jobs video that someone put up. We just try to make the best products we can and if consumers like
⏹️ ▶️ John them, we succeed. If consumers don’t, we don’t. It’s in the end, it’s kind of as simple as that. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s more complexity to it, but if people liked the phones that Apple was putting out,
⏹️ ▶️ John liked as in, in their whole, not just like, oh, if I gave you this phone for free, would you like it? But just here’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John product, here’s a price, here’s everything about this phone. What do you think of it? And what consumers thought is,
⏹️ ▶️ John we are not inclined to give you as much money as you thought we were gonna give you for the phones that you’re offering.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a time for Apple to look at what they were offering customers and say, What is about
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re offering that they don’t like? Do they not like the phones? Do they not like the price? Do they not like the combination? Do they
⏹️ ▶️ John not like these features? Blah, blah, blah. The answer is not that they had difficulty transferring the data. And the answer is not that they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John a layaway plan, for crying out loud. Obviously, they’re not going to tell us what they’re really going to do. But it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a shame, because things like the XR, I think, are a great new,
⏹️ ▶️ John previously unforeseen balance of features and price. but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the XS is not an unforeseen bounce of features and price and
⏹️ ▶️ John is instead an extremely expensive phone that is not that much better than the old phone and maybe abandoning the
⏹️ ▶️ John SE and abandoning the low end of the line to just hand me down phones is not a great strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. So yeah, I think we’re going around circles here. But anyway, I just I just want to say that I don’t think it’s a lack of effort.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s misdirected effort
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Apple employee retention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things that I believe we’ve talked about on the show and made brief rounds through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people like us a few years ago was, hey, retention is going to be a problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. And we said this, I don’t know exactly when, but I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a post from Gruber that he made about this back in 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was interesting to me thinking about, you know, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s like to be an Apple employee, but my assumption is that a lot of your compensation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being an employee is in the way of stock or stock options or stock grants or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. So in other words, maybe you make $100,000 a year doing whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you do at Apple, but you might get $50,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 worth of stock-related things every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so a lot of your compensation is involved in Apple stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I looked earlier today and the stock was at $232 as recently as October.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I looked earlier today, it was at $157. And by the time this makes it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, I bet you it’s going to be a lot lower because all this stuff happened after hours that we’ve been discussing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that makes me wonder, if Apple stock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has just taken a kind of big dump, then what does that mean for talent?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a lot of times, from what I can tell, from way out here in the East Coast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like when this sort of thing happens, a lot of times a lot of people will leave and go to one of the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Silicon Valley darlings. You’ll see, not immediately, but you’ll see a bit of a quiet exodus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Facebook or maybe Tesla or something like that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just got to thinking, and I wondered what your guys’ take was, do we think that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retention problem is still a thing? Do we think it’s related to the stock price? if their stock really does dive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that create a crisis? And that’s probably too strong a word, but, but I don’t know if a better one, a crisis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of retention and talent at Apple. And then secondarily, secondarily, where does this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talent go? Cause Facebook is evil. Tesla seems like it’s an awful place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work. Google hasn’t been all that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting lately, at least from what I can tell. And I’m sure I’m going to get a bunch of email about this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t point to anything that Google’s done lately that’s been specifically interesting. So where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does the talent go? Do they all just go to startups and hope for the best? Like where does this all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go? So Marco, is there a problem here do you think? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if so, where are all these people going to go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m not really very well qualified to answer this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never, well at least not for a very long time, sought a job in Silicon Valley.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t ever had a job there and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t really even had a job for nine years, something, eight years. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, uh, so it’s hard. I’m not really in the market, so it’s hard for me to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like specifically in that market what’s going on. We do. We have heard though that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, for multiple, multiple people on multiple occasions, we have heard that yes, indeed, you know, Many Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Valley companies, Apple included, do base a lot of their competition on stock options. And so if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working there and I’ve heard on a number of occasions, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope not insulting anybody here. I’ve heard that Apple it is kind of cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the salaries like relative to the competitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The brother competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that they don’t have like the highest salaries in the valley, which itself I think is dumb because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard of a lot of great people, very talented people who choose not to work at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for reasons including that. And that’s stupid. Like that’s an easy problem to fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have the money to fix it. They have plenty of the money to fix it. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should not be a reason why somebody chooses not to work at Apple. Assuming that’s true, because I have heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on a number of occasions, then the stock really is a substantial part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people’s compensation. You know, it’s one thing, you A lot of jobs will offer some degree of stock options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but unless it’s like an early stage startup, those are not gonna be worth a fortune.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might be like a nice bonus. And that’s the much more common scenario. And when you have a scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, you are tied to the stock price for retention on some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level. A dip like this would hurt a little bit and some people might quit, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be a huge problem for you. Whereas if you’re relying on the stock options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a substantial part of the compensation, this becomes a larger problem. