408: Feature Headphones
10 Dec 2020How much could we possibly say about headphones that we don’t have yet?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Casey’s great news!
- Marco’s Slightly Unpopular Opinion
- Marco’s new “experience”
- Follow-up:
- Is Apple-Silicon-Ready?
brewand Rosetta- Chiplets & Multi-chip Modules (via Adrian Sampson)
- Extracting images from a Google Doc
- In the defense of Apple News
- AirPods Max
- Post-show: Marco has scheduled his walk of shame
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Chapters
- Skype, Slack, and Discord
- Is Apple-Silicon-ready?
- Chiplets, multi-chip modules
- Images out of Google Docs
- Y’all like Apple News, apparently
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- AirPods Max
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- AirPods Max 🖼️
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- AirPods Max
- Ending theme
- An actual tech podcast
Skype, Slack, and Discord
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have updated call recorder for Skype just barely in time for this phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call. Did you see they now have a feature where it will automatically offer to reinstall itself?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which didn’t work by the way. So I did my call recorder update and then I updated Skype
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then nothing. So then I had to manually go and re-update call recorder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean just to show you the pains that we go through to bring this program to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, ladies and gentlemen. I am recording this not once, not twice, but thrice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I now have a hardware recorder, the, what is this, a MixPre-3-2? Correct. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the audio hijack running and Skype call recorder, a call recorder for Skype,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it’s called, because darn it, I will not lose this recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will not, I swear it. But yeah, it’s really getting frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Skype updates even more often than Chrome, it seems, and that’s saying something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every time it updates recently, it breaks Call Recorder, which seems to just uninstall. I mean, Call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Recorder has given us years of solid functionality and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid service for what I’m pretty sure was only a one-time purchase. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or something like that. Like 20 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like six years ago. Like, I don’t think I’ve bought it since. It just, it keeps updating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the time of relying on it for anything is over because Skype is just outpacing it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just constantly disabling it and issuing it, or rather Skype is constantly issuing updates to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself that disable it. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but that’s what happens. And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at this point, like you can’t really depend on that anymore, actually working.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it always works if it’s installed. You just got to remember to look to see whether it’s installed or not before you have an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour long call and you realize, hey, where’s that little window?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, imagine if that worked, if that’s how your backups worked. Like, if Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just stopped every three days until you remembered to go look for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still feel like you can rely on it. I mean, we all reinstall cult recorders. I don’t think one of us has had that
⏹️ ▶️ John use case where it’s like, or that failure mode where the problem is that we forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John that cult recorder wasn’t installed. We always notice it’s not installed, and then we reinstall it, which is annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like once it’s installed, it still does the job. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for me, it’s my backup recorder. And it has been for some time. and I use Audio Hijack for primary, for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of stuff, like the entire processing that generates the live stream file, the live stream itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the processing to make me sound crappier on the live stream, to match how bad you guys sound from Skype.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All that’s done in Audio Hijack, and then I have a couple recording blocks.
⏹️ ▶️ John If anything, what we need to do is get rid of Skype and finally move to one of the bazillion services that everyone tells us has better audio
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than Skype. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just gonna say that. So, as with all things podcasting related, Anytime any of the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us complain about anything relating to podcasting, all of Germany comes out. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who have no idea what podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John were right about chapter markers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were right about chapter markers. And so I’ll never forget, it was a few months ago and it was a genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well-meaning email. Like it was clear that this person just wanted to help. And they said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s what you got to do. You got to get this like completely esoteric, like super professional, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tons of switches and knobs and buttons software that is either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey untranslated or lightly translated to English. And I swear that’s gonna fix you up, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you need. And I was like, uh, okay. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure if you’re a German person and can understand German, this works great for you, but I am neither of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, see, we’re lucky. Like usually I edit out any mention of Skype from the published
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. Can you imagine how many more times we would get these recommendations if I didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. Oh, golly. I know you probably should edit all this out, but I don’t know. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is kind of preposterous. It’s like, you know, why do we use IRC as the chat room? And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, oh God, please, I don’t need the Discord apologists to come at me. I know there are other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options, but for the purposes that the three of us have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think that IRC is probably the best answer for what is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a group of people chatting via text for two to three hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once a week. Like, I don’t think I’d need a full Discord just for that. And yes, I understand we could do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for membership or something, and who knows, maybe we will one day, I don’t know. But today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like the best answer for a group of people that wanna chat via text is IRC. And IRC is what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 30 years old, 20 years old? Something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be fair, IRC sucks. I hate IRC, but I just hate every other option here more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s Skype. It’s the same thing with Skype.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Skype sucks, but there’s a reason we keep using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, we could do something like Cast, which I’ve met the guy who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes it. And he’s a super nice guy. I can’t remember his name off the top of my head. I apologize. But super nice guy. From
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything I understand, it’s like a great service. But when we have something that works, even though we hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and it’s free, it’s actually a surprising amount of momentum to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to do something else. I mean, the chat room is saying we could use Slack. I’ve thought about pitching like FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio group calls, but God knows I don’t want to rely on Apple for that sort of thing, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, wait, you mean Slack as, not as chat, but as the video, or as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the audio service? Yeah, it’s audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forgot that everybody has that now. It’s just, God, enterprise software is the worst. Like, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single platform has some kind of calling feature built in. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just, how do we know what’s good, what to use? and it’s like, I don’t know. Anyway, I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a slightly unpopular opinion. Oh, please. Discord is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco QuickTime Player was in like the late 90s or early 2000s, whenever it came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Discord is that to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So at the time, I was a Windows user back then. Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John John, we’re sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please stop listening for a few minutes. QuickTime Player to Windows people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just the worst. Because you’d come across some video that was in QuickTime format and you’d be like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god, now I have to either install that thing or run that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And QuickTime Player in typical Apple on Windows fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a terrible Windows citizen. And it just was bloated and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed like weird little hooks everywhere and tried to auto launch it. And it’s like all sorts of crap. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just totally out of place. and it just sucked. Like, it was just a terrible experience having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to open stupid QuickTime Player on Windows to play a QuickTime video that you had that nothing else would play.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, to the Windows people, was just, you know, annoying and hellish and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big turnoff. But to the entire world of Mac people, that’s just what they had.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was fine. On the Mac, QuickTime Player was just the video player, and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in their world, what was fine was totally foreign and unpleasant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this other world that existed that they just never thought about. That’s what Discord
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to non-gamers. Like, gamers love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Discord, and I think to some degree, Slack has the same attribute where, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re in a community that uses Discord or that uses Slack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding another one is no big deal because you already run the app. You’re already running it all day on all your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices. You already have it set up, you already have like, you know, accounts and stuff, you know how to use it, you know what it does, you know what it doesn’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you’re already in one of these like communities or environments that use one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these chat apps, like adding another Slack to me is no big deal. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I added a Discord to my regularly checked things, I would have to run Discord.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have to install it on my phone, which I’ve never had before. I would have to make a spot for it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my home screen, which I don’t have. I don’t have any more space for that that I would want to spend on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Especially not on your tiny phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like on my Mac, I’d have to install Discord on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my mini Macs. I’d have to keep it running a lot of the time so I wouldn’t miss stuff or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. It’s just one more thing, one more bloated Electron app that I’d have to run.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The last thing I want is to have to add something like that to my life that isn’t already there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if I was already in Discord, this wouldn’t be an issue, just like I’m already in Slack. So Slack isn’t an issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. But because I’m not already in Discord, I don’t wanna have to add that entire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire bloat of yet another one of these services to my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I have a couple thoughts here. First of all, I agree with you with regard to Discord
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have lots of complaints about it. Second of all, we are removing all doubt that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the oldest, most out of touch of all of the people in our little sphere because everyone else seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to love Discord I hate it. Third of all, I see your QuickTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey player for Windows and raise you RealPlayer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey was worse. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Such a pile of garbage. I mean, QuickTime was bad, but oh, RealPlayer was such a pile of garbage, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is funny because, you know, back in the olden days when you had to carry your bits uphill both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways in order to get on the internet, when, you know, Marco and John and I were on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming audio or video was just not a thing. It was not possible. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of a sudden, real player came out and you could stream audio. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it was the same time, it was a little while later, then you could stream quote unquote video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco which really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like a postage stamp sized video that had approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 12 pixels of data within it that would update once every seven seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was quote unquote, video back then. And oh my God, the RealPlayer app was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a pile of garbage and I hated it so much. With regards to Discord,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think a lot of the problem I have with Discord is that to my eyes, it fulfills the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same needs as Slack does, even though I understand that they’re not the same and there are very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large differences between the two. But for the kinds of needs that I have, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chatting with a select group of people in one or more different context, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like chat rooms or what have you. I don’t feel like Discord handles that simple use case as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it does many other things quite a bit better. Like my understanding is that moderation is way better on Discord
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was built for gamers. And I already insulted every Tesla fan ever last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, so let me try to be a little more gentle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be challenging and that could require, and maybe require a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little more finesse than your average Slack user. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, and the other, the other, another thing that I dislike about Discord is that, and this very well could be user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey error and maybe, maybe I don’t understand what I’m doing, but I, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it is information overload always. Anytime I start Discord, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically only when I’m recording analog, cause that’s where the chat room is for relay now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started, and first of all, it makes me log in again because I haven’t logged in in a month and that’s annoying in and of itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then they do this, you know, really slick, and I mean that genuinely, a really slick, like, you know, scan this QR code with your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause I’m on my desktop, you know, scan this QR code with your phone and we’ll log you right in, which is great. Except I go to my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my phone’s logged out because I haven’t logged into that in a month. So then I log into my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone thinking, all right, I’ll just do it here. I’ll use my face ID to get my password and then that’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then every time I forget where the hell it is that I go to scan the QR code. Cause I can’t just use the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iOS camera, the iOS camera, because then it just punts me to Discord and Discord’s like, okay, you’re in Discord.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suite. No, no, no, no. I want to log in on the other thing. Like in the web?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I see. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m on my phone. It just punts me to Discord from the iOS camera app. So then I got to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out where the hell it is in Discord on the iPhone that I can scan the code to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get me logged in on the desktop. And then I log in and there’s 304 frigging channels, all of which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are bolded because all of which have had activity since I’ve last been logged in. And unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slack, where you seem to be able to leave a channel, and And again, it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible this is user error because I barely ever touch Discord. But it seems like in Slack you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose to join or leave a channel and the equivalent in Discord is muting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a channel. Well, fk that, man. I don’t want all this. I don’t want all this sh in my life. No, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want it. I don’t want to mute it. I don’t want to friggin’ see it. So yeah, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very frustrating. And I know that I am just announcing how old I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am by going on this rant. And I can feel how old that I am. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think my hair is actively getting more gray as I’m in the midst of this monologue. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It’s just, it’s for the kids, man. And I ain’t a kid anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s too bad you both can’t be young and vibrant like me. That’s right. That’s right. I’m in six discords.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re a gamer. Discord to me, it clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came from gamer roots. Overall, Discord looks like it was designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Windows users, and Slack looks like it was designed by Mac users. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not saying Discord is badly designed, it’s just a different set of goals, and way different priorities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way different styles of doing things. It’s very rooted from those gaming roots, and you can see it in so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ways. Gamers are usually Windows users, and it feels like a big old Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And Slack, for all of its faults, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had many quibbles with Slack’s design changes over time. It’s still, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a bloat electron app for sure. There’s a lot about Slack that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ideal or not great. But Slack still feels generally like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed by Mac people with Mac sensibilities and Discord feels like a Windows app. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will probably always be the case. Speaking of communities, and Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking of Tesla people, I just got an email with a terrifying subject line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an email from Tesla, and the subject is your new leasing experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please just try to do the lease correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even that is very hard for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is the new leasing experience? What do you have to look forward to?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like they’re just moving lease stuff into the Tesla account control panel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of I guess whatever like financial company was like subsidiary servicing it before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla changing the leasing experience is kind of like Apple changing the laptop keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, ooh, please, please don’t mess it up. Like, oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have a good track record here. Please just maybe not touch it. Like once it works, just please don’t touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yep. Whew. you
Is Apple-Silicon-ready?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is Apple Silicon Ready? It’s a very odd phrasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or title for a site, but it’s actually a really good site and does what it says on the tin. If you want to know if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an app is ready for Apple Silicon, just go to isapplesiliconready.com and it’ll tell you for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair number of different apps. It’s quite stunning, in fact.
