318: Not a Casino I Want to Play In

21 Mar 2019

On Monday, we got iPads. On Tuesday, we got iMacs. On Wednesday, we got AirPods. On Thursday, all we got was this episode of ATP.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Hierarchy of Needs is satisfied... by a ThinkPad?
  • Searching for things in Settings.app
  • Nvidia and Apple
    • CUDA
• Apple's wild and crazy week
  • Monday: New iPads!
    • iPad Mini!!!
    • iPad Air
    • Jessie Char's revised lineup
  • Tuesday: New iMacs!
    • Upgrade #237: New iMacs, iPads, and the 2019 March Event Draft
      • Colleen Novielli
    • Connected #235: Stephen's Hellish Nightmare of Dates
    • iMac Pro bumps
  • Wednesday: New AirPods
• March 25th Apple event
• #askatp:
  • Why doesn't Marco lease iPhones? (via Jacob Ford)
  • Would Marco still recommend the 2015 MacBook Pro? (via David Mikucki)
  • How is Overcast adoption of CarPlay vs. Apple Watch? (via Chris Adamson)
• Post-show: Marco's HDMI CEC update
  • Reddit post

Sponsored by:

• Marine Layer: Clothes that make it easy to get dressed in the morning. Use code atp15 for 15% off your first order.
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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Follow-up: MacBook needs
2. Follow-up: Search in Settings
3. Follow-up: NVIDIA & Apple
4. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
5. Monday: iPad Mini, Air
6. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
7. Tuesday: iMacs
8. Buying philosophy
9. Sponsor: Marine Layer (code ATP15)
10. Wednesday: AirPods
11. Thursday and Friday?
12. Next week’s event
13. #askatp: Leasing iPhones
14. #askatp: 2015 MBP today
15. #askatp: Watch vs. CarPlay
16. Ending theme
17. Post-show: HDMI-CEC

Follow-up: MacBook needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How the hell do we start this episode in any way other than like having John Maltz on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That would be amazing. I kind of wish I had planned it such that Maltz was waiting in the wings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey God that would’ve been amazing So, yeah, so we should start with follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as this is a normal episode as always and let’s talk about the MacBook hierarchy of needs I did think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bit about what my hierarchy of needs is since it was kind of sprung on us last episode and my conclusions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Were not that exciting even after having thought about it for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But we did get a little bit of feedback about this, including from Abby Beckert, who wrote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that if you make your own list, there’s good chances that one or more PC laptops actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey includes every single item on the list. So for Abby, they wrote, you know, a reliable keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey touchscreen, carbon fiber, sensible built-in ports, first-party dock for extra ports, cellular SD card

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reader, waterproof, a 14-inch screen at two and a half pounds, which is half a pound lighter than 13-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBook Pro, sensible screen resolution, an option for gloss or matte screen. And this was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all in, and I don’t have the rest of the email in front of me, I’m sorry, but it was all from some flavor of ThinkPad, if I’m not mistaken,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Avi had found. And so their point was just, hey, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of us, including the three of us, are lamenting some of the choices that Apple’s made with regard to laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But you know, you could just go swimming in the other pool and that may not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be so terrible. You might get the hardware you want, even if you don’t get the software you want. And it’s an interesting point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s an interesting point, except that like, number one on my hierarchy of needs is runs Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that wasn’t the point of most of the emails. It wasn’t like, hey, you should try BC. It’s just that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the idea, and it’s kind of what I was getting at with the MacBook hierarchy of needs. As I said on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show, not so much like, let’s find out what our one or two in the line of acceptability is, but just like, what is your full list?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And can you imagine Apple running the whole list?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it seems unimaginable because we’re like, well, what we collectively on this program want from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptops, it seems like Apple doesn’t want to build. But you start to get into this mindset that it’s like, well, it’s not just that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple doesn’t want to build it. Nobody can make a laptop like that. That’s asking for too much. And it’s just not true. Like you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a laptop, like if we just read these bullet points, not that Apple has ever been about chasing specs or bullet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John points or like feature lists, like that’s the opposite of what Apple is about. But our lists,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each of our lists weren’t that out, you know, out there. This list, I feel like is out there. Carbon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fiber and waterproof laptops like, you know, but if you make a list like that, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can find the PC laptop to satisfy that showing that not only is it possible to do, it’s possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do probably at a price, you know, half of what Apple charges, of course, probably also less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than half of the fit and finish or whatever. But all this is just I put this item in here just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a as a level setting that like we shouldn’t be to sort of resign

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the fact that the only ports that can ever be on a keyboard or on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a MacBook are USB-C and Thunderbolt. We shouldn’t be resigned to the fact that there only can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one keyboard across three different sizes of laptops. Like, you know, we need to keep believing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it is possible to make a slightly different set of trade-offs. Kind of like we did when we talked about the phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and lo and behold the XR is here and it does make a slightly different set of trade-offs and and it goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John places that no phone has ever gone before. You know, it’s got a screen that everyone agrees is great, even though it’s not OLED.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s got the longest battery life of any iPhone Apple has ever made. And it’s a tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit thicker and it comes in cool colors. You know, I’m trying to be optimistic. All this is to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, Apple, we believe in you. You can do this. You can make slightly different choices for your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptops and it will make more people happy.

Follow-up: Search in Settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, we also got some feedback from a couple of episodes ago when we were talking about, and I think it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey might have been John, was justifiably lamenting that the search feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the iOS settings app is kind of spotty. And sometimes you can use like a synonym or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that in order to get what you want. But oftentimes it’s just kind of a disaster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And we weren’t really sure what this was about. And we heard a little bit of feedback, which I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey paraphrase. And that feedback was that the settings app is set up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so that each of the different teams writes their own remote view controller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then that’s loaded up to display their little part of the world. And that means that the way it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey implemented is that each team gives a list of words or terms or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever. And then they have to implement something when that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey term is searched for. So the point of all this is that there’s not one master

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey list that there’s one or more humans kind of curating. In actuality, each individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey team is curating their own list and doing sometimes a good job and sometimes a bad job

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of that, which explains why John or whoever it was, or maybe it was Marco, saw such spotty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey results when using search, where sometimes you can use something that doesn’t seem like it’s at all related, but it got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you where you wanted to go. And then sometimes you’ll search for the exact thing you’re looking the exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey appropriate term for a thing, and it won’t come up. And that’s because that team apparently is not good at search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey terms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s kind of amazing to me that they don’t implement sort of what you would think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the outside or from an outside programmer’s perspective, that just take every single UI label and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John add that to the list of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} strings that you’re going to search, right? Kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what I assume the macOS help search thing does. It just takes the name of every menu item. And if you type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the help bot, like you don’t have to program that. that you don’t have to export any special lists from, you know, if you make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a menu item called foo and you search for foo in the help thing, it will highlight the menu item called foo and you didn’t have to do anything. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the point of framework. So the two parts of this, the fact that it’s a remote view controller, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the settings app just lets another app show its UI, but it’s showing it inside the setting app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Another thing that strikes me strange about this whole split that again, made sense when there was no multitasking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on what was then iPhone OS, but in the modern world, it still feels kind of weird to have things split up in this way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then B, just let all the UI labels, let every single string

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your view contribute to that corpus automatically. So you don’t have to, if you forget to do whatever, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why we get frustrated. Like I have a screenshot of this exact item and these are the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John words that are next to the label on this little on off switch. And if I search for those words, I can’t find it. It’s all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they forgot to export those words. Well, don’t make them export it. Anyway, maybe that will be fixed in iOS 13.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll be sure to check for it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If

Follow-up: NVIDIA & Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then our next piece of feedback, which is our final bit of follow-up, is a little bit long, but bear with me because I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s really interesting. Way back on Christmas Eve of 2017, that is not a joke,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really mean it, an anonymous birdie wrote in to tell us a little story about NVIDIA, which I think all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey three of us had forgotten about until we spoke about NVIDIA a couple of weeks back. And then this anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey birdie wrote us to say, hey, remember when I emailed you all that way back a year or two ago? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I went digging through the email, and turns out it was a good email. So I’m going to read you a bit of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is from this anonymous person. Regarding Apple’s affinity for AMD GPUs, two anecdotes that may

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey suggest why. Back in 2010, when deployed Macs had a fairly even distribution of GPU vendors,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey over 98% of all kernel panics reported to Apple indicated that it was NVIDIA’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kernel driver. So a few years ago, this is back in 2017, shortly before Apple dropped NVIDIA, a friend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at Apple shared their recent experience working with all three GPU vendors to add a new minor feature to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s low-level display software, which required a small change to each GPU driver in order to adopt it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The Intel driver was owned by one Intel engineer who was permanently stationed at the Apple campus. They finished

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it in half a day. AMD sent an engineer down to Cupertino from Toronto. They finished the work in two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey days. NVIDIA responded only to say that they had received the request and would evaluate it in the next quarter’s planning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey meetings. Oh gosh. Moving on. NVIDIA is also and has long been a lumbering,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bumbling, bureaucratic mess. Worse, their success in the Windows GPU market, despite themselves, has made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them arrogant. And so it’s their fault that the GPUs aren’t in Macs, not Apple’s. It always has been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So now if you like smash cut to this year and this anonymous birdie writes, you know, as to why they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey haven’t made up yet, this is Apple and NVIDIA, history saw it perhaps because NVIDIA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remains arrogant, highly opinionated, intensely stubborn, and not good at all at writing reliable software, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like Apple. Birdie said that, not me. So you can see why they might have issues getting along. I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that was fascinating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I think we brought this up on the last show or maybe on past shows that there was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John NVIDIA GPU in laptops that was very unreliable. And I think Apple’s still sore about that. And there’s all sorts of bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blood, but like, I felt like things were kind of, I felt like NVIDIA was reaching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out last year or whenever it was where NVIDIA was like, hey, we’ve made a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of drivers for our latest cards for what were then the latest Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pros. So if you buy our cards and buy these drivers, it’ll work great on your Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Apple just silence like, but I felt like that was Nvidia reaching out saying we’d like to be in the Mac market.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And even if Apple won’t talk to us still because of everything that we’ve just listed plus more,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe we can show Mac users that we’re the good guys here and we invest time and and energy and engineers and making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drivers for Mac. And even their thing where they were like saying, oh, Apple won’t let us make drivers. It’s like, it’s like Nvidia is still trying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And from the outside, it looks like Apple isn’t trying. And you know, so this is yet another one of those,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need to come up with a name for these things. These balance of power between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two giants, both of whom are being hurt by their inability to cooperate with each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Who’s being hurt more? Probably Nvidia, because Apple’s got more money than anybody else in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, so they’re fine. But if you look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you narrow your vision to not Apple as a whole, Apple’s doing fine, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just Apple’s plans for the pro desktop market in that narrow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John view, and video is not there. Their ambitions for the pro desktop market are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not heard that much by Apple, not adopting it. But Apple’s ambitions might be hurt because there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are whole sections of the market that Nvidia has handily cornered with CUDA and its particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expertise and it still, as I keep bringing up every couple of shows, has the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fastest GPUs for certain sets of applications and AMD just doesn’t seem to be able to catch them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, it’s probably not going to be the end of the world, but I still continue to wish that these two crazy kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can work things out.

