340: You Are a Computer Athlete
19 Aug 2019Rainbow Apple logos, RSI treatment and prevention, game-console hardware, store-brand cheese* loafs, and breaking Marco’s silence on fancy watches.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- PlayStation 5 hardware
- Apple Rainbow Apple Logo Returning?
#askatp:- What are some techniques to avoid RSI? (via Mark Bramhill)
- What year will USB-C ports be mainstreamed in cars? (via Nicholas Gaffney)
- Post-show: What does Marco look for in a watch? (via James)
- Marco's blog post
- Under $200:
- $200–700:
- $700–1,500:
- Dressy:
- Cool:
- Utilitarian:
- Micro-brands:
- $4,000-5,000:
- "Fashion watches"
- Unattainable grail: Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711
Sponsored by:
- ExpressVPN: Protect your online activity. Get 3 months free with a 1-year package.
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Chapters
- Feelings and facts
- Store-brand Velveeta
- Keyboard-cleaning app
- Game-console hardware
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Rainbow Apple logo?
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- #askatp: RSI
- #askatp: USB-C in cars
- Ending theme
- #askmarco: Watches
Feelings and facts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’ve mentioned this once on the show, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to getting an Ask ATP answered is generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking to have tweeted it Wednesday mornings. Now, obviously today’s not Wednesday. So this is— That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I pick from all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, well, so that—okay, let me back up a half step. It used to be that I was the one who chose and volunteered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do all the Ask ATP. So last couple of months— That was never the case. That was never the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe not all of the AskATPs, but I feel like there was a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John stretch of time. You
⏹️ ▶️ John participated in the selection process, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is true. Oh my god, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this really how we’re going to start the show? Anyway, I feel like I did the lion’s share of the AskATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not complaining about that. I think that’s perfectly reasonable. You did not. Oh my god, can you just let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get through this, please? Please, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please. Give it a false premise, Casey. Anything follows. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m just trying to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whether or not it’s invented, whether or not it’s true, my feelings that you cannot f***ing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are that I did the overwhelming majority. You can have
⏹️ ▶️ John feelings about factual things. That’s fine. Great. Go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So normally we would start with follow up, but I should make it plain that we are recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Sunday, the 18th of August, and we are doing that because your two favorite hosts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show, that’s not true, but whatever. Two of the hosts of the show are going to be in San Francisco this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we needed to record early. We’re going to be in San Francisco because Relay FM turned five this very day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 18th of August. So congratulations to our friends, Stephen and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike and everyone else at Relay, including the three of us. Congratulations for turning five. That’s a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cool achievement. And I am glad that the three three of us have had a very small part in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That aside, we should start with follow up and
Store-brand Velveeta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Nate Lyman had something to say, but I don’t care, so let’s move on. Stephen Howell writes, regarding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple laptop—are you really letting me get away with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this? I’m very surprised. No, you got
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. You got to—your punishment is you got to do this item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I should have just soldiered on, but I felt guilty. Nate Lyman writes, store brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Velveeta is, quote, smooth melting cheese loaf. I couldn’t even say it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John with a straight face.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s smooth melting cheese loaf at Safeway, which is a grocery store here in the United States. Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know. Thanks, Nate Lyman.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speculated last week during the discussion of Casey’s awful taste. Does that discussion ever end? Whether his beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Velveeta actually, whether there was a like cheap imitation or store brand version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Velveeta and there actually apparently is at Safeway named smooth melting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheese loaf, which So bad. I mean, Velveeta itself is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty inexpensive, pretty crappy. How do you make Velveeta cheaper?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what is it made of? My main question is how are they allowed to call it cheese loaf? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t they have to call Velveeta like cheese food?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I believe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pasteurized cheesed product if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if this is called cheese loaf and there’s no modifier, is there like an asterisk next to cheese?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Velveeta, which remember the tagline is liquid gold, which again, you can’t even say with a straight face,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pasteurized recipe cheese product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey do they actually use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phrase liquid gold?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes. Yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s not a joke. we say about it? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something they say about it? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. I’m putting Link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really something. Also, who has decided that the word loaf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a good thing most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of the time? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like if you’re describing bread that is a good term to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re describing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John almost anything else, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not positive associations. No one thinks loaf of a type of food
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a loaf that is not bread. No one associates that with quality or even anything appetizing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what’s the alternate? Let’s get some alternatives for loaf. Brick block. Uh, brick is
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangular, solid pasteurized processed cheese block block. Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plug. Wow. Cheese product plug. Cheese
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Excited by that. Anyway, there there are, Velveeta
⏹️ ▶️ John has competitors somehow. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin So on rare occasions, especially if we’re having like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a party of some sort that is themed around football, I don’t know why football is required, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When we’re watching American football or maybe like the Super Bowl, for example, that’s a great example. Occasionally we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a sausage and cheese dip and by we I mean Aaron. And so that’s Velveeta, like you know, the block of Velveeta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with sausage and Rotel. And I think we talked about this on analog a couple of times. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really honestly just, well, I can’t say this because the two of you are going to jump all over me. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it to be very tasty. But the thing is, if you let it sit, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you heat up this block of cheese, it melts, you put sausage in it, you put this Rotel diced tomatoes and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey green chilies thing in it, and then you mix it all up. By the way, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you mean loaf of cheese.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, right. Sorry. Loaf of cheese. Yes, that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You’ve got to be precise here with your… Yes, exactly. And anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you get this melty cheese with the sausage in it. Cheese and sausage, okay, granted, Velveeta is a little weird, I’m not going to deny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, but on the surface, cheese, sausage, tomatoes, and chilies, I think all three of us can agree in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey principle, maybe with different cheese, in principle, this is okay. Well, the thing of it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you let this Velveeta cheese sit after it has been heated up, it eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey becomes kind of a loaf again. So one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of the most terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things I’ve ever witnessed is the remainder of the sausage and cheese dip after everyone has eaten whatever they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eat, and you look at at this thing in a bowl that’s congealed into a solid that is unbreakable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by even diamonds. You wonder, hmm, what did my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lead to to make me think that this was a good idea to consume this? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s tasty. It gets hard again?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it gets harder than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John original started out as?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. I’m exaggerating some, but it definitely congeals and becomes not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. Better question is, what does it do inside of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey if you do eat it? Exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly right. And that’s the question I have with my, that I ask myself every single time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s kind of grossing me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. To be fair, making some kind of like cheese dip with Velveeta that you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dip chips into is indeed really good. That’s what it’s really, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is I feel like the ideal thing to do with it. There’s not that much else you can do with Velveeta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can defend at all, but that is one thing that it is really good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if you recall, people who have listened to Analog, I sent Mike, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I purchased on Amazon.co.uk a Velveeta shells and cheese box and had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike make it, and he was utterly disgusted by it. But then, of his own volition,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a year or two later—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, is that what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was? I didn’t realize it was you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I do that to John, now I’m doing it to you, Marco. So when visiting the Armands, they made a Velveeta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Rotel and sausage or a rough equivalent dip and Mike reported back on the show saying, oh my gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually quite delicious, as you were just saying, Marco. So yeah, it can win over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the most stalwart, you know, I can’t think of the word other than evangelist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the wrong direction, the antonym of evangelist. Haters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also report that after doing that, we visited London a few months later and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I brought Mike a block of Velveeta and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can of… You mean a loaf, a loaf. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a loaf of Velveeta and a can of Grotel. I will say it was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered in TSA inspection tape when we arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? I did not know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we put it in our checked luggage because it’s pretty big and heavy. Imagine how a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block of plastic-like cheese must look in an x-ray. They had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think it was like a plastic explosive, right? I’m sure it is something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see that on the x-ray and you pull that bag and you inspected like for sure and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco must I can’t even imagine the expression on whatever TSA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey agency when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they opened it up and found a block of Velveeta in this suitcase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely made the gift extra cool that it was covered in TSA tape.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He doesn’t travel without it. Real
⏹️ ▶️ John time follow up just so we don’t have to get all the responses and tweets. Lucerne is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John the Safeway store brand. So it’s a fancy name. Now we know. Corey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Baer-Wilson Uh, Walmart store brand, great value has original melt apostrophe n dip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Easy melt cheese. John Savage Melton. Corey Baer-Wilson Melton dip. Is that Don’s? Did Don do this? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don would never do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Savage Yeah, it yeah, the Melton dip invented Safari and swears a lot. Corey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Baer-Wilson He drinks a lot of wine. Very, very well done.
Keyboard-cleaning app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Stephen Howell writes, regarding Apple laptops that turn on with any key press or trackpad click, one solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve found to clean my keyboard is by using an app called Keyboard Clean Tool for exactly this purpose. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing and does it well, when you open the app and click the start cleaning button, the entire keyboard stops responding to input. Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey input is restored after clicking the stop button. And according to the author’s website, it can also be useful for toddlers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cats. P.S. if you accidentally lock your screen while the app is enabled, no worries, the lock screen overrides whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API the app is using, so you can still type your password. Cool. That is a useful tip.
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly a solution, but part of the reason I’ve always wanted my computer to be off before I
⏹️ ▶️ John clean the keyboard is just in case there’s some kind of moisture going
⏹️ ▶️ John on there. I mean, really, you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco let the moisture
⏹️ ▶️ John in the computer at all anyway, and it’s probably just mostly superstition, but it is that extra bit of safety,
⏹️ ▶️ John that some tiny molecule of water can’t work its way in there and hit a contact.
⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, especially with today’s keyboards the way the laptop design doesn’t really make any sense, but it always makes me feel better
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s actually off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I completely agree with you, but you know, it’s the next best thing, I suppose. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick follow-up. I’m very impressed with us.
Game-console hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s move on to our main topic. So I’m going to go take a power nap because we need to talk about PlayStation 5 hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yay. It’s not really about PlayStation 5 hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s a bunch of stuff in the notes about PlayStation 5, which is old news. I forget how old, I don’t know. I guess I could
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the date on this article and find out. But it’s really just about consoles.
⏹️ ▶️ John And wow, it’s from April. Okay. Slow news summer, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this in the context of like Nintendo and
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they should still make hardware in light of iOS games. Remember we had that discussion like before the Switch came out and
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my more strident positions was that as long as there remains a market for
⏹️ ▶️ John devices that for hardware devices that mostly just play games, Nintendo can
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to make hardware and should continue to make hardware. And the question was like all right well but is there still a market for devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t personal computers that mostly just play games or will tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John and smartphones and everything take over for them or whatever. So I mean I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that was long enough ago that the verdict is in certainly for this generation and probably for
⏹️ ▶️ John the next that yeah people still want to buy game consoles basically. The PS4 is sold very
⏹️ ▶️ John well, the Xbox is in a strong second place and the Switch has done surprisingly well for Nintendo.