⏹️ ▶️ John I added the hyphens to the name, so you would know how I think it’s supposed to be done. So the URL
⏹️ ▶️ John is all stuck together, isapplesiliconready.com. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you want to think of how it’s supposed to be interpreted, my interpretation is,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, it’s a question about a thing. So it’s, and it’s leaving out some words to be sure, but it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this thing Apple Silicon ready hyphenated because it’s a three word phrase that works as an adjective
⏹️ ▶️ John to describe the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon ready or in Emax parlance, Apple Silicon ready P there I’ve done my
⏹️ ▶️ John max job for the month. So my quota is filled anyway. Yeah. Good site.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is very well done. And you can even, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I played with this very briefly, even though I’m the only one of the three of us that does not have an Apple Silicon Mac. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey among things you can do is you can like, search for something. So I searched just arbitrarily for FFmpeg because hi, have we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey met? And I think there’s a way that you can actually fill out a list of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that you have that may or may not be on the site and make your own like little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey profile. It looked very, very well done. And it seems like it’s translated a bunch of different ways. So this is very impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I had an Apple Silicon Mac, I would be looking at it more often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, for whatever it’s worth. Like I know Homebrew is not quite ready for all this stuff yet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably gonna be a while before all of the different packages, and the popular packages like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FFmpeg, it’s probably gonna be a while before all of those pretty much build on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1. But there’s some kind of fluke of migration assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On my MacBook Air, I have my homebrew installation from another computer. It just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got imported over. And it works. Like, cause all those, they’re just compiled binaries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you can get a compiled binary from an Intel Mac and run it on the M1, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run under Rosetta. And so like my M1 MacBook Air does run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FFmpeg just fine. It’s not as fast as it could be if it was native. But it like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rosetta works on command line binaries also. So that is an option if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to run some stuff like that for some part of your workflow or something, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring that over from an Intel Mac. And I think there are certain ways where you can force,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s some command, I forget what it is, but you can run Homebrew itself in Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some kind of command line trickery. And again, I’m sorry, I don’t know what it is off the top of my head, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look that up if you’re curious. I haven’t done that. All I did was bring stuff over from the other installation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I assume is just copying the user local directory over, I guess, maybe. It’s just, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a little bit slower than
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be. Speaking of running things on Rosetta and then being fast enough, I tried to find this URL while you were talking about I couldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone did a benchmark, Lightroom just updated to be ARM native,
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone did a benchmark of Lightroom running on a Rosetta versus the native version. The native version was only
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit faster. And it was sad, because the Rosetta is so good. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was faster, but not by a lot, by like single digit percentages. And it’s like, wow, Rosetta’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, here we go. Who was this in the chat? I’m not in the right window. Rip Mac in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote, there’s a post on notion.so that talks about how to do it. So what you do is you make a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duplicate of the terminal app and then you go into the info
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that terminal app and tick the open using Rosetta checkbox. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything that happens in terminal apparently is run through Rosetta. So you could use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s something. Also, thanks to Ryan Booker in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a blog post by Sam. How do you pronounce his last name? Sophus? Sophus? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. Sophus, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think. I’m not confident I’m right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, been around forever. Anyway, Sam Sophus wrote this good blog post also about running Homebrew on Apple Silicon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it uses the arch command to basically use the entire Homebrew installer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under Rosetta using the arch command. So we’ll look at these in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was thinking of and what I think you were thinking of as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This looks familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always pronounce that as ARK, like short for architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s architecture. Just like the mob file format, short for mobby.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think mob has the most RAM. Graphics interchange format.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. All right.
Chiplets, multi-chip modules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you tell me about chiplets and multi-chip modules, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try to make me read this big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that all I am to you? That’s all I am to you is a frigging speaker, aren’t I?
⏹️ ▶️ John We have our roles, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role. You want us to have the say command read it for you? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. All right, Agent Samson writes, and this is a lot, so blame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. On the topic of sheer die size, an important avenue for scaling lately is chiplets or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multi-chip modules, or MCMs, where more than one logic chip goes in the same package. Think roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same idea as the M1’s in-package DRAM, except it’s multiple logic dies instead of one logic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey die and some memory. Chiplets were just a research topic until fairly recently. AMD CPUs are all MCMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of a couple of years ago. A chiplet-based approach could be a way to scale the M1’s CPU core count or GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size without requiring separate packages or ruining yield. On the topic of using in-package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory as a cache for more traditional larger onboard DRAM, a second rapidly approaching technology is relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, quote, 3D stacked, quote, DRAM, where RAM chips are glued right on top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a logic die. The leading standard for this is high bandwidth memory, or HBM, which is a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name, and it has so far appeared only in a few high-end NVIDIA GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xilinx, is that right, FPGAs, et cetera. The capacity of this memory is pretty limited, so research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on HBM often involves managing it as an OS managed or page-based cast for a larger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pool of DDR memory, which seems like a win because as John mapped out in the show, the bandwidth and latency advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over traditional off-package memory cross a threshold to make it worth it. Then there’s some math, which I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we care about. Both of these technologies were coming soon for a long time, but now they’re here. I wouldn’t be shocked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would be thrilled to see them in a quote-unquote M2. Any acronym that has BM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it, I can’t get behind. Get behind!
⏹️ ▶️ John so they have a link to TSMC’s 3d thing on it So I’m pretty sure all the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone chips have used the RAM on top of the logic For a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John now, so I don’t think maybe it’s not maybe they’re talking about something slightly different But
⏹️ ▶️ John that putting that putting the RAM on top of the logic instead of next next to it is definitely a thing you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do But for Macs in particular or especially big Macs, you probably don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna do that because it is much harder to deal with heat in that scenario. It’s handled
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone because the whole deal with the phone is there’s not gonna be a fan in there anyway, so everything’s clocked
⏹️ ▶️ John down and made low power because the battery is tiny and yada yada. But one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons that the, potentially one of the reasons that the M1 in the Macs has
⏹️ ▶️ John logic with the RAM next to it instead of on top is that it’s much easier to cool, because you get direct
⏹️ ▶️ John access to the logic, which is super hot, right? And you can put a heat sink right on that to draw heat away from it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you have heat sinks on the RAM modules as well. So that’s way easier that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John stack them, now you have this hot logic thing that you’re prevented from extracting heat from by the
⏹️ ▶️ John also kind of warm RAM that’s on top of it. So I don’t expect to see it stacked like that in any
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, but multi-chip modules is definitely a possibility. That’s related to something we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to a little bit later.
Images out of Google Docs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So moving on, getting images from a Google Doc, and this is from Daniel Santos. So if you recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode, I think that I expected Marco would have cut this out, but he didn’t. I was trying to extract,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, a graph or something from our shared show notes document on Google Docs. And in typical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey fashion, I think several colorful expletives were uttered as I was trying to figure out how the crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a image file out of a Google Docs doc. And so Daniel Santos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, a few months ago, I spent hours banging my head against the wall and screaming profanities for hours trying to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this. One would think it’s a basic feature, but alas, Google being Google, they kind of included it, but made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as unintuitive as possible. So basically on a Google Doc, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to File, Download, Webpage, HTML zipped, and it’ll download a zipped package in which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a nice little folder called Images with all of the image files from the document in their original quality. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have just asked John for the original. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. There’s also, I found another method when I was just like poking around, trying to get that image out of the dock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the chapter art.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have just asked me for the original too. I forgot to send it to you. Obviously I have the original, just ask.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I save everything. You can also right click on the image. When I right click on an image, I get this weird option,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save to keep. Keep is capitalized, I assume it’s some kind of service that Google offers, I don’t know. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you right click and say save to keep, it shows up in a sidebar. In that sidebar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can right click on the image and that’s when you get the browser native, like open image in new tab or save image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as. I think you have a virus.
⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell is save to key?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t see this option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, wait, there it is. OK, I got it. I got it. OK. Yes. So I have some kind of like rogue
⏹️ ▶️ John You just sent your whole key chain to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco somebody. Yeah. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, like, I don’t, the only thing I ever use Google Docs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for is this. So I’m not an expert in it at all. But I did find that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And of course, I could have used the Web Inspector, I’m sure. But it shouldn’t be that difficult. None
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these options are good. But just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got the images. That’s difficult too, John.
Y’all like Apple News, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this is yet another thing, going back to our Apple News discussion last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet another thing that you know when you have something in a browser, unless they’ve taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great pains to override the right-click menu like Google Docs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but normally, right-click Save As or right-click Open Image in a New Tab is something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can always do. Yet another thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content that is viewed in browsers gives you this ability, and constantly viewed in apps oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ John Or copying and pasting text, which is more infuriating. Not that browsers do that
⏹️ ▶️ John well either, but you’ve got a fighting chance at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Apple News, we got a little bit of feedback in defense of Apple News. The feedback we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very, very upset that we had besmirched their beloved app. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was one fairly short email from Jay Peterson who wrote, news gives you better font size control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey readability options, and accessibility features than the quote unquote open web. No jerk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bars. We had a different name for this back when Twitter was doing it. Cookie accepts flashing ads or page obstructions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And no ad blocking required for the average user. With regard to swiping behavior, which is what I was complaining about, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you swipe from the middle of the screen, it does move you to the next or previous story, depending on swipe direction. But if you do the edge swipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the left to go back, News does take you back to the prior view like most Apple apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is, I think a lot of people were very upset about me describing the swipe behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess that I just didn’t get my finger precisely to the left edge of the screen in order to go back, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my fault. But I don’t know. It’s just, as we were discussing just a moment ago with Google Docs, you expect to be able to right-click
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say Save Image. And whether or not that’s the best answer, it’s the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it seems most people expect. And I could make a passionate argument that a good UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a UI that doesn’t make you go, huh? And so this was an instance where Apple News made me go, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, continuing on from Jay Peterson. Also, most stories in the News app link you to the web source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by tapping the Share button and tapping Safari, which opens the web version of the story, or swiping all the way to the bottom of the story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in News and then swiping further down automatically pulls up a web view of the story. Some sites abuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this in News by only showing a stub of the story in News and then requiring a full scrolling swipe to see the full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad-laden and much more unpleasant to read version of the story. So in the defense of Apple News, there are some things to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like about it. I still don’t think it’s for me, but there you go.