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Monday: iPad Mini, Air

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So this has been a big week, as it turns out. I have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loving this week, despite the fact that I’m 200 and change dollars poorer, which we’ll talk about later. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Monday, Apple decided to release new iPads. On Tuesday,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new iMacs. We record this on Wednesday, and there were new AirPods. And we’ll go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey through this one by one. But what an awesome rollout. I mean, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why this happened other than clearing the decks before next week’s Apple video event.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I’m kind of loving this new thing each day. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the 12 days of Christmas. It’s almost like Hanukkah even in the middle of March, which is unusual to say the least. I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they got word that It was my birthday this past Sunday, and this is just late birthday presents for me. Keeping the birthday rolling, so thanks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple. But they started with Monday, new iPads, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey miracle of miracles, ladies and gentlemen, a new iPad mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m very excited about this. Yeah, I’m super happy about that. Yeah, that’s super awesome. I’ve left

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the iPad mini behind. If you recall, I had the original iPad, then I had the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Retina iPad, then I had two iPad minis, now I have an iPad Pro. You can probably buy my iPad Pro for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my cold, dead hands, but I am genuinely, genuinely, really, really happy that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mini has gotten refreshed and is basically on par with most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey modern iPads. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, of course, especially as an iPad Pro, but in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the CPU, it’s an A12, which is great. That’s super awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m very excited about this, not for myself, but for my son’s iPad, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he he has been using my old, what Casey would call a Retina Pad Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the, what Apple called, I believe at the time, the iPad Mini 2.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so it wasn’t that different from the 3 and the 4, but it was like a generation older in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain things like processor and camera and everything. So, you know, it’s running an A7 processor, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that does run iOS 12 not well. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’d been deferring the update for a very long time and at some point, somehow we lost that battle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it got updated. Somebody hit the wrong button at some point and it got updated and boy was that a mistake. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s painful now. He’ll try to launch a game and it’ll be like a white screen, white

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen, white screen, and eventually he’ll just give up because he thinks it’s broken. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he’s really started to use his iPad a lot for things that I want to encourage. Things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like experimenting with using the camera, shooting video, shooting photos around the house, recording

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what he calls podcasts, which is super cute, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} in voice memos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I want to encourage him to experiment with like some musical things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like GarageBand and stuff. And you can do those things on that iPad, but boy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it slow. It’s really cumbersome to do those things. And the game thing really frustrates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco him when we allow him to play games. And so it’s painful. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as he’s like doing all this creative stuff that I really want to encourage, the last thing I want is for his tools

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that he’s using to be creative to fight him in any way. You know, like you want to like separate a parent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from their money, have their kids show an interest in something, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the parent will very quickly want to like, oh please enable this here, throw money at this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want to encourage this wonderful creative thing you’re doing. So anyway, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so all these years we’ve like I’ve been kind of waiting for an update for the last couple of you know less year or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two, but I didn’t think an update was ever going to come for the Mac Mini for the iPad mini, rather.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we, like, I even like, when Tiff and I upgraded our iPads in the fall,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I prepped her old one for him, which was a 9.7. It was just so big and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heavy and unwieldy, you know, he’s still a small kid. Like, he, it’s, that, the size of the mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is perfect for him, and the size of the 9.7, especially with the case on it, was just so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big and bulky. And it, like, he could have managed, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He probably wouldn’t have carried it around as much. He wouldn’t have used it as much. So we really just wanted a Mini, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the jump from the Mini 2 to the Mini 4 wasn’t that significant, and the Mini 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was ancient, so I didn’t really wanna buy one in 2018. And so now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have a brand new Mini that keeps everything we love about the old one, it’s the exact same form

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco factor, exact same size, it even apparently has the same case dimensions and magnet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco placements as the iPad Mini 4, and so the iPad Mini 4 accessories should theoretically work with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, although there’s some questioning about cases that might cover the microphone now, but we’ll see about that. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so like it’s the same iPad Mini that we love, but up to date. This is exactly what we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want. Like I didn’t want him to have to deal with, you know, something bigger. I didn’t want him to have to deal with things like Face ID, although he’s smart,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he could have figured it out, but you know, it just keeps everything the same, but makes it faster and current, and it improves the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco camera, and it improves the speed, and it lets him run the current versions of iOS without painful speeds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just exactly what we needed it to be. has a new battery that’s gonna help too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m just so happy to see this. I never thought that we would see an iPad mini update. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fact that it got updated, sometimes when Apple updates the lower end products, sometimes they get like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last year’s specs, or like a generation ago’s specs. And that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes there’s a reason for that, but it kinda sucks when that happens. This is one of those awesome updates that we get sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where the low end products have the same specs as the current flagship.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, this has the same processor as the iPhone XS, and a very similar processor to the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro. It’s not quite the same, like, you know, the iPad Pro has a faster GPU because it has the X version, I assume, but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of lost track at this point. But like, it has the same processor. So now, all of the iPads, except

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the very lowest-end one, the 329 one, all of the other ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now have A12 series processors. That’s awesome. Every iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the lineup now has Pencil support. and yeah, it isn’t all the same pencil, blah, blah, blah. That’s fine, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care. They all have pencil support, they’re all fine pencils. Yeah, I would’ve liked to not have the, you know, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boner charging method, but like it’s fine. Like it’s better than not having it at all. They all, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the bottom ones, all the ones that aren’t labeled pro, all now support the Logitech Crayon, which is cool,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s cheaper, it’s a little more kid-friendly, it’s a little easier to manage in certain contexts, so that’s cool,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, to have more options like that. The Air now supports the keyboard, so now, and we’ll talk about the Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a second, but like, you know, it’s like, most of them support the keyboard, all of them support a pencil

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of some kind, all of them have A12s, except for the very cheapest one, which has, I think, an A10 or an A11,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so either way, it’s like, it’s pretty close, you know. This is a fantastic lineup. I am so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super happy about these updates, because on paper, they seem boring. You know, okay, you updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two kind of low-end to mid-range iPads to specs that aren’t new,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, who cares, right? but the fact is this patches a huge hole in the lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It resolves a bunch of old business, old neglect, and it unifies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things to the most coherent lineup I’ve seen in years. And you look at what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad offers compared to what Macs offer. It kind of makes you feel bad being a Mac person because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t point to any of these iPads and say, nobody should buy that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can’t point to any one of these and say, that’s gonna be a bad product to use in practice. None

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them. Now, and we can point to Max, and we will later when we get to the spinning hard drive iMacs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can point to Max and you can say, nobody should buy that one. That one’s a bad product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That one will punish you for having bought it. There’s nothing in the iPad lineup that you can point to and say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. That’s awesome. So to cover that much of a price range, that much of a capability range,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and have every single one of them be, on its own, a really good product, that’s really impressive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m just, I’m super happy about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s interesting that we can say that about iPads for a couple of reasons that are actually related to the reasons that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we talk about and complain about Macs. One of them is that the iPad as a product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when, you know, from its introduction until now, has always been defined by sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simplicity. Like it’s always just been a screen, and it has one button or zero buttons, and cameras

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the front and back, and a thing on the bottom where you plug it in to charge it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s been the iPad. So never at any point we were like, God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t believe these iPads still only have one port on them. Cause that’s always been the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was never an expectation that it would have more capabilities. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same token, as they become, computing wise, more powerful, Apple has added features.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Detachable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboard, smart connector, the pencil, obviously. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s another reason these updates are great because yeah, so we’re not saying don’t buy any of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPads, they just have one port, right? But on the other hand, with some of the old iPads, we might have said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s probably not what you want, you might not realize this, but you can’t use the pencil with the iPad mini. So even though your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kid would really love to use the pencil, you can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, why can’t I use the pencil? It doesn’t work with it, like it predates the pencil and blah, blah, blah. Right, so the few things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple has added, hardware wise to the iPads, we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John waiting for those to be rolled out to the full line and here they are, which is why when we look at this line now we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say they’ve all got all the things, not all the things you can imagine a computer might have, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the things that we now currently expect an iPad to have. The thing that I like the most about this lineup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setting aside the names which still don’t quite make that much sense, is that it’s easy to explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to anybody what the difference is between the expensive and the cheap models. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the most explicable this line has ever been, right? What’s the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro? And you can list off all the things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if the person says, oh, well, I don’t care about those things. Like, great. Then I got the product for you. Buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the cheaper one. But they’re real things. There are real differences. You know, the USB-C, the different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better pencil, ProMotion 120 Hertz, like Face ID. Like those. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, maybe not all of them, but those you can explain those and people will understand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John At the minimum, people will understand this one has a button on it and the other one doesn’t. One of them has, you know, face ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which you may or may not be familiar with from your phone, and the other one doesn’t. That’s a huge differentiating factor, which is not to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say that I think they should keep it like this. Face ID should totally go down the line everywhere, but you can explain why the hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this one $1,000 and this one starts at $400. It’s very easy to understand,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and price-wise, I do like the fact that that the new ones are not, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the price hasn’t crept up. Starting at 399 for 64 gigabyte, that’s a reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of storage for, in the context of an iPad, a reasonable price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a product that as we’ve already established has all the modern internals in terms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, will this run things really slowly? No, like it’s not past generation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not two generations back, it’s current generation, maybe not the fastest of the fast with all the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, there’s a reason the Pro is Pro, but it’s just such a nice balance of like, take away this super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John duper Pro high-end stuff that you think everybody doesn’t need, but make sure it’s got all the things. And so that’s why,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, why I don’t think, I’m not upset personally about the old pencil. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point is, I wanna be able to draw on the thing with a pencil. The point is not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, but this isn’t the latest and greatest pencil that snaps onto the side. It’s not, that’s another reason why you might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prefer the Pro because that pencil is better. It’s better in much more subtle ways and face ID versus touch ID, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is better. But if you just want the capability, it’s there. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m really happy with the iPad lineup as it is now. And then of course you’ve got the bottom basement one being the cheapest possible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which has never really been Apple’s forte to get that price all the way down. But it’s still like, I can explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this line. I can explain every single one in it, and every product in it, and why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is where it is, and who might wanna buy it, and how to choose between them. I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why, well, I can, but not in a way that people will find satisfying why one is called Air and one is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} called Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, I was really happy with these iPads and it was just, like, honestly, I didn’t expect this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I expected maybe they would revise one of the iPads, but very rarely do we get to see, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think we’ve talked about this past, an entire product line from top to bottom, sort of in sync.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, it wasn’t exactly in sync. Obviously, the Pros came out a while ago, but like, here we are at a point in time where, as Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, they’re all A12s, they all have all the things, They all have easily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explainable differentiating factors. They cover a big price range. If you were thinking of buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iPad, now is probably a pretty good time to buy one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Did you see a friend of the show, Jesse Char’s tweet, describing a revised

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way of doing the lineup? It’s really, really good. She wasn’t the only person to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this, but she was the first person to do like an Apple-style diagram, which is in her

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tweet. And so the current iPad lineup is, you have your two sizes of iPad Pro, the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Air, the iPad, and the iPad Mini. And what Jesse proposed was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad Pro, two sizes, iPad, two sizes, done. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey understand why Apple didn’t do this and why the Mini is still called the Mini and the Air is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey called the Air, but I couldn’t agree more with Jesse’s thought and several others who said the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing, that it seems to me to make a lot more sense to say, hey, there’s an iPad Pro that uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a fancy new pencil two sizes. There’s an iPad that doesn’t use a fancy new pencil but still is a pencil,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I agree by the way, John, a lot of people had chapped bottoms about this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just, I mean, it’s, of course, I would love for the new pencil to work with everything, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t see this as egregious as a lot of people on Twitter. There were many hot takes given about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’ll be egregious if it’s like this in two years for sure, but at this point in time, it is explicable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The new pencil is brand spanking new, introduced only on the Pro models. It’s okay for it to be exclusive to the Pro models

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until next year. I think that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, because using Pencil 2 on these iPads would have required a case redesign