⏹️ ▶️ John So not only is there a market for more or less dedicated game hardware, but it’s actually big enough to support three
⏹️ ▶️ John large players and none of them is you know Going down the tubes. I
⏹️ ▶️ John go all through those three players. I mentioned seem like they’re doing. Okay, obviously Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John is massively subsidized by the rest of Microsoft’s business, but I think they’re doing fine there too, even though they were firmly
⏹️ ▶️ John in second place in this generation And I think that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to continue because I don’t see any market forces with the possible exception of the streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming stuff that we talked about when Stadia was announced that are really going to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the landscape in the near term. Like I think the next generation of consoles is going to come out and I think they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell in similar numbers to the current generation. Which means that you
⏹️ ▶️ John know that iOS and smartphone games and tablet games and whatever you want to put in there is
⏹️ ▶️ John not dethroned the game console quite yet nor has the PC replaced it or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario you might imagine. So it got me thinking, like, why do I care
⏹️ ▶️ John about game consoles at all? Because I do. And I realized this when the PS5 announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, like, Sony came out and said, here’s what we’re planning to do for our next console, and here’s a bunch of specs and blah blah blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t, you know, show any hardware or announce a name or anything like that. I just wanted to talk about the next hardware. And I got excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And I’m like, why am I excited to buy this thing that is like, like, it’s always been true of game consoles, especially in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past few generations, They’re basically like PCs, but not as good.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco x86 CPUs, they have hard drives, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, and they have a GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all of those things are less powerful than the equivalents in PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, PCs cost way more. So it’s like, well, great. So I can buy it for, it’s like a $500 gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, to be fair, it isn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that PCs cost a little bit more. It’s like most game consoles, the entire console
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be sold for less than what a decent PC graphics card costs.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a different price class. And you could say, well, it’s pretty amazing what they do for price performance, but honestly, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John probably build a gaming PC for similar to console
⏹️ ▶️ John prices and get close to the same power maybe if you bought a bunch of stuff used. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be a terrible shambling mess or whatever. And obviously, that’s the experience of a game console way different
⏹️ ▶️ John than cobbling together your own gaming PC, especially if you’re trying to do one for like $500 or $600.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, it seems like it should be hardware that is not exciting. So, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, first, before I talk about why I’m still excited by console hardware and why I think a lot of people are,
⏹️ ▶️ John just briefly go through what Sony announced back in April about
⏹️ ▶️ John what will presumably be called the PS5. So the CPU is going to be AMD,
⏹️ ▶️ John Ryzen, you know, it’s 7 nanometer, so the game console, our Macs won’t have 7 nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs in them, but all these game consoles will, that’s great. So it’s x86, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The big deal is it’s going to have an SSD, which I think most people would have predicted, like it’s not surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually have an SSD connected to my PS4 now, just because it reduces load time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this was really pushed by Sony. the idea that, yeah, it’s got an SSD, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like connecting an SSD to your PS4. So this is from,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco name, Mark Cerny?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always get his first name wrong. Anyway, he says, I’ve got a PlayStation 4 Pro, and then I put an SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John that costs as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro, and it might be one third faster. So like, because if you have like a terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive and you connect a terabyte SSD, and back when he wrote this, you know, a four or $500 terabyte SSD, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doubling the price of your game console just for the storage. And I can tell you from experience that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes maybe 1 third faster. So it’s a huge investment. And it’s worth it for me, because 1 third
⏹️ ▶️ John faster is a significant decrease in load times or whatever. But it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John great bang for your buck. So what they’re trying to do with the next generation console
⏹️ ▶️ John is say, OK, we’re going to have an SSD, but kind of like Apple did. It’s going to be built in. We’re going to build the
⏹️ ▶️ John system around it. And it’s going to be way faster than if you connected an SSD to like USB 3.0
⏹️ ▶️ John bus, external bus or whatever. So the figure that they put out is like 19 times
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the Sphinx, which again, shouldn’t be hard with the SSD, but it’s, you’re gonna use PCIe 4.0
⏹️ ▶️ John and the SSD is gonna be built in and it’s not optional. There is no hard drive version. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John next generation PlayStation will have solid state storage and it will be like an integral part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the system. Does it even talk about possibly using it for, you know, that it’ll be so much faster for swap
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’ll make it seem like you have more RAM and many more things, or many more options are open.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the examples they showed was like the Spider-Man game, where there used to be 15
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds to do like fast travel from one place to the other and they reduced that down to less than a second, so the 10
⏹️ ▶️ John to 20 times faster, depending on what you’re doing, is apparently a real figure, at least for PS4 games.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe PS5 games are a little bit different. The next interesting fact about it is that it will
⏹️ ▶️ John still accept physical media, which I’m assuming will just be another optical disc, a blu-ray, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is kind of surprising because I have never inserted
⏹️ ▶️ John a plastic disc into my PlayStation 4 and sometimes I forget that it even takes discs. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not how I use it. I download everything. There’s plenty of storage for the amount of games that I play
⏹️ ▶️ John and if I run out of storage, which my son has on his PlayStation 4, you can just delete a game and then re-download
⏹️ ▶️ John it later and with cloud saves like it’s not a big deal. But apparently they still want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John discs. I’m sure there are a bunch of reasons having to do with bandwidth and, you know, how far
⏹️ ▶️ John broadband goes out into the potential customer base and just how much easier it is to ship people plastic discs
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But we’re not away from physical media quite yet, which is interesting because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox One has a model called the Xbox One S,
⏹️ ▶️ John O-N-E, space, capital letter
⏹️ ▶️ John are the worst at naming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t wait to see what the next generation Xbox can be called. I mean, Xbox two.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, yeah, let’s see. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s the fourth. Yeah. So first, so you have the Xbox one, which is not the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. You’ve had the Xbox one back in 2001, which made sense, right? Then you had the Xbox 360,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the second one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, his name, it named the number beginning with three. And then you have the Xbox one, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the Xbox one, but it’s the Xbox one. That’s the third one and then you have the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one s but it’s not number one s it’s the spelled out one but not the spelled out s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Xbox one s and now they’re making more so so I guess well they
⏹️ ▶️ John also have the Xbox one X which is not s that’s right but it sounds like it X was
⏹️ ▶️ John like the and it’s not pronounced 10 yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco X was the one
⏹️ ▶️ John actually I don’t yeah it’s not pronounced 10 it was the more powerful one and so the new one that
⏹️ ▶️ John is relevant to the discussion about media is the Xbox One S All Digital.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s the Xbox One is like the this is this generation of thing and they just put suffixes on it right
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’ve got Xbox One with no suffix and you got S, X and now you have S All Digital
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s the Xbox One Sad Xbox One
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco SAD. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey S All Digital.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh they are so good at this. But anyway it’s $250 and all digital means it doesn’t have an optical
⏹️ ▶️ John drive and hey you save money and it’s less complicated and you can make the case you have more room in the case
⏹️ ▶️ John for cooling. Like, getting rid of the optical drive is an advantage, but apparently it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still not a thing that Sony’s going to commit to for their introductory flagship console,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Microsoft is already offering one model that’s like that. It’s the cheap model, $250, late
⏹️ ▶️ John in the generation of Xbox One, so now they have all these different variants and stuff like that. Anyway, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for the optical disc to go away entirely because as far as I’m concerned I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for it with both my money and space that could be used for cooling or storage
⏹️ ▶️ John or just making the box smaller and I’m not even gonna use that feature but whatever it’s fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the new PlayStation not you know not they did a bunch of figures in GB or whatever but yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be less powerful than a PC surprise it’s probably gonna be like five or six hundred dollars it’s gonna have a really really fast
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD and an optical drive and so why is this why do I care
⏹️ ▶️ John why do I care about a console hardware at all because I did when I was
⏹️ ▶️ John reading about this I was excited I was excited about the kind of stuff I’m going to see in PlayStation 5. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because consoles still have this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess it’s an advantage. There are disadvantages to it, but advantage, even in today’s world
⏹️ ▶️ John where they release pro versions of consoles and S versions and X versions and X S version all digital,
⏹️ ▶️ John of being a fixed hardware target. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a couple of variants in general, it is a fairly fixed hardware target for game developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means and these generations lost her a long, long time. So the game developers have a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John to get used to the hardware. When they test their game, they know
⏹️ ▶️ John that how it runs for them is how it’s going to run for you. And they can safely
⏹️ ▶️ John optimize the game using optimizations that will only work on the target hardware and.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bring every last bit of power out of the hardware because they know this is our target and we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to. we can spend time optimizing for this specific GPU because this is the one and only GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that will be in this model of console and millions of people buy this model of console and that’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ John get games like uh you know an uncharted 4 or something for the playstation 4
⏹️ ▶️ John that look really really good even though they’re running on by pc standards incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John underpowered hardware part of it is art direction part of it is artistic skill i always think
⏹️ ▶️ John back to metroid prime running on the GameCube. The GameCube is an incredibly underpowered console compared to PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time, but Metroid Prime looked amazing even though it was like low polygon, short draw distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John low res textures, art direction can go a long way. So part of it is talent, but part of it is also
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you’re, you know, especially the game starts at the end of a generation, if you have a game engine that’s very well optimized
⏹️ ▶️ John for the console, you really just use every part of the the buffalo. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting every execution unit firing at the same time, you’re not wasting any
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, you’re using all the GPU, you’re multithreading the whole game thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to do that on a PC game, or even like a phone game, because phones, there’s so much variability
⏹️ ▶️ John in what generation of phone you have. Whereas on consoles, you make a game and it’s for the PlayStation 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though there’s two variants of the PlayStation or, you know, they’re not that different
⏹️ ▶️ John from each other. And it is a very fixed target. And what that means is that the kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of games that you see on consoles differ materially
⏹️ ▶️ John from the kinds of games you see on PC, the kinds of games you see on iPads, on phones. It’s just, it’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ John genre of game. Even if it’s the same quote unquote genre, it’s a different sort of class of game.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the expectations are different, especially when a new console generation comes out. You have this expectation There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be a generation of games that are going to show off the new hardware and maybe there’ll be a little bit clumsy and maybe they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be that great. But like every, every part of a console generation has something to recommend it in the beginning. You say, here’s the game
⏹️ ▶️ John that you couldn’t imagine seeing before because it would never run on the PlayStation four years in the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation five. And it’s, you know, so why would I be excited about that? I could have seen that
⏹️ ▶️ John game on the PC. It’s like, but you, you didn’t see that game on the PC because these people either don’t make games for the PC
⏹️ ▶️ John or they don’t make this game for the PC. or they made it for the PC, it wouldn’t look like this except for on some
⏹️ ▶️ John super duper rig that you don’t own anyway because you’re not into PC gaming. So I find that
⏹️ ▶️ John prospect exciting. When I see hardware like this, I’m not excited like, wow, they put an SSD in, I’m so excited by SSDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m excited by is the games I’m going to see on this console, that all
⏹️ ▶️ John those people who make games that I love, what will they be able to do with more hardware to work
⏹️ ▶️ John with? Because I don’t have a big gaming PC and you know, Naughty Dog is not making PC games.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if I think about here’s what Uncharted 4 looked like on a PlayStation 4, imagine what
⏹️ ▶️ John the big flagship Naughty Dog game in the Uncharted vein will look like on a PlayStation 5,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it looks so amazing on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 is a tiny baby compared to the PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware wise, even though PlayStation 5 hardware wise is a tiny baby compared to a gaming PC. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I find myself getting much more excited about a new console generation of hardware than
⏹️ ▶️ John I am about a new top-end video card for PCs or anything like that because the advancements
⏹️ ▶️ John in the PC world don’t come along with a giant new crop of games that you know are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to take advantage of it. It takes a while for games to take advantage of it and very often it’s just playing the same games that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have at ever greater resolutions or, you know, 200 frames per second instead of 120 and that just doesn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John me excited. I’m excited about, you know, The Last of Us 2, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be a PS4 game I think, Or even a next generation Nintendo console,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what could Breath of the Wild be like with twice as much power? I’m excited about that prospect, even though twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as much power as the Switch is probably still not as fast as our phones. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a great example. How can a game like Breath of the Wild exist on a Switch when the Switch is so underpowered
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to any… It probably has less power than the AirPods. That’s exaggerating. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch is incredibly underpowered, but they made this amazing game for it. So I always think of what could those
⏹️ ▶️ John same people do with much more freedom, much more power. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I’m excited. And why I think a lot of people are excited about consoles all out
⏹️ ▶️ John of proportion with the supposed specs or whatever. They put, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the way people always talk about it in an idealized manner. It’s like, you shouldn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of camera they use to make a movie. You should only be excited about the movie itself. Well, in the console world,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think more than any other technology platform, people are excited about the games.