Sponsor: Flatfile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Flatfile. You’ve experienced
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AirPods Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So was it today? It was no, it was yesterday as we record. We were recording on Wednesday the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 9th. Apple just randomly dropped a new product on us and it was not the 4K Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update I’ve been waiting for for a year. Instead it was AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max and I don’t care. So what else are we talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a very hard thing for us to talk that much about. you know, as everybody looks at the chapter marker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sees the 45 minute long chapters. It’s a hard thing for us to talk about because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one seems to have them yet. Or at least like when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announcement was made, like we, there were no, there was no like advanced reviews that were seated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that announcement. So like, there’s no like MKBHD review or anything like that. So we don’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there were, there was no like, you know, preview by John Gruber, like there was nothing like that. And so we can’t comment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all on how they sound, how they work, anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is pretty unusual for Apple to release a brand new product in December.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’re gonna talk about them anyway. And I think everybody wants us to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the one thing we can’t talk about is the sound, obviously. And the comfort and everything else. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we can say something about that because we can physically see the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget, what was the, AirPods Studio was the rumor name for these?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like it’s not out of nowhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John because this is one of the many rumored things, like leaving poor AirTags as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like- I still like AirHeads and HeadPods and all those other fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John names that we all came
⏹️ ▶️ John with. So AirTags is the, I think the lone, aside from the Apple TV, AirTags
⏹️ ▶️ John is the lone remaining sort of rumored product that still hasn’t landed in any kind of form.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you set aside air power and think that weird folding travel thing is whatever those rumors are about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, so I think these headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John are, in the beginning, I thought, well, you know, it’s nice that they made
⏹️ ▶️ John these, it’s good, I feel like it fills out Apple’s line, kind of like them making a small phone and a big phone. They make AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ John they wanna extend the AirPods brand, even though it makes not that much sense. The Air thing makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense, the Pods part not so much. But anyway, it’s good, Apple should have an Apple branded
⏹️ ▶️ John over your headphone. And I think this product comes at more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John the right time because the AirPods Pro introduced a whole new set of features that actually
⏹️ ▶️ John are ideally suited to an over-ear headphone. The noise canceling, I mean, it’s cool that
⏹️ ▶️ John the little AirPods Pro can do noise canceling, but it’s obviously, you can do a better job
⏹️ ▶️ John if you cover the entire ear with a thing. The spatial audio stuff that they rolled out,
⏹️ ▶️ John and of course, all the wireless pairing and all the other convenience factors. Like, there’s that whole feature set. you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at that feature set, that would work pretty well in over ear headphones. So Apple should probably
⏹️ ▶️ John make one of those. And they have, and it looks super Apple-y. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a reasonable product, but I didn’t think it was for me, because I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even like the AirPods Pro. I just use my plain old regular or original AirPods. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still my favorite, because I don’t like things in my ear canal. And the only place I use over ear headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John is right now. podcasting and I don’t really use them at any other time in my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John life. So I didn’t really have a place for these. Uh, but, uh, as you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still, there’s only running reviews, right? So, you know, I don’t, nothing has changed about my
⏹️ ▶️ John attitude towards this, that related to reading what people think of them, but as the day has,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the two days have gone on, I’m thinking, you know, I do put my AirPods in and watch
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on my iPad. I watch a lot of content that way sort of late
⏹️ ▶️ John at night, you know in bed watch a TV show before bed or whatever, right? And I do that with
⏹️ ▶️ John my plain old air pods Which don’t sound that great, but usually doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter for a TV show But sometimes I watch, you know a movie like that or whatever and but you know
⏹️ ▶️ John These things I could put these on my head and watch something on my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I’ve done the spatial audio thing with the pros and it’s kind of cool and what
⏹️ ▶️ John if these are really comfortable and what if they’re even more noise isolating for my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John next to me in bed who doesn’t want to hear if there’s some loud part of a movie or something. So I started thinking about these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I didn’t put it in order. I’m not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I really need these in my life, but I am actually primed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in the reviews. If people say, and yes, they are expensive, we’ll talk about that in a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit, but people say, yeah, they’re super expensive, but they sound more or less like $500 headphones. And we already
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less know that all of the AirPodi
⏹️ ▶️ John features are good because we have the AirPods Pro and we’ve done all the pairing things and we’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole feature set. Like we understand how they interact with the Apple ecosystem. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you like that, these do that too, only now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John So I am AirPods Max curious at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I obviously don’t need to buy a $500 pair of headphones, what am I, Marco? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I am waiting to see what the reviews say. If the reviews say, oh, they’re only okay, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have Sony noise canceling headphones which I really like, but I only use them for travel. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use them for the sound quality, I can tell you that, I just listen to podcasts on them. But if they say, oh, these are not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re on par with much cheaper models, don’t bother, I probably won’t bother. But if they
⏹️ ▶️ John say, wow, these things actually sound like $500 headphones, and they’re super convenient,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, you can use them for monitoring during podcasts, which we’ll talk about a little bit, I’m sure too,
⏹️ ▶️ John I may consider these at some point in the future. Marco, on the other hand, is not
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to consider headphones. He is
⏹️ ▶️ John buy all of them sight unseen. So Marco, tell us about what you think of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did order a pair. I don’t have it yet. I did get one of those day one delivery windows though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think I’ll have it in roughly a week or so maybe. I have some concerns. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it might end up being a really great product, but man, $550, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a ton of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a flagship headphone from a headphone brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you look at high-end headphones that audiophiles buy, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually quite mid-range. Like high-end headphones for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audiophiles go well into like the $3,000 plus range. And that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fairly recent phenomenon actually. But anyway, and I don’t own any of those. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this market, this is very expensive because the direct competitors to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the Sony, you know, WH, whatever, whatever, whatever, mark whatever, I think they’re up to four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, and those are about $350 usually. The Bose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco QuietComfort full-size model of whatever, you know, two-year period we’re currently in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s currently called the Bose 700, those are usually also in the $350 range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for Apple to come out with something that, you know, those are the most obvious direct competitors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at $550 is really above the market for what this product most likely is and what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most likely is competing with. Another very strong competitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this area is Apple’s own AirPods Pro, which are less than half the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re 250 officially and have been on sale a lot recently at various places for like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 190, 200, like, you know, something like that. So this is on track to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be kind of another HomePod. Not HomePod Mini, the regular HomePod. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, first of all, there’s maybe more overlap than we think. The rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mill seems to think that these were edited a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of rushed out the door. And that like the final product has been changed so often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in development and things didn’t work out the way they wanted and they changed it around and changed it around and changed it around and then shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something out the door. We heard a very similar thing about the HomePod when that shipped. The HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out to a market where it seemed like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of missing the market. Like the HomePod came out way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too expensive, missing some key features that the market expects,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just kind of seeming like the people who designed and marketed and priced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it either weren’t familiar with the market they were entering or were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confident that they would be superior in some ways that they totally didn’t bother competing in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other really important ways. And it looks like they’ve done the same thing here. There are some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about this that look really good. There are some things about this that are question marks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me and will remain to be seen until we get it. And it’s super expensive for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it seems like its category is. And so I think this is probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a similar outcome as the full-size HomePod, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of us will buy it, but it’s really expensive for the market that it’s going into and most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t gonna buy it, and it probably won’t do the kind of volumes Apple wants it to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that being said, specifically about this product, I’m excited in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPods Pro are so good. Like, they’re so good that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last couple of flights that I took back when I was flying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m sorry, what is a flight?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the last couple of flights I took, I took only the AirPods Pro with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was remarkable in almost every way. The amount of space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a bag that you save by not having a full-size pair of noise-canceling headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is substantial. And it was wonderful traveling with just one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair of headphones. Having one pair of headphones do everything is so great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so convenient, it’s price-efficient, you know? So there’s a lot of benefits to having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one pair of headphones that you can do everything with. And that’s why everyone loves their AirPods so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because for many people, AirPods can do that. And the AirPods Pro did that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me for so many things. I’m no longer interested, for the most part, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size portable headphones for anything anymore. I use my AirPods Pro for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much everything away from my desk. At my desk, I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size headphones for reasons. But you know, like, when I’m away from my desk, I use AirPods Pro pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. I’ve stopped using almost any other headphones away from my desk. So something like this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very promising. If this can not only be that for people for whom AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro weren’t comfortable or didn’t fit, or if this can be that, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who need things the AirPods Pro can’t do or don’t do well. Noise cancellation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of those things that you wouldn’t think the AirPods Pro do well, but they actually do extremely well, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as full-size headphones like the Sonys and the Bose’s and everything. So I expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise cancellation on the AirPods Max. I don’t like this name by the way, because I don’t think anything about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is AirPods, but I think noise cancellation on these is likely to be excellent, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good on the AirPods Pro, it actually might not be that much better on these. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want like additional noise cancellation beyond what the AirPods Pro offer, this will probably do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t know if it’s going to be a massive difference. we’ll see when we get them. I have some concerns about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long wearing comfort. Now the AirPods Pro on a long plane flight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a problem of battery life. They only last about four hours. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you try to take AirPods Pro on a cross country US flight that’s about five hours usually long, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna probably at some point have to pop one out, put it in the case, charge it up, then a little while later pop the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one out, put it in the case, charge it up, and then put them both back in. or you can do my solution and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy two pairs, which you can do for a little bit less than the cost of the AirPods Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever these are called. Wait, you bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two sets of AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro? I did. Did I never tell you guys that? I did. I don’t think you told us that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this might be the singularly most Marco solution to a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve ever heard in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was fantastic, because it’s so much smaller still than a full-size pair of headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as with every Marco solution to every problem, I kind of hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet, and yet, and yet, I do understand the logic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there is an annoying amount of logic there.
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if they’ll get the rattle of death at the same time, or if one of them will be like the backup pair when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one of them starts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the first pair, I only had one for a while, the first pair got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the death rattle. And so that one got replaced recently. and I’ve been exclusively wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the backup pair like for a little while, hopefully to try to make it get the rattle within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its whatever two year period that it’s gonna have. Anyway, the thing with the Max is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we haven’t heard it yet. It might sound amazing, but the AirPods Pro are so good that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has an uphill battle.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t think it’s a given that these are gonna sound better than the AirPods Pro? I’m just accepting that as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sure hope they do. I mean, because the AirPods Pro, while they sound excellent for their size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sound merely okay compared to headphones of the Max’s size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now for them to sound even close is remarkable. They’re not in-ear monitors, they’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partially sealed earbuds. And so just to sound, and they’re only 250 bucks and that’s Apple prices, so to sound as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a $400 pair over-ear headphones would be a tall order for that product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the AirPods Pro do sound remarkably good for their size and convenience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and portability everything. But you know they don’t sound amazing in absolute terms and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if these headphones sound better that’s wonderful. And these do solve the battery life problem. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco claim 20 hours of battery life for the AirPods Pro claim four and a half so that’s pretty good. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know these are clearly made for flights and everything and that’s great. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re also significantly heavier. Mac rumors noted this as well. They’re significantly heavier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than most of the headphones in this class. And weight has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with long wearing comfort for headphones. Now there’s all sorts of factors. There’s like the clamping force,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how hard it pushes against your ears, you know, how the headband is designed, how the ear cups are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed, what kind of materials are involved and everything, how they fit on a given person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for instance, like the clamping force, how hard it squishes into your head, like from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ear pressure, that varies a lot based on your head size. and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headband can stretch in different ways. In some models where the headband doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flex very well, it’s significantly uncomfortable for larger headed people like me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where smaller headed people, it might be totally fine for them because they aren’t getting as much pressure because the headband isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexing as much for them. So everything’s different for everybody here, but I do worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfort because of the weight alone. These are pretty heavy headphones for their category. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a warning sign for me. it doesn’t mean that it can’t be comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John To give some numbers on this, by the way, these are 13.6 ounces. The Sony MDR-7506s that
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody has are about half that at eight
⏹️ ▶️ John ounces. And the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pros that I just
⏹️ ▶️ John got a markers recommendation are 9.5 ounces. So, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not surprising when you look at it, why would these be so heavy? What do you see? Those ear cups, those are
⏹️ ▶️ John metal. I mean, it’s aluminum, it’s lightweight metal, but it’s metal and the little adjustable,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you call them thingies, that you know, things that let you adjust how big it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John those look like they’re stainless steel, which is also very heavy. So it’s not surprising that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a heavy product because it’s made of heavy materials. And that presumably makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John feel expensive and appley and yada yada, but when you’re wearing something on your head, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that great. Right, and even, and you know, and they have to have a certain amount of electronics in there and batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, even when you compare them to the Bose’s and Sony noise canceling headphones, they’re like 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 50% heavier than even those direct competitors. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a warning sign there. Again, it doesn’t mean they will be uncomfortable, but it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it harder for them to be comfortable and harder for them to be comfortable on more people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Sony and the Bose are just, I have both of those and they’re, I mean, they’re not 100% plastic, but they’re mostly plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like temples to plastic. Right, and you know, that’s fine. Plastic is a good material for that. It’s lightweight,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s durable, you know, but like the Apple way to do it is to have stainless steel and aluminum and
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks very appley, but the price you pay is weight.