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the flat-sided case, which probably brings with it Face ID, and that becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a much bigger job. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re basically just asking, make me a cheaper iPad Pro, which is a thing they could have done, but it couldn’t have been this much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheaper, like, bottom line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And by the way, I would argue that the iPad Air and Mini are basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cheaper iPad Pros. Previous generation iPad Pros, yeah. Well, yeah, sort of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I guess if you allow for the home button and touch ID. But supporting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially the iPad Air supports the keyboard. It’s literally the exact same keyboard as the 10.5

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inch iPad Pro. If you had that keyboard, you can still use it with the iPad Air. So that’s, first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all, unexpected and great. Because now, for so long, what distinguished

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad Pro, what made it the iPad Pro, was a larger size available that you didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to necessarily take, four speakers, and compatibility with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the pencil and keyboard. And a lot of people who bought the iPad Pro only bought it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for like one of those things. Maybe it was the pencil, maybe it was the keyboard, maybe it was both, but like, a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were buying Pros who didn’t necessarily want like the highest end of everything specs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just wanted like one or two of those things. And you don’t get the four speakers anymore with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new cheap entries. Like the new iPad Air and the mini, You don’t get four speakers, as you mentioned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You don’t get 120 hertz promotion. You don’t get some of the other fancier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff, but the difference is smaller than ever. So like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You do get the P3 screen though, which is nice, which is the thing I didn’t expect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like the 329 iPad has like a cheaper screen construction,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the new Air and Mini don’t. Like they have nice screens. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have True Tone. They have like, they have so much. there’s stronger differentiation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than ever that if you really want the Pro, there’s a few things for it, here they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are, these high-end things or the new design or the face ID or whatever else, but more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people now will be happier with the middle entry, which is the iPad Air, the 499,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than what the middle entry has covered if it had even existed for years. The iPad started

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out at that $500 price point, and then for a little while it crept up a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then the iPad Pro came out and it went way up, and then the middle iPads kind of disappeared and moved down market.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so there was this big hole in the middle, where like, if you’re willing to pay $500 for an iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could have gotten something great, but Apple wasn’t really willing to sell it to you. They wanted to sell you either something really cheap and low-end and old,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something much more expensive and high-end. Now that hole has been filled and it looks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s just great. I’m so happy about this lineup. I know it’s not gonna be perfect forever. Like at some point, something’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna get updated and then it’s gonna make no sense again. but for right now, this is great. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you said earlier that this probably may be a good time to buy an iPad. I’m gonna say this is a great time to buy an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the Pro is only a few months old and the other ones are now like two days old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, and the lineup has never been stronger or made more sense or been more sensibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco priced than it is now. And in absolute terms, these prices for these things are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still expensive, especially when you option them up. You’re still gonna, for a well-optioned iPad, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna be probably in the six to $700 range at least. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, it’s still Apple pricing and modern Apple pricing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the options that are available to you and the base prices for them are really nice. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even, you know, the base storage is now 64 on most of these, like that’s pretty good too. So I gotta say, this is a heck of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I also am really hoping that all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our hopes dreams for iOS 13, especially around the iPad, come true this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey June? Because how amazing would it be if not only does Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey deliver this really solid hardware lineup, but then in June they deliver

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the software as well, and suddenly the iPad is firing on all cylinders. It is cranked all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the way up to 11. It’s in great shape. And I would really love to see that. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that would be incredible.

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Tuesday: iMacs

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Soterios Johnson,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ph.D.: All right, so that was just Monday and that was a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And now we come to Tuesday and hey, guess what? New IMAX. So I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like to call everyone’s attention to a really great episode of Upgrade with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And they had an interview with someone whose name I’ve forgotten, so one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can fill in for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Colin Novielli.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There we go. Novielli. Thank you. Colin Novielli. And she is the product manager for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I would say is the iMac, but what Apple people call iMac. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was a really good interview outside of me always finding it awkward that no Apple people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say the iPhone or the iMac. It’s just iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} and iMac. Some of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey old ones do. Fair enough. Anyways, it was a really good interview and it’s worth listening to the whole episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But new iMacs, and that’s exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not as exciting as we had hoped, but it’s exciting that it happened at all. This is exactly the kind of update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we keep begging Apple to do if the alternative is just neglect forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That clause is important. Right, like if you don’t have something exciting ready, just do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spec bump updates that are boring. And that’s what they’ve done here. They didn’t do a larger update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, it still looks the same. It still has the same, or at least close enough to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same internal designs. Notably, it does not have the T2.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was kind of disappointed with that. I was expecting all Macs to go T2 in 2019 that weren’t yet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which the only ones that are left are the iMac, 12-inch MacBook and the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro. Those are the only ones that are left. I think the reason why they couldn’t do it here, most likely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that I don’t think the T2 is built to support spinning hard drives. My big disappointment here with the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that they still are shipping spinning hard drives. And they made other improvements that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are great. They now go up to eight cores because Intel is super desperate to keep the 14 nanometer process going a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco longer. And so they now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go up to eight cores on the high-end ones. And that’s great. They have six cores standard, and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also great. So, you know, this is all good stuff on the CPU front. Although

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do have some concerns about thermals. But, you know, the performance-wise, they sound great. They have new GPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s awesome too. It does, though, seem like, you know, thermally they are really pushing the boundaries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that chassis design, of the now fairly old standard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac design. The iMac Pro has a whole different internal layout, whole different thermal design, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is a totally different machine inside. It doesn’t have any support for spinning disks, and it has a totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different cooling system in there. And so the iMac Pro is able to cool its

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high wattage, high performance parts very well, and very quietly, and very reliably. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old iMac chassis, though, which is now still in use for these new ones, it seems to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco struggling recently with the higher wattage Intel heat amounts that they keep putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in as Intel can’t shrink their process down to 10 nanometers yet. Like, Intel keeps just adding more cores

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and pushing the heat envelope higher on their 14 nanometer process to make these new, quote, faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chips. And that’s pushing the heat envelopes higher and higher. And that’s why you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have problems like the most recent 15 inch MacBook Pros that have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really hot, really hot, high running max thermals and possible thermal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues that arise from that. You have the same problem in the iMac, where you have like severe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thermal loads being generated inside this case that has not been updated in a very long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so combine that with similar problems on the GPU front in that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco competitive high end GPUs require more and more heat capacity over time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re just they’re getting more sophisticated, getting bigger. So you basically have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco components that are hotter than ever being put into an enclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a thermal design that was designed a long time ago before that was a thing rather than using the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new iMac Pro one that was designed more recently and can handle much higher loads more gracefully. So I expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these machines to have similar issues as the previous generation. You’re probably going to hear that fan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot and it’s probably going to run a little hot and that’s kind of a shame and that might have problems down the line with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco longevity or things like that and that’s also kind of a shame. I’ve also heard this design has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues with dust ingress and dust getting under the screen and if that’s true that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to be exacerbated if the fan spin faster most of the time for cooling because it’s going to be sucking more air through the machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and therefore more dust through the machine. So all those things I have some concerns about but ultimately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I used an iMac in this generation, the 5k one that came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out in 2014, I used that for three years and And it was awesome. Anybody out there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who’s wondering, like, do you need to go to the iMac Pro, or are you okay with, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quote, just the iMac, quote, just the iMac is great. It’s a great machine. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s overall fantastic. I do, though, worry about these newest components with these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco newest thermals. That- that is still a concern. And at the low end, boy, do I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems with these hard drives. I… ugh. So the… I think the whole reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this machine has not been redesigned yet thermally, like internally, is to keep compatibility with spinning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard drives, to keep those low-end options there. And I gotta say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am not happy that Apple updated the iMac and is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco selling base models that don’t even have fusion drives, that are just a hard drive. Nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should use a computer today that is booting and running solely on a spinning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco platter hard drive. And, you know, people have been focusing on, oh, there’s only 5,400

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RPM, so it’s even worse. And yeah, that’s true a little bit, but ultimately, if they put it in a 1,700 RPM drive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it wouldn’t make a big difference. It’s still gonna be a spinning hard drive in 2019

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for an operating system and a file system that are not designed to be running on those things, and with modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loads and everything, that’s terrible. Yes, they are hitting a price point here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they haven’t sold a hard drive in a laptop, which is the majority of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their computers sold, for what, five years at least? How long has it been since

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the last hard drive model? It’s been a long time, and they’ve been fine. And most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy laptops and they’re fine. It is criminal, first of all. They shouldn’t be selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything, if they’re gonna put a hard drive in it, they shouldn’t be selling anything that isn’t a Fusion Drive because to make it a Fusion Drive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it takes some piddly amount, I think it’s like 24 gigs of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an SSD stick to put in there to make it a Fusion Drive. That costs nothing in 2019.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco First of all, it’s too small. But like, if you’re gonna have, like put a bigger one in there, first of all, if you’re gonna do it at all. Even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was 64 gigs, make it 128, who cares? That costs nothing with today’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flash pricing. Even the super high-grade flash that they wanna use everywhere, that costs nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But even if you can get past that, this shouldn’t have a hard drive at all. All the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Macs sold don’t have hard drives, and it’s fine. Yeah, some people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have larger storage needs who can’t afford giant SSDs at Apple’s crazy prices, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are other options. One option is external storage, which a lot of people use, or cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco storage, which a lot of people use also. That’s what they use with their laptops. Like, all the laptops have these same problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They solve them. Another option is, you know, Apple insists on using like the highest grade,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco highest performance Flash possible when they use Flash, but what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they don’t necessarily need to? Like, are they honestly, basically their position seems to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it’s okay to have the slowest storage mechanic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the world today, the spinning platter hard drive. Like that, they choose that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over like a cheaper, consumer grade, slower flash disk to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hit a price point. Like that’s, that argument might’ve made sense two, three years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In 2019, flash is big and reasonably cheap. I would rather them either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not even offer large capacities and just have like a 128 gig SSD be stock

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than to offer any hard drives. And for people who need more storage, they can buy externals, because they do anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They shouldn’t be selling a computer today that is a bad computer. And I can honestly 100% say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first of all, any computer that’s non-retina in 2019, that’s because the base model is still for sale,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s still non-retina. and especially any computer that has a spinning hard drive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is a shitty computer. Apple isn’t and shouldn’t be known

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for selling shitty products. They can sell expensive products, they can sell cheap products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can sell high-end, they can sell low-end, but Apple, like the spirit of Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that nothing they sell should really be shitty. It can be low-end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it shouldn’t be horrible. And the experience of using that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco base model computer today is horrible. They should not even be selling that. I’d rather there be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hole in the lineup than to have that computer still be sold. The fact that they’re still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shipping hard drive configurations in the iMac is preventing them, it’s holding them back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from doing the new thermals in there and from making everything all T2

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco based which is way more secure and has some performance benefits and everything. It’s holding them back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco For what? To create these terrible experiences for these terrible products? Apple you’re better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that. They’re so much better than that. They shouldn’t be selling that model anymore and I don’t care whatever the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are to sell it whatever the value proposition is it’s not worth it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think you have the cause and effect reverse there. I think I mean you mentioned before talking about the cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much better the cooling is in the iMac Pro and everything and people maybe thinking what is he talking about they both look the same except