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by making it a larger part of the compensation, you are basically taking more risk with your employees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are putting more of your personnel problem onto your stock price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you necessarily need to. And that I don’t think is a wise move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a company like Apple where, you know, even when Apple grows, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think most of the large growth is behind them, not in front of them, right? Like they went through this awesome growth period. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s mostly done, right? I think everyone, including the stock market, seems to be agreeing with that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the potential upside for them, like the money they could save by giving things a stock option instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of more salaries to people, I think most of that upside is behind them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now they’re just left with all this risk. So I hope that what they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe what they have been doing, I’m not sure, I hope they are making the stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options less of a part of people’s compensation and making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for that with higher salaries. That’s what I hope. But I have pretty much no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information on that subject, so I really can’t say what they actually are doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you are an Apple employee, Marco, and you decide to leave,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where are you going?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I’ve never worked at any of these companies before. I have visited the campuses of a few of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The biggest contrast for me was visiting Apple and then visiting Facebook. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly see how somebody who works at one of those places could go to the other one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t see it. They’re so insanely different in atmosphere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment, the types of people you have, the types of work that you’re doing, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing good things for the world or whether you’re being the worst company in the universe. There’s a pretty huge difference between these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two companies. So to To me, it was a no contest. I was in these two places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, well clearly, Apple, this is where the adults work. Facebook, all the teenagers can go there, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Here at Apple, this is where the adults get real work done. That was the clear feeling between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two places. When you add in places like Google, I don’t know, I’ve never visited Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I visited their New York office, which is hilarious, but I don’t think that would really count. I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much they’re working for the same people in a lot of areas. Now there are some areas where they are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitive but the companies where Apple has had problems getting and retaining talent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the big areas there is services and especially in the area of machine learning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri and related technologies, big data problems, things like the iCloud infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stuff. Apple has historically had a lot of problems getting and retaining talent there and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost a lot of those people to places like Google because they do more AI research type stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is higher prioritizing the company. So Apple does have problems there, but I don’t think those are usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money related necessarily. Those tend to be more like people who want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a company that prioritizes their area of expertise higher than Apple does. So I don’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t expect that to affect that kind of hiring. So ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I am not anywhere near an expert on this, but I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can avoid these problems if they make stock options less a options less a part of people’s salaries and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make up for it with actual money in the salaries.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I know this question was about retention, but in some respects,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is actually good for Apple’s ability to hire.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like Margaret just said, Apple has long since passed the part where
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re going to get options, you’re going to get rich off of them because they had their big growth period and now they’re the biggest company in the
⏹️ ▶️ John the amount of growth that they’re going to have in the future is not going to be as great as it has been in the past. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no one is getting hired on board to say, and guess what, we’re gonna give you some options
⏹️ ▶️ John and in a few years they’re gonna be worth so much more than they are now. Nevermind
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t know what the mix of options and RSUs and all that stuff is. Like they could just give you shares
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, well the shares are worth this much money so we’re just giving you money, it’s another form of giving you money. That works fine
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can trade that off as salary. But the idea that you get hired and that there’s a big upside
⏹️ ▶️ John for you because whatever the stock price is now, in a few years it’ll be even higher. Well, if they take a massive,
⏹️ ▶️ John disproportionate, somewhat irrational hit to their stock prices, they probably are sure to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s sustained because let’s say Apple makes some changes to its business for
⏹️ ▶️ John the long-term success, but in the short-term, just make Wall Street angry about them not making as much money or profit
⏹️ ▶️ John as they did before, that actually makes it easier for Apple to hire because Apple can
⏹️ ▶️ John say, we are massively undervalued now. When you come on board, we’re going to give you options. And no, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to go up by 3,000%. But it’s conceivable they could go up by 50% or 75%.
⏹️ ▶️ John So whereas before, when their stock price was 232, the highest it’s ever been or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you hire someone on and say, and guess what? Next year, our stock price would probably be, eh, best case, like 232 again, 230 something.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not a big growth story to be told there. But if they’re down in the dumps,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if they have a reasonable story, Or if people think
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s undervalued, that it’s too low, that this company makes so much money and has so much success,
⏹️ ▶️ John so much brand value, or their stock price should not be this low. And there’s people who thought they were too low at 232 because their price-to-earnings
⏹️ ▶️ John ratio was always ridiculous as compared to some of their competitors, right? But taking a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John hit, because this is the first bad news in multiple decades or whatever, is a time
⏹️ ▶️ John that it makes them easy to hire. Now retention, if you have a bunch of options and you’re like, you can exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John these options at $200 and now the stock price is $140, you feel crappy, right? But I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple’s been doing in terms of giving people options versus giving people RSUs or whatever. Because if they
⏹️ ▶️ John give people shares, things that are just immediately redeemable for shares and not options, and you have those shares,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sad because your shares went down. But if you’re in it for the long haul, you’re like, well, we’ll be back above 200 in a couple years. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not too bummed, so I don’t think that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retention. Well, and we’re hearing from people in the chat and stuff that Apple does just do RSUs and that kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not actual straight options. And that’s fine. I think all this actually applies regardless. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re tying a substantial part of your employees’ compensation to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock price of the company. However you do it, that is the result.