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AirPods Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going back to the market and how this product fits in the market that it looks like it’s made for, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is those like high-end, you know, airplane trip noise cancelling headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has always, I think in the same way that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter’s always jealous of Instagram and Instagram’s jealous of Snapchat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Facebook is jealous of everything, like in the way that like all the social networks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just constantly trying to be like all the other social networks so they can’t be happy with what they have and what they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has always seemed to even way back from the Steve Jobs days has always seemed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very envious of the makers of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the $400 speakers and headphones they would often sell in the Apple stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know all the Bang and Olufsen stuff and Apple has always seemed to want a piece
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that market themselves. That’s why they made the old, what was the iPod thing called? The iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi-Fi. That, yeah. That’s why they made it because Bose and B&O were making these hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars speaker docks for iPods and Apple wanted a piece of that market. And they’re like, we could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that totally. And they just walked in and flopped. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. Anyway, Apple has always wanted a piece of that particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market of like the like $400 headphones and speakers that they sell on Apple stores and high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle places. This is their version of that. And so like, it’s clear what they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for here. But you know, Beats never did it. Beats had its own success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different markets, but Beats was never a high-end luxury play. This is a high-end luxury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play, and that’s what they’re competing against. But if you look at this market too, like, the market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, which again, is often plane travelers. That’s the people who buy multi-hundred dollar noise canceling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless headphones for the most part. The market for that has a few requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or priorities that I’m not sure these do well at, besides price, which, you know, it matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t matter as much to a lot of these people, but it certainly matters in absolute terms. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things that those headphones all have is a hard case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a carrying case that you can somehow fold the headphones into to varying degrees of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you fold them. These just fold where like the ear cups rotate 90 degrees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the whole thing kind of folds flat. That’s one way to fold. It’s the worst way to fold,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides just not folding at all. The better way to fold is what most Bose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Sony headphones have done over time in this segment, although actually not the current Bose ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them have done a thing where the ear cups fold flat like that, and then also they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swivel around the points where they attach to the headband, So you can kind of take advantage of the space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like between the ear cups and the top of the headband and rotate one of the cups in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make a nice little compact and flat package. That is not what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s chosen to do here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Marco, you should exercise your image extraction skills to take out one of the pictures I put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes of this, probably the Sony one. It shows just how much smaller headphones get
⏹️ ▶️ John when they are foldable in this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m looking, again, we’ll talk about the case in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just ignoring the case for now, I’m just saying how do these headphones get smaller?
⏹️ ▶️ John When I saw that they didn’t do this, the thing I thought of right away, and hopefully you’re looking at this right now
⏹️ ▶️ John in your podcast player that supports chapter images, the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought of it was like, well, a folding like that is asymmetrical.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And it is, I mean, look at the thing. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John almost like they’re broken and it looks ugly. And Apple really does not like
⏹️ ▶️ John asymmetry. There are things about asymmetry, yes, the aesthetic thing of like, oh, it doesn’t look
⏹️ ▶️ John as nice. But also folding in this way potentially makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the, God, I sound like Johnny when I talk about these things, but like potentially makes the item
⏹️ ▶️ John less sort of cohesive, less of a solid thing, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, because it has to have two degrees of articulation instead of just one, right? And so now you have all these
⏹️ ▶️ John extra joints and moving parts and things that can fail. And the hard case thing, I can imagine this
⏹️ ▶️ John argument going like this inside, you know, the hard case thing is like, these plastic ones, the Bose and the Sonys, and again, I have both of
⏹️ ▶️ John these, so I’ve traveled with both of them. They fold up really small, but there’s no way I would put this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in its folded up state into my bag because I’d be afraid that it would crack or something because it’s all these little
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic hinges and the whole thing is made of plastic and I’d be afraid if I squished up against something that
⏹️ ▶️ John all that plastic would just break apart. Whereas these metal
⏹️ ▶️ John things that Apple has made, there’s only one degree of freedom for the folding. They don’t get very small,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you get the feeling that, and again, we don’t have these things, Marco will tell us when he gets his, that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re sturdier because it’s stainless steel attached to aluminum, attached to what looks like a fairly solid headband.
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t look like they would crack when put in a bag even with no case
⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever. So I can imagine them saying, well, we don’t need a hard case. We’re gonna solve that by
⏹️ ▶️ John being sturdier. I don’t know if that’s true, but an argument could be made for
⏹️ ▶️ John it based on the design. But the real problem is, okay, but you’re still not small. Right? If I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna, this is gonna be my carry-on bag that I have to somehow shove underneath the seat in front of me or whatever, because I don’t wanna have to go up to
⏹️ ▶️ John the overhead thing or the overheads are always all full. I need these headphones to get as small as possible if I’m gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ John them on a plane. And saying, well, we couldn’t make them that small because it would be asymmetrical
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would be more delicate and then we’d have to have a hard case. It’s like, yeah, this market exists and these products that
⏹️ ▶️ John have been competing in it have converged on this design, not for the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, because the original Bose QuietComforts that I had didn’t do this kind of folding. They did the Apple style folding and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were much bigger and they were also plastic, right? But the current Sony, well, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, You said the current Bose don’t do this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I believe the Bose 700 does not fold this way It folds the way apples do the stupid way, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though it does still have a hard case It’s got that
⏹️ ▶️ John weird headband thing, right? Anyway, I think this design is really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Sony’s that I currently use get so small. It’s ridiculous And I like the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that when they’re all sealed up in their case, even though the hard case is not that hard it
⏹️ ▶️ John is Uniformly shaped and I’m not afraid they’re gonna break inside there and it’s small
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s lightweight weight and the AirPods Max just totally missed that target. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely sure they were aiming at that target specifically because
⏹️ ▶️ John in all the advertising materials, the pitch that it’s making to me
⏹️ ▶️ John is that, like I said before, that these are going to sound good, right? That you’re going to want to listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to music that you like on these because it will sound good. And yes, you’ll be able to listen to that music out in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John and transparency mode and yada yada all the features. But the idea is that these will do your music, justice,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas the Sony and the Bose, I’ve only used essentially as like, what you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what someone who uses a jackhammer would use headphones for, it’s like I’m blocking out the noise of the plane. But
⏹️ ▶️ John music through them sounds terrible. I mean, I’m not even a headphone snob, but the Bose and the Sony’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know if it’s terrible, it’s not good, right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s terrible. I mean, the Bose is more terrible than the Sony. The Sony, like, the Sony has an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EQ app that you can use to fix some of its shortcomings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which actually, I’ll get to that. You can make it a little bit passable. The Bose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has an EQ app as well, but no matter what you do, it sounds like garbage. It just sounds like different garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not what I’m using for. Because these are clearly travel headphones. They get really small. They have a hard case you put
⏹️ ▶️ John them on, so you can’t hear the plane, and you can’t hear your podcast or your music. But obviously, you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have an amazing music listening experience on a plane no matter what, because you’re on a plane, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like these things are for when you’re, you know, either out in the world or
⏹️ ▶️ John bopping around your house and you wanna have a really high quality, good music experience, kind of like what Marco does, but he’s got his
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy headphones and he’s on his computer and he’s coding and he wants to hear good music with high sound quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that has to be what these things achieve for them to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a viable product because I feel like that’s what they promise. That’s what Apple’s advertising materials promise. What
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not promising with their folding and their case and everything else is, these are the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ John companion for a business traveler. Now you can bring them with you if you’re a business traveler but you will
⏹️ ▶️ John realize that they’re heavier, they’re heavier in your bag, like not just on your head, they’re heavier in your bag,
⏹️ ▶️ John they take up more room, and you’re probably going to be missing out
⏹️ ▶️ John on the improved audio quality because as good as the noise canceling may be, planes are super noisy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I see the case of the AirPods Max come in, I just think this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was not designed.
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Can you try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco describe it? Cause is it really a case? It’s, it’s like, it just kind of wraps. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like some kind of vinyl wrap.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know how, you know how we talk about bras for your car? Yeah. And I know there’s an obvious bra,
⏹️ ▶️ John but thing going on, but like, this is like a bra for your, your
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones in that, like a bra for your car, it doesn’t cover the entire thing. A bra in your
⏹️ ▶️ John car does not cover the entire car. It just covers the front of it. So they have what looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like leather that kind of covers some of the headphone portion.
⏹️ ▶️ John It leaves parts of it exposed for reasons I do not understand. Does anyone here understand why the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottoms have the little cutouts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Maybe so they don’t get, because like after you wear headphones, they’re gonna be probably a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit moist. They’re sweaty, like to air out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, yeah, maybe they would get like moldy if they didn’t have that, but the other ones don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John All my Bose and my Sony hard cases don’t have a place for, don’t have slits for things to come
⏹️ ▶️ John in and out, and I don’t think there’s any, anyway. Yeah, well, they also have permeable liners, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if it’s for letting air in or out as you’re extracting or inserting? Seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they don’t even, doesn’t look like it fits that tightly, though, because look at the gaps on the left and the right edge. Those seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John you could put a pencil in both of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, like, I assume, like, that the big flap that goes over the top, I assume that’s like a magnetic closure thing. you flip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up like a bag opening and you pull it up. Like that’s, ugh. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this, again, we don’t have this yet. Everything about this looks like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be, it looks clunky. Like the way the physicality of this looks, it just looks clunky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like getting it in and out of a bag is gonna be clunky. It looks like you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way that when you’re in an airplane or even just walking around the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco city or whatever, when you have the Sonys or the Boses in their hard case, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can then just toss that into a bag and have it bounce around and it’s fine. You know everything will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this isn’t really a case, and so I would never toss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that loose in a bag with other stuff, because I know the other stuff would scratch up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal on the headphones, it could get in there, it will fill with lint, it could damage the headband
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever that mesh material on top of the headband is. So I would never toss that loose in a bag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, what’s the point then?