⏹️ ▶️ John And with good reason, because history has shown many really great games have come
⏹️ ▶️ John hand in hand with new advances in consoles. That’s of course why you too should also be excited by consoles,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re not really that excited by games at all, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yay, games. Woo! Actually, I haven’t been playing a game very heavily these last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few days, but on the Switch. Wait, what? Which one? What have you been playing? Forager.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what that is. Same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Mike told us to play it. It’s kind of Stardew Valley-like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is probably why I like it so much. Yeah, it’s one of those building stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stuff games.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything bounces up and down while it breathes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s extreme. When you see the anime, if you’re watching someone else play the game, or if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching a video of it, it seems like the entire thing is manic, like how much it’s, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is moving. every action you do shakes the screen. It seems crazy. When you are playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it doesn’t seem crazy. But yeah, so far it’s pretty fun. It’s pretty delightful. It’s kind of like Stardew Valley,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but without any of the socialization aspects. With a lot more combat. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s more focused on combat and resource collection and building and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s simplified in some ways, but then expands greatly in other directions. What I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it over Stardew is that it a lot more becomes automatable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s less manual over and over again work and a lot more like automation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time as you level up. But it doesn’t give me feelings the way Stardew Valley did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Stardew Valley is an incredible work of art and it has like, you know, way better story, way better like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interpersonal stuff, way better music. God, I love the Stardew Valley music. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different, it’s a more different game than what it initially appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be, Forager is. But Forager is very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its own thing. And what it is is similar enough that if you like Stardew Valley, you’ll probably like Forager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is really fun, it’s really great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another example of hardware power, you think, well, this whole hardware power discussion is irrelevant to games
⏹️ ▶️ John like Stardew Valley and Forager, but that’s not actually true. So these games are sort of a retro
⏹️ ▶️ John feel, their top-down 2D game wave of sprites, you’re like, well, that could have been made
⏹️ ▶️ John in the SNES era, but as you noted, like- Trust me, I was there, it couldn’t. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at these games, they are actually using, not obviously all of the power of the hardware, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way these would be possible because, yes, they use sprites, right? But very often they have
⏹️ ▶️ John lighting effects and weapons effects that would absolutely be impossible on those consoles, and then they add things like screen
⏹️ ▶️ John shake and warp and other filter things that you just absolutely could not do. Those machines were like sprites and color palettes
⏹️ ▶️ John and very, very limited. So this is like taking the aesthetic, the sort of art direction and game design
⏹️ ▶️ John from that era, but applying all the modern technologies, all the cool GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John effects, all sorts of things that actually affect
⏹️ ▶️ John the gameplay and change how the game look. And so you’re looking at it, you’re thinking, this looks like a retro 2D game, but it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks better. I use this example a lot and it’s perhaps increasingly problematic,
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like Quentin Tarantino when he takes all of his influences from
⏹️ ▶️ John movies that he liked and remixes them into a modern invention
⏹️ ▶️ John that is so much higher budget and nicer and better done than those
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But you can clearly see the influence. That’s what these games are like. Forager is like, you love those 2D games?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now imagine somebody making that who has played all those 2D games, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John has access to modern hardware and game development practices. and you can make it way better and way cooler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many ways, it’s kind of like, forgive me for this incredible tangent, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a huge nerd about these things back then. This is kind of like the direction that Sega
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went with the Saturn. And unfortunately, that was a terrible time to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, the market at that time with the PS1, the N64, the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pushing into 3D. And Sega had a lot of problems back then, but they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming off the Genesis, which was an incredibly successful system, and the direction they went with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Saturn, instead of making a system that was good at 3D, they made a system that was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for doing really rich stuff with 2D stuff. And unfortunately, the market didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow. The market wanted 3D, and so the Saturn became a crappy 3D system, like in practice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was really designed to be an incredible 2D system and do a bunch of stuff like this. So at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, that’s not what the market wanted. But anyway, yeah, like this, like the, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style of game, I find very delightful because it really is, as you said, like it really is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking the style of game that I grew up with and that I really loved and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically having no constraints whatsoever, like for doing this style of graphics and this style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of gameplay, modern hardware is effectively infinite. Even the switch, which as John said, is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very powerful console by, by, you know, modern standards, but it’s, you know, It’s powerful enough for stuff like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a lot of fun and it’s really cool to see. Instead of trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo realism 3D stuff, which would probably not look very good on the Switch, instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do a really awesome job of something that is a totally different ball game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did either of you have a Dreamcast?
⏹️ ▶️ John Aw, come on. That controller was so ergonomically awful. Probably the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ergonomically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking ever released for a console, for a popular console.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So at the time most of these came out, I grew up with the Genesis, I couldn’t afford the Saturn when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came out. And a couple of times I actually rented a Saturn from Blockbuster, you could rent entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems. It was some crazy price, like $30 to do it, but I splurged a couple of weekends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and got myself a Saturn for the weekend. And in retrospect, I’m very glad I never got one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually what happened was, But later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after college, I bought one on eBay when it was ancient and cheap for something like $100 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Saturn and a bunch of games. And I realized, wow, this really isn’t a very good system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I lusted after it for so long and I couldn’t buy it. And then yeah, in retrospect, it was a good thing I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it because had I spent $400 on it because of what it originally cost,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have regretted that, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Babbage’s when I was in high school and early on in college, and this would have been in high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school for me, and I remember trying to hock Dreamcast like it was my job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was successful in getting a bunch of people to buy Dreamcast, and I might have been the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person that can say that because it did not sell well. And it was amazing, though. It was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve McLaughlin To be fairly, to clarify and to keep myself from getting too many horrible emails from Dreamcast lovers, the Dreamcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was actually a really great system, but just such a massive flop and had such a short life because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a combination of both incredibly poor market timing and also incredibly poor marketing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also at that point, Sega fans being so burned from the series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Sega CD, 32X, Saturn. The series of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those three systems just destroyed Sega’s fan base and the loyalty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at that point there was very strong competition especially from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on what you were looking for, if you were looking for quality and playability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fun, the N64 and then later the Gamecube just killed it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were looking for more mainstream stuff, that was like the heyday of the PS1 and 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Dreamcast just, if the Dreamcast would have come out from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different company at a different time, it would have been much more successful. But unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, it was, it was like, you know, too little, too late.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaker 1 Oh, that’s too bad. All right. Anything else about the PlayStation five? You’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get one? I mean, no, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Speaker 2 Destiny three on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m all excited. Speaker 1 I can wait another six years until it comes out on a platform. I actually care about
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaker 2 Destiny is never going to come out on a platform you care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Speaker 1 Oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. I, when you said destiny, you absolutely said destiny. I heard journey in my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The implication was a game I’ll care about on a platform.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of months back, actually, no, it was just last month. I’m sorry. It just feels like forever ago. There was an article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on MacRumors saying Apple’s rainbow logo may return to some new products as early as this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As someone who lived with the Macintosh from day one, gentlemen, I cannot be more… No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I am excited about this, but this has no significance to me like it does to you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, how do you feel about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Griever Well, it has aesthetic significance to all of us, and that if this comes to pass, we will be faced with these
⏹️ ▶️ John devices with the rainbow logo. But it made me think about when it went away. Was that before your time? Before
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco both of your time?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco really? Oh, well
⏹️ ▶️ John my my recollection my time was a g4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I yeah all aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John my recollection is that it went away when jobs returned
⏹️ ▶️ John roundabout and my recollection is
⏹️ ▶️ John that even though we don’t know how these decisions get made the prevailing theory was that it was
⏹️ ▶️ John Like like everything that happened at Apple back then that it was because jobs Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John either decided that he didn’t want the rainbow one or was okay with it going away. So it’s kind of in my mind I have
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a Jobs, Johnny Ive kind of joint
⏹️ ▶️ John agreement decision that we’re going to break with the past. I mean I think different campaigns still had
⏹️ ▶️ John the rainbow but I feel like when the IMAC came along and they did the glossy one I think that was around the time
⏹️ ▶️ John where I really should have looked this up ahead of time. But my recollection is that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was after Jobs had been back, around maybe 98, 99
⏹️ ▶️ John was when the rainbow logo disappeared after the Think Different campaign, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it kind of makes sense in the sort of what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was doing aesthetically at that time, because there was the teal glossy stuff. Remember when they used to
⏹️ ▶️ John do, this should have been in your time maybe, the ads and the slides at
⏹️ ▶️ John presentations would have like a shiny, glossy, silver or
⏹️ ▶️ John teal Apple logo. Do you remember seeing that? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re talking about like the G4, like Aqua kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John era? No, I mean like, yeah, but it would be on a slide. Like it would be like at a Macworld presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John There would be a slide up there that would show an Apple logo. And instead of it being just a solid color of an outline, it would be like a
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D rendered, like, you know, medallion made of like glossy translucent
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic. They treated the Apple logo a little bit like that. You see it on Mac OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John versions and like startup screens and intro movies and stuff like that. Before they went to totally
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s monochrome, it’s a single color, it’s flat, there is no sort of shading to it whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, that was sort of like, between, you know, the rainbow went away, but they hadn’t totally settled down
⏹️ ▶️ John into absolutely flat silhouette colors, whether it be gray or black. But all of that
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of fits with the break from the past, yes, but also an aesthetic transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you think about aesthetically what Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John looked like and evoked, you know, there was the Snow White design language, which was sort of the Mac 2, the SE,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that sort of era. But even before that, we had the yellowish beige boxes of the Apple 2
⏹️ ▶️ John and the original Mac. And the boxes themselves were,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, grayish, tan, brown, beige. The only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the computer hardware box that was colorful was the Apple logo. And it was sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of part of the design was it would be a very monochromatic look, very understated and elegant,
⏹️ ▶️ John and with a little sparkle of color would be the Apple logo,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would always feature, not super prominently, but it would be on the front of the machine somewhere, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they would spend a lot of money to A, make that logo because it’s apparently very expensive to manufacture, and B, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John they started fitting the case around the logo better. Like on the Apple II, it was like a little rounded rectangle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in that rectangle would be a rounded square, rather, and in that
⏹️ ▶️ John square would be the Apple logo. So it would be like a square, then another piece of plastic,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a raised Apple logo on that. But eventually, once they started making the fancier Macs, they fit the case right
⏹️ ▶️ John around the Apple logo, which was also tricky to do. And in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac jobs era, they weren’t hurting for color.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their computers started to be teal and grape colored and green, and if there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a rainbow Apple logo there, it just would have clashed with all of that. And then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John in the later Ive, Johnny Ive era, when everything had to go super simple
⏹️ ▶️ John and minimalist and he was in his white room and all the hardware lost all the ports and all external features and all buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having a rainbow logo sort of flew in the face of that. They didn’t even make
⏹️ ▶️ John their phones in colors for the longest time if you recall. It was always just, you know, there was the one iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ John there weren’t alternate models and there weren’t a lot of color choices but eventually there were color choices and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John not many of them. Gold was the most colorful it got and then we got a rose gold. But in the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John day where you can get phones in all sorts of colors and certainly cases in all sorts of colors,
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs are still pretty monochromatic and the iPads, meh, in between. But I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the door is open, aesthetically speaking, for the rainbow logo to come back
⏹️ ▶️ John and not be completely out of step with what Apple is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both because, like I said, they have, they’re more open to colors on the hardware these days and also on the models
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re not open to color it would fit right in in the same way it used to where if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John completely silver MacBook Pro that’s very monochromatic and doesn’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ John any different shades of variations of color having just one spark of color on the thing I think
⏹️ ▶️ John would look good as evidenced by a lot of the mock-ups that you see or if you see somebody who has like a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John and they take a rainbow Apple logo and they stick it over the the Apple logo that’s on the back of their lid
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it doesn’t look great that it’s a sticker, but if you look at it, I mean, maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have nostalgia for it, but I look at it and I say that that design works because it is just featureless gray
⏹️ ▶️ John with the rainbow. And on the flip side, if you have a rainbow candy colored phone and say the phone is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John product red phone or whatever, and that red matches the red in the Apple logo, putting a rainbow Apple logo on a candy
⏹️ ▶️ John color red phone, I think also works and looks nice. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not desperate for this vaguely unsourced rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John to be true, but I can imagine really cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John fun, exciting looking hardware coming from a return to the rainbow logo. Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like Apple ever sort of disowned it. They just stopped using it
⏹️ ▶️ John in their hardware and all communications, but it’s still their logo. No one else has
⏹️ ▶️ John taken it. So it’s right there waiting for them to pick it back up and reincorporate it into
⏹️ ▶️ John their designs and I’m not trying to pin it on the departure of Johnny Ive, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a feeling that, well, I can’t even say if he was still here they wouldn’t do it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think if he stayed on with the company, it was going to stay on for another 20 years, he would have eventually brought it back
⏹️ ▶️ John too, just because these things go in cycles. And so, you know, we went away from it, we went as far away as we possibly can, we stayed really
⏹️ ▶️ John far away from it a long time, and now I think it’s an appropriate time for it to return. rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John had more foundations and maybe think it was more than just wishful thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you both have, I think we mentioned in the sticker show, does at least one or both of you have the rainbow colored
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo sticker somewhere on your hardware? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I’ve never done that, but I’ve seen it and it does look really nice in person. Um, if it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know they wouldn’t do this, but if it was an option, I would definitely take it. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, just overall in this, I’m with you in that I don’t think we have good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information about this actually happening or not, but I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope it does. I really hope they do bring this back because, you know, not only do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want more color in Apple’s products and more humanity to return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their industrial design, because so much of it has been stripped out in the Johnny Ive era,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also just imagine the statement it makes in today’s political climate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have these immensely popular computers, to have all of them all of a sudden have a rainbow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logo. That would be amazing. I really hope they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t assume this is an incredibly likely thing to happen, but man,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it be cool if it did. And so I really hope they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the support for it, and they put in the article and everything, is like, Apple has been using these
⏹️ ▶️ John rainbow colors more often than they have in the past. Like, so that stage they built on their campus for Lady Gaga to sing
⏹️ ▶️ John in or whatever is the Apple logo colors. It’s not a rainbow Apple logo, but for many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only was the logo no longer rainbow stripe, but you would never see those colors anywhere and anything having to do with Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John now they’re building gigantic structures made literally out of that rainbow. I have some more pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John in the article like so it shows that Apple is not averse to