⏹️ ▶️ John But options are tying your compensation to the growth of the stock price. Whereas RSUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just giving them, instead of giving them money, you’re giving them the other money that is variable, but it’s not going to collapse to
⏹️ ▶️ John zero. So the variability of the stock price, even if it goes down a little bit. Okay, so we didn’t actually give you as much money
⏹️ ▶️ John as you thought we did, but if you hang in there a little bit, it’ll go up, and it’s not going to drop to 1% of what we gave
⏹️ ▶️ John you, whereas options, all you care about is the growth of the company, and if you have anything
⏹️ ▶️ John less than, you know, if you have 0% growth, we gave you nothing, you have 1%, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all about growth. So options are much more applicable to a company on the trajectory, the big growth
⏹️ ▶️ John trajectory. Like that’s where you get really rich, where they give you what they thought was a small amount, but the stock price quintuples,
⏹️ ▶️ John then now you’ve got way more than you thought you did. So yeah, I don’t know what their compensation structure is like and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like reportedly Tesla, similar companies like you should just be glad to even work here because we
⏹️ ▶️ John have high prestige and they do, there is lots of prestige working for Apple. There is lots of prestige working for Tesla or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John company that has a good reputation and is generally, when you say you work there, people are
⏹️ ▶️ John impressed. Prestige is part of your compensation package. Just like those stupid Falcon Wing doors are part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the futuristic compensation package you get when you buy a Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to the degree that it becomes less impressive to work for Apple, they have to adjust for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think, in the end, I think the upside of
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to hire more based on being massively undervalued probably offsets any
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are sad because their RSUs are, their shares are worth less now than they were.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think, to Marco’s point about Apple being a company for adults.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most people who are at Apple, I imagine, are in it for the long haul. It’s not that much of a revolving
⏹️ ▶️ John door company. As much as we know so many people who left Apple and come back, they do it in waves of multiple years. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like they work there for three months, then leave, then come back, then leave, then come back. You know, it’s like, well, I worked at Apple for eight years, then
⏹️ ▶️ John I left and did some other thing for four years, and I went back to Apple for eight more years. Like, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people probably don’t like it that the price went down, but I think that Apple has long
⏹️ ▶️ John since stopped being a company where employees are obsessing over the stock price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One other angle that I hadn’t considered until you just said the whole dropping door thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of the people who left Apple like over the last decade, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of them came back or whatever else, a lot of that was because we had this booming app industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside of Apple. And when you work for Apple, you can’t have apps on the side like they don’t allow side projects really. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there was this whole world of the App Store booming on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all these people in Apple were like, hey, I can make apps. I know all these frameworks and everything really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And I know exactly what would make a good app, and I can make apps. So maybe I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strike out on my own and see if I can make it as an app maker. And many of them did for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then over the last few years, as the app market has cooled and become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more challenging to succeed in, many people have actually left that world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gone either to Apple or gone back to Apple, who were there before. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was, I mean, this is, again, this is anecdata, but I know a lot of people and I heard about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot more who had a similar pattern to that. And so maybe if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock price hit is the result of an overall cooling market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there that we’re in for kind of some belt tightening all around and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire financial market kind of cooling down a little bit, that actually might be good for Apple’s retention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because a lot of people might retreat back into the safety of working there, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people would be less tempted to leave who are already there because what’s going on outside of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is less tempting than it is during like a big boom time.
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#askatp: Switch controllers
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Josh A. writes, on the most recent episode of Reconcilable Differences, Merlin made passing reference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the seminal conversation on video game controllers, Pinching the Harmonica, which is episode 49 of Hypercritical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having just received a Nintendo Switch, I was wondering if John could, or had already, discuss his opinions on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey various permutations of controllers for it. I had heard several opinions that the Pro Controller is the quote, best controller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever made, quote, which seems like a bold statement, although, says Josh, I really do like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Controller is not the best controller ever made, but to address the controller-ness of the switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the switch is a television console. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John also a portable console. Portable consoles historically and probably
⏹️ ▶️ John permanently are in ergonomic compromise. The whole point is they have to be portable. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want them to be too big or and also you don’t want them to be too like unwieldy like in
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to shove into a bag or a case or something so they tend to be flat,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, and they tend to be small. And also, in
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much all the ones I’ve seen, you are holding the entire device up while you use it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John not only are you gripping a controller but you are also holding aloft the thing the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John time you play it. So they can’t be too heavy and you have very
⏹️ ▶️ John limited options in how you work the thing. The switch is very
⏹️ ▶️ John flat. The switch is pretty heavy because it’s got a really big screen. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the switch has a mode where you can play it where you don’t have to hold the device. You can take the little, what are they called,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Joy-Cons, you can take them off the side and put the little screen on the little kickstand. And now you’re not holding the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just holding the little controllers. But those little controllers were things that fit on the side of the flat portable device.