⏹️ ▶️ John And just think of everything else that this thing doesn’t do. So in all of my little hard cases for
⏹️ ▶️ John travel headphones, I have a lightning to headphone adapter, the cable with the
⏹️ ▶️ John little remote that it comes with, some spare batteries, because a lot of these take, you know, interchangeable like
⏹️ ▶️ John AA, AAA batteries. Like, because it’s a case, you can fit other little things in there. There is no place for
⏹️ ▶️ John anything like that in here. You can’t even put a lightning to headphone adapter in this thing because it’s not a case. Like, where would
⏹️ ▶️ John you put it? it would fall out the little holes, right? So it’s not fulfilling the job of the case. Now here’s what’s baffling about
⏹️ ▶️ John this product, right? It is, it’s $550. I think it’s for like, you know, for better sound quality,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus the AirPods Pro feature set, which, you know, it’s fine. It comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with a lightning to USB-C cable, which is kind of weird that this thing has lightning on it. Like it could just be USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John to USB-C, and this is for charging it. It does not come with a charging brick, because, you know, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s thing anymore. So you have to have something that you can plug this into to charge, fine, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it comes with the case. This is what’s baffling about it. We just
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about how strange and potentially useless the case is, but it comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so now it’s saying, wait a second, product, are you trying to tell me that the case
⏹️ ▶️ John is so integral to this that you get it no matter what? You’re not gonna charge me $80
⏹️ ▶️ John for this separate leather case that no one buys because it’s $80? It comes with it, which makes me think. So you think
⏹️ ▶️ John people are gonna travel with these? Cause that’s not what the product is saying to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, here’s the thing. I think you have to, because what it says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the case is that when the case is on, they enter an ultra low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power state that preserves the charge, which sounds to me like you can’t turn them off without the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no one’s gonna put them
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the case when they’re on their desk. I’m sure there’s an idle, because it has, let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the features. It has sensors in it, okay? So this thing has optical sensors in each ear cup,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m assuming it will use that to tell when you’re not wearing it to go into a low power mode and not just the magnets in the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got position sensors in each ear cup. It’s got a case detect sensor in each ear cup, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I guess, separate from the optical sensor that senses your ears, the case detect sensor is the magnet thing that senses the magnets.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got accelerometers and gyroscopes, that’s all for the spatial audio stuff, right? It’s got nine
⏹️ ▶️ John microphones, eight for noise cancellation and three for voice pickup, but two
⏹️ ▶️ John of the three for voice pickup are shared with the noise cancellation, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The hardware design wisely, thankfully, happily, does
⏹️ ▶️ John not include any of the rumored touch surfaces. I have Sony Switch touch surfaces,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t like them. I think it was a smart move, even though it seems like, oh, they were having problems and they ditched them, or
⏹️ ▶️ John if the rumors to be believed, but who knows? but touch sensors on
⏹️ ▶️ John big over-ear headphones I’m not a fan of. Instead what you get, which is, I mean, in some
⏹️ ▶️ John respects it’s like, you gotta reuse everything Apple, but they put the quote unquote digital crown on there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the little dial from your watch, although I’m assuming this is not quite the same size. But on the other hand, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is an ideal control for volume. It’s a twisty thing that you can feel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, we’ve used the digital crown and it’s actually surprisingly easy to manipulate the digital
⏹️ ▶️ John crown on your Apple Watch with your finger. So this I think is like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps the best case scenario for manual mechanical volume
⏹️ ▶️ John control on a headphone. Maybe, I’m not sure about the position because I don’t have these, Marco will tell us when he gets them, but maybe it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John in a different position that might be better. They might’ve put it up there for aesthetic reasons, but I love the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got an actual physical dial for volume control. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John also press it to play pause, press it to answer a phone, press twice to skip forward, three times
⏹️ ▶️ John a skip back, you can use Siri through it, like all the things that you would expect. Unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods and the AirPods Pro where they have to do taps and pinches or whatever, you can put physical controls
⏹️ ▶️ John on here because the head, you know, ear cup things are huge, right? And then it’s got a button,
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual physical button that you press in and out to switch between noise cancellation and transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. Another thing that you can’t really do on a tiny little ear pod like the AirPods, the tiny AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ John how are we gonna refer are they saying the non-Max AirPods? You’ve got a room to have a physical button, so they put a physical
⏹️ ▶️ John button on it. And I think all of that is great. I wish that the Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John and Bose headphones would take notes from this and say, you don’t have to try to put a touchpad in
⏹️ ▶️ John and these don’t have to all be like a remote that’s on the wire or whatever, right? Setting the case
⏹️ ▶️ John aside, if I pretend that I’m not gonna be using these on the plane, I’m back
⏹️ ▶️ John to thinking, oh, well, these sound really good and they look really sturdy and they somehow manage
⏹️ ▶️ John to be comfortable and aren’t heavy, I think the ergonomics and
⏹️ ▶️ John general design of these headphones when they’re just headphones looks pretty good to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like not in their travel mode and not, you know, maybe again, you can’t say anything about the way
⏹️ ▶️ John that it might not be a problem if they managed to pull it off, but I think it would be cool to use these.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never owned a headphone with these kinds of controls on it. So I don’t know if I’m, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong about how easy it is to turn a little dial, but it seems like a good idea to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, first of all, I would bet it is exactly the same part as the Apple Watch Sport. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size-wise, I bet it’s exactly the same size. It looks bigger to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s hard to tell. These are, so that’s one thing. I think these headphones are not gonna be that big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s this huge tension when designing like fashion headphones, which is what these are, between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size and comfort. because what you want comfort wise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty large ear cup because you want everyone’s ear to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not press against any edges. Like ideally, the padding goes around the ear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not touching any part of the ear because that’s better for long-term comfort. But to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have an ear cup that is large and deep to accommodate lots of people’s ears, you have to make the headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty large and that doesn’t look very good. and you have to have the attachment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco points where the headband attaches to them, they have to be further away from people’s heads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the ear cups have to be deeper. And that doesn’t look as good either. And when you’re designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for fashion, you have to prioritize how you will look when you’re walking around a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco city with these on. Because even though I never walk around with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size noise-canceling headphones are, many people do. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a thing that people have to design here. And Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of its good qualities, is not so good at prioritizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfort over aesthetics and size. And so I think these are gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty small. And I think for anybody for whom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small headphones are not comfortable, I bet this is gonna be a problem for you. Unfortunately, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these people. So that, again, this is another reservation I have. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think these are gonna be substantially smaller than what you think, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a potential comfort risk. They
⏹️ ▶️ John look huge in the photos, but you just don’t know, maybe they’re using small models. But one thing I can say
⏹️ ▶️ John is I applaud the fact that they are vertically rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ John and not circular, like the Behr Dynamics, because ears are roughly vertically
⏹️ ▶️ John oval things, right? not that nobody’s most most people’s ears are not circular
⏹️ ▶️ John right and so i’m glad that these are proportioned like an ear which gives your ear a fighting chance they
⏹️ ▶️ John do look shallow though they don’t look particularly deep and the pads look pretty uh like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the border defined by the pads the pads look pretty fat so there’s not a huge amount of room maybe for
⏹️ ▶️ John larger ears in there but at least they’re the right shape so there’s a a fighting chance this is the problem with any product like
⏹️ ▶️ John this that you know has to fit on people’s bodies people’s bodies very these things
⏹️ ▶️ John are only adjustable in one way which is those little stainless steel tubes that come out slide out different lengths.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that’s the adjustability but there is still the place where they connect to the headphone looks like a ball joint
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can swivel in all directions which is a very good idea because I hate the headphones that demand that the ear
⏹️ ▶️ John cups remain exactly sort of you know parallel to each other or whatever and don’t twist
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way. So I think these have a fighting chance to actually be comfortable despite the
⏹️ ▶️ John weight if it if your head and ears fit within the bounds
⏹️ ▶️ John of the design and you know we should look at the size and we can you know make little models and figure it out but
⏹️ ▶️ John in all the pictures just
⏹️ ▶️ John week I’ll have these ear cups look so big to me right they just they just
⏹️ ▶️ John look gargantuan they don’t look deep they look shallow but they look really big and I and they look
⏹️ ▶️ John they look comfortable like they have that comfort look to them the only the only thing I’m a little bit worried about and uh mark
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell me if you have headphones like this, the mesh top, lots of headphones have this mesh top. I’ve never used a headphone with a mesh
⏹️ ▶️ John top. How do they feel in general?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’ve had one that was exactly like that, but I’ve had a lot of different like headband designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re all different and they’re all over the map. And how comfortable a headband design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, is very complicated and varies a lot person to person. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing about this to me that screams, this will definitely be comfortable or uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably gonna vary for everybody. I will say on your size estimations, keep in mind that what you’re viewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the headphones on their absolute smallest setting, because the steel, like, you know, push in, push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out tubes that raise and lower the ear cups appear to be pushed almost all the way in in these pictures, because it looks best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you extend that downward, you know, an inch on either side or whatever it is, however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big you wear your headphones, they will look smaller proportionally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the thing that concerns me about the headband, and I think this is a universal thing, people don’t like stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John tugging on their hair, right? And so in general, I feel like headbands
⏹️ ▶️ John that are made of what this looks like, like a soft touch, rubberized kind of plasticky thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John are not ideal because they sit on your head and there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of friction between the band and your hair. And any kind of movement there, it’s gonna feel like the thing is tugging on your
⏹️ ▶️ John hair. Now the mesh part doesn’t do that. The mesh part’s not gonna tug on your hair, but the whole thing isn’t mesh. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John get the idea that the mesh like a tennis racket springy kind of thing where that’s supposed to be contacting your head
⏹️ ▶️ John but the borders on it are these thick tubes of the rubbery stuff and I do wonder if they
⏹️ ▶️ John will come in contact with your hair and mess with it a little bit. I mean presumably this is all the things that they
⏹️ ▶️ John tested and we’ll have to just see how it goes but like my experience with over your headphones over the years of spending
⏹️ ▶️ John hours a day on them you know at work and coding and stuff like that is I tend to like the ones that are actually a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John slipperier up there just because having stuff tugging And her hair is terrible.
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AirPods Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Back a little bit to the market for these and the Aeroplane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t include an audio cable and there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no regular, you know, 3.5 millimeter audio jack on them and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t operate passively. Every one of their competitors comes with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a headphone cable because sometimes you need that and one of the most common places you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need that is on airplanes, where if you want to use the in-flight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entertainment system, and you want to like listen to the movie that you’re playing on that crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux screen, you have to plug into it somehow. Sometimes they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth support, but that’s usually more trouble than it’s worth to try to get that to work. So usually you’re plugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a jack on the screen or on the armrest. And so you need a 3.5 millimeter cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Bose comes with one, the Sony comes with one. Also, sometimes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on a plane, on a long flight with your noise canceling headphones, and your battery dies, and you wanna keep using the headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it turns out, headphones can be usually passive devices that require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no power of their own and just get their power from the audio signal of the headphone cable. And almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these noise canceling headphones can operate as just passive headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where even if they have no power, their battery’s totally dead, if you plug an audio cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that jack on them and plug it into an audio source, usually you can play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music through them even with no battery power left. The AirPods Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as we can tell from people asking questions and press briefings and everything, it seems like they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no passive operation. So once their battery is dead, they cannot operate at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do have that lightning port for charging and there is a cable that Apple sells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only works on like one Beats model and this, that has 3.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeter plug on one end, not the jack, but the plug on one end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the lightning port on the, or lightning plug on the other end. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use that cable, sorry, apparently I said AirPods Pro, I mean Max. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use that cable to connect the lightning port on this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on something. And this will apparently take audio in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. That cable is $35. Nobody has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one yet because like, it’s not the cable that connects your iPhone to headphones. Like that little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dongle thing that connects your iPhone to headphones that doesn’t have a headphone jack. It’s not that. But that might work though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know that that doesn’t work. It might, but the audio goes the other direction on this one. Some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combination of other stuff might work here, depending on how this works. But all we know for sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the Apple cable definitely does work, and that’s the one they say works, and it’s $35. And so-
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon has cheaper ones, and I have to think, we talked about this when Lightning first came out, and remember how
⏹️ ▶️ John they had a way to send analog audio over? When the iPhone 7 came out, how
⏹️ ▶️ John does the adapter work or whatever? We don’t know that this does the same thing, but it’s entirely plausible
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s exactly what this is, that it’s just a weird way to essentially connect a
⏹️ ▶️ John regular analog audio cable up to these things. And we do know from, this is from,
⏹️ ▶️ John where did this come from, let me see. We do know from Matt Panzerino that these headphones do not
⏹️ ▶️ John support USB audio. So if you’re thinking you’re gonna use them like a USB audio device and send digital
⏹️ ▶️ John audio data over a USB cable to them, that does not work, right? So what could possibly be traveling
⏹️ ▶️ John over that lightning to 3.5 millimeter jack cable. It’s gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John be analog audio, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most likely, yes. So, I mean, that’s what I’m hoping because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, market fit wise, this is hilarious because as John said, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanna bring this cable with you, say on an airplane, to plug into the in-flight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio system or your laptop easily, whatever, you know, there’s lots of ways or reasons, a Nintendo Switch, Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of reasons you might want to plug analog audio into your headphones on a plane or in real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. And so if you bring this cable with you, there’s nowhere in the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put it, A. B, you had to pay $35 extra for it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your already very expensive headphones. So you’re hitting about $600 for
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean- You could wrap it around the headband because there’s plenty of room because it’s not like the ear cups are