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one is dark gray. That’s mostly true like the external shape of the iMac and the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro are the same, but inside, inside that exact same shape, they are wildly different. And you wouldn’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would make that much difference because they’re both super skinny. And if you had tried to explain this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to all of us before the iMac Pro came out, you might’ve had a good point of like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is kind of skinny there. How much better can the cooling be? Like how much quieter can it be? But now that we’ve seen the iMac Pro, we know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer is a lot. Yeah. It’s like, they both look skinny, but apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can do a much, much better job with it. And we assume, we assumed before these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came out, and we still kind of assume, you know, that the iMacs all will eventually go T2. And if they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to keep the case the same, they would look on the inside a lot like the iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does from the perspective of what shape is the board, where is everything located, where do the fans go, where does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the air come in, where does the air go out? And it would, you know, it’d be even easier because presumably the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMac Pro puts out way more power and heat than the iMac will in the top configuration. So you don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to try as hard as that. But for that to happen, you’d basically need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all new iMacs. Like it wouldn’t just be a matter of, okay, well we’ll just, you know, take out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hard drive and just have them SSDs and then like make the fans bigger or something. You need to reshape and reconfigure all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the components. It would basically be an entirely new iMac. And getting back to the case thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of people have noted that, and it’s true, the external case, figure out the insides, the external case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the same on the iMac and the iMac Pro and has been the same, like that same case shape for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the various sizes has been the same for a very long time. So some people are going, when is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the newly shaped iMac going to come out? If I were Apple, I can kind of understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how you could find yourself in a situation where there will be a newly shaped iMac soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And knowing that that will happen, this may not be the best timeline to which in which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to completely reconfigure the guts of the regular iMac, making newly shaped boards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and every component new and differently arranged to match the iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then immediately say, okay, well, that was the last design in that case anyway, because now here’s the new iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case and everything has to be differently shaped yet again. Just in terms of economics, of how often do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to totally redesign the guts. The iMac Pro clearly was on its own path and started a long time ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and was like the future of the Pro Mac before the Mac Pro, and you could see why it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worth it for them to make the iMac Pro targeting this same case. I just feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they’re stuck now where they can’t go to an all-new iMac Pro style

⏹️ ▶️ ^John design with the T2 in the current case without redesigning everything, but now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not the time to do that because the new new iMacs are going to come out next year or whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so it timing-wise just didn’t work out. Given that, given that you don’t have a T2 and you don’t have totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John redesigned internals, you are stuck with the spinning disks because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, you’re not stuck with the old model, they could have just stopped selling it, but there’s no way to reconfigure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that stuff to make it, to get all the advantages of SSD only, because even if you just buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an SSD only iMac, you don’t get the iMac Pro’s quieter fans. Like it’s not just the hard drive that’s making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noise inside there, that’s not a thing to blame, it’s the entire cooling arrangement that has to account for the hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s messing things up. So, like, it’s an unfortunate situation. I kind of understand,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John though, how they found themselves there. And I don’t think that they are married, the hard drives, Apple wants to get rid of the hard drives as much as anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else, but I feel like they are slightly married to the prices, which is why they’re still selling the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one with just a spinning disk, which to be clear is not a new or updated in any way model. It’s just the same old model they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were selling last week. They’re just continuing to sell it at 1099. And I totally agree with Margo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nobody should buy this computer. Not so much because it’s a shitty computer, But it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it isn’t in the, when you look at alongside of the other Macs, but it’s not up to Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quality standards. And more importantly, if someone spends $1,000 on a computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they should have a better experience than they will with this, just flat out, right? So, because I can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people using a non-retina computer or using a computer with a hard drive, but I can’t imagine it costing $1,000 for that. Because for $1,000,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can get a computer with the SSD with granted less storage space,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the experience will be so much better. Like this is one of those computers I would never recommend anyone buy. I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recommending people not buy Fusion drives if possible, just because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like, like just it’s worth the sacrifice now. And it’s not even that much of a sacrifice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in terms of storage space. Or like, if you can’t afford to buy one, just wait, like wait longer and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John save money because you’ll be happier. It’s kind of like telling people to get a lot of RAM back in the old days. It’s like just, if you’re buying a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in 2019 and you don’t have enough money for one with just an SSD, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just keep saving your money. Because it’s such a big upgrade and it increases the longevity so much and it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John such a sea change that I feel like you just gotta hang in there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and wait for these hard drives to go away. Yeah, so but I’m looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the next generation, which will surely be all SSD and hopefully we’ll actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a different case for the first time in how many years? Four years? Three years? This case has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been with us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a while. I think like 2012, like it’s been a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, for the ones that are gonna have face ID built into them, they have a smaller chin, like they don’t have to be any thinner.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe they’ll have a height adjustable stand. Ha ha, just kidding, Apple will never do that. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like, it’s, I agree with Marco. It’s great that they did expect bumps on these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We were expecting T2s, but if I had thought about it a little bit more, and we’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If they put it this way, if they had come out with T2s, I would be like, guess what? We’re with this external design for another three years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easy. Now without T2s, it’s made me strangely more optimistic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a new external case design for the iMac to come sometime next year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the meantime, tell your family and friends, no spinning disks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like we had, and first of all, just to quickly disclaim this, I don’t, I’m not dying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a new case design of the iMac. Like I’ve been using an iMac myself as my main computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, almost all day, every day, since the late 2014 timeframe, like when the retina came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out. So, you know, for five years, whatever, five, four and a half years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I never think about what it looks like, because if I’m sitting near

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, it’s on, and the screen is glowing at me, and I’m looking at the screen. The case could look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty much anything, and I wouldn’t even notice. So I actually don’t, and you can’t see it, the side of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back while using it. So like I don’t actually care at all really what the case is as long as it you know covers like thermal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs and practical needs I’m fine with it and the current one does I’m not dying for a new case design on it I recognize this one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is pretty old but you know it’s fine but you know like to give people some idea like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know most of our listeners probably haven’t used a spinning hard drive only computer recently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and to give you some idea like on this on this week’s episode of connected Stephen Hackett was saying how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somebody he knows has one, and opening up the settings app makes it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco beach ball. And if you look at, okay, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the range of usability between the lowest end Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this, and the mid-range, the high-end ones, if it can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even open its own settings screen without having performance problems, that’s a pretty big problem. Whereas if you look at,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the iOS area, If you buy the cheapest iPad or the oldest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone that they still sell as new, it’s gonna be still way better than that. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco floor of how low they’re willing to sink, experience-wise, performance-wise, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way higher on the iOS devices. But for some reason on the Macs, they’re willing to sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these terrible iMacs at the low end. And that’s why like, it just seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco embarrassing. And it’s just, it’s a terrible idea. But anyway, and before we leave the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac topic, I do want to say at the higher end, people often will ask

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us, they have asked us already today, you know, whether an iMac is good enough or whether they should get the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro. And if you spec up the new iMacs into iMac Pro territory,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new iMac still ends up being around $1,000 cheaper than the iMac Pro. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s certainly worth asking, like, what do you get for that $1,000? And I would say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically to repeat what I said earlier for a minute, like the regular iMac is fine for almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything. Like if what you’re doing doesn’t require the levels of performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the higher ceilings of resources that the iMac Pro will offer, the regular iMac is totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine. I used one myself, as I said, for like three, four years and it was great. The iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro is also, what, about a year and a half old now? So it’s not quite a level playing field.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But what you get with the iMac Pro in general is you get higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ceilings, so if you need more than the number of cores or the amount of RAM or whatever that the iMac, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the regular iMac offers, that’s kind of your only choice. You get space gray, which is cool. You get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more Thunderbolt ports, which is useful to some people. I like just having more USB ports in general, which is nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you get that amazing cooling system and ECC RAM and things like that that just make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quieter and more reliable and more likely to last you a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But those are all kind of vague benefits for a lot of people and you know, or they’re unimportant to a lot of people and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might not be worth $1,000. So if you’re really being value conscious but you want something high performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I honestly can’t say you should get the iMac Pro compared to a well-specced regular iMac now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would still choose the iMac Pro because those things matter a lot to me. And if those things matter a lot to you, you should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still get it too. It’s a fantastic computer and I’m still happier with my iMac Pro than I’ve ever been with any computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve ever owned. So I just love this thing. But you know, the regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMacs are a pretty damn good value now if you can tolerate like the thermal potential

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Faster storage I think on the iMac Pro as well. Yeah, I think I looked at that same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email. I recommended it. I didn’t look at the prices, but I said if the prices are comparable, it’s a no brainer to get the iMac Pro for all the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you listed. If the prices aren’t comparable, then you haven’t decided. This is another thing that people think about for looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the iMac lineup. like, wow, if you take the top end one and you start specking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it up, it’s practically anti-iMac Pro territory. And they point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that out as like a downside or a mistake on Apple’s part. But that’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how product lines should work. If you go to the step-down product and crank up all the options,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it should just meet the step-up product at the base model. You don’t wanna leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big gaps, right? And it lets you make different trade-offs for similar prices. I think the gap is probably still bigger than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it probably needs to be. Because that’s like, ideally, every product would be like that, that you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John span the entire range of options. And at the margins, you’d have to make a trade-off. Do I get the top-end product

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A or the bottom-end product B? And there should be explicable and explainable trade-offs, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are in this case. And so I think it’s great. It’s just that we’re, these IMACs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are still lagging behind a little bit for what I hope is reasons that having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do with the next generation. And as for the case design, like, most people don’t think about it, but that was an interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aspect of Jason’s interview with the iMac product manager.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The fact that one of the reasons the iMac is purchased,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the jobs to be done in the market is part of it is to look really good in scenarios where people do see the backs and sides

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. Like that is actual, you know, Apple doesn’t just do this for the heck of it. People like pretty computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and people like pretty computers for a reason very often because they’re going to put them into a public place. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the the iMac product manager, she’s sort of tuned in to all the reasons people might buy a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that is definitely on the list. So I do appreciate that, which is probably the same reason why we’re never gonna have a height adjustable stand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that would be ugly if they just want us to use a VESA mounting or whatever. Although I still think that is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s an opportunity to get into pie in the sky territory. Like, what can you do when the whole computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just a screen and you don’t see any parts of it anyway? Like, what more is there to do? It’s kind of like the iPad. Like, well, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can you do with the iPad? It’s just a screen you hold in your hands. there are things you can do. There are, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the flat sides with the pencil that goes through it is a perfect example of a refinement. It’s still just a screen, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s improved in a way that is measurable and significant to customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Trying to make an iMac that is basically just a screen better, one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the things that defines that product is it is a screen and the screen interfaces with the person sitting in front of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that interface benefits from the ability to get it just right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the right height, the right distance, all that other stuff. But that’s difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do. Apple’s taking many different runs at making the iMac screen adjustable for height and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reach and everything. Some have been more successful than others. I think that is a worthy challenge of Apple’s design team. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure they’re ready to take it on quite yet. But eventually, when there is no more chin and face ID is built

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in and they all have all SSDs and all the other obvious things, there are other challenges to tackle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The stand is one. How to deal with the ports, because people really don’t like reaching around behind the computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get to them, but you also don’t want to see them in the front. There are still very interesting challenges related to what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we think of as a very boring computer. So the future is bright. If the iMac team needs a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of problems to solve, I can give them a nice list, and they’re all very hard problems. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t expect them to all be solved right away, but never let anyone tell you that, oh, there’s nothing more they can do with the iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just a screen. There’s plenty.