⏹️ ▶️ John And And so they’re very flat and they’re very small. And they’re not as small as, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the Game Boy Micro or whatever, like Game Boy Advanced Micro. I think that’s the smallest
⏹️ ▶️ John one they ever made. But they’re still small. And so the main problem with the Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch by itself with no other accessories, just with the Joy-Cons, is
⏹️ ▶️ John everything about them is small. The joysticks are small, the buttons are small, the shoulder buttons are small, the controllers themselves are small.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whether you keep them on the thing and have to hold up the entire device by the small things or take them off and put the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on a kickstand, they’re just small. Probably good for little kid hands,
⏹️ ▶️ John not good for adult hands. Ergonomically, for the most part, the Joy-Cons are
⏹️ ▶️ John bad if you have large hands. They’re not impossible to
⏹️ ▶️ John use. The quality of the controls on them is good. The buttons are good. The joystick is good. But there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John getting around the fact that they’re really small. The fact that many games expect you to use them as D-pads makes them even
⏹️ ▶️ John worse because things are on them are not positioned correctly for d-pads. They have to have strike
⏹️ ▶️ John this compromise between being sensible to use vertically and also when you turn them sideways you can
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of squint and see it’s kind of like a d-pad but on a d-pad you wouldn’t put the buttons that close to the joystick.
⏹️ ▶️ John The buttons are practically in the middle of one of the joycons and the quote-unquote shoulder buttons are very
⏹️ ▶️ John awkward to hit so they have those little attachments to make them slightly less awkward to hit but those attachments make you feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re hitting a button that hits a button because that’s exactly what you’re doing and it is not a good feeling. I
⏹️ ▶️ John find using the Joy-Con in a D-pad mode or in a like horizontal mode
⏹️ ▶️ John to be basically painful I mean I have RSI and everything right but for even just a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John people it’s awkward and it is unresponsive the shoulder buttons are not as responsive and if you take off that
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing and just put the shoulder buttons directly there like these little recess things bottom line the Joy-Cons
⏹️ ▶️ John are not good controllers they’re okay for what they do it’s amazing that they can be used in so many different
⏹️ ▶️ John ways, but they’re not good. So thumbs down for the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco switch, ergonomically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John as a controller. The Pro Controller, on the other hand, is where you do have room to make a thing that is not flat,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it can be a reasonable size. Pro Controller is really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that it has four buttons that are exactly the same size and a perfectly uniform diamond
⏹️ ▶️ John pattern, because that’s, I don’t know, geometrically pleasing. That’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I miss the octagonal surround that lets you know what the cardinal directions in the 45s were, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see the case for omitting it for things like first-person shooters where people like to have more free-form control
⏹️ ▶️ John than that, even though it’s not as good for like a platform game or whatever. So the Pro Controller is, it’s very, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very good controller. I don’t think it’s as good as the GameCube controller, but it is a high-quality controller
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is miles better than trying to use the Joy-Cons. Now, and even though I’ve complained
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Switch ergonomically, bottom line is if you want something portable, like as a portable gaming console and
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have like a table to put the thing up on it, you have to hold the entire device in your hand. If you’re holding the entire device in your hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets the job done. Like it is, I don’t see how it could be better without
⏹️ ▶️ John fundamentally changing the Switch because it is flat and it is this tall and I
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t want it to be any taller and I wouldn’t want it to be any less flat than it is. Like it’s already pushing up against that limit
⏹️ ▶️ John with the big thick shoulder pad. So it’s an understandable compromise, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like using it that way and they’re not good controllers. So that probably went on too long.