⏹️ ▶️ John evoking the old Apple logo in things that it does itself in an official capacity. So I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like that opens the door. And yeah, the rainbow’s always been, like the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John shtick with the rainbow logo was that it was the colors of the rainbow, which at the time Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was founded, or the time Apple came up with this logo, which was after they were founded,
⏹️ ▶️ John have the LGBT, whatever, connotations
⏹️ ▶️ John it has today, at least not in a widespread fashion that people would know it, but the whole idea was that it was the colors of
⏹️ ▶️ John the rainbow, and rainbows are good and everybody loves them, And there was a diversity angle, but also that the colors
⏹️ ▶️ John of the rainbow were all mixed up, because it’s not the same order that the colors are in the rainbow. So there was a bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of 60s-era anarchy in the mixed-up rainbow. That was sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John original pitch for Apple’s rainbow logo. It’s like, we are hippie children from the
⏹️ ▶️ John 60s, and that’s why we are into rainbows. But also, they’re all mixed up, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re wild, man. We don’t wear shoes to work. That was, you know, 70s
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon Valley. And today, yes, there’s a much more, a much clearer connotations, uh, political connotations,
⏹️ ▶️ John which Apple absolutely embraces. Uh, and I think most of the customers that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re either ignorant of or also embrace. So it’s, you know, it makes a statement, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s a fairly safe statement as far as corporate America goes,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why they built, you know, a giant rainbow college stage on their campus and invited Lady Gaga
⏹️ ▶️ John to play there. So I feel like that’s right in the middle for the company. Uh, If they’re not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and they never do bring back the rainbow Apple logo, it won’t be for political
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, it’ll just be purely aesthetic. But honestly, I don’t know what direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s next for Apple’s aesthetic direction, because we still kind of have the carryover
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Ive era, and even like new stuff like the Mac Pro fits perfectly in with the Johnny Ive design era.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s nothing about that that screams a massive change in direction. And I don’t think we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John really any hardware that we would be, that doesn’t fit with the Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ivera. Obviously the Ivera has evolved significantly since the iMac to where it is today, but every piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware that has been announced by Apple today we look at and say, yeah, that totally makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be excited to see a product from Apple that would surprise us
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetically in the same way that the iMac did. Something with a rainbow Apple logo could do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s probably hard to recapture
⏹️ ▶️ John that sort of lightning in a bottle because everyone’s tried anything now. Apple’s sort of opened the floodgates now. Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John is willing to try any kind of design. So anything that Apple does, I’m sure, will have some precedence, again, aesthetically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, not design-wise. But yeah, I would be excited to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have Apple logo stickers on your stuff, but I guess they’re not rainbow. And I don’t know why I thought you would even have access to rainbow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, I mean, you can get like, you know, people on Etsy making like exactly die cut ones that can fit the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the lid logo. It was better when they were light up logos. Um, but no, I, I think one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one other reason this, this has some potential to be good or, or realistic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, is that timing wise, you know, fashion changes obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is of course everyone’s top fashion podcast. So obviously we are the experts in this area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 70s stuff is really in right now. 70s style design, but like a modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take on 70s style design is very in. And this logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think would very much fit that or could be made to fit that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that obviously is one big area where I think there is some credence to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also if you think about the time that this logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came from. You know, you mentioned, you know, the whole like 60s hippie era thing and 70s coming up. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the world politically today, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only are we fighting literally some of the exact same fights that we are still, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, fighting, but I feel like we’re in kind of a dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place and they were in kind of a dark place back then too. There was a lot of really messed up stuff going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. And that kind of ebbs and flows. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now we’re in a low part of that. And I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, the use of color and the kind of resistance against the corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world or the government world back then, this was kind of like a resistance movement against that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to break free and bring some light to a dark world. I think we need that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now in today’s world. We really need a lot of that, actually. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this is one small way in which this massive corporation—it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard for a massive corporation to have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of statement or attitude. It’s very, very hard because it’s so big and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commercial. It’s one thing when Apple was like the small upstart of rebels. It’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different thing when they’re like the biggest corporation in the world. But to whatever degree they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe do this, the timing would be right. And I think the world could use some things
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’ve had campaigns like this in the past with Think Different that I already mentioned, but even
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like the iPod campaigns where like the message was like, hey, isn’t music great? Those
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sort of right up the middle, you know, heartfelt,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody love each other kinds of messages can be corny when
⏹️ ▶️ John done poorly, but when done well, I think are kind of universal and sort of feel good
⏹️ ▶️ John and like definitely the rainbow Apple logo could be incorporated into a campaign like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is Apple still capable of campaigns like that? I obviously think different. It’s not a campaign that today’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can probably get away with. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reason you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, like they’re, they’re not the, they’re not the underdog. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John melancholy about their potential financial fortunes there was then. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad campaign is great. It’s like, we’re not saying we’re an underdog. We’re just saying we love music
⏹️ ▶️ John and you love music, so let’s love music together. That can still work. I don’t know. If you do it for TV, we love TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John you love TV. I’m not sure how it would work, but I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that working. We love subscriptions. You love subscriptions. Let’s love subscriptions together. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, the thing that is, is I agree wholeheartedly with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you guys were saying that it would be a very bold statement, a statement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would, I would encourage, and I would be overjoyed to see if Apple added
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rainbow, which has connotations to the LB LGBTQ,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, community, like I would be all in on that. A hundred thousand percent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, taking off the what Casey wants hat and putting on the Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the business dweeb hat, I don’t see them ever doing it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s too much of the world that finds, that takes issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that community. Unfairly, I’m not saying I agree with it. It’s awful to take issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with someone just living the life that they want to live. I could not speak ill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it strongly enough, but you look at the iPhones, which the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sales have just sagged in the most recent quarter, have they not? And, and then you’re going to make this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey political statement on a product line that is both deeply important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also sagging a little bit. I just don’t see it happening. I, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am all in on it happening. Casey, the person all in a hundred thousand percent in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Apple as a corporation, I don’t see it happening. I mean, can you imagine the backlash that they would get?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is, again, totally bogus, totally ridiculous, but I just don’t see it happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’ll get it. I think there’s enough cognitive dissonance that people will be like, oh, it’s the old Apple logo they’re bringing back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if you point out to them, say, isn’t it kind of neat that it’s kind of like the pride rainbow colors? They’d be like, oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just the old Apple logo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think most iPhone owners know that it would be the old Apple logo, but I also agree with Casey that, yeah, stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to rage against this and horrible. And you know this is I am way outside of my comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zone I’m trying to talk about these things without offending people because there would also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be angles such as you know co-optation that you might want to think about. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately I don’t think they would do this on the iPhone I think they would do it on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the the stakes would be very different there. The risk would be a lot lower if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are gonna have a problem with it. Although, I don’t say screw those people, but if people are gonna have a problem with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like they could take that risk on the Mac and maybe the iPad, right? But on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve just been so incredibly conservative with even offering any color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all on the phone that I would be shocked if they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the phone. But yeah, I think it’s most likely to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure where it’s likely to happen. I think it has more to do with the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who are designing those products and less to do politically. But honestly, I think that politically Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would absolutely put this logo where the hell they wanted to put it for whatever reasons they wanted to. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there is possibility of some backlash, but this is a company led by a gay man who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the CEO. They’re just going to do it because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t even think they’re cynically going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the math to see if they can get away with it because the guy at the top is not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to shy away from this like he’s like as much as I go he’s gonna he’s like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John not to say that they’re gonna put it in all their stuff or even this rumor is true but absolutely feel like they
⏹️ ▶️ John would do this and just take whatever lumps they were gonna get which if they got any lumps it would be awful but we live in an awful world
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it’s hard to say like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know I don’t it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to take that risk with the iPhone though Casey’s right
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can’t I can’t make myself that cynical So I can’t see them coming with the idea and then nixing
⏹️ ▶️ John it internally for this reason. Like I just can’t, I just can’t imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. The iPhone, I mean, one thing actually, I’m kind of coming around to the idea now because I’m thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest problems Apple has with the iPhone design cycle is when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get into the second or third year of a design, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to visually distinguish it somehow such that people want to upgrade to it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be seen with the new phone, especially in certain markets where that matters more, like where it matters more to be seen with the newest thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe this is a way to do that going into what is going to almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the third year of the same industrial design in the iPhone 10 line. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that would be a good reason to do it this year, especially because like it would be a clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obvious way to see like, Oh, I have the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, I’m not predicting they’re going to do it for the phone or for any of their products. I just, like, just honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t bring myself to believe that if they chose not to do it, that would be the reason. I think the reason they would choose not to do it is because the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone design language is still more or less what it has been and they’re sort of evolving in that direction. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t fit with what they’re planning to do. Right. And I can imagine it being on the Mac first just because maybe the design direction of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is changing while the iPhone is going off in a different direction. But man, like I just can’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you imagine? I mean, we see lots of interviews with Apple executives, as much as they give. I think if they give
⏹️ ▶️ John them, we tend to see them. Can you imagine them like, ever, like they retire from the company
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone asks them about, like they bring back the Rambo logo, but they don’t bring it back to the iPhone. And in the interview they say, yeah, we
⏹️ ▶️ John thought about bringing it back to the iPhone, but we were afraid of backlash, so we didn’t. Like, I can’t imagine them ever
⏹️ ▶️ John giving that interview and saying that. Mostly because I can’t imagine it being true.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t. Like, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Like I’m sure there are people within
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple who would take that sort of cautious attitude for say, you know, cowed middle managers who have been,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, uh, incentivized to do the safe thing at all times. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook for all of his sort of, uh, you know, sort of steady, what’s it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, charitably called steady leadership. Uh, and just sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the Tim Cook thing and keeping products on the shelves for a long time because people are still buying them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope that we do actually get interviews with all these great people once they leave
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple because I would like to hear, you know, tales from the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco By the time we
⏹️ ▶️ John hear them, the only people who will be interested will be like old timers like us, but I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John still like to hear them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love, you know, setting aside the iPhone question because I don’t know what the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just thinking about this logo coming to the Mac, can you imagine the symbolism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like this this new rainbow logo like showing us the light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rescuing us from the era of the butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh my god. Finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Pro to greatness.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they don’t light up anymore. Maybe it would. I don’t know. I don’t think they would ever do a backlit rainbow logo because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really hard to make that look good. I think it would have to just be solid.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s probably true
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#askatp: RSI
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s move on to some Ask ATP and we start with friend of the show, Mark Bramhill, who did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, and I guess is technically still doing, the unbelievably great show, Welcome to Macintosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Bramhill writes, what techniques or tools have you found most helpful in combating or or preventing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RSI pain, RSI being repetitive stress injury or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ergonomic, strain, thank you. Stretches, ergonomic keyboards, mice, apps to remind you to stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or take a break, going to physical therapy. Just where do I start? So can we help Mark out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark’s a really good guy. What can we do here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll go first because John’s gonna have the right answer. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some relatively minor RSI issues early on early on when I first started doing like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know full 40 hours a week work on computers and you know like in my 20s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve mostly fixed them. I don’t I don’t feel any RSI problems really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever anymore and what I have found to help most was a combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some like basic ergonomic desk changes so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like making sure you have a desk that is the correct height and a chair that brings you to the correct height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such that you don’t have to reach your arms up to reach it. You know they always say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your your elbow should be pretty much at a right angle or at a more oblique angle than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even. Not a more acute angle so not less than 90 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you shouldn’t be like reaching up and then having your wrists then tilt down or whatever to get to your keyboard or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tilt up. It’s really yeah you don’t want any of that. So I fixed all that you I’ve read all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know 15 years ago and fixed all that and then I also switched to split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ergonomic style keyboards and I’ve used a bunch of them by far my favorites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been the Microsoft ones first the old natural 4000 and more recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the natural sculpt ergonomic not the surface ergonomic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it is gray wrong that one not only does that really have a lot of problems working with Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s actually ergonomically worse in significant ways than the old black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sculpt version. The sculpt ergonomic keyboard is fantastic. I will put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But more generally than that, I have found there’s all sorts of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe temporarily solve the problem for some people sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would put into this category almost any kind of physical product that is made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically for RSI. I would include a huge one here, any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist brace. I’ve used them before, I’ve known lots of people who have used them. As far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I can tell, they do nothing. If you are to that point, the best thing you can do is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to take a break, first of all, from the activity that’s causing the problem, and then fix your ergonomics in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other ways so you don’t create more flares in the future. And John will have a lot more to say about that, I’m sure. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have I have found most of those things to be ineffective. What has ultimately fixed it for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides fixing my ergonomics to not have a problem in the first place, is strengthening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my wrist muscles in various exercises.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one product that did seem to help was the DynaFlex, which is like this gyroscope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ball thing that you spin in a certain way that exercises your wrist. Any kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just basically getting your arms in shape, I have found ever since I started doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like regular workouts and strength building and stuff like that, all the RSI problems I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had in my wrists disappeared. I have not had a single problem since that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can look back at the times that I had RSI issues and those were times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was the least in shape in my life. And so I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be surprised if there was not a strong correlation for people in that way. So I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly suggest first fixing your ergonomics of your setup and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then really consider basically getting in shape in a useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that will affect your arms and wrists in particular.