⏹️ ▶️ John folding into the area. you’ve got your beautiful headphones in their leather case with this ugly cable wrapped around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This cable, by the way, which is not available in all these colors. It’s only black or white. So you’ll have this non-color match cable, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though Apple makes color match cables for every Beats headphone and every Beats headphone comes with them. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll put all that aside for now. So assuming you do all this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s my one question on this, which I don’t think we will know until we can get some press reviews or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I can actually have one of these in my hands. Is there a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero or effectively zero latency audio into these headphones?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know over Bluetooth this is not possible. What I want to know is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can somebody plug these headphones in to a computer or an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio device with that cable and have zero or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perceptibly zero latency on that audio, because that will affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether these can be used for video games, for podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording, for podcast or video editing, for live monitoring, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like on a video shoot somewhere and you wanna plug something into your phone real fast, or whatever it is, like your camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many use cases, so many applications that many of Apple’s customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do where you need zero latency, headphone monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or listening. This is the one big thing that when I’m bringing, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a trip and I wanna bring only my AirPods Pro, I can get away with that as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I don’t have to do anything that relates to podcasting, recording a podcast or editing one. I did edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on AirPods once, it sucks, it’s terrible, because of the latency, it’s really a hard thing to do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very unpleasant, you don’t wanna do it if you don’t have to. and recording one is nearly impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way, for anybody who doesn’t podcast, the way it works is you need to hear yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you’re speaking into the microphone, you hear it back through your own headphones live. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the same way if you are old enough, like us, to have used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones back when they were hardwired, you know, landline phones. If you’ve ever used a landline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, when you speak into a landline phone, you hear yourself out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earpiece as well as the other person. And you hear yourself with zero latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there’s any delay in hearing yourself, it sounds very strange. And so it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t, it drives you nuts. You can’t have any latency. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every podcasting targeted USB microphone has a headphone jack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it also. So you can plug in headphones to your USB microphone and hear yourself back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no latency, without your voice having to travel first to the computer and back and be processed by any kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like no latency, you hear yourself exactly. And if you don’t have that, it’s very disconcerting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s harder to podcast well. Similarly, if you’re editing a podcast or video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need that because as you’re watching the play head move forward, it’s crossing over audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re not hearing for another, whatever, 50, 100 milliseconds afterwards. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it significantly harder to edit. If you’re editing video, same problem, even worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. And for video playback, the system frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are made to take audio latency into account. And so if you play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a video through an app that uses the system video playback frameworks, the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows if you’re listening to Bluetooth headphones, it knows what audio latency is for most headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or for Bluetooth in general, and it accounts that, so it’ll do things like delay the video by a couple of frames
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it lines up with the headphones, so that your audio and video play in sync. But any app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does not take advantage of that, or does not take that into account, or can’t take that into account, which is almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything besides video playback, you have, like, latency in audio playback causes problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and makes it either difficult or worse to do a lot of things. One of the great things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sonys and the Boses and almost any other noise-canceling headphone is that you can bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on a trip and you can have that be the only headphone you have on that trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if you happen to need to record something or monitor something or edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something or plug into a Nintendo switch or anything like that you can use the exact same pair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of headphones with that cable they come with to just plug it right in and you have zero latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passive like totally normal audio unprocessed normal audio with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the AirPods Max I know you’re not going to have unprocessed audio, I know you’re not going to have passive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operation possible with no power, but I don’t know whether it’s possible to have zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency input. And if it is, which I hope it is, that’s great because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then people can more often bring only or own only these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones. This could be someone’s only pair of headphones who There’s all sorts of things if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a zero latency input. If it doesn’t, then that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one less thing about it that can differentiate it from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods Pro or the regular AirPods, both of which are very convenient, small, portable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Pro has great noise cancellation and pretty decent sound, but you can’t use those things for zero latency applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no zero latency input on those because there’s no input on those. This has an audio input.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it’s zero latency. I will tell you as soon as I know. Hopefully some of the press reviews will cover this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the one thing I really wanna know here. That’s my one big question. The sound, I’m pretty sure these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are gonna sound pretty good. Like that’s, like Apple has a pretty good track record with that in recent years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re gonna sound pretty good. They’re talking about all sorts of, you know, technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks and tricks and advanced methods they’re using to do things like try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to measure, you know, the ceiling around your ear and every person is different and have adaptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EQ and everything, that all sounds great. I bet they’re gonna sound good. I don’t know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna sound amazing, but they might, and I bet they’re at least gonna sound very good. My question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, can I bring only these on a trip? And that’s the one big unknown.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to bring these and then the inevitable third-party case that will actually have a place for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to put the cable you just bought for $35.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to also bring the Apple case, otherwise they’ll never turn off. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I think like I said-
⏹️ ▶️ John ever carried around AirPods without the case? But like I said, with the sensors on them, they’ll know when they’re not on
⏹️ ▶️ John your head. And I assume they’ll just go into sleep mode then. Like why would they not do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods don’t do that. AirPods, like they sense whether they’re in your ear or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, who’s carrying AirPods without the case? You’re not gonna be doing that for very long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, but the reason I don’t is not because of like, you know, breakage or loss. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods without the case fit very well in that little jeans change pocket. But the thing is, if you walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around with that, they will sometimes, they’ll mistakenly think they’re in your ear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ll turn on.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because their proximity sensors are pressed up against your leg, but these things have, it’s much harder to
⏹️ ▶️ John fool these because they’re so much bigger. It doesn’t take much to cover the- Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re in a bag or something. I bet you have to have that case, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re not using them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I say? It doesn’t have, it has optical sensors, right? It’s gotta know, there’s no way that you’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John two things pressed up against both of the cups in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John convinces that it’s next to your head. I don’t know, we’ll see when we get these things. It just feels like, I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods get confused about whether they’re, if you put them in a pocket, especially a tight pocket, you know, they’re so small,
⏹️ ▶️ John those little pinprick sensors on there, that texting proximity, it’s easy to fool them. It should
⏹️ ▶️ John be much harder to fool these. If that stupid magnetic case is the only way to get them to go to sleep, that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy. But hey, with 20 hours of battery life, then just assume it’s a one day charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John And charge them all. And so a few more tidbits from Jason Snell. He asked about this. They say they get a
⏹️ ▶️ John five minutes of charge, gives you 90 minutes of use. So they charge pretty quickly. No claims about water resistance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he says, so maybe don’t use it while exercising. But the idea that someone would want to sweat into their $500 headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then the ear cups look like they’re made of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This category is not, like nobody exercising uses this category of headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially it’s so heavy. They’d be like bouncing, they’d be bouncing up and down on your head. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like rucking, you know, you guys know what that is. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no. It’s you put heavy weights in a backpack and walk around anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. To give yourself some exercise for your neck muscles. Replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John cushions, if you you know, the cushions are magnetically attached, as we said before, which is nice and very
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple replacement cushions are 70 bucks, which is typical Apple, Apple markup on what regular
⏹️ ▶️ John cushions might cost. That’s actually not bad. Yeah. If the battery goes bad, eventually 80 bucks battery
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement, which is reasonable. I mean, that’s the other thing people are talking about with these headphones. They are made
⏹️ ▶️ John of aluminum ear cups and stainless steel tubes, and they look kind of like they don’t have a lot of moving parts. They look
⏹️ ▶️ John like they could be sturdy, and if you buy these, unlike the Apple Watch Edition, it’s not like these are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John age out technology-wise very quickly, because if they do a good job as headphones and they sound good,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they support a fairly rich feature set, like hell, people buy headphones that don’t support spatial audio
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. How do they get around with those? No dynamic EQ. And sometimes people buy headphones that don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have noise cancellation and yet you can still use those Primitive feature headphones as they call them
⏹️ ▶️ John For decades, right? So if these I’m saying is if you buy a pair of these and you like them and they fit you well and
⏹️ ▶️ John they sound Good, there’s no reason you can’t use these for long enough that the battery eventually dies and you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John get it replaced So I think if you buy a $550 pair of headphones and three years later, the battery is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a little wonky You’ll shell out 80 bucks to keep using them because they don’t like technology wise
⏹️ ▶️ John unless Apple does something very silly these should last you a very long time if you happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to like them and if they end up being as sturdy as they look. And they do work with Find My,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, that’s from Matt Panzerino. And he also confirmed that they don’t work passively,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that is something that I probably shouldn’t be bummed out about, but it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems crappy. Now, with 20 hours of battery life, I can’t imagine it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that often that one would need to run them passively, which is to say, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery is dead, but you plug it into a plane or a computer or a phone or what have you, and you plug it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a cable, and the power coming through that cable is enough to power the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones, the headphones, but perhaps you wouldn’t be able to use like noise cancellation or anything like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is not possible with the AirPods Max. I also tried to say Pro. It’s not possible with the AirPods Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s kind of crummy. I don’t know. With this, that’s with all things Apple, especially when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes to their accessories. It seems like this is designed to fit Apple’s Apple-y world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you want to do anything else, it’s not for you. If you want to have a case that doesn’t look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous, it’s not for you or buy a third-party case. If you want to plug it into a plane after the battery’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dead, it’s not for you. Sorry, no, look elsewhere. And it’s just, it’s tough because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same way that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a HomePod to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a line in, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for these to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a case that doesn’t stink, to fold a little bit better, to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work passively. And I mean, I’m talking out my keister because I mean, I haven’t handled these. I don’t know anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about these, et cetera. But I don’t know, it’s just, this is the, this is Apple’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the part of Apple that bothers me that they put the guardrails
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so close to the edge of the road that it makes their products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse, I think, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit more of Apple. But, I mean, I’m the same jerk that’s poo-pooing a product that nobody’s ever seen, so who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am I to talk? I don’t know, we’ll see what Marco says in a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s a valid criticism of this product approach, though. Many of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products that Apple makes that we all love so much are really incredible generalists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are incredibly generalist products. They hit a huge, broad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spectrum of their markets and there’s kind of something for everybody in these product lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they do a lot and there’s not a huge amount of sharp downsides to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then Apple makes stuff like the HomePod or like the AirPods Max where there’s some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steep drop-offs to some of the appeal or the capabilities. And what a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will say is this wonderful phrase, well, it’s not for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a place and a time for that phrase. But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple, in so many ways, so often makes products like this where it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so many people that it seems obviously targeted to, that you kind of have to wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is it for exactly? And would it have been possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a few compromises here and there that could make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a hell of a lot more people. Like, you know, the HomePod, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep going back to the HomePod because there’s so many similarities between the apparent market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit between that and this. You’re right, if the HomePod had any kind of input, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it as your TV speakers. And that would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like they learned from the HomePod though. I feel like this doesn’t make the exact same mistake as the HomePod because it does
⏹️ ▶️ John have audio input, right? Like you can imagine, when I first saw this, I just assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John there would be no way to attach a wire to this other than to charge it. But it seems like that’s not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, they didn’t go all the way, which is, hey, just give us an actual headphone cable, because imagine that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does have input, and for now, I’m assuming that that really is analog input.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the exact mistake that they made on the HomePod, and they fixed it on this
⏹️ ▶️ John one, and I think that’s a big deal. Same thing with the physical controls. despite the rumors or whatever they were about touch
⏹️ ▶️ John things, physical controls versus whatever the hell is happening on the top of the HomePod, physical controls was the
⏹️ ▶️ John right call here. They’re learning from their mistakes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think most of the design of this product is good. Now, the one thing that sticks out, and we’ve talked about over and over, is no
⏹️ ▶️ John passive uses. But if you think about this as a product, like the whole idea of this product, I know we
⏹️ ▶️ John think of it as like, hey, it’s a pair of headphones, but the whole idea of the product is the full sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John computational audio feature set. Not just noise canceling, because like, well, I never used noise canceling,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all the other stuff, the spatial audio, the dynamic equalization, the sensing your
⏹️ ▶️ John ear, and like, that’s the whole point of this product. They didn’t just make a set of passive headphones. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a sort of limp mode where, okay, well, all the electronics are off because the battery’s dead,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll just allow the analog audio to feebly, you know, send audio
⏹️ ▶️ John signal to these drivers and it’ll be really low volume, right? That, I think, is the
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing I might have made the same call and said, that’s gonna be such a bad experience using these passively. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do we want to have to design the speakers and the drivers and everything to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John be driven passively, even though we don’t expect them to be used in that mode?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what do we have to compromise about audio quality to make them work well there, while also
⏹️ ▶️ John working okay in the mode where they’re powered? So I can see an argument for these
⏹️ ▶️ John not working as passive things. And assuming this is your latency
⏹️ ▶️ John analog audio input, I think they made a reasonable set of compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who never want to take these on an airplane.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If you just want to use