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably got on even longer, but I’m cutting myself short.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we, uh, when we were together, John, we played some Mario Kart and I could not agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you more that using the Joy-Cons in horizontal mode is painful because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little, I don’t know, bulges that, that, that are kind of used to help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you grip them when they’re in the normal mode attached to the switch. Those bulges end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up being physically uncomfortable because you’re bracing the Joy-Con against that bulge, which is then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jamming into one of your fingers and it’s just not fun. Now, that being said, I mean, it’s still an amazing device and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do love my Switch, even though I don’t use it that terribly often. And I think that, I feel like I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the compromises they made and they all made sense, but yes. But the Joy-Cons, I don’t mind when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re, you know, being used in their regular mode and vertical mode and portrait mode, if you will, but in landscape,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s rough. Marco, anything to add on that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not really. I hate the Joy-Cons, like you guys. I never want to use them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which, you know, I never use the Switch portably because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like the screen. It’s both too small and also not a very nice screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really, really hate the feel of the Joy-Cons. So, like, I’m the only person in the world who wants like a Switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, like a Switch Max. I want a thicker, larger Switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, you know, just has, it basically has the grip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a pro controller, which would of course make it massive. Like nobody else except me would actually want such a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And while they’re there, they can make the screen really big because we’re already making something that’s basically the size of a Sega Genesis. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find the Switch ergonomics to be awful unless you’re using a pro controller and a TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Image case, I love it. So I’m not as much of a controller snob as John. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if anybody in the world is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why we love him. But I have had no problems with the Pro Controller really, except for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one small problem that there is no way to turn it off. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you, for instance, if you need to transport Pro Controllers in a bag, every time a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button is nudged, it will power itself on and try to connect to the switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is, or if you’re just like, if you are moving Pro Controllers around, say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a cabinet, they’re all gonna turn on and try to connect and try to activate and everything. It’s kind of annoying to not have a power switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. Other than that, that is my only complaint. Other than that, it’s totally great. I love it. I love that it charges via USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the feel of it. I have no complaints about any of the buttons or pads or sticks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s pretty good. I just want a power switch to turn it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with what you said.
#askatp: USB-C AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco. Enker Oberoi writes, Hey, these new AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should still be coming at some point or another. Will they use USB-C or lightning or any chance for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new AirPods to just have Qi charging standard? And related, when do you think if ever the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a leap to USB-C? For me, I would be very surprised to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPhone or AirPods move to USB-C anytime soon. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I collect more and more devices, including the switch and the pro controllers, as Marco just mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including my newest GoPro, including my iPad, my MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of those things are on USB-C. And I’m kind of really liking having the one USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector for everything. So I am ready for my new USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overlords, except I just don’t think they’re ready for me yet. But John, when do you think, When do you think we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to USB-C, if ever, on AirPods or phones?
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods are weird because the only pattern that can be discerned with Apple’s use of USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John thus far has been that they’re going from big devices down the scale. So the smallest device
⏹️ ▶️ John that has USB-C, not counting the Apple TV, and you know, full-fledged device with
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen, is the iPads. And only recently on the super-duper, you know, pro ones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So would they skip over all the middle things and go to like one of their smallest things, a tiny little AirPod case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s no reason the AirPods have to be, have to have lightning or USB-C. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John case has plenty of room for both. There’s no size considerations. USB-C chargers
⏹️ ▶️ John are all over Apple’s products, but so are lightning things are all over their most popular
⏹️ ▶️ John product, phones. There’s not, you know, the arguments for the phone, for the thinness and
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen and everything. Like I’m having trouble thinking. I mean, I’m gonna say no, just because
⏹️ ▶️ John like inertia and assuming the AirPods were designed a long time ago, even though they have the new AirPods that aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even released yet, I’m assuming it’s just gonna be lighting because the existing ones are lightning and these ones are probably designed
⏹️ ▶️ John shortly after the existing ones with just the addition of the wireless charging. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason why they couldn’t have USB-C. So I think actually, surprisingly, AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John are a candidate to move to USB-C before the phone. There’s lots of reasons to
⏹️ ▶️ John stick with lightning on their most popular product, both the thinness reasons and also because
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t rock the boat, like it’s such a popular product, you don’t want to do anything to perturb customers who have tons of lightning cables all around.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I had to make a prediction, the next set of AirPods that come out will have a port on them, that
⏹️ ▶️ John port will be lightning, regardless of their wireless charging situation. And the phone, I think we’ve had whole