Buying philosophy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you mentioned like two minutes ago, like whether you want to buy like the top of one product line or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bottom of the one above it. I’m curious, like in general, do you have any philosophies on that? Because I do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m kind of wondering what yours are, both of you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it really depends on, like because when I said where they meet, like there will be differences. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these are actually the same product. Like it’s not like you spec it up and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John huh, that actually is the low-end iMac. It’s not, the low-end iMac Pro has other attributes. So you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to look at those attributes. And the case of the iMac with my value system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like ECC RAM alone would make me take the iMac Pro just because if you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a computer with a lot of something, a lot of storage or a lot of RAM, it just increases the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chances that something’s gonna go wrong. And if I’m paying a lot of money for something, again, I want it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be, like, I want to minimize, I want this money to turn into something. If I can pay more money to have fewer problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the work that I want my money to be doing. I don’t want to take, it’s like the equivalent of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You want to get the very fastest Honda Civic you can, or a Honda Accord

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is maybe a little bit slower, but is bigger and nicer and has, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I tend to not like a product, a product

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a line, that is pushed to the very, very limit, because that’s where I feel like where things go wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and some aspects of it don’t match. It’s super expensive, but the seats are uncomfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it is a bargain basement car, right? It has a huge amount of RAM, but none of it’s ECC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you get 64 gigabytes of non-ECC RAM. It’s not a casino I want to play in. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s usually my philosophy. You’ve heard my philosophy a million times about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, you know, these are expensive things. And my solution always, when you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John afford it, is to wait and save more money. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that’s my solution to everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we know. The person sitting in front of your computer is to wait. I know it’s not an easy solution, But it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always available to you. Wait and save more money. So yeah, that’s my philosophy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel like John just spent that entire time describing my car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s take something and crank it to 11. And yeah, I don’t want that, right, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So it’s tough. I think nothing that John said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I actually disagree with. But if you look at my history, specifically with cars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I got a 335 M Sport, which is as great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a 3 Series you can get without being an M3. Then I get a Golf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey R, which is as great a Golf you can get, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not an Audi. And so for me, I always try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get the best of the thing, but that doesn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean that I will go to the next rung on the ladder, if you will. Like you could make a really good argument,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey especially in the past when the two cameras were only on the big phones, you could make a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good argument that the big phones were the best phones. I didn’t feel that way, so what I ended up doing was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey typically maxing out or at the least getting a mid-range smaller phone. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my iPhone X, I honestly don’t even remember what capacity this is, but I think it’s a 256 if memory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey serves. But I got the best of the thing that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my price range and in the best of the thing that I wanted. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s what I did with my car. I didn’t really want an Audi for various and sundry reasons that we’ve been over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a million times. And so I got the best golf I could get. And that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I tend to do. But again, it’s not that I necessarily disagree with John. I totally understand what John said, and I think he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of right. It’s just, if I look at myself, that’s not necessarily the tact I take.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My strategy changes depending on what the product is. Like, some products, like I’ve always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used the 15-inch MacBook Pro as like a really great baseline of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that is one of the best values met much of the time in Apple’s lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because, like the base model, 15-inch MacBook Pro. Because like, to achieve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco base models, Companies will use, like the base model is almost always a better value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of something than the base model plus upgrades of that same product, because the upgrades are always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overpriced, especially with Apple, but this applies to lots of companies, like this isn’t just them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so what’s nice is if you can get a base model of a mid-range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or high-end product line, because then the baseline of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s not gonna make that many variations of the same product to hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco low price points. So like the 15 inch, like every 15 inch for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while had 16 gigs of RAM. You couldn’t even choose it. That was just like the preset. Like it was 16 gigs of RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the 15 inch no matter what you did. And so even the base model, therefore, had 16 gigs of RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s stuff like that. Like a lot of times in the lineup, there’s choices that like, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made the base model basic in some ways, but maybe you don’t care about those. like maybe they gave you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the low-end CPU, but it was only 15% slower than the fastest one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so that doesn’t matter to most people. So you get it, and you get this amazing laptop for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not too bad a price, because you didn’t pay for any of the pricey upgrades. And so depending on the product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can achieve things like that. Whereas, as John mentioned, with cars a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of times, you might pay 30 grand for a souped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up, optioned up version of a car, but it still has the, you know, 16 grand cars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seats or dashboard or whatever else. And so like that, that kind of does irritate me on the other side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sometimes what is done to achieve the next step ups base model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cuts out things that are important to you. So for instance, like if you were choosing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between a really nice accord and a low end BMW, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Accord will probably have better features at the same price than the BMW, because the BMW

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has probably cut a lot of things down to hit that price point, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you might not care about some of those, and you might want that feel of driving that BMW, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that might get you, like that might be worth it to you to be like, oh my God, this feels great, and I can’t believe I only paid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, whatever, a million dollars a BMW’s charging for the 3 Series these days. Like, whatever it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whatever it is for Ruth. God, it’s so expensive. But like it depends on what you value and what has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cut to achieve the next product ups base model. It’s sometimes it makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to stick with the lower end money and get like more features for the money because like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you get like the maxed out version, you are getting like that company trying their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardest you’re getting like the thing that they make that is the best thing they could possibly give you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Unfortunately, it might also be a little bit of their comfort zone because it’s like the highest end of what they’re making. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re getting the best thing they can possibly give you. And so you can often get really cool stuff there. But on the other end, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you get the base model, you’re getting like, the absolute cheapest this company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can tell you they’re awesome thing for. And sometimes that’s a better deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just want to point out the car analogies are terrible in this particular situation, just because, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the BMW three series is a great example. It’s like the 5 series is not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we’re talking about the iMac and the iMac Pro. The iMac Pro is an obvious step up. You can have any iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for free. Which one do you want? Just pick the Pro. It’s the best in all the ways. But if they said that about BMWs, the 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not necessarily better than the 3 if what you’re looking for is like a nimble sports car. It’s a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size class, right? It’s like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like saying, should I get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them? Should I get a maxed out 15 inch laptop or an iMac? It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want a laptop? It’s like, well, the iMac’s better, right? Because it’s more, no, it’s like, it’s a different thing. Like the five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not, like the M3 is better than the base five. Let me just say that, it’s easy. Like it messes up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the analogy entirely if it doesn’t match up to the way computers work. The hot hatches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are though, in case he had that right, that part right, are an example of taking a car that probably really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John isn’t designed or shaped or envisioned or anything to be any kind of a sporty car and saying, what if we just make it really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast? It’s like, all right, well, you can do that, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my word. All right, so we’re only on Tuesday. Is there anything else we need to discuss about Tuesday?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just briefly, they bumped the iMac Pro options too, so you can get 256 gigabytes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of RAM for $5,200, and they put in faster GPUs, and they made 64

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs of RAM cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Still too expensive, but whatever pro prices. And they reduced the price of a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John options. So the iMac Pro is mostly unchanged, it’s a new computer, but they adjusted a bunch of prices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and gave you some new options for even faster parts, which is good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, especially the GPU side of it, we’ve been saying for years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a product like a pro product like this, and they did the same thing on the 15 inch, what, about two months ago?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Where on a pro product like this, Intel is slow, we know Intel is slow to make progress.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And as far as I know, I don’t think there’s any workstation CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, in the Xeon class that Apple could update the iMac Pro to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the current CPUs that have been sold on the iMac Pro for the last year and a half, whatever it’s been, are still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the best Xeon workstation CPUs that Intel will sell them. So there is no available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CPU upgrade. But GPUs change more quickly. And so Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco given us a new GPU option. And I don’t follow the GPU world enough to know whether it’s a particularly good one or not. but I think people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem to like it. So that’s great, that’s great news. That like, they didn’t just sit here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco selling the same ancient GPUs as the only options for the entire, you know, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco three to four year lifespan of this product. Instead, they gave us a new GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco update, like halfway through. That’s awesome, and we want them to do more of that. And so far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they did it on the 15 inch, they did it on this, that’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good. And they reduced the price of the old GPU options. They reduced the price of a lot of old options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like how much does it cost to get a two terabyte SSD? They reduce the price down, which is practically unheard of. Like, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do an existing computer to say, yesterday if you wanted a two terabyte SSD, you would have been 600, 800 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But today it’s 600. They almost never do that. And it’s so weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see them doing price adjustments on like their most expensive, highest margin iMac. But I’m all for it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iMac Pro continues to be a really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer. Yeah, I, man, I love this computer so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I can imagine. I’m getting a little bit of envy at me and my 2015 iMac. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so old, John, you don’t understand. Save your pennies, Casey.

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Wednesday: AirPods

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so finally we come to today as we record, which is Wednesday. And I was greeted shortly after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I woke up this morning with new AirPods and I cannot, and I mean this genuinely, I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remember a time I have Insta-bought something from Apple while knowing nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it as quickly as I did these new AirPods. Because as I’ve lamented on the show before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my AirPods, which I got very shortly after they were released, what was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, late 2016, 17? They’re getting old. As many people have reported, their batteries are getting very old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I am desperate for new ones because I love these things so darn much but I can’t go more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than about 15, 20 minutes with them without them dying or at at least one of them dying. So I spent $210

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after tax on a new set of AirPods with the Qi charging case, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am really freaking pumped for them to come in next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here in Texas, I spent $214. I bought them off the tweet. The tweet comes in my timeline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that says, new AirPods, tap, tap, tap, buy, buy, buy, instant. Instant buy. It was just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like, honestly, I was at the point where if I didn’t think new AirPods are coming out, I would have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already bought the same exact product second time just to deal with the battery thing. And we discussed this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the last show, it’s like oh, Apple’s selling disposable stuff, blah blah. Like there is no better secret battery technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they could be using with the AirPods. This is it, lithium ion batteries, they’re tiny. After a while they start losing capacity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I use mine every single day for long periods of time. I love them, they’re great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Instantly bought second pair. These will just become hand-me-downs. The only thing I threw

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the mix this time is that I got mine engraved because now we’re about have three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AirPods rattling around

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the house, one of which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ostensibly owned by a child. So I need some way to keep these things straight. I guess I know lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people like to use stickers and little dental floss stickers and stuff like that, but I’m not a sticker person. So with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engraving, I’m assuming, Casey, you got the one with the wireless charging case? Yeah, you did, because that was 200

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bucks. To be clear, they still sell it with the non-wireless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John charging case, like the one you have to just plug in, and that one is the old price of $160, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still the new AirPods. They’re not last year’s or whatever yesterday’s model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They are the new AirPods with the new features that we’ll talk about in a second. Just the case doesn’t have wireless charging.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the second question a lot of people had, which is, Apple makes clear in text, but I wish they made clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in pictures. The wireless charging case still has a lightning port on the bottom. It’s not just wireless, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wireless in addition to the other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I had to like read the paragraphs below it to figure that out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So did I. I was looking for words to show me the bottom of it, but they didn’t show it. But just to be clear, Apple does include that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text if you want to read the words. So what features this thing has, it’s got Hey Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which we all knew was coming, which means that you don’t have to tap or touch the AirPod in any way. You can just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say the words, Hey Siri, and it will activate and then, so now you have a way to change the volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up or down without touching the AirPod, which is nice as long as you don’t mind talking to yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re powered by the all new Apple H1 chip, burning another letter in our quest for what the hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac arm chips are gonna be called. Although I don’t think anyone else picked H. The things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re touting for it is, twice as fast when switching between active devices, which, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is your interpretation of that line? Is it saying like, I’m using them with my Mac, but now I’m gonna get up from my desk and I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like to use them with my phone, and so you tap the little thingamabobber in Control Center and then tap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AirPods and watch the little spinner, that’s two times