⏹️ ▶️ John John? So I did an entire episode of a podcast about this. I was on the Pragmatic podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago. We’ll put a link in the show notes, episode number 50 called Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John You can listen to that and it is almost two hours of me talking about this. I can’t get into
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of detail here because I probably have even more than two hours to talk about. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the most important points that I think I would bring up from that thing are
⏹️ ▶️ John it depends on what state you are. This is combating slash preventing
⏹️ ▶️ John preventing, you know, learn about the ergonomics and get your your thing set up right. But combating is like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re already suffering from it. I feel like the two most important hurdles
⏹️ ▶️ John to overcome it, because there are many hurdles. The first is
⏹️ ▶️ John finding a doctor who actually can help in literally any way with RSI is
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly difficult. This is one of the major hurdles that you will face, at least in the United States.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you go to your doctor and discuss it, you’re just gonna get some sort of, oh, here you go, take ibuprofen,
⏹️ ▶️ John rest more, use ice, put on braces at night, or splints
⏹️ ▶️ John at night. Like there’s all sorts of just sort of immobilize, you know, anti-inflammatory,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Like that, now I’m not saying that won’t help, but that is a
⏹️ ▶️ John very shallow understanding of what the potential issues could be. You really need to find a doctor
⏹️ ▶️ John who understands exactly what the deal is. Because repetitive strain injury is an umbrella term that encompasses
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge host of problems that you could be having. Like basically the cause is you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something repetitively, typing, using the mouse or whatever for a long time. But what that
⏹️ ▶️ John can cause is all sorts of dysfunctions and injuries over your entire body.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re connected in very strange ways. For example, you may feel the pain in your wrist, but the problem may be in your neck or shoulder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s all connected, right? You need to find a doctor who understands this.
⏹️ ▶️ John What kind of doctor is that going to be? I don’t know. It’s probably not going to be a general practitioner. be a physical therapist,
⏹️ ▶️ John might be an occupational therapist. I don’t know what kind of doctor will be. Like find an actual person with a medical degree though
⏹️ ▶️ John who treats people with these problems successfully.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re killing me, John. You’re killing me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Why am I killing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? This is the kind of thing, look, I trust modern medicine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a lot of things. It is almost always the right move for lots of different things. But when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back problems and this kind of RSI thing, it’s the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the way most doctors are trained to operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way that the system kind of makes them work, it really results in oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty poor outcomes and doesn’t… It’s like addressing the symptoms instead of like… Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying. It’s going to be difficult to find a doctor who who actually understands it. But here’s the thing, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are combating it, if you are already injured, finding your way out of it on your own is going to be very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult. If you can find a medical professional, medical professional, I am stressing this again,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can help you come out of it with actual things that treat your body.
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on what your injury is, how many injuries you have, what they may be. It may just be
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stretching exercises and weight training. It could be physical therapy. It could be like there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of things. Like if they’re just put it this way, if they’re just giving you medicine, it’s probably not going to help.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can probably having experience do that’s, there’s going to be something that you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do with your body and very often there are things that other people can do to your body to help you
⏹️ ▶️ John out of this. But the thing is you need to find someone who understands exactly what you’re going through. If you find someone who says, oh, you should just type less,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not gonna help you and it’s very difficult. So I say this because I’ve seen people who are very injured try
⏹️ ▶️ John to like muddle through and like, I’ll get an ergonomic mouse. It’s like, it’s not gonna save you. If you have like nerve
⏹️ ▶️ John damage and you’ve already injured yourself, you need someone who understands, who can figure out exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what is wrong with you and understand how you can safely work your way back
⏹️ ▶️ John from it. This is probably the first hurdle you’re gonna find, especially if you’re already injured, because
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, in the US, it’s very difficult to find this. So, look for
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I’m not even sure you’ll be successful. I went to many different doctors. I found like two people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have ever helped me in any way and a lot of people who didn’t help me at all, right? But you should
⏹️ ▶️ John try it. Just have it as a background task. Continuing to try to find a medical professional
⏹️ ▶️ John who actually understands this. It’s difficult, right? Second thing, sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John mumbo jumbo, but it isn’t. And that is, like, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for younger people and especially for people on your computers, very often you will
⏹️ ▶️ John do things like using the computer for hours and hours at a time, getting really
⏹️ ▶️ John into the zone in your programming or playing video games or whatever it is, I’m not gonna say not without
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about it, but you don’t have the right relationship between your brain
⏹️ ▶️ John and what your body is doing. That if you were to step out of your body
⏹️ ▶️ John and observe and like take notes and measurements, you’d be like, this subject
⏹️ ▶️ John is sitting in the same position for four hours with stress hormones coursing
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the same action. And the entire time
⏹️ ▶️ John it hurts a little bit. Why aren’t they stopping? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing you want, you need to become, this sounds so bad, but it’s 100% true, more aware
⏹️ ▶️ John of your body. Like when you’re in there, when you’re doing the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John your wrists are, or whatever part of you is hurting, is actually hurting and sending signals to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people, again, especially young people, are amazingly good at literally ignoring that feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, if you’re able to ignore it, like if it’s below the sort of background threshold of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, I feel something, but whatever, you need to turn that around and get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John point where you become aware of what your body is telling you. It’s not telling you complicated things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s telling you, this kind of hurts, kind of doesn’t feel great, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John sore. I don’t want to keep doing this. And you’re just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John even, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it just gets, it completely disappears. And the reason you have to become more aware of your body is
⏹️ ▶️ John as you’re working your way out of these problems, all these things about, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John take more breaks, have an app to remind you or whatever. Those are all good things, but they are all substitutes
⏹️ ▶️ John for you being aware of what your body is telling you. And you respecting what it’s telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John and not saying, trust me, buddy, I’ve got this, you’re fine. It doesn’t even hurt. Like just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can feel my wrists feel different than, you know, I feel them more, but everyone’s wrists feel like that, right? Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably just what everyone’s wrists feel like when they’re typing. It doesn’t actually hurt, I can keep going. That’s how people injure themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you go until one day you wake up and you literally can’t type anymore. And you’re like, how did I
⏹️ ▶️ John get to this point? And the months leading up to it, your body was yelling, it’s kind of hurting over here,
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like you’re doing bad things to me, I don’t feel good. And it’s like a boiling the frog thing, because it comes on slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ John And you just like don’t even consciously, but unconsciously convince yourself that this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever this it’s fine. Like, yeah, I didn’t have an intense coding session for seven hours last night,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever. That’s just what it’s like to be a programmer. Like, this is terrifically normal. Everybody feels this until
⏹️ ▶️ John all of a sudden you’re like, Oh my god, this isn’t normal. I can’t do anything with my hands anymore. What happened? What happened
⏹️ ▶️ John is you just ignored everything that your body was telling you. So you need to change the relationship with your body and
⏹️ ▶️ John be aware of your body in a way that you are not like I Don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how else to say it. It’s it sounds like new wave mumbo-jumbo, but it really like yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John your ability to completely ignore signals from your own body is amazing and that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John people get massively injured because it creeps up on you slowly and You’re doing it to yourself over a long
⏹️ ▶️ John period of time everything else. I feel like beyond those two things you will find
⏹️ ▶️ John your way to like, get your ergonomics sorted, like you figure out which devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how would you tell, how would you tell if you get like, should I get an ergonomic keyboard, should I get an ergonomic, how can you tell when you get one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those things whether it’s helping you? Well, if you’re aware of what your body is telling you and if you get one of those things, you’ll be able to tell immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ John does this help or does it hurt or is it neutral? Does it change anything about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how I feel or how long I can go before I start feeling something? If you
⏹️ ▶️ John never stop until you are in crippling pain, all devices are the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it’d be like, I can use a regular mouse and then eventually I feel crippling pain. I use an ergonomic
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse and eventually I feel crippling pain. And you know, is the amount of time different? Like there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John magic solution that will make it so that you don’t repeatedly injure yourself if you keep doing the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John All there is, is just, you know, a series of different ways for you to injure yourself. The only surefire way to
⏹️ ▶️ John not have repetitive strain injuries to not repeatedly do an action with your body, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it is. Cause even if you do all the working out and have perfect ergonomics or whatever, you can give yourself repetitive strain
⏹️ ▶️ John injury if you really try hard enough, no matter what. Just do the same very difficult action at
⏹️ ▶️ John a very awkward angle over and over and over again. No amount of ergonomics and exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John and stretching will prevent that. Like you can always injure yourself. It’s just a question of being
⏹️ ▶️ John aware of when you’re approaching that and finding ways to A, get yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John back to a healthy state, B, maintain that healthy state, with you know, getting stronger and using better, using the bigger muscles
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of the smaller muscles. Like there’s tons of stuff you can do, but it all comes back to, so how do I know when I’m screwing myself
⏹️ ▶️ John again? You have to know that. It’s like, it’s the feedback loop. The feedback loop is, it’s like trying to write a program
⏹️ ▶️ John and never being able to see the execution or any of the errors, right? You need to be aware of what your body is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually doing before you can fix it. So anyway, I said that in probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a more concise way, but hopefully a more clear way in this podcast. And I talked about all different devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and ergonomics and all things you can do. So let’s do that. And I have one book to recommend. It is a super
⏹️ ▶️ John old book, cause I’m an old person. A lot of it is silly and out of date. The thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I like about this book is the attitude that it tries to impart on the reader. It sounds kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of corny. Like there’s stuff in it that like describes like, listen, this is what you’re doing when you’re at the computer all
⏹️ ▶️ John day, even though it seems like you’re not doing anything particularly strenuous, you are actually doing
⏹️ ▶️ John many small physical actions a huge number of times. And that actually is a thing that you need to,
⏹️ ▶️ John to Marco’s point, strengthen your body for and train for. And no, just doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not training for it. Like the same reason that athletes don’t say, I just need to play the sport forever and ever. I don’t need to do any training
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere else. No, they go do things that are not the sport. They lift weights, they run, even if their sport
⏹️ ▶️ John is not weightlifting or running. You need to do that to be able to use the computer eight hours a day. As
⏹️ ▶️ John they say in the book, and you will roll your eyes until they go back in your head, but hopefully by the end you will
⏹️ ▶️ John be convinced, you are a computer athlete. It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sounds so dumb. It sounds so dumb. No, but it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to get your head in that space. And computer athletes do not become better just by using computers. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to actually do exercise with your body to train to be a computer athlete, and you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do it in a way that is safe for your body. So anyway, the book’s called A Repetitive Strain Injury,
⏹️ ▶️ John A Computer User’s Guide by Emil Pasquarelli and Deborah Quilter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also add, before we leave the mumbo jumbo area, not only should you listen to your body and everything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also this is one of the many things that like nobody wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to be the solution. Nobody wants, everybody wants the solution to be you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to go and buy some cool gear and that will solve your problem. Or, or they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know that you get to, you can go to your doctor and they’ll give you a magic pill and it’ll fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem. Right? That’s, those are the two things that everybody wants to be the solution, but the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution is the, are things that you don’t want to be the answer, but they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As John said, do less of the thing. That is one of the major
⏹️ ▶️ John solutions to it. That’s like the eat less version of dieting, but it’s like, if you eat
⏹️ ▶️ John less and exercise more, you’ll probably lose weight. And if you type less, your wrist will