⏹️ ▶️ John shows where we talked about that, but I don’t expect the next phone to be USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The AirPods case should always have the same port that the iPhone has, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna wanna charge your AirPods when you have your phone with you sometimes. And you’re gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if the AirPods are USB-C and the phone is lightning, you could be out somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using your phone, like on a plane or something, and not have a USB-C charger available to you or easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reached. And then, you know, you would have to have two different chargers if you traveled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an iPhone and AirPods. That’s ridiculous. You know, we already have enough different chargers. We don’t need a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. So I think for wherever possible, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods should charge the same way the phone does. That being said, I think both should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move to USB-C. I would love to do that because we already have so much of the rest of the world moving to it. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since I’m pushing pretty hard into USB-C for my travel setup especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just so nice to have fewer cables and fewer types of connectors and everything. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants that, right? Everybody wants the one cable that can do it all, the one charger, the one battery, whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have all that with USB-C now. So now, devices I have that are micro USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even lightning are weird to me. Those are like, oh, I need to get the special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable out to charge my lightning things. You know, like that’s, it feels bad. It feels like the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it feels like, you know, unnecessary friction. So the more things that can move to USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better. And I just, I hope we someday can reach the all USB-C future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before like USB-D comes out we have to change it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey again. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two years where it’s stable and where everything supports USB-C. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the main question I have about it like about whether Apple would actually do it or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not about like MFI licensing of lightning connectors or anything like I don’t I’m sure that makes them a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m sure it pales in comparison to like you know like a 2% dip in iPhone sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance like I don’t I’m sure like it’s not enough money for them to like make major product decisions around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am a little concerned like the the reason the USB-C port can fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad and the iPad is way thinner than the iPhone so it isn’t an issue of thickness at the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge but there is an issue of like how thick can the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be and have a screen that goes above a USB-C port so the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t on an iPad the USB-C port is basically the depth inside the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of of the screen bezel. So I don’t think there’s any point in there, or at least not like a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, where the screen is actually going over the USB-C port’s internal volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the phone, the margins are a lot narrower. And so there isn’t enough room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a phone to have a USB-C port that the screen doesn’t at least partially go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over top of. So I’m a little concerned that maybe that might preclude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I mean, I’m sure you can make the phone, there is some thickness for which that would work. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if Apple’s willing to ship a phone with that thick, but I do really want this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really want an iPhone Y
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and YS and YS Max that has the industrial design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the new iPad, basically. But it would probably still have, it would be like a hybrid. It would still have a notch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would still have the thinner iPhone margins of the 10 series, but would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the straight sides and USB-C. I would love this product. This is like my dream iPhone. I don’t know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually able to make that or if they’re planning on making that. That would be nice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I hope. And if they did that, then I would expect an AirPods update that would also have USB-C because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it just makes sense for AirPods and iPhone to have the same charging plug, no matter what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think AirPods would go Qi only because I don’t think a Qi coil can fit on the back of AirPods. and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see them making the case significantly larger just for that reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there goes that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with the point about wanting to charge with the same cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that charges the phone. I think you’re absolutely right. And so I think these will move in lockstep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, I just thought they would probably make us pronounce Y11.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, I hope not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be terrible. It’s the iPhone 11, it’s spelled iPhone Y. It’s YS, but it’s 11S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the iPhone Ys. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the Roman numeral for 11, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So? Stop Apple’s market department.
#askatp: VW with Beats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, which I think is translated to, I do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand anything writes in Brazil, Volkswagen is launching a small hatchback featuring beats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio, an example of quote unquote, Apple selling parts for car manufacturers. What’s in the steel for Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think money, obviously. I don’t read too much into this. To me, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the beats unit doing the sort of thing that you would expect beats to do if they were still independent. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t personally see this as that big a deal. I find it slightly interesting that it’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Brazil uniquely. Um, apparently this is in the Novo Polo Volkswagen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I should say the Vol, Volkswagen Novo Polo. Um, but yeah, I don’t, I don’t read that much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into this, John, am I crazy or is this not a big deal?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know if there are any beats hardware. It’s probably just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, who knows who actually makes the audio system and the thing it’s got the word Beats on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I doubt there’s any actual Apple engineering that goes into this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just yet another case of random branding of semi-premium options
⏹️ ▶️ John in cars. And you know, Beats is weird because it’s one of those companies that Apple acquired, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John got to keep its own brand. But the Beats brand is not on my personal
⏹️ ▶️ John radar for much of anything. So I have no idea how popular they are around the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’re big in Brazil, or maybe this is just yet another one of those weird card options that comes and goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty common in the world of audio brands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for brands that have like a lot of consumer recognition like Beats or like Bose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Harman Kardon to license their name to put onto some other thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars, computers, fridges, who knows. But like, I think it actually was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beats. Remember for a while HP laptops would advertise they had some brand names audio in them. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was actually beats. This was before Apple bought them. But like this there’s a long history of companies doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like this and it’s almost always like a really shallow marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. Like they’re like maybe they have like an EQ that boosts the bass all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gives it like the beat signature sound and maybe beats had to go approve the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make sure it sounds like beats or something. But like that’s again This is a very common thing in the audio marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, and it’s not really anything noteworthy. Yep, agreed. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Eero, and Linode, and we will talk to you next time.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John you aqui, next week!