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} faster? Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that what you’re? Yes, that’s what they’re referring to. They said it, I think, somewhere in the press release, something like that, they actually said like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one switch in between an iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a Mac or something like that. All right, I mean that’s good because I don’t like that thing. Well, 1.5 times faster connect time for phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John calls? What is that supposed to mean?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love that this is an update to headphones that people are excited about speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upgrades.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are operations that are slow but I’m just not even sure what they mean with like, they mean like when someone calls,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how long does it take for you to pick up? Faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} connection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time? So let me give you a theory and the way I’m gonna do this is a little bit of a story. So just bear with me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for one second. A lot of times when I have my AirPods connected to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phone, and then I trigger the person in the tube, not the person in the tube,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s the phone, but you know what I mean? I almost said the keyword, and so I don’t want to say that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Hey dingus. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nine times already,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco’s not going to believe it, so people just have to deal with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. Well, at least I tried.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Phil said it on stage, in front of a crowd of people. Like, I think we’re okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but he dropped out the four kilohertz range when he said that, so I won’t activate the devices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that’s what it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So in any case, the point I’m trying to say is, when I do Hey Dingus, or if I even just mash down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the side button, I believe, and I’m probably wrong, but I think there’s some sort of mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey switch from just audio playback to like headset mode. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in order to do that, it pauses for a second. And actually, lately, it hasn’t been able to hear my AirPods. I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s an AirPod issue, a software issue, whatever. But it takes a moment for it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey switch from audio playback mode to headset mode. And I think that’s what this is about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right. And the other one is 30% lower gaming latency. And I put scare quotes around gaming because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re, this is a weird marketing copy. What they’re trying to say is there is less latency for the audio, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John means that if you’re playing a game in which you have some sort of input and you, you know, you do some action like hit a fire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button and the game makes a bloop sound because you fired something, you want to hear that bloop as soon as you see it fired

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the screen and the amount of whatever amount of lag that the sort of wireless, you know, interface is adding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will become apparent to you much more apparent in a sort of real-time interactive application like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a game than it would be say in video because in video they can and do account for the latency and just say well we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just show you the frame that we know you’re supposed to be seeing by the time you hear the sound that you’re hearing but in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interactive games they can’t do that because the next frame you’re going to see is dependent on your input which is real time blah blah blah but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what I think this means is the latency is lower period and that’s really important in gaming it’s not as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if there’s only lower latency in gaming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think I saw just before the show, someone had torn these open and looked at the guts and said like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, there’s basically the H1 chip. What was the other one? It was like… W1. W1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, it has an all new name, yada yada, like how do you get all these features? Like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s more powerful hardware in there. Presumably, maybe on a new process. I don’t know if the other one was set

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up in Anemir’s. I don’t know if this one is. But the little teardown speculation I saw was like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power of an iPhone 4 in each of your ears. Like it’s just if you look at what’s inside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if that’s true, but if you look at if you look at what’s inside the air pods, just think of if you look at how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many little components are wedged in there and what they’re able to do, it’s it’s a it’s an amazing miracle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of miniaturization and you know, and power computing power in such a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tiny space. It’s very futuristic. There’s a reason these this is such a great product and on the outside it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks like one beautiful as we said before, one beautiful of uniform white solid. That doesn’t fit Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ears. Sorry, Marco. But on the inside, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complicated. It’s one of Apple’s best products they’ve introduced in a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is why it has so many fans, which is why it’s so tragic that Marco has weird ears.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah, I just, oh, it kills

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. No, I mean, like, and it isn’t just me. Like, I’ve seen a few other people today say like, hey, me too. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the only thing that I wish they had revised is a lot of people are able to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better comfort with AirPods by having some kind of like silicone thing that goes around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them and the prompt the challenge with AirPods before with with those things is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the the key the charging case is so important that you have to you have to use it very frequently and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have any kind of like silicone thing on the AirPods they don’t fit in the case anymore because there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re like perfectly snug there’s no room in there so I was hoping that Apple with the next generation of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would either adjust the sizing somewhat, make maybe multiple sizes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heaven forbid, or at least better accommodate people who need to use things like this to make them fit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by changing the shape of the cage or something about the way they charge or something like that, and they didn’t do those things. So it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems like it’s exactly the same as it was before. So if they didn’t fit you before, they’re probably not gonna fit you now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s unfortunate, but I have to realize like I’m the minority here. It seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone else loves their AirPods and they fit just fine. So I have to sit this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one out, but everyone else can really enjoy it, and I’m proud of you all for having this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you’ve got a lot of the other headphones I hear, anyway, so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I do, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’ll be fine. This is just the second generation, and I feel like this is kind of delayed. Like, what was it, Mark Gurman was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying that, actually, what was supposed to ship now was like a new water-resistant model that was very different than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this one was supposed to have shipped last year, yada yada. But the point is, these are only the second AirPods Apple has ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John released. I fully expect in a few years, the AirPod line will have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John diversified in some way. Maybe just colors, but I think that it’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in several years from now, maybe three years, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that they offer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either differently shaped AirPods or AirPods in two sizes because they’re trying to do the one size fits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all thing, but, and I think they did probably a good job of finding the right balance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s never gonna fit all. And so at a certain point, in a mature product line, you start to diversify

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to fill the needs of the minority. So I think that will happen eventually. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think AirPods are an unfixable thing that will be this size, shape, and color forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So just keep waiting, and we’ll get to you eventually. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} as for the H1 chip,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the W1 chip, the W1 was in Beats, I think. Yeah, there was, I think, a Beats

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Solo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, there were some Powerbeats or something that it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. Any non-Apple headphones to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} get it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, no, no, no, just Apple and Beats.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, right. Well, anyway, Apple refers to the H1 as like a headphone chip, not an AirPods chip, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expect Beats to start supporting the H1 as well. Which, you know, plenty of room for this. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a miniaturization miracle in Beats, but, you know, this is more room in there. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, I’m really happy that they revised this product just in time as everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John batteries start to die on their AirPods. And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t wait for battery technology to catch up with this product because it’s very, very close to perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already. It’s just one size tweak and one new set of battery technology away from being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very nearly perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One cool thing about it too that I heard some people point out earlier is that if you had previously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mapped one of the double tap gestures to trigger Siri, now you don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do that anymore. So one of the biggest challenges with the AirPods is that you really only have like two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buttons of sorts. Like you can double tap left ear or right ear and you can assign it to different things. If one of those was Siri

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before, you just freed up a button. So now you can just rely on using Hey Siri

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then you can, whatever button you used for Siri before, you can map that to something else. That’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I also heard lots of people hoping that they can turn off the Hey Siri feature because they assume that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John listening all the time costs battery life and they never wanna use that feature so they’re willing to, can I get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that battery life back? But A, I think it probably doesn’t take a lot of battery life because that’s part of the reason we had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to wait for the second gen for it to come out. And B, I think the times that it’s useful, like when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have gunk all over your hands from cooking in the kitchen and you’re not too embarrassed to talk to yourself, far outweigh whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extra battery life you’re gonna get from that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} working. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it only listens when it knows that you’re talking anyway. So it has some sort of technology to do that. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll see. But I can’t wait to get these. Mine are coming, I think, like the 27th or something, which I think is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first delivery window, even with the engraving, but we’ll see what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happens. Also, I don’t think any of us thought that it could actually be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Qi charging.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah, good point. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our commentary, the ethos we’ve been working with so far up till

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today is they have to wait for air power because a Qi pad can’t fit on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the back of an AirPods case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought I brought that, maybe I didn’t. I meant to interject last time you said that. Like a friend of mine at work has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a case with a Qi charging coil stuck to the outside of it. It’s some weird knockoff thing, like it plugs into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the lighting port or whatever, but it totally can fit. Like I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it fit. And so I, I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m meaning to point out every time I brought this up that size-wise, you can do a Qi charging in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that space. I’ve actually physically seen it work. It was ugly. It was like the coil was on the outside of the case, but if you look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John width and height, you’re like, oh yeah, that’ll fit. And so it does. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good.

Thursday and Friday?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s good. Also, we should also point out like at the moment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re recording on Wednesday night. Air power does not exist at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the moment. We don’t know. It’s entirely possible that Apple could be releasing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more things Thursday and or Friday of this week. That will be after we’ve recorded,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but Thursday it will be before we’ve published. So it’s entirely possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you’re listening to this thinking those idiots didn’t even know they were about to release air power or an or an iPod Touch or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If the Mac Pro comes out between now and release, Apple will never be forgiven.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think we have to record another episode if that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happens. In general, Apple tends to want to release things on Tuesday. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they have to prefer our first half of the week or second half of the week, they want the first half. So I imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple doesn’t want to release any good news on a Friday. But Thursday’s not a Friday, but it’s still past Wednesday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I’m thinking that we are at

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the tail end of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. I’m losing track of these moving cups here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Thursday’s not too far away. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m saying is, beginning of the week is better than end of the week. And we are just clearing Wednesday, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like we are done with announcements for this week. But who knows? Especially announcements that no one cares about, like the iPod

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Touch. They did also announce the spring colors for watch bands and phone cases. I forget what day that was announced. That was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Little disappointed they didn’t bring back the nylon straps, but it seems like, I guess those aren’t coming back yet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or ever. I feel like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Like if AirPower was gonna come out, you’d think it would’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come out with the AirPods. That said, there are still persistent rumors that in the iOS 12.2 beta, there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still references to AirPower, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna ship. And there’s like, oh, AirPower’s been put into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manufacturing, it’s a go. I guess it’s still coming eventually. It’s not canceled.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The rumor is not AirPower totally canceled. The rumor is AirPower, someday it will come. So that’s the state

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we are right now, 10 o’clock on a Wednesday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Also, Kyle Seth Gray in the chat reminds me, how about Tim Cook’s game on Twitter being so awesome?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So first he does the Tim Apple thing, which was great and then the the announcement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco earlier this week of the iPad mini Tim Cook kind of tease like right before it happened right as it happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with like a doodle of him like drawing hello with the pencil on the iPad mini and then today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was that same picture but photoshopped in instead of the hello doodle was a doodle of air pods

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} like as like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John air pod photoshopped in his ear. I don’t think Tim Cook is running is on Twitter again just to be clear, but yeah it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cute. My theory is that the Tim Apple thing, like he finally cracked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He’s kept up to his like, you know, solid, like kind of boring,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but like reliable face for so long, and I think the Tim Apple thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like broke him, and I think now he’s letting it out. Like he’s like, you know, he’s we’re finally seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, oh, Tim actually has personality like, you know, he’s been he’s been keeping it bottled up all this time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and now he’s like, F it, I’m done. We’re seeing him

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually being more engaging and I kind of like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wonder if he even knows his PR team tweeted those things through his account. It’s hard to tell because he does cheer on his favorite sports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John teams and that’s totally him. But then these ones, I’m like, all right, the marketing people are posting those. That’s pretty awesome

⏹️ ▶️ ^John though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve enjoyed it. Okay, so this is a weird thing, but do we have predictions for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the next two days of this week? I mean, it seems so odd, but I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you think AirPower is coming this week? I’m going to say yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He believes in the AirPower. All right. So in the last like, you know, seven days, we’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco WBDC announced, all these products announced. It does seem that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the event they’re having next week that is most likely to be about, you know, subscription services, news,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco games, whatever, etc. We should probably talk about that. But it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does seem like they are really clear in the decks so that there is no hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco left for that announcement because they’re going to be focusing so much on what the announcement is. That’s not hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It would not surprise me. Like, there have been strong rumors of all or most of these products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being released like in like, you know, quote, soon or spring or first half of this year or whatever. There have also been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rumors of AirPower and a new iPod Touch shipping in the first half

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this year. And so I think it’s actually very plausible that in the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two days we’re going to get those things. Because it seems like they’re really, really clearing out the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decks hard. So that next week all the attention can be all about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that event and the new services and the new TV and whatever else they’re doing. and they don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything left over for people to be asking about or expecting or complaining about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think it’s actually very plausible to have both the iPod Touch and AirPower shipped in the next 48