⏹️ ▶️ John feel slightly better. That’s not all you have to do. There’s other stuff you should do, but that’s one pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good starting point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I will, and unfortunately, one of the answers to this, I mentioned earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know, honest exercise is one of the biggest answers to this. Any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of exercise that can strengthen like the upper part of your body, especially in the lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arms and shoulder areas, those will probably benefit people for RSI reasons. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, hate to tell you, diet can also help. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t, I’m not gonna get too far into this because it’s hard to find good science on it, but diet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affects inflammation not as much as other factors might maybe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a connection there. There are dietary choices you can make that it can be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or less inflammatory and RSI is mostly an inflammatory problem. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make dietary changes that can reduce inflammation and help your body
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better deal with it, that will almost certainly help RSI. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again I hate to tell you the answer is diet, exercise, and gradual long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco habit change. But that really is the answer. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my natural keyboard, I think, bought me a few more years until it was a bigger problem. And unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never got to that point because I was also making those changes in the meantime. But all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the different gear can do is buy you a bit more time before you have to really address the root problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re giving people we’re giving people bad news. One of the other pieces of bad news is that if you have one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John various strains of repetitive strain injury that causes permanent injury, you could be out of
⏹️ ▶️ John luck. Like, for example, if you have nerve damage, it’s very it’s much more difficult to come back from that. You can really
⏹️ ▶️ John screw yourself over if you go too far before you’re like, oh, I should I should do something about this. It may be
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can never get back to the level of activity that you were able to do, just like an athlete
⏹️ ▶️ John who like breaks their femur. they’re probably not going to be a world-class sprinter again, like, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the sporting equivalent might be. A really bad ACL injury for someone, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on how badly you were injured and depending on the exact nature of your injury, it may be that you can’t get all the way
⏹️ ▶️ John back. So that’s part of being injured is to understand, how can I come back from this? How can I
⏹️ ▶️ John prevent it from happening? And can I come all the way back? And of course, as you get older, this just gets worse. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey everything else. Yeah, age will come and get you.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s that’s that’s why it’s important to that’s why I say it’s important to seek out a medical professional
⏹️ ▶️ John because Are you gonna tell you’re gonna diagnose in yourself whether you have nerve injury? They can do nerve conduction
⏹️ ▶️ John tests on you, which are not fun, by the way, but they can do them to find out Hey, do you have nerve damage which nerves are damaged?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much are they damaged? Do not self-diagnose that do not Google it Find an actual medical
⏹️ ▶️ John professional who can help you figure out exactly how badly you are injured and what screwed up with you and and even for the strength
⏹️ ▶️ John training stuff like Like they can tell you which muscle groups to work on. And also a lot of it has to do with like flexibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make your injury worse if you strengthen up muscles that are already in a section of your
⏹️ ▶️ John body that is too constricted. And like, if you’re hunched over, like all of us hunched over computer people and you strengthen
⏹️ ▶️ John all the muscles on the front of your chest, but none of them on your back, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have like thoracic outlist syndrome, you’re gonna be crushing everything in there even worse as you make these big
⏹️ ▶️ John strong muscles on the front of your body and these wimpy muscles on the back. Like, so you have to know which parts to work out how
⏹️ ▶️ John and a medical professional can help you with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and one very common thing that at least is a big part of American
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medical culture, many Americans basically treat their doctors as prescription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drug vending machines. Like you basically decide before you even go, like, I want to get this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prescription drug and you go to the doctor and they can tell immediately what you’re there for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you really want, and most of them will just say, fine, here’s the, you know, they’ll go through their diligence and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll just give you the prescription that you want. If you’re going to do that, to solve problems like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get yourself a prescription for physical therapy. Physical therapy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, when dealing with issues like this, or by the way this all applies to back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems as well, physical therapy is generally a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more useful remedy than most medication can be for this kind of problem and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical therapist, at least when you find good properly trained ones, physical therapists are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good at what John just said at being able to tell you like, you know, do this specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exercise and then they will do it with you. They will show you they will watch you do it to make sure you do it right. This specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stretch stuff like that, like they physical therapy is one of the most effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options in the medical complex that we have today for this kind of problem or back problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John One more mumbo-jumbo bit which is in line with Marco’s inflammation related food stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned stress hormones before and that is absolutely a real thing. If you’re under stress,
⏹️ ▶️ John even like momentary stress, like stress of debugging a particular problem and you’re stressed about that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s the end of the day and you have to get something done before you leave, you can injure yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John more in like the last stress-filled 15 minutes of the day than the whole rest of the day combined. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John being under stress makes you type harder, makes you tense up more,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can make you injure yourself more. It sounds like mumbo jumbo, but your
⏹️ ▶️ John body is one big, giant, connected thing. You may not realize you’re typing harder. You may not realize your
⏹️ ▶️ John muscles are tensing up. But in a repetitive strain injury situation, when you’re on like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the edge of messing yourself up, and all of a sudden everything
⏹️ ▶️ John gets more tense and tighter, and start typing harder and it’s the last 15 minutes and you
⏹️ ▶️ John should have stopped 20 minutes ago, you can really screw yourself up in that last 15 minutes. That’s part
⏹️ ▶️ John of being aware of your body, part of being aware of when am I tensing up? When am
⏹️ ▶️ John I typing harder than I should? You’ll know you’ve reached a level of awareness of your body when
⏹️ ▶️ John you realize exactly how much pressure you’re applying when you’re typing. And am I typing this
⏹️ ▶️ John email slightly harder than I should because I’m angry about it or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John does make a material difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of quick thoughts. Hi, I’m Casey. I’m still here. So I haven’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been lucky enough not to really suffer from RSI in any meaningful way that I’m aware of as
⏹️ ▶️ John totally do. I didn’t even realize this. I was going to say that like literally every person I know suffers from RSI.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Casey, now I know someone who ostensibly doesn’t, which probably just means that you’re not aware of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, this is probably like because I’m at like rebooting itself all the time. Like, I don’t suffer from RSI. I just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move my wrists every Friday after I finish work for six hours, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why. I literally just said that I’m aware of. I literally just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said it. I try to squeeze my bottle of Hunt’s ketchup and I just can’t get the pressure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I just can’t get it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, I hate you
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, I was exaggerating saying that it’s like everybody, but it’s a lot of people that we know, right? Like us collectively.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, a lot of people. When I think of all the computer nerd people I know, it’s hard to think of one who hasn’t had some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John RSI issue at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in that vein, I wanted to call attention to the show Fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fact, which we’ve name-dropped a couple of times recently with our friends Arik
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Alan. And Alan has been going through some RSI issues, and he’s been talking about some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways he’s been trying to treat it. And it’s a pretty funny journey, because he’s apparently tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything under the sun. I don’t know that you’d necessarily get any factual tips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of that. And I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. It’s just that he’s kind of thrown a million things at the wall and hoped that something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is stuck. but it’s interesting to listen to that. Also in the vein of listen to your body,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike, my co-host on Analog and one of the founders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Relay FM, he had a catastrophic back injury that was entirely Marco and Tiff’s fault, or at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least that’s the story he told me. Unrelated to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unrelated to typing. No, he did not blame Marco and Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. But anyway, he did have a catastrophic back injury in the presence of Marco and Tiff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently his doctor, who is a British doctor, which means they’re probably really good at what they do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they actually have good medicine over there, his British doctor told him, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to butcher the retelling here, but apparently the doctor told him, avoid pain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which at first you’re like, oh, okay, great plan. Thanks for that. How long did you go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to medical school? I’m glad that’s what you learned. But what it boils down to is if your body says, wow, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurts, then maybe don’t do which is exactly what John and Marco both were saying, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John was saying earlier. Listen to your body and don’t do things that hurt. Who’d have thunk it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually helpful.
#askatp: USB-C in cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, very quickly, let’s do our last Ask ATP for the main show. Nicholas Gaffney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, what year will USB-C ports be mainstreamed in cars? Well, they’re already in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeep Wranglers, so boom, 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All kidding aside, I would guess a couple of years after the iPhone goes USB-C, and if it never goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C, then I don’t know, four or five years from now. Marco, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it kind of doesn’t matter whether the iPhone goes USB-C or not because A, lots Lots of Android phones have already gone USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s a pretty big part of the market, especially people who would buy Jeep Wranglers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to take a bet on what the most popular phone platform is for people who buy Jeep Wranglers? I bet it’s Android.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me tell you, Marco, since you brought it up, I know two Jeep Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owners, and both of them use Android. Anyway, carry on. It’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of data. Anyway, so yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what mainstreamed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context means. Like, is it all new cars? Is it all cars on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey road? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the majority of cars, over 50% of cars that are shipped in whatever year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a USB-C port within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I’m going to say within the next four years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this cars are not independent. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John will go USB-C along with the rest of the USB-A world. So
⏹️ ▶️ John all the power adapters, all the plugs on airplanes, like I feel like they’ll all go together or
⏹️ ▶️ John not at all. So not at all would be like there’s some new standard after that that they go to and they just skip USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John but assuming they’re ever gonna go USB-C I feel like it will happen in pace with the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the USB-A world. That’s what it feels like to me
⏹️ ▶️ John although it’s hard for me to get other than the Jeep Wrangler I can’t think of an instance where I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John a USB-C like this end of the USB-C like I see that
⏹️ ▶️ John on cameras and obviously computers and phones or whatever. But the other side, like the charging side, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t think of a time I’ve actually seen that. So it’s hard for me to gauge how long it’s going to take it to come. But I feel like the cars
⏹️ ▶️ John will not be ahead of the rest of the world, nor will they lag behind it. It’ll just come at the same time. So four
⏹️ ▶️ John years sounds a little soon to me. I would say five or later, but
⏹️ ▶️ John again, hard to judge because I just honestly don’t see USB-C anywhere in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if the regular car gets in four years, the Tesla will get it in eight to 10. Oh, no, Tesla won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be around then anyway, so no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tesla could be ahead because they’d be like an early adopter. I’m just kidding. Oh my God, please do not tweet at me or email me. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just kidding. Marco, save me quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and ExpressVPN. and we will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at atp.fm and if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into twitter you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s that’s k-c-l-i-s-m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-marco-armin s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-racusa it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental they didn’t mean to accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental You’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to me, accidental Accidental Tech Podcasts!