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check broadcast so long
Post-show: HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started using HomeKit for the first time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you bring that up. Me too. Did I already talk about this on the show? I don’t think I did. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so. But we have a single Wemo switch that, or not switch, I keep calling it a switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s a plug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it was. That’s what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I actually want to get one of those. I keep bookmarking links when people say, oh, you should get this one. But then someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says, oh, the Wemo plug that everyone recommends only works on 2.4 gigahertz
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless and has some problems. So if you find one that’s good, that’s good, let me know, because I got some plugs I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to try out. I have like six of those things, they’re great. I mean, the WeMo app is hilarious garbage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they all are. Like all the apps for smart home things are hilarious garbage. The good thing is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you don’t really need to use the app beyond setup. Like you configure it and then you control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it either via HomeKit or via Amazon Alexa or via, you know, automation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools or, and you can- Can you control it through both? Yeah, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John actually, yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same. The older generation you can’t where you needed like a bridge, and I decided like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bridge costs like 40 bucks that you can make all the old ones do home kit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but throughout the Black Friday season, I scored a few deals where I got them for like 15 bucks each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I just replaced all the old outlets with new ones. It was like $15 more to just get all new ones, and I’m like, all right, I’ll just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, and not need this stupid bridge forever. Yeah, so what you want is like the white rectangle ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those Wemo outlets, those are the ones that you want,
⏹️ ▶️ John older like. Were you in the Slack where somebody said 2.4 gigahertz only and doesn’t work well with
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-node systems like Eero?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had that problem personally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I have a multi-node system. So one thing I do, so my system, it’s a ubiquitous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, it isn’t Eero, but I have it set up so that I have a smart home devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network that only broadcasts from one of the APs. Hmm, interesting. And this is admittedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an overwrought solution that might not be necessary, but I had some issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past that I don’t know would still be issues today that were fixed by doing that and so I set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all up on that it’s only a 2.4 gigahertz network so I avoid that problem too and all the smart home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are on that and it’s not like you know it’s not like super like subnetted off or anything it’s not like a fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separation from the main network it’s just like a second SSID being broadcast by the wireless access point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only that they connect to to basically control and limit that to avoid problems but these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are indeed then controllable via the you know the Alexa cylinder and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by by HomeKit and and also you can set up automation rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in either HomeKit and or the Wemo app so like you know if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to deal with certain things in HomeKit or whatever you can do it in the Wemo app you can set up rules and you know it even has some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco random some like limited intelligence about things like sunset and sunrise stuff like that so it’s been fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used I’ve used these switches for years and they’ve been totally fine. We keep buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more whenever we have a need. Like it’s nice. Like for Christmas we put our Christmas tree on one of these and we could say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey cylinder, turn on Christmas and turn on the Christmas tree. It’s, you know, just fun stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, it’s nice at the end of the night to say turn off everything and have everything turn off, you know, and you go, you go upstairs. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, it’s been fine. And so anyway, so I did want to talk briefly about home kit, not enough to make it a full topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but basically, uh, I have finally set up HomeKit. Like I finally did it right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I actually like moved things out of default room and gave them real names and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up a few scenes so I could ask Siri, you know, turn on bedroom lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or goodnight and have it shut everything off. And it’s not bad. I gotta say it’s, from the HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is the fastest thing the HomePod can do. You know, I complained last week that Siri is just too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow on the HomePod. Like it takes forever to respond to things like start a timer. so long that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think maybe it didn’t hear you and you start to say it again, then it says, okay, here’s your timer, you know? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomeKit stuff is way faster. I don’t know if it’s doing it locally or what, but it’s way faster. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s also nice to be able to also take my phone in my pocket and just hold the button down and say, turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on outside lights and have my outside lights go on and stuff like that. So it’s nice having it be in multiple places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a few things about HomeKit that are a little bit weird that I’m not used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t appear to be possible to, to like create groups that span
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple rooms and have divide and have things in them that are in multiple groups. Like I guess scenes are what I’m supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use for that. But like if I want to create a group called everything, I need two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenes, one’s a term on one, one turn them off, I guess. I’m still learning all this stuff, so I could be wrong, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are certain things about it that are like a little bit odd and like with some of the restrictions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, but the scenes are pretty nice. They’re pretty powerful. They’re, um, it’s nice to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set like, you know, different colors on the hue bulbs and different brightness levels and have something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can turn certain things on, but turn certain things off as part of the scene. So, you know, there, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powers of it that the other systems don’t have or there aren’t, there aren’t as easy in the other systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other pro, the only problem I have with it for the most part is that certain things like Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries to be too smart about, and I can’t get them to work. So for like two or three years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve had two lamps with smart outlets in our living room. And we’ve called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those to the Alexa cylinder. We’ve called those lamps so we can say, Hey, cylinder, turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on lamps. I cannot get the home kit to respond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that same command in the same way. I think Siri is trying to take over lamps and it turns on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the things it knows about that are lights. And that’s not what I want. You just have to speak it in quotes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, like there’s some things like that where I’m going to have to change the name of some things