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hours.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. I would be stunned if the iPod Touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gets an update, but AirPower I’m really 50-50 about. I don’t know what to say. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I’m gonna wager a guess, I’m gonna say no, but I’m right on the fence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I believe in the iPod Touch more than the AirPower just because iPod Touch can be released on a Thursday,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s no big deal. And if that’s still gonna be a product line at all, do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you do with the iPads, make an updated version of it. I mean, they updated the mini for crying out loud, why not the iPad and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPod

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Touch? And all of these products are also things that don’t really require an event. They’re kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boring or spec bump updates, like they’re the perfect prep release things. AirPower is a brand new product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but because it has been so delayed, I don’t think they’re gonna wanna make a big deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} out of it when it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ships. I’m gonna sneak out, I thought I was doing bad news on a Friday, AirPower release is basically bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} news, like we’ll just sneak it out on Friday. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re not taking any questions at this time, it’s AirPower, we told you about it a year and change ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’ll come out Friday at 5 p.m.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The reason, so on the side of AirPower is the references to it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS 12.2 beta, which is like something compelling, although there’s been various references to AirPower in various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple software beta releases forever. But on the other side of it, how can you release

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the AirPods and not release AirPower with them? I mean, maybe with them is tomorrow. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to say I’m willing to believe the iPod Touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and AirPower I am below 50% on. Not that it’s ever gonna be released, but that it’ll be released in 48 hours.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I feel like if it could have been released in 48 hours, they should have done it with the AirPods. So anyway, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I’m coming down. And honestly, I also wouldn’t be surprised if today was the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John day. So the least likely scenario, as far as I’m concerned, is both the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPod Touch and AirPods are released over the next two days. That’s my least likely scenario. It’s wild.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’d also be the coolest, obviously, but well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s super wild, though. I’m loving this Apple firing on all cylinders. This has been really fun to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey watch each day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they’re just like, they’re cleaning up and unifying and patching holes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much. Like they’re just sweeping away so many old, stale products, neglected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things, things that have been rumored forever but seemed like they were never coming. Like they’re just, they’re knocking them all down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all in one week. It’s pretty awesome. This is a really fun week to be an Apple fan.

Next week’s event

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Anything else before? Oh, we don’t even have time to talk about the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey week’s event, do we? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} guess we can skip it. Well, we can take two seconds. I mean, I feel like we should probably talk about it. Yeah. We’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already talked about, I mean, it was rumored to talk about subscription services and we had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an entire show, maybe a show and a half, where we talked about what can Apple sell you a subscription to and how can it combine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John subscriptions and what are the pros and cons of that. So I don’t think we need to rehash that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prediction wise, that’s That’s what everyone has always been expecting, and with today’s releases it just nails

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it down farther. They’re not going to announce new hardware, they’re not going to announce the Mac Pro, they’re going to announce

⏹️ ▶️ ^John subscription services, probably their video service, probably their news service, whatever, in some combination.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the most sort of business-focused Apple event that I can think of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a while now, because yeah, it’s about products, like there’ll surely be some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software involved that you can get, but it’s mostly about business models. How has Apple decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to charge you money for stuff that it delivers to? And the stuff is essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John content through, you know, either existing applications or new applications. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we’re all waiting for. Not show me the new piece of hardware, not show me the amazing new app. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show me like a price sheet and show me the content. Um, there were a couple of good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John articles floating around about here, all the, the V here’s all the video content that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has paid for or is in the process of paying for it to have created and it’s a surprisingly long list. Supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have five of them already done in the can and you know it’s the list is like 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or 20 items with big names and famous people and you can go on the list and say not interested, not interested, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interested, but eventually you probably get the one you say, oh, I might check that out. Um, so I’m,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m most excited about the video service. Maybe that’s not going to be, uh, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assume it’s going to be the big one, but maybe that’s not the thing that most people are going to interested in but and maybe it won’t matter because it’ll all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be in one bundle but i’m thinking that pretty much no matter what happens during this event

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after the event or as soon as i possibly can i’m going to sign up for apple’s video service maybe that’s not a big reach because i sign

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up for every video service in the entire world and i’m currently paying for all of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because uh right now the new season of star trek is going on so i am subscribed to cbs but then i always unsubscribe after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it ends. But yeah, I’m looking forward to the event. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am looking forward to seeing how they bundle stuff. Oh, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the latest rumor about the bundle name is Apple core, but I’m not sure how much steak

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put in

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that. That’s the worst. I mean, first of all, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s marketing names are often terrible when we first hear them. Yeah, I mean, boy, that’s a bad one. Because like the core

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of an apple is the bad part you throw away. Yeah, it tastes terrible. Nobody wants

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they they do have core animation, core image, core storage, which I know are techier type things or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will never, at this point, there’s no name so bad that I will put it past Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All I would say is I do not prefer Apple Core. Obviously, it’s not gonna be called Apple Prime, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how I’ve been referring to it. I think we went through the names before. Anyway, that is part of the challenge, is naming the service, assuming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a bundle. If it’s not a bundle, then Casey gets to call it Apple Video or Tavazir, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was saying call it Front Row. Remember Front Row?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh yeah, that was fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Which kind of makes some sense, but you’re not really in the front row for TV, like there’s no audience,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway. Also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the front row for movies kind of sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well I mean, but they called it, they called front row, front row when it was about watching television and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movies. I think it’s more of like a theater thing, you want to be in the front row so you’re close to the stage. Do you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, some people do. You want to see the people on the stage, you want to see the sweat flying off their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know. No, I think the name, people keep saying whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s going to be Apple TV Apple video, but as we keep hearing more and more rumblings about there being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more to this, you know, whether it includes the magazine thing, the news thing, um, whether it includes games

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as, as a rumor thing, which I think is very exciting. Um, you know, assuming it’s going to be sold as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one big bundle, which I really think and hope it should be, as I’ve said before, um, I don’t think it’s going to be TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or video. I think it is going to be something more generic. I hope it’s not core cause that’s a terrible name,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I think whatever it is, like it’s going to sound weird at first, uh, cause it is going to be probably some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco generic word like that. Whether it’s Apple Plus, Apple Prime, who knows what it’ll be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple Air, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Core has the advantage, like when I see Apple Core, I’m like, well that’s gotta be the one that includes iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Storage, right? Because when I see Core, I think it includes subscription services and other junk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know why it makes me think that, but I don’t actually think they’re gonna include iCloud Storage, so that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like Apple Core is gonna be a bad name. It doesn’t make me think, put it this way, it doesn’t make me think of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John music and television shows and movies and news. It just makes me think of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the heart of Apple. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know. Yeah, I’m thinking like, God, I hope it isn’t core.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I could believe Apple TV. Video I don’t think sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. I also still would not rule out the possibility that they just still call

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it Apple Music and just add things to Apple Music that don’t make sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my reach, remote possibility, risky pick kind of thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what if they call it iTunes?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think we mentioned that in the Apple Music Show and I was just thinking it as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because iTunes has stopped meaning anything on mobile and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s going to soon probably mean nothing on desktop because I’m assuming that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco future of Apple music apps on the Mac is gonna be a marzipan version of the music app. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so, it’s gonna stop meeting something on desktops soon too. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually think calling it iTunes is not totally outrageous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think Apple is self-aware enough to know that the brand equity in the name iTunes is on the downward slope.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, maybe. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} but I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even non-tech nerds don’t particularly have good associations with that word these days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, I’m hoping they call it something really boring, like Apple Plus. I think Apple Plus is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just call it Apple Plus, that’s great, or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PlayStation has that, I told you, they can’t use it, PlayStation Plus. Yeah, but no one knows about that. Yeah, the lawyers do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, there’s not a lot of great names for it. The best I can hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for their naming is that it’ll be highfalutin, that it will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something aspirational And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how to, sophisticated, like aiming higher than just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Music. Apple Music does not aim particularly high, but it also is not the same. Like iTunes is sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, we’re casual and cool. We got some tunes, man. Apple Music is kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} of like straight ahead, straight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ahead, boring,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever, but like. Yeah, Apple Music is the iOS 7 version of the name. Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like we’ve stripped all personality out of this. We are called in from space.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and then the highfalutin version would be like a word that evokes the idea of music,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it isn’t so boringly strictly related to music. So front row would actually kind of be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John highfalutin name because it alludes to the idea of, I don’t think they’re gonna use it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what I have in mind. But like I said, nothing will surprise me anymore with Apple names. There’s no more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system you can use. You can’t look at a name and say, that sounds silly. Apple will never do that. It’s like, nope,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not the way things work anymore if they ever did. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think whatever it is, it’s going to be a really weird sounding name for about a week, and then we’re all going to get used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} just like all the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John names. Yeah, but unless they use Roman numerals, then we’ll never get used to it. Yeah.

#askatp: Leasing iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alright, so I’m gonna ask ATP. Let’s do it. Jacob Ford writes, Hey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, why are you so into leasing cars but not so into leasing iPhones?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pretty easy really, and he’s referring to the iPhone upgrade program and why I don’t do that, at least currently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Main reason is, leasing cars brings, it reduces

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco financial risk, basically. Like if you buy a car, new or used, whatever the case may be, maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are taking on more uncertainty with the finances of that over time. Because at some point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are going to probably have to, you know, you have to service it at some point if you’re gonna keep it for a long time and have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it be used especially, Casey. You’re gonna have to service it, and that could be, you know, that’s a big unknown.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And even if you buy new and just, you know, trade it in after, you know, three to five years, whatever else, you’re taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a risk on what its long-term value’s gonna be. With iPhones, you’re not really doing that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you kinda know what they’re gonna be worth. It’s a much smaller investment compared to a car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so there’s less need for that. And then also, the inflexibility of leasing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that you tend to be inflexible on timing. Using the iPhone upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco program, you do have some restrictions. It’s better than a car lease. Like you can make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things easier and buy things out early and whatever else. But like, you’re losing a lot of flexibility.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And with a car, I don’t really care. The inflexibility of a lease works fine for me. I don’t need,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, when a new model of car comes out, I don’t really, really, really need to have it on day one. Whereas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, on an iPhone, I want complete flexibility. I want zero obligations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want to be able to buy a new iPhone whenever I want to and walk in on day one and get the new one so I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do whatever I want with it. Like, that’s what I want. And so that’s why I don’t do it. And I also, the upgrade program

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assumes that you want AppleCare and are willing to pay for it. I don’t buy AppleCare. So it’s just stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s little motivation for me to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s fair. I mean, on paper, if I was an AppleCare person, there’d be no reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not to do the iPhone upgrade program, but I, like you, am not an AppleCare person, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey once has been annoying, but generally speaking, it’s been fine. Knock on glass. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so we’ll see how this works out. But for me, I also don’t want to do that whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lease thing. Plus you have to like get a credit check, if I’m not mistaken. And there’s some hidden

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey agita there that I just don’t want to do.

#askatp: 2015 MBP today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey deal with. Continuing, David McCookey writes, Hey, would Marco still recommend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey using a 2015 MacBook Pro in 2019? I cringe at recommending it, but I cringe more at recommending Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey machines with defective keyboards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is a tougher question. I mean, as time goes on, it becomes less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and less advisable to use such an old machine because over time, like, you know, if you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a 2015 machine today in 2019, you’re still buying, you know, four-year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old parts and a lot of that 2015 machine was not particularly up to date. Like like the processors in it I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think are from like 2013 really or like the core of the core of them is from 2013 something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. So like it’s, you’re buying old parts if you can get a really good deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on it and it’s a really good shape, I’d say that’s still a great buy. Uh, but as time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes on, how good of a deal it has to be increases.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I wouldn’t recommend paying the new price for it now, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at that point you’re paying a lot for pretty old hardware. But if you can get a good deal on it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s still a fantastic machine. And if it fits your needs, it’s still a fantastic machine. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say for most people, it probably does fit their needs, and probably better than the current ones, unfortunately. But it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah. The 2015 is still an awesome machine, but just, it is getting pretty old. So adjust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your price expectations accordingly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah.