#askmarco: Watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so we got one more Ask ATP question that I wanted to make the after show because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has nothing to do with anything that we ever talk about for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So James Lastnamewithheld writes, speaking of non-Apple tech, it’s been about three and a half years since Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blog post about mechanical watches. Marco said then that Nomos is that pronounced correctly? Yep. Nomos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what got him into mechanical watches. But I wondered how his collection has developed since then. What does Marco look for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a watch these days and what are his favorites or wishlist items. What would it take for you, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to regularly wear an Apple Watch? That actually is the most interesting question to me, but feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free to take these in whatever order you would like. So what do you got and what are you looking for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. So I’m not going to go into too much because this is, it’s a very hard thing to talk about and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I mostly don’t share my watch world online. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s awkward. If I like, you know, if I buy something expensive, I don’t want to really talk about that right? So like it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it’s an awkward thing to talk about in public. So I’m going to more speak generally here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give some recommendations in different price brackets of what I think are like things that people may want to check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out because they represent best bang for the buck or you know really nice design in that category or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. So what I tend to look for these days in a watch, first of all I tend to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple. I like time only or time and date. I don’t like most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know big chronographs or GMT’s which like as an extra hand so you could track 24-hour time or a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time zone or whatever else. Normally I go with simpler time only watches for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of reasons. They tend to have cleaner designs, they are mechanically simpler, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to have smaller sizes and much thinner cases and that’s one thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look for. One of the things that’s mattered a lot to me recently is I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watch that’s relatively slender, relatively, you know, not too big. I tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go 38 to 40 millimeter is my sweet spot. Not thicker than about 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeters. Not a bulky wide case design. I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely prioritizing recently comfort of the strap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s a bracelet that does not have any kind of micro adjustment, I don’t like that at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I can never get the size exactly right. Like I’m always like between link sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I prefer leather and rubber straps. I’m not a big fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of NATO straps, the nylon ones, because they, I don’t know, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find really nice ones and they tend to be way too long on me. I don’t like having a bunch of extra slack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticking out the back and everything. Most of what I look for in a design is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a very nice aesthetically pleasing dial and hands. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all about like dial design, especially nice dial surface finishes like a sunburst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finish or a texture, anything like that. I’m a sucker for like nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applied indexes for the hours, like applied markers, which basically means like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are stuck on the face as opposed to just like numbers that are painted on, you know, usually like polished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edges of each marker, stuff like that. That’s the kind of thing I love. Fancy dials, fancy hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the comfort of the strap and in a reasonable size that isn’t too big or too thick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To answer the question of what it would take for me to regularly wear an Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s anything that could, honestly. I think the answer there is nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the reason I like watches is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways in which I find them delightful and satisfying and useful that the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do. The Apple Watch can never have nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco materials on the dial and fancy finishes and the way it plays with the light. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the one of my favorite things to do with a nice watch is like just kind of move my hand a little bit in the light and see how the light reflects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of all the different surfaces. You just can’t have that with a screen. You can try to simulate it maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like it’s not It’s not the same thing. Watches are jewelry, and the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch is very much not jewelry. It’s 100% function. And some of the functions it does, it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. I still want it to be better. I still use one regularly for exercise tracking here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m still frustrated by a lot of the things it isn’t very good at still, or a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that it’s like 80% good at, or it works most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, for the most part, what I love about watches, the Apple Watch can’t do by its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nature. I also love I never have to charge my watch. I never have, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just set it and I reset it for accuracy purposes maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every few weeks and it’s fine. Like, it’s totally fine. So, going on to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more specific recommendations. I tend not to talk about this stuff much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m gonna keep this relatively quick. In the various price categories, If you are, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under $100 or $200, you’re looking at only quartz watches that price range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Quartz is fine. Quartz is the kind of watch that has batteries and has a seconds hand that ticks once per second, usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what most people wear. It’s fine. You have to change the battery every couple of years if it isn’t solar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually under $100 or $200 if it isn’t solar. And that’s about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a simple, durable, fairly accurate watch design that is fine for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I honestly think in this price range, give a really hard look at Timex.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Timex is surprisingly good. It makes surprisingly good designs. They have surprisingly good quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it ever needs, you know, batteries or service, anybody, anywhere can service those watches because they’re very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common. They’re very inexpensive, usually under $100. And you can get some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really surprisingly good designs recently out of Timex, especially for the price point. Moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, I kind of classified under $700. This is like the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step. You can start to get mechanical movements in this price range, but mechanical movements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are in this price range tend to have pretty poor accuracy. You’re on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order of like plus or minus 30 seconds a day, which you think about like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good mechanical watch might have plus or minus, you know, one to three seconds a day. That’s like, that’s a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. When you’re at plus or minus 30, you’re off by a minute every two days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It basically makes it so that you have to reset your watch more frequently if you want it to be remotely accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also at this price range, usually you’re not getting some of the more useful amenities. Things like hacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds, which means when you pull the crown, the seconds hand stops so that you can stop it at zero and precisely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set it. Usually you don’t have things like that in this range. You also might not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-magnetism. You almost certainly won’t. And if mechanical watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get magnetized in a certain way, which is very easy to do around iPad smart covers, then they get even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less accurate. They usually will, you know, start gaining like 45 seconds a day or a minute a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s like, you know, like mechanical watches under about $600, $700,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have these inexpensive movements that aren’t very nice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still a mechanical watch. It’s still useful. I think the king of everything mechanical in this price range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Seiko. Seiko is going to come up again throughout this discussion for a good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have really amazing bang for the buck at almost every price range. If you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can also go for Hamilton. Hamilton’s, they have a new line called the khaki field watch that I think is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, very modern and I think it’s only about $700, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also in the under 700 category, Citizen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. Citizen competes very well with Seiko in lots of ways. They tend to specialize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the solar quartz area, which is the EcoDrive line that they have where it’s quartz,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you almost never have to do anything to it because it has an internal unchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery of some sort that is charged via solar panels under the face of the watch that you can’t even really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell are there. It’s really hard to beat Citizen at that type of movement under this price range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So moving up, if you’re willing to spend between $700 and $1,500, this tends to buy you nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanical movements, nicer finishing, maybe a little bit nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dial work and a little bit nicer cases and finishing work. You start to get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some cooler style potential here. A lot of micro brands live in this $700-$1,500 price range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the macro brand category, Longines is probably the biggest one. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest brands in the world. And they’re surprisingly good bang for the buck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, Seiko returns. They have a line of dressy watches. I don’t know how to pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I think it’s Presage or Presage. These are like dressier Seiko options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have really amazing finishes and amazing dial designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and textures and materials. They have Yurushi, they have enamel, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this one, it’s the SARX055, their names make no sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has this awesome like paper texture dial. And these are for like $900, $1000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the watch world, the Seiko Presage line is amazing value.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s stunning what you get for that value. I would also say this is kind of where Nomos’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entry-level models live, like in the $1,500 range. I’m less into Nomos in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years because they’ve pushed very much upmarket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in price and they’ve kind of lost me on some of their design directions recently. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they also pushed a lot larger in size. And I’m now both too small for many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their watches that I would actually want, and also they’ve pushed way up in price to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re basically paying Omega prices now. And I’ll have more to say about that in a minute. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we leave the $1,500-ish price range, I also want to mention German brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Junghans, spelled Jungens. They make this wonderful iconic line called the Max Bill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line about the famous Max Bill designer. very like, how do you pronounce it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bauhaus? Bauhaus? I don’t know how you pronounce that. But that school of design, very represented in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their Max Bill line. Those are really cool, if you like that kind of style. And also in this price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range, you get some nice utilitarian models from Sin and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Damasco. And I’m a Damasco fan of the two. They’re both good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Damasco watches are incredibly useful tools. These are like tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches. They can take a beating. They have a lot of good functions. You get a lot of technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of advancement for $1,500-ish. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also where, in this price range I mentioned earlier, micro brands. Micro brands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are hard to find in person. They’re hard to see in person. With the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one exception, there’s an event put on by a watch blog called Worn and Wound called the Worn and Wound Watch Fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They put it on every year in New York and San Francisco, and that is by far the best place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know of to be able to see these brands in person. Some micro brands I would take a good hard look at are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Halleo’s, which Halleo’s watches are incredibly nice for the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re like $600, $700 at retail, but they sell out immediately and are very hard to get, except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondhand for a premium. So those are, they’re very nice if you can get one. Farer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a brand that Mike recently got into very much. I’ve seen them at the WarnerWound watch fair. They are very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very nice for the price, and they do a lot of cool color work that a lot of other brands don’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also a brand that I like a lot is Oak and Oscar, which they also do some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool designs that you don’t really see anywhere else and that are in this price range. Moving up from this price range, I know this is a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump, but we’re gonna go now to the like four to $5,000 range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is where you start to get the big brands that you’ve heard of that are nice brands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You tend to get higher accuracy movements. you start to have all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common convenience features like you know the the stopping seconds, quick setting dates, anti-magnetism,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you start to have those pretty much as standard in this price range. And in this price range to me there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are two amazing standard options. Number one is Grand Seiko.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Grand Seiko is again continuing the Seiko line, amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality and like super fine finishing work, super nice like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco polishes, dial textures and colors and designs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s hard to find a watch that is nicer and has better finishes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a Grand Seiko at any price from any brand. They are that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. They specialize in very intricate dial patterns and extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp and well polished hands and hour markers on the dials,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Grand Seiko’s are really something to see. And the best thing for me about Grand Seiko
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they have this movement that they’ve made that no one else has called spring drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This works like no other movement. It’s basically a mechanical power source that has like the same kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like what you know automatically wound mainspring as an automatic watch, but instead of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an escapement that ticks back and forth with the balance wheel that you know it’s the wheel you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the back of a mechanical watch that ticks. Instead of having that, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of uses like a magnetic brake controlled by a quartz crystal, and so you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly precise timing, and it moves in a continuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motion instead of having little ticks. And so what you get with Spring Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a perfectly smooth-moving seconds hand. Nothing else in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch world works like this, and and it’s incredible to see in person. The most famous model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Snowflake. It’s a fantastic one. The Snowflake encapsulates everything that’s great about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Grand Seiko. You have amazing, like, you know, sharp, highly polished, reflective hands and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dial markers. You have this amazing, like, snow dial texture, and you have spring drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you have this continuous, smooth sweep, and it is more accurate than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost any mechanical watch. Because it’s using a quartz crystal for regulation, It is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quartz like accuracy. You’re in the area of like less than one second per day deviation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Grand Seiko, especially Spring Drive, in the four to $5,000 range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not gonna find anything that is like fancier, nicer. Like it’s really, really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I would also strongly suggest if you’re in this price range, consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Omega. I know it’s hard to say this about something that costs $5,000. Omega is probably the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best overall value in the watch business, because what you get, you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly nice watches. I would especially steer you towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more recent Master Chronometer models. Those have a new generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of movements that’s incredibly nice and accurate and practical. I’m a big fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Seamaster line. I’m currently wearing a Seamaster Aqua Terra 150M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a rubber strap. They make really good rubber straps and deployant clasps for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the most comfortable thing. I’ve been wearing it all summer. I just absolutely love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Omega gives you all the modern things. The movements have all the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amenities. They’re anti-magnetic. They have all the good features. They’re incredibly accurate. They’re easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to service. That’s one thing. Grand Seiko is kind of, it’s not great to get Seiko serviced. Omegas are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super easy to get serviced. There’s boutiques everywhere. You can see them in person in lots of different places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So on resale, they tend to be all right. You can also buy them, you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either of these used, but it’s a lot easier to find used Omegas because there’s so many more of them. And then once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get above $5,000, you tend not to get meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements in things like mechanics. Like the mechanics are all basically the same above that price range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you get into like, if you’re willing to go up between five and 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s when you start getting into the brands everyone has heard of that aren’t Omega. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s when you start getting things like Rolex, Panerai, IWC, those all start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like up in that price tier. There are many great watches among all these brands. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, the bang for the buck is the Omega and Grand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Seiko category. Those are, in very different ways from each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are just amazing companies. And if you’re looking at watches, give those a serious look. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could only wear watches from one brand for the rest of my life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today I would choose Omega to be that brand because they’re just so practical and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good and span such a wide range. I would also, before we leave this topic, I would say two things. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, I know this is hard in most of the world because of location issues, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really should see watches in person if at all possible before buying them. This is not the kind of thing that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just research online and order online and be fine with most of the time. It’s jewelry, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very dependent on how things look in person and how sizing works on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many watches don’t photograph well in both directions. Sometimes there will be one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is amazing in person that doesn’t photograph well online, or more often, you’ll find amazing photos of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one online and then in person it doesn’t look that nice. You really try to see these at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in person if at all possible. I know it’s hard. There aren’t that many places you can see watches in person besides a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top brands. but it’s something you should really do if at all possible when buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you try to do research about sizing, the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very hard to figure out by numbers alone whether a watch will fit and look good on you or look too big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or look too small or whatever. And finally, I will close this by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I could never follow this advice because of the kind of person I am and how much I love this kind of thing, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideal number of watches to own is one. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Because if you only have one, you never have to think about which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one do I put on? Is it wound? Do I need like a storage box or an automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winder or things like that? Like, no, the ideal number of watches to own is