⏹️ ▶️ John them in your house and have them as a cool set of headphones that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John dance around your living room in or just use while you use your computer, like all the places where AirPods are good, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not an AirPod person, You were an over your headphone person. Plausible, it’s plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I see is I see growth. I see a growth from the HomePod to this. You’re very right that the development history of these
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds very similar and that the HomePod was supposedly gonna be for the Apple television thing and it didn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John work out and like, well, now we got this big product and it just wasn’t priced right. And this could be doing the exact same thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing situation. Although honestly, as someone who owns multiple 300 plus
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar pair of noise canceling headphones, yes, this is more, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the usual Apple markup. And it’s, I think it’s in the realm of like, I think Bang &
⏹️ ▶️ John Olufsen, speaking of them, I think Bang & Olufsen makes a set of headphones that look eerily similar
⏹️ ▶️ John to this, like, and are probably priced very similar and probably don’t have half the computational audio features
⏹️ ▶️ John that these do, right? So I’m not entirely sure this is as far outside the market
⏹️ ▶️ John because the reason the HomePod was, you know, the original HomePod was such a dud is it was competing with $100
⏹️ ▶️ John cylinders from Amazon, right? This is not competing with $100 headphones. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ John competing, I think Apple thinks this is not even competing with $300 headphones. I think they think they’re competing with other $500
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones. Remains to be seen if they really are, if they have the audio quality to stand up to that or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not like they’re coming into a market where everybody is like a hundred bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Or even less for the little dots. They’re coming into a market, headphones, which goes
⏹️ ▶️ John from super cheap all the way up to ridiculous. And they’re not at the ridiculous end. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re gonna sell a lot of them at 500 bucks, it’s how many people buy $500 headphones, but it’s not inconceivable that
⏹️ ▶️ John this could land in the market and fit right into the slot where $500 headphones sit and sell a $500 headphone quantity of
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones. And if Apple’s happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with that, then congratulations, you made a $500 headphone. And then three years from now, you can make the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPod what? AirPods mini? God, I don’t even know what the hell they would call it. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John the $199 version It’s not made of aluminum and it doesn’t weigh as much and it’s cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air pods air, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh golly. Yeah, the air pods, I mean, they’re not pods.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get the air, they’re wireless, I get it. But they’re not like pods, they’re too little. These are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what are they, discs? The air discs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air beats, I don’t know. To be fair, and to clarify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my position on these too, the passive operation, I agree, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very unlikely to happen here. And not that important. Relative to all of its other potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pitfalls and shortcomings, that’s like the least important one.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it had a five hour battery life, it would be super important, but 20 hours, I feel like you’re okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. And yeah, so it makes sense not to have that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever use the passive mode on most recent Bluetooth headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you learn how incredibly bad their drivers actually are. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s happened in the camera market, and our phones certainly are significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefiting from this, but this even applies to a lot of standalone cameras now, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in the olden days when cameras shot onto film, everything about their optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco path had to be perfect because there was no software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing to fix the flaws. Digital cameras, especially modern, low-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones that are maybe very small ones, can rely on software processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only to make up for like, you know, the noise that their crappy little sensors produce,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even to correct for optical distortions. So they don’t have to put really great glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of the, you know, almost any modern camera, because the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s built into them can automatically correct for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the known optical flaws of that lens or of the optical path that’s going through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so making something modern and digital with modern software advances, modern computational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power, has actually enabled it to use crappier components or fit in smaller spaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and correct for those flaws in software rather than have to have the perfect physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture path. The same thing has happened to headphones. As headphones moved to Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they got significantly upmarket, in part helped by Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part helped by Beats, in part helped by just the world moving in this direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They got a lot of budget applied. Portable headphones didn’t used to cost $300 as the baseline. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be the top of the line. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can now afford to have lots of electronics in there as the price of small computational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embedded computers and stuff has plummeted, and the price of headphones has gone way, way, way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Newsflash, it doesn’t cost $350 to make a pair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of headphones like the Sonys and the Boses. Not even close. These are very, very high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profit items. So they can afford to have, you know, certain computational benefits in there. At the same time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth by definition, unlike a wired headphone, Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always able to process the audio with a DSP, you know, with digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing before it’s sent out to the headphones. And so any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaws in the headphone drivers, any flaws in their frequency response or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distortion characteristics or things like that, they can build in like a stock EQ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profile to the headphones that’s always on. And they can correct for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those flaws the same way cameras correct for optical distortion now. They can correct for some of those flaws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in software constantly. So they’re able to ship crappier drivers or drivers in more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromised physical enclosures that wouldn’t be able to reproduce sound unassisted, that’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well balanced or that good or whatever. And so they do. And this is why if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play any, especially Bose is a severe difference between Bose’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and off modes. If you play a Bose headphone in passive mode and then you turn on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing, it sounds radically different. They both sound like garbage, but the one that’s off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like even more garbage, and you’re shocked that they’re able to pull anything out of the non-garbagey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, or the powered one, rather. They’re both garbagey. So Apple’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with these headphones, too. Like, they talk all about all their Active EQ features and everything, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they’re doing that. So these headphones, with no processing at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would probably sound about as good as if you ever took an iPhone Raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shot and didn’t apply any noise filtering to it or anything and just like took it raw as it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was. And like those pictures raw look like garbage. These headphones raw might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound like garbage. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. For Apple to require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their processing pipeline at all times makes a lot of sense. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I am super excited about, cause here’s the thing, we’ve talked a lot about our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential, you know, criticisms and pitfalls of this product, But like the HomePod, like I like the HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like these AirPods Max, like I think I’m probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like these. There are some, I have some reservations as I’ve said, but I think I’m probably gonna like them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I like them, they could be really incredible because one thing I’m really super excited about is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparency mode. Transparency mode on AirPods Pro has changed the game for headphones in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my opinion. Like it used to be that to get anything like that, you would have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use things like our past sponsor, Aftershocks, the bone conduction headphones. Like I’d have to use those. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love those so much is because I was able to hear the world around me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hear my podcast as I’m like walking around with my dog or whatever. And so I could like stop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say hi to people. I could hear cars coming. You know, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to hear the world around you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selectively. And then as I’m walking past a leaf blower, I can turn on noise cancellation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it turns down a leaf blower. I can take these same headphones that I can wear outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m walking my dog and hear everything. I can take those same headphones on a plane and turn on noise cancellation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to hear things at a low volume. And so it’s wonderful to have both of those things in one headphone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have super good isolation and noise canceling when you want it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then to also have amazing transparency that like the Sony’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if the Bose’s offer these, Recent Sony models do offer a pass-through mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is like Apple’s transparency mode, but it’s nowhere near as good. It sounds kind of weird. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could, you definitely know that you’re listening to like the microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through your headphones that’s being slightly altered on the way to your ears. Whereas like the transparency mode on AirPods Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can almost forget that it’s there. It’s like, it’s so good. It really is. Transparent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a great word to use for it because transparent in audio means you don’t notice it. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great, that’s exactly how transparency mode is on AirPods Pro. So on AirPods Max, assuming it’s as good or better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be a game changer to have that good of a transparency mode in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size headphones. And to also presumably have really good full-size noise cancellation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you want it with that one hardware button on top. That is gonna be great on planes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if everything else about these is good. And that’s why I hope these are good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they are good, they could be worth $550
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some people. Like, again, I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be a mass market product. I don’t think you’re gonna see like, you know, consumer reports and wire cutters saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are gonna be the best noise canceling headphones for most people, because they’re just too expensive. And, you know, most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are gonna be totally happy paying like slightly more than half the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for one of their competitors, that’s probably gonna be almost as good in most ways. But if these really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are as good as Apple says they are, and if all these potential pitfalls are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workable, and they aren’t as bad as we think they could be, this could be an amazing product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really hope it is, I really, really do. Because the AirPods Pro are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, they’ve made almost every other headphone irrelevant to me. If this could do that even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further for full-size headphones and for more people who maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods Pro don’t fit or whatever, more power to them. I really hope they do it. 45 minutes was so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Last question. I know, seriously. Last question on these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headphones. Marco and headphones. Oh yeah, it’ll only be five minutes, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John course. I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have them yet. I know, just wait until you do. Last question on the headphones. What color did you get? I got blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t frankly love any of the colors that they’re offering. Oh, the blue looks really good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff said that she wanted the blue. Like if she were to get a pair, she said she’d want the blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so because I think these are a risk, I think these are a high risk. I think there’s a high risk that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either I will return them because they won’t be at all what I want, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I won’t like them, but Tiff will. So I yielded to her preferences on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s gotta be only one color choice, which is the white, which you would think that that can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John the right color choice for any headphone, but in the AirPod family, as we know, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John it in any color you want as long as they’re white. And that is the choice that I think most people should make.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, if I got a pair of these, I would say, all right, white, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods are very small and are shiny, glossy plastic that tends
⏹️ ▶️ John not to accumulate smudges, but this sort of matte-looking headband
⏹️ ▶️ John might get dirty. So then I start looking at the black one, but then black is super boring. and
⏹️ ▶️ John I have fatigue at the muted anodized color thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone on Twitter pointed out that the headband colors match the iPhone 12 colors
⏹️ ▶️ John and the ear cup colors match the iPhone 12 Pro colors. No, the iPad Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, the iPad Air colors, so there you go. Someone will have to hold them up and see is this literally the same green as the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Air or does it just look similar to our eyes in these product shots? But anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure you can anodize aluminum to not be so muted, but Apple’s in this muted
⏹️ ▶️ John phase and I feel like all the muted ones, like the blue, yeah, I guess it’s blue, but it’s like a midnight
⏹️ ▶️ John blue headband and it just kind of faded iPad Air blue for the ear cups and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just not doing it for me. So I like the black and I like the white. But I really hope most people do buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the white because then it’s like the white AirPods. You see someone with a bright
⏹️ ▶️ John white set of giant over your headphones like, oh, those must be the Apple ones. Oh, and speaking of Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of, let’s not say it’s amazing, it’s notable to me
⏹️ ▶️ John that these gigantic ear cups that do not have a touch pad on them also do not have an Apple logo
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere on them. And you would think Apple doesn’t do that, they don’t put logos on their products. Look at the back of your phone, look at the back of your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not above putting a big Apple logo dead center on a big flat surface. They have two flat surfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John on here and they didn’t put a single thing on them. Even the engraving, which by the way is super cool and you can use emoji, the engraving
⏹️ ▶️ John is on the edge and not on the uh you know on the sides of the thing it’s like on
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on where like the little stalk goes into the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um i just i never thought about that you’re right there’s no apple logo on them i i wonder do you think it’s because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to put one on each cup and there’s nothing with two apple logos on it
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i don’t know if there’s no apple logos on this i mean you can get it an exam there’s probably some apple logo hiding somewhere but
⏹️ ▶️ John um the the other the other thing i was bringing this up on twitter of like how do you how do you tell which is the right or the left? Now the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John answer is once you own these things you figure out that the whatever the right or the left one is the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John digital crown on it. It’s a thing that you can physically feel, again yay for physical buttons, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see it with your eyes it’s very clear once you know which side that little thing is on it’s always on that side. But they do put a big
⏹️ ▶️ John R and L inside the ear cups which is something that I hadn’t seen before but apparently every headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturer under the sun does. They do it by stitching slightly differently like making the stitching thicker
⏹️ ▶️ John on the little mesh that is inside the earcup so you have to look inside the earcups for a gigantic R or
⏹️ ▶️ John L but I’m amazed at how many headphones get this wrong like I posted pictures of my Sony gaming headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and uh the even in the the Beyerdynamic DT 770s um
⏹️ ▶️ John they like to do embossed R and L on plastic and it’s hard to see that especially in dim lighting the
⏹️ ▶️ John Beyerdynamics have braille so if you know braille or you just learn what series of bumps mean R and L. At least you can
⏹️ ▶️ John feel it without having to look with your eyes. But in general, if there’s a wire and you learn that the wire comes out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, I’ve, I’ve held so many barodynamic headphones. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never realized that those bumps were braille. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John What did you think they were?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I just, I didn’t, I wasn’t paying that much attention, but I know exactly the bunch of time I have a pair right over there. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where, where are these? Hold on. Where are these?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, it’s on like, it’s where, it’s where like the yoke connects to the headband.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Oh, yeah, it’s very snazzy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But with wired headphones, though, you just learn which side the wire comes out of and hope that you don’t have one of those terrible headphones where