#askatp: Watch vs. CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s fair. And then finally leading or finishing up the all Marco-esque ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Chris Adamson. Lucky

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us. Lucky us. Actually, in Marco’s defense, I chose all these questions. It’s not him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Chris Adamson writes, hey, I’m idly wondering, and this is within the context of Overcast, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for CarPlay versus Apple Watch, which is more interesting, more difficult, and used more?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you can take those however

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you would like. more is the easy one. I have analytics on how much people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use CarPlay or how much they have the watch installed and use the watch app. The Apple Watch is used more by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a factor of roughly three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with my current data. I’m surprised it’s that little actually. I would have assumed a lot more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CarPlay is very popular. CarPlay gets more usage than a lot of features

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do. It gets way more usage than the website, for instance. It gets way more usage than parts of the… the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offline playback of the Apple Watch app gets way less usage than CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets. Like orders of magnitude less usage. So it’s, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like, you know, certain things like, you know, chapter support get similar usage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as CarPlay. The Apple Watch though gets really high usage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s one of the reasons why like, I find it important to develop an Apple Watch app even though I personally don’t really use the Apple Watch very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco often because it’s just that big. And CarPlay similarly, CarPlay is on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost all new cars now, or at least it’s available on almost all new cars as an option. And so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gotten very popular very quickly. So use more is watch, but CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is no slouch. As for more difficult and more interesting, which are kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not sure how I should define more interesting, I certainly have a favorite, and that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I greatly prefer working on the CarPlay app because working on the Apple Watch app is more difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The tooling and the software around both are pretty rough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a little CarPlay setup on my desk where it’s literally a CarPlay head unit strapped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a 12 volt power supply in a plastic box that I dremeled out some holes in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to like mount the thing in and get some wires out and everything. It’s a really like, you know, homebrew

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of setup and I don’t have any skills in the area of constructing things. So it’s ugly as hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and yeah, it’s a terrible setup. but I had to build this hardware set up because while there is a CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco simulator as part of the iOS simulator, it’s not very reliable and it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very representative of real world hardware. So testing, and my car doesn’t offer CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thank you, Tesla, for being so stubborn. So I have to test this, you know, using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this crazy test rig on my desk. Well, building an Apple Watch app is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that much less cumbersome because the Apple Watch simulator is also pretty buggy and pretty limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and has things about it that do not reflect the way the hardware behaves. And so you have to frequently test on Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actual hardware. And building and running an app on an Apple Watch through Xcode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is incredibly slow and incredibly unreliable and very frustrating. And honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hate building for watchOS. I really do. WatchKit itself is very frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s very limited, it’s very buggy. Just very, very frustrating for developers. And the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always kills your app for exceeding resource limits that are very, very, very low, that are very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard to avoid, and that you get no warning for. So just developing for the watch in general is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cumbersome. It’s a process I do not enjoy. It’s very demoralizing, and it’s something that I try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do as little as possible. And once I get it working, I try to not touch it, because it is just incredibly time-consuming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and just draining of motivation. Carplay isn’t so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad, because there’s only so much I can do. I don’t control the CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UI very much. The way the CarPlay API works for the app, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the watch, I’m like rendering that whole UI, like I’m putting whatever components I want in whatever order I want and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, having them behave in certain ways however I want. With CarPlay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you just supply like a tree structure of data and there’s certain properties

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can set on each row. You can say like whether something has sub-items or not, whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something is playable or not, whether it is a streamable item or a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco locally downloaded item, whether it has progress and what that progress is. And you can set like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, title, description and an image, like a table row cell. And that’s about it. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t control almost anything about the now playing screen. I control very little about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the other screens. So the total problem space of what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your CarPlay app can be is pretty small and mostly out of your hands. So the parts that are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so like your part of it is not that big of a job, and it’s fairly reliable to develop for. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t too bad. So it’s in many ways poorly documented, but it’s still like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s pretty easy to work with. So CarPlay is a way more pleasant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco development environment to work in, even though it’s way more limited in what it can do, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t have to do as much, and the parts I do have to do are way more reliable and way easier to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything I’ve ever done with the watch, I’ve regretted the amount of time I spent on it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time, and I have to do it for, you know, just for like market reasons, like I have to have a watch app because a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people do have it and they want it. So it’s in high demand, but I get zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enjoyment out of watch development. It’s the kind of thing, it’s like doing my taxes. It’s like I do it because I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to, and I try to procrastinate as long as possible before doing it because it’s gonna, I know it’s just gonna like kill

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my week. Like every time I work on the watch app, I have a bad day. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just, it makes every day worse. The only person who can tolerate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco working on watchOS all the time is Underscore because he is just a much better person than me. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hate developing for watchOS. So does that answer the question? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think so. All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Marine Layer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we will talk to you next.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anti-Marco Armen, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse, it’s accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Accidental! They didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean to Accidental! Accidental! Tech Podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long

Post-show: HDMI-CEC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I hear through the grapevine, Marco, that you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey either become or ceased being an HDMI CEC unicorn.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I have a story.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lay it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I got my wonderful 4K LG

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C7 TV. I love the LG C7 and the newer C8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything. This is a great series of TVs. The motion isn’t so great, but everything else about them is awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, lovely 4K OLED sets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t keep the TV connected to the internet because I don’t trust it. I don’t trust smart TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have their internet connection. So when I set it up, I wired it up for ethernet, set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it up, had it do its initial download of whatever it needed to do, and then I unplugged the ethernet. I never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco told it about my Wi-Fi credentials or anything like that, so it could never get its own connection, like, nice and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easy. It does support HDMI CEC, which is the protocol of HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that allows devices, like, for the Apple TV, allows the Apple TV to turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off or turn on the TV it’s connected to when you push the Apple TV remote buttons. Or it allows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to take the active input, so if you hit a button on the Apple TV remote, the Apple TV can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make the TV switch to its input. So, and there’s things like that, and certain things like with audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control, where you can use the TV that can communicate via the HDMI cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to tell the TV to turn the volume up and down, stuff like that. It’s a cool protocol. As we famously have discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this show before, as John famously says that, it basically, at some point, it never works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s unreliable, and any HDMI CEC setup that works is only temporary, and eventually it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stop working. And, but I’ve had this TV now for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think over a year, and it has always worked great. I’ve never had problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Apple TV always was able to like, turn the TV on and off, take the input and not take the input, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s been wonderful. The TV’s also capable of HDR. And when I first got the 4K

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple TV, I first tried setting up in HDR mode. And I had a couple of problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and there with like the cable would flake out occasionally and everything. And like the picture would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flake out. And eventually I’m just like, you know, I don’t care about HDR that much. Like I don’t see that much HDR content.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just being a problem for me. I will just set the Apple TV to just 4K output

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not use HDR here. If I really want HDR, I have a Blu-ray player that does it just fine, and I can buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high-end Blu-rays and that’s fine. So I disabled HDR. And I mentioned this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this show maybe three to six months ago sometime. And somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrote in saying, I had the same problem with the same TV. If you run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a firmware update on it, plug it back into the network, run a firmware update on it, and it fixes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the HDR problems of the Apple TV. And I had that in my head for months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was just like a thing on my mental to-do list. Sometime I have to plug the TV into Ethernet and have it do this. But it just never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really came up. About a week and a half ago, I decided, you know what, I had some free time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the living room. I was like, you know, let me, I was like doing stuff around the house, like getting stuff done, fixing tech things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like needed to be fixed. And I was like, let me finally do this. So I updated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plugged the Ethernet in, let it run its stupid software update, came back, unplug the ethernet, all right, we should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be good now. And I played with HDR settings for a little while, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the funny thing is, I couldn’t get it to look good at all. No matter what settings I changed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I could not get HDR from the Apple TV 4K to look good. And so I turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it back off. Like I actually preferred it the other way. And so I turned the Apple TV off and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco went about my day. Later on, I came back to the living room and the TV was on again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s weird. I turned it off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I figured,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, maybe the remote fell and maybe Hop stepped on the button or something or somebody sat on it or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever. And then the next day, Tiff’s like, hey, something’s wrong with the TV. I tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turning it off earlier and it just kept turning itself back on. And I’m like, oh, that’s weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let me try rebooting everything and unplug, replug everything, reset everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That should fix it, right? The next day, it happened to me where I tried to turn the TV off, and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few minutes later, it turns off back on. And I turn it off again, a few minutes later, it turns off back on. And it took like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco three or four tries before it actually would stay off. And I thought, maybe the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco TV is not behaving correctly with CEC for some reason, even though I didn’t change anything about that. I changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what the TV was running, but let’s blame the Apple TV for once. So I switched

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the active input. Before I turned off the TV, I switched the active input to the Nintendo Switch. And then I turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the TV off, thinking maybe the Apple TV is waking it up wrong or whatever. Same problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did some searching. I’m like, please don’t be a problem, but I did some searching and I found a Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco post issues with the LG C7 since upgrading firmware to 5.80.15

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco describing a bunch of CEC problems. And then the comments to this post describing more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people saying, yep, Same thing happened to me on the same TV with the same firmware update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so this seems to just be a problem. And this is, it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about a month since this version came out apparently. And I don’t know if, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know how often LG issues firmware updates for their TVs. I’m guessing it isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that frequently, especially for a TV that’s now like two years old. Uh, and the solution is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disabling CEC. And the problem is, I’ve been living a CEC lifestyle, and it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice when it’s working. It’s really great. My whole family is now very upset that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things are now way more cumbersome than they were before to operate the TV. Because we have to now turn things on and off separately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and adjust volume in a different way, and everything’s all different. You have to manually change inputs like we’re animals.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s terrible. We had this working so well, and I was a dummy and decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to update the firmware to fix something that wasn’t really even that much of a problem, it turns out. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t downgrade it. And so now I just have to sit here waiting for my TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to hopefully get another firmware update sometime that hopefully fixes this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem. Which is totally out of my control. Like I’m just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m so mad. Like I don’t know what to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do. I’m glad you learned that the solution is always to disable CEC. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solution to all your problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But it’s nice. But it’s not, no it’s not because I’m with Marco on this. I have an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ancient 1080 TV. It’s 40 inches. It’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey close to 10 years old at this point. I’m starting to get a little bit of an itch to upgrade the TV,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but for now, I’m fine. The one thing that it does relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reliably is power itself on when I mash down on the Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remote. It takes a freaking eternity for the thing to turn on, but eventually, it will turn itself on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is really darn convenient. I really, really like it. annoying that I have to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey flip the switch on my receiver, you know, get the remote to turn the receiver on separately because the TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is automatic. Why can’t the receiver figure it out? And it’s also an ancient receiver, blah blah blah. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of this to say, I agree with Marco that when it works, it’s really darn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice. And also there’s things like, like I’ve seen in some of the comments about this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that like certain sound bars and things are only volume controllable via CEC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There are certain components now, like hardware components that require the use of CEC. So like, this has to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work. You can’t just say I’ll turn it off everywhere forever because there are things being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made that depend on it. Oh, I’m so mad. It’s like, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorry. If they never update the firmware again, you can always get a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remote to orchestrate all the things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hate universal remotes. I hate them, I hate them so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, I know. Well, I mean, do you hate them more than the Apple TV remote? I’m surprised you actually use that thing so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much. Yeah, actually I do. That’s how much I hate them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s serious business.