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Sounds like it might be zero. I don’t have to worry about which watch to put on and which winder and what box
⏹️ ▶️ John to put it in. I don’t have any of those concerns and I have money that you wouldn’t have if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch. That’s also true. You know, I feel like I could play back all of the talk you gave probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Neutral, maybe on ATP about having two cars, because this is the same thing all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, there’s a lot of overlap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Although this might even be more expensive for all I know, my word. Let me ask you a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. Are you familiar, well, I know you’re familiar with them, but are you like very familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with movement? Because movement strikes me as someone who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not- You’re talking about MVMT?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, yes. As someone who does not really know anything about watches, MVMT strikes me as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very affordable, I’m talking between one and $300, reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aesthetically pretty series of watches. But for all I know, the watch people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Hodinkies of the world, Hodinkers, I don’t even know what to call you people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For all I know, you guys hate MVMT or MVMT or whatever they’re called. Are they like really shunned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is this not a bad option?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s this whole category. I’ve seen them before. They advertise heavily on Instagram, and one of the big companies bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I forget which one, I think maybe Fossil. But anyway, there’s this massive category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what the watch people call fashion watches, which is a lot like saying a lifestyle business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the VC crowd. Like it’s used not kindly. It’s a way to look down upon these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this includes things like Fossil and MVMT, Danny Wellington, Shinola,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which has a whole bunch of things going on with it and controversy. but I’m anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a whole bunch of that and by the way I’m fairly cool on who dinky these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they are basically a hype machine and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like anything they shine their light on gets immediately ruined by their audience so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like like anything that hodin key says is awesome becomes impossible to get basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people obsess over it like crazy and it kind of drives the industry and it’s it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s you know the crowd ruins everything I guess regardless fashion watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fine but don’t overpay for what they really are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shinola is a fashion watch brand like the the quality you get out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of something like that is not meaningfully higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what you can get for a lot less money from other brands and and you can say that about a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a lot of these fashion watch brands. If you’re paying like you know under $200 you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably okay. Once you start crossing that point when you’re in this kind of quality level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not getting a good value there and you might not care. This is jewelry. Nothing about watches is a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value like except Timex. Nothing else. Timex and like and Seiko. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the good values. Nothing else is a good value. So like realistically speaking you should buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes you feel happy because this is jewelry and it’s all irrational and it’s all based on spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money for things that aren’t worth that money because they make you feel good. If you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a good value, typically the fashion brands are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Leo Dion I don’t think I have ever seen you prepare more for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything in your life than I think you prepared for this topic just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, the thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I don’t share them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my online life. And so, I have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years of bottled up opinions and expertise and preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rules. You should see the kind of things I would rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a watch for. For instance, I’m looking at this MVMT homepage right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wouldn’t get any of the three watches they have here for various reasons. Like, number one, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule out because it has a diagonal date window. I am extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picky about date windows. I have recently become a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who appreciates having the date on the watch. It is a very useful thing, and in fact, one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I love my Seamaster 150M is that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a really nice font on the date window, and the date window is centered at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom at the six o’clock position. That is the ideal date window. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be at six o’clock if it’s there at all. And most watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it at three o’clock or if they are chronograph style, which means they have like three sub dials
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two sub dials somewhere in the middle, oftentimes they will shove it diagonally at kind of the 430
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position. And that to me, I can’t abide. I recognize that’s a practical thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really hard to fit date on a chronograph any other way besides that, and that’s why they all do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But I can’t abide that. That’s why if I’m going to buy a chronograph, I want one with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no date at all, because there’s no good place to put one and have it fit in a reasonably sized dial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except diagonally, which I don’t like. I have all sorts of opinions on design issues like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I’m also big on legibility. I want to be able to quickly tell the time, and certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color combinations or metal combinations or finishes make it so that in certain light, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of contrast with the hands against the dial or something like that or like the markers aren’t distinguished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough or you know there’s all sorts of potential problems that can arise from poor design so I care a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot about watch design but I don’t I don’t really want to make it a part of my online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life because I don’t like the online watch press world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to join it and I don’t want it to bleed into what I do here because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would mostly be me talking about very expensive things. Nobody wants to hear that. Corey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ponder Yes, let’s talk about your Mac Pro. Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cynova I’m not buying the Mac Pro probably, maybe. Corey Ponder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It’s funny because, and I feel like we’ve talked about this several times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show, exactly half of me thinks this is the most self-indulgent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preposterous, wasteful hobby in the world. Tim Cynova It is. Exactly half of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me thinks, oh, if I only had more money, I would be so bad about this, I would be worse than you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you can say all the exact same things about cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, yeah. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like cars, like, you know, it’s one thing, like people want to tell the time, they can buy a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Timex or a Casio and be fine, right? And they’re inexpensive and they’ll last forever. You can say the same thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars. You can buy, like, you know, a basic economic car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that isn’t any fun to drive and doesn’t and isn’t very nice and doesn’t have any cool features and is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accord. No, honestly I think an Accord is better than what I just said. But like- Accord is fun to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so like the people who really care blow massive piles of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to get something that makes them happy. And that’s what this is. Like buying a fancy watch is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good use of money. It’s not a great value. Just like buying a nice car is a terrible use of money. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a great value either. But if you have the money, It’s a way that you can make yourself really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy, you know, if you care about that kind of thing. All right, and you know, it’s, that’s why, like, it’s jewelry, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like any other jewelry. It’s, it doesn’t serve that much of a purpose, except that it
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, these watches are kind of more like if every car was a Pagani. And even Pagani,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not fair to Pagani, because like, the terrible value of fancy cars
⏹️ ▶️ John is a terrible value, but the value, like the fraction that gets that terrible value
⏹️ ▶️ John usually includes performance, and in watches it doesn’t. Because the best performance is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John quartz watch, and all the very expensive ones tell terrible time. So it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ John if the more expensive the car got, like the slower it got and the worse the handling was.
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of weird. But jewelry is a better analogy, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John really is an almost 100% aesthetic thing. And I understand the beauty
⏹️ ▶️ John of the movements and all the other blah, blah, blah. But if you cared about performance, the one job
⏹️ ▶️ John that the watch has to do is to tell accurate time. And the more expensive the watch, the worse it does at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s a bunch of asterisks on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. There’s a transition from really, really good at telling time, and then crap at telling time. And in the crap
⏹️ ▶️ John realm, you can pay more money to get higher in the crap realm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of exceptions to that, but we’ll leave that on the table for now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, quartz. Like you mentioned the expensive watches actually have quartz stuff in it. It’s a solved problem. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know what? I don’t like courts. I like little gears. It’s like, all right, well then. Get one with little gears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if you want to watch the tells time accurately, just buy an Apple watch that’s constantly on atomic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. No, honestly, like if, if accuracy is your number one goal, the Apple watch is the best option,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you can charge it every night and do software updates and as long as you only tell you the time, most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. All right. So, so here, so let’s say you have just fallen upon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hundred million dollars, you know, just for the sake of discussion. So money is no object.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have, you have decided you’re going to buy yourself the watch. I don’t care if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s new, if it’s used it’s, but you have a hundred million dollars to blow on a watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like you need to up that to a billion to say that money is no object. Cause I don’t know how expensive watches
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey get. That’s probably true. I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worst. That’s probably true. Okay. Whatever the number may be for you, ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, you have an, you have infinite money to buy one and only one watch, like, what do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your eye on as the unattainable, I wish I could justify it or I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could afford it and I just can’t. What is your be all end all watch today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Natalus. 5711. What does 5711 mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the model number,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. The reference model. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of different model
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the same looking watch. I find that Natalus a very ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch. Yeah, I’m not, I don’t understand it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. A year ago I would have said the same thing. My tastes have changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, and I might say evolved, it might just be changed, I don’t know. I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not get the appeal of a lot of very popular watches. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’ve gotten more into the watch world, and I’ve seen many more of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially seen them in person and worn them sometimes, and as I’ve gotten more into it, my tastes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have changed and expanded and now I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more. Like for instance, a few years ago, I thought Panerais were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous. More recently, there have been a few that I’ve been like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hmm, I wouldn’t mind trying that on sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those brands that like, they do look ridiculous, they’re made to look ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yet, when you see them, they’re kind of nice. And maybe one time you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and you don’t think they’re kind of nice, and then, you know, but maybe two years later you do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jewelry, it’s fashion, things change, fashion changes, and you change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s lots of things that I loved when I first started getting into watches a few years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now I don’t like anymore. And there’s lots of things back then that I thought, who would ever buy that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then like two years later, I bought one. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John clicking around on some watch search results, and I clicked through to this one for this $850,000 watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I find it hilarious that in the lower right corner, I got one of those little bubbles,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the little speak, would you like to have a live chat with a representative now? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for an $850,000 watch? Like, that’s pretty low rent. I feel like the chat bubble, like, come talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John your watch. It’s like, are you kidding me? If I’m gonna spend this much money for
⏹️ ▶️ John a watch, you’re gonna fly me out there on a private jet. You’re not gonna talk to me in that chat bubble. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much is this 5711? Do you know offhand? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it retails for like 30, but no, it’s, you can’t get it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s, it’s here for like a 60 grand, 78
⏹️ ▶️ John grand, 95 grand. Okay. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I were to somehow get one of those, I don’t think I could ever actually wear it. What if you like bump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a doorframe and you scratch that incredibly brushed bezel it has,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just get Apple care and that’s Apple care is only like 10 grand.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I don’t. And, and even like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem that I think has come out of like Houdini culture some of these like super Hard to get watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had one I think I’d be afraid of people noticing it on me Cuz
⏹️ ▶️ John then they would they would eat you And they probably should eat you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like they like if I would feel I would be mortified If I was wearing that somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and somebody recognized it or knew what it was worth. I would be mortified
⏹️ ▶️ John It’d have the Twitter parrot, you know, the has Jeff Bezos decided to end hunger today Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John account, you know, that one? No, it was like he has enough money to end world hunger or something. And every day that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a Twitter account that checks whether he’s decided to end world hunger. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John once you start wearing a million dollar watch on your wrist, you get one of those parody accounts. It comes with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. Right? Yeah. No, that’s silly. That’s why, like, I don’t, I don’t like the kind of attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t want to wear something that people would be able to recognize as something that expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Most of what I wear are things that most people wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize, and that is intentional.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then what appeals to you about the Nautilus 5711 then? I’m genuinely asking because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an outsider who really doesn’t understand this stuff, it seems to me like half of the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to be recognized for this from the people in the know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the half I don’t want. And that’s why I wouldn’t want to get something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually just like it for the design. I just really like the way it looks. It’s just a nice design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told you, I got to try one on a store once. It fits me really well. It’s very thin and light. It has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice bracelet. I love the way the light plays with the dial and the markers and the hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just like the design, which is basically the worst possible reason to ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy this watch, because at this point you’re into like, you know, speculation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investment territory, and I have no interest in that at all. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to buy something to
⏹️ ▶️ John wear it. You can get matching cufflinks that look like the face of the Nautilus.
⏹️ ▶️ John noticed that. For $5,560. It’s a bargain compared to the watch.