to make Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less smart about it so it does what I actually want it to do. And I still, as nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it is to have Siri so quickly responding to things, and as nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it is to have the microphone that’s always in my pocket that I can always just pick up and use anywhere in the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have the wonderful pickups of the HomePod, like It’s a wonderful long range pickup for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are all really, really nice. But Siri is still kind of like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dim assistant from California who talks too much. It’s just kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. It gives such long responses to things that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want at all. If you tell your cylinder from Amazon to turn on something, it says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. Or you can even configure it to have the little short do-do kind of sound, and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Siri, it’s like, okay, I’ve turned off all those things for you, have a good night and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy new year. Hey, while you’re upstairs, do you want me to, you know, maybe order some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pizza for you? Or, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, hey, you know, how’s, you enjoying the weather up there? Is it nice? Yeah, I hope you have a good day. It’s like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please stop talking. But thank you, you did what I wanted, thank you. That’s enough, you aren’t a real human. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to have a conversation with you. You don’t need to be that polite to me. I would just want you to say, okay, that’s it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. That’s it. So all the extra, like, you know, cuteness and commentary I could really do without.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if Apple insists on having it in there, I really wish they were just deciding to turn it off. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, I’m actually enjoying HomeKit. I’m trying to use it more to kind of get myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that world. The rest of my family still uses the Amazon cylinder for everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m trying to use the HomePod and Siri and HomeKit exclusively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not incredibly easy at times, but for the most part, I’m getting into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I finally have an appreciation for this system I think like we’ve heard from our friends for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that HomeKit has finally gotten good in recent years And I think that’s I think that’s true. I think I think HomeKit’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally arrived. It’s finally good
⏹️ ▶️ John I just got an Amazon cylinder by the way, so now I’ve got all the systems achievement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlocked What was the impetus for that
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a Yankee swap? That’s what I got in the Yankee swap at work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it a full-blown cylinder or the dot
⏹️ ▶️ John no just the dot? It’s a Yankee swap and what do you expect but but no like it’s there
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m already fighting with it because I was the very I had the thing for
⏹️ ▶️ John 15 minutes before I was googling for disable indicator light echo dot of course you were
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s got a giant It’s the it’s the original not not the new fancy one, but the original dot right And it’s got that giant
⏹️ ▶️ John ring the giant ring of lights, and I wanted that light to go away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s good. Then you have you have it as a big volume knob.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I don’t I don’t like the light The answer is you can’t disable the light so just in case you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wondering But you know what, one big advantage to that is like, you always know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it is hearing you. Like that’s the one, I really don’t like with the HomePod that unless you’re standing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right on top of it, you can’t tell if it’s hearing what you’re saying. But you know, but the Echo is like, they have that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LED ring on top and you can see it from anywhere in the room. You could see, is it hearing me right now? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a very valuable bit of feedback that the HomePod really
⏹️ ▶️ John needs. Yeah, but it’s a little bit aggressive. Like it’s getting to the point where I was considering Googling how to disable the feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when you have notifications or messages, it goes like yellow. And this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even know existed, right? So I could disable that feature, I suppose, say please stop telling me about notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when an Amazon package arrived, it just solid yellow the whole time, right? And so I come in in
⏹️ ▶️ John this solid yellow thing and it lets me know that there’s something that it wants to tell me, but I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ John into that feature. Like I can tell a package arrived, I don’t need the little thing to be lit up. So I’m almost at the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m asking disable that merely to just get it to turn off the light. I wish I could just tell it, don’t turn
⏹️ ▶️ John on your light ever. Unless I’m talking to you, maybe I would accept it as a feedback to let you know that you heard me, but if I have
⏹️ ▶️ John not spoken to you, do not turn on any of your lights, because they’re pretty bright. So, you know, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was free, some worthwhile, you know, free for the cost of me throwing in something into the Yankee swap.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I’ve got all the things, and that’s why I was looking for outlet things, because I’ve got some lights that I want to control,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I will have literally three devices that I can talk to to control those lights. Maybe I’ll connect it up
⏹️ ▶️ John to all of them, and they can all compete to see who can turn off the lights first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is cool to say to your watch, Hey Dingus, turn off the Christmas tree and have the Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tree turn itself off. Like that’s no different really than using the person in the tube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that, but it’s just something magical about doing that via your watch. I do think that’s quite
⏹️ ▶️ John neat. I have more practical needs in that I have just floor lamps that are not connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to a switch. So every time I want to turn them on and off, I have to walk over to the corner of the room and turn on the lamp and then I I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to walk over to the other side of the room and try to, like, by touching them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John a practical concern. Yeah, that’s, I’m like, well, you know, it would be nice if I could
⏹️ ▶️ John say something. The other problem is I have some recessed lights that an outlet’s not gonna help with. I would actually need
⏹️ ▶️ John like a smart switch or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light bulb. There are smart Wemo switches. I don’t know if they’re HomeKit compatible yet. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they might be. But there are Wemo wall switches. And I haven’t installed them, but some people in the family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, and they seem to work well. It’s really nice. Like it seems extravagant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install like small wifi devices to let you voice control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two lamps in a room so you don’t have to walk across the room and touch two lamps. But when you do that every day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually a really nice little quality of life improvement to just be able to speak into the air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey thing, turn off everything and they just go off. And yeah, you save 10 steps and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it isn’t a big deal once, but when you do it every day and you’re saving 10 steps every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, that adds up. And it’s just a nice little thing. It’s just pleasant.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need things in my life that make me take 10 more steps every day, not 10 fewer steps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that should be steps you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to take. Yeah, yeah, exciting, exciting steps. Quality