⏹️ ▶️ John the wire comes out of both sides. You just learn which side the wire comes out. Like, there’s usually a physical way for you to tell which is which,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple also did the thing where if you look inside the ear cups, they stitch the mesh differently. It just makes me think
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, boy, do you really care about audio quality, Apple? If you’re making different thicknesses
⏹️ ▶️ John of stitching in an R and an L pattern, that makes the left and the right ear cups sound different. You’ll have to account
⏹️ ▶️ John for that in software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John make that big of a difference. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Earpads make a big difference because of like the rim part. The actual part that covers the driver,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little thin piece of cloth makes almost no difference at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, these are very sort of minimalist and featureless. Like, the ear cups are big
⏹️ ▶️ John expanses of a very smooth matte aluminum and there’s nothing on them. No
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo, no markings of any kind, no R, no L. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can get them engraved, but you totally should because it looks cool. That’s on the top edge. You can’t see it when looking from the
⏹️ ▶️ John side. So I can’t wait to see somebody in real life with these. The first time that happens might be the next time I see Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they really sell and the volume is worth
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. And they’re gonna sell them, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t believe we did the entire show. Of course I can’t actually believe it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding? Of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can. Thanks to our sponsors this week, the Apple Pro Max headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John my God. You don’t even know what they’re called. You’re gonna, you’ve already bought these things. You don’t even know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re called. Yeah, yeah. The Airheads Max. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Flatfile. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can do that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially less than $550. Quite a bit less. At http.fm slash join. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will talk to you next week, probably about something else. Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s 50-50. Maybe. It’s 550 is what it is. Hey-o!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts so
An actual tech podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I finally made an appointment at the genius bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh god, for what? To get your dust bunnies removed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring in my iMac. Fix that thermal paste. I don’t know what they’re gonna do. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always hard, like, when you bring in, like, when you have to tell them, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nerd, like, look, I’m pretty sure that I have thermal issues that are physical in nature. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just nodding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like, did you try reinstalling the entire OS? Like I’m not gonna come on like cuz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna be like did you restore your phone? Like they’re you know, they’re gonna be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John My experience is if you go in there and just rattle off like a bunch of crap that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John them Convinces them that you know what you’re talking about. They don’t make you do all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I hope over the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John they will because they have a script but in person they look in your eyes and be like, okay
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know Cuz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing is like imagine from their point of view, you know So if somebody comes in and says, my fans are running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time, yeah, you know what, it’s probably some kind of weird software thing because there’s all sorts of things on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that consume 100% CPU as background processes all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. But they don’t have to have that discussion with you because if you frame it, here’s how I think you should frame it. You should frame it as,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a hardware problem and here’s why. And they could be like, okay, well now that you framed it that way, I’m not gonna run any of your software.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna boot it from one of my things. I’m just gonna ignore anything that you have. I’m not gonna run any of your software.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna run your OS. I’m just, you know, whatever. like whatever diagnostic tool they have to boot this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John up in a place where it’s like total safe boot, ignore everything that’s on the drive, ignore this person’s crap,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just let’s see hardware wise, like run our hardware tests and let’s see what the cooling capacity is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you frame it that way, then if they ignore the software issues,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s what you asked for. And I don’t think you’ll have to do the whole dance of like, let’s reinstall, let’s reset your
⏹️ ▶️ John PRAM, let’s do all this or whatever. And then the second thing is, the reason they roll their eyes is because of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John customers come in and they think they know what the problem is, but do they really know? Maybe it is a software thing, because you’ve only booted
⏹️ ▶️ John from your OS. So maybe your fans are running constantly because you have some things messed up in your
⏹️ ▶️ John SMC, and you actually do need to do a PRAM reset. So don’t just assume you know what the problem is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I would assume you know what the problem is, and I would say, please just replace my thermal compound. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and clear out everywhere dust could possibly be in the cooling solution, please clean it out. Yeah, remove all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spider eggs. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then they’re gonna hand you a sandbox and say, well, we built this from the sand that was within your iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what you’re saying is you want me to open this up and blow the dust out of it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all? That’s all?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John If you’re so smart,
⏹️ ▶️ John why can’t you do it? Yeah, the thermal compound is sus. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thermal compound is sus, as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. I’ve seen that word so often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so close with the, I had like a whole iFixit shopping cart ready to check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with all the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different, like the little pizza cutter thing that you have to like cut the screen adhesive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the new adhesive kit and a tube of Arctic silver. And I was all ready to go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m like, I just, I can’t. The IMAX service wedge, you could prop the screen up at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right angle. But I was just like, I was reading the guide and I’m like, okay, you know, you have to separate the screen out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, you have to cut the adhesive around the whole screen with this pizza cutter thing. Then you have to like slowly, gradually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull the screen up, but don’t rip the cable, and you better unlatch the cable in this exact right way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just like, oh my God, I’m gonna break something, and I’m gonna feel like such an idiot. And then what finally did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, I looked up my AppleCare coverage expires the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day after Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no. You love doing this. You did it with image retention, now you’re doing it again with your dustbin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly, so I’m like, AppleCare expires in a couple of weeks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta get this done.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is your relationship with IMAX. So you buy IMAX, you buy these all-in-one computers, they eventually manifest
⏹️ ▶️ John problems that you ignore for as long as possible, and then in a panic right before your warranty’s gonna run out,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you say, here, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please, quickly. Well, because, would you do anything different? I mean, being without your desktop sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a big pain in the butt to get it there, to mail it in or bring it somewhere. It’s a big pain in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butt because they’re huge and heavy and fragile, and so it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’m just, I have such a love-hate relationship with the iMac as a family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, I love iMacs for about two and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. And then like when something goes a little wrong, it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive pain to have it addressed in any way. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John changing the way they lease their iMacs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A new experience to lease their
⏹️ ▶️ John iMacs. That’s what you want, you want a lease. You want to own it for the good years and then when it has any problems, you want to give it back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, but the problem with leasing is that you don’t control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you give it back. So like, imagine if my lease expired right now on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac. Right now is a terrible time to need to buy a new iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Volvo leasing thing, the Volvo rent your Volvo thing, I think you get to pick when you send
⏹️ ▶️ John it back. There’s lots of leasing possibilities. It’s not the same as leasing. What is the Volvo thing called? Subscriptions? What the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is that? Yeah, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, crap, I can’t remember their like branded thing, but yeah, it’s a subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you basically use a car, and when you don’t wanna use a car and you wanna use a different one, You bring the car back and you say, give me
⏹️ ▶️ John a different one. And it’s more expensive, but you always are driving a new car that you like. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you need before IMAX.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I just, and even just the process, I’m gonna have to clone it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be ready for them to restore, because I know they’re gonna restore it. So be ready for them to restore it, and then have to get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, have to restore it from my clone, reset up all my crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s such a pain. this is why I don’t do this more often than necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know, if there was any, and this is again, because of where I’m living
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year, this is much more logistically expensive and complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it normally would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you brought that on yourself, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Congratulations, you played yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John on the bright side, you could drop it walking down the street and shatter the thing and then problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, problem solved, except what the hell would I do then? You’ve got 500 computers in that house, be quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have one desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the problem. But you’ve got the LG 5K, you hook it up to your super fast M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air. Well, and that’s what I’m gonna do in the meantime, because I assume they’re going to need to keep my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like a week or something. So, you know, in the meantime, that’s what I’m gonna bring the
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna know in an hour and a half whether you need a thermal compound replaced and then be done with it. Like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll sit there for a while, waiting for a tech to go look at it, but I don’t think your problem is gonna.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. They might not know in an hour and a half because the only appointment they had was on a Saturday
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, you’re not going to get it back that day, but I’m going to say like they’ll bring it in the back. They’ll sit it there. It’ll when it comes up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the queue, someone will sit with it for a couple of hours. And with all these things are like, oh, we let it sit for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John We let it run. We look at the temperatures or whatever, but hopefully I mean what you’re hoping for. And
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully this is what made you go in. It’s like, look, I can reproduce this for them now. I can just bring this in and
⏹️ ▶️ John just plop it down and say, here, look. I hope so. See how high the RPM is, see how
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no activity on the CPU. This seems abnormal to me. And hopefully they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with you. I hope so. In a noisy Apple store, they might be like, what are you complaining about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I was just thinking the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just thinking the same thing. No, yeah, yeah, I know as soon as I get it there. It’s like when you bring your car to a mechanic, it’s making this noise and he can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it to make the noise. There’s a high risk of that
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, because you will have dislodged the spider eggs when you carry it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. Well, and frankly, if that fixes the problem, it’s like alternative medicine. If that actually fixes the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I said, I said it last show, just take it for a walk. Yeah, my problem’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved then. I only need this computer to last until the next iMac comes out. Whenever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARM iMac comes out, I’m buying it, possibly. Now, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving me nuts with this is, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know what the future roadmap holds and what my future needs are, but like, every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a problem with my desktop, so roughly every three years or so, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always think at that point, maybe I should just go laptop and monitor only again. No, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that. And every time I actually do that, I hate it. And I go running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John back to the desktop. Right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why, so stop thinking about it. But this, but like, one of the, like the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that bad are diminishing over time. Like the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, the laptop I have at least, like has no fan. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan noise cannot happen if I plug my current laptop into
⏹️ ▶️ John Ram limits, SSD limits.
⏹️ ▶️ John But- Here’s your purchase plan. Get the next iMac when it comes out and then get the
⏹️ ▶️ John next Mac Pro when it comes out. Done. We don’t have to keep having this discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, why do I get both? You mean the MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Get the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which presumably will lead the Mac Pro by like a year or two.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then a year and a half later, when you’re still happy with your iMac, or maybe when it’s doing the first thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that annoys you, get rid of it and get a Mac Pro. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, somebody mark this down because that is exactly what’s gonna happen. Some,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless Marco just rage quits everything and buys an Intel Mac Pro tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but it’s a good plan because he gets the cool new ARM iMac which is probably gonna be amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And he’ll love it. And when the honeymoon just starts to end, they’ll release the Mac Pro and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is annoying him about the iMac, he can ditch it and get a modular,
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet, half-size, super fast, extreme capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop and then he’ll just use that forever because Mac Pros last forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I use all my computers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in Marco years. Four years. So what, three months? No, three, four years. For a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop, yeah, four years,
⏹️ ▶️ John five years, something like that. But then you’ll be able to keep the display and swap out the computer, like I’m gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John when the ARM Mac Pro comes out, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, hopefully. I mean, that’s one thing, we don’t know how the XDR ages yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John. That’s like so far so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s the thing, like, you know, in reality, I would love, like if they would just offer the 5K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel as a standalone display, which they still won’t do, what is this, six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years into the 5K panel era? 5K is old and busted, 6K or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing. but like I would love to be in a position where like I would just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a separate monitor and a monitorless desktop. And if one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them needed service, like I would love to be in that situation. Right now, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current Mac Pro XDR situation is not something that I’m super interested in. And that’s why I’m gonna, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna bring back my 5K and just plug in my laptop as at least a temporary solution while my iMac is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being serviced. But I think it’s actually a non-trivial chance that I might end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco liking that a lot and I might just stick with that for a while until the next iMac comes out and I might do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Underscore has done. Underscore’s iMac Pro is turned off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the corner of his office sitting on the floor and he’s using his MacBook Pro full time because it’s so fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That might be my actual situation here. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get this back from service, I might not want it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you say that because until you brought up the soon expiration or the pending expiration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your AppleCare Plus, I really thought that what you were implicitly saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here was that the MacBook Air was so good that you can stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be without the iMac Pro for a week or two, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Now I see it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also about time, but I think you’re onto something. I think you’re right that even though I know how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you hate the LG 5K, which admittedly I’ve never lived with one, but my dad has one and I’ve seen it from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time and it seems fine to me, but you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. It has the perfect name. It’s called the Ultra Fine. And that is the perfect name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. It’s fine. It’s ultra fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nothing about it is great, but nothing about it is awful. It’s fine. It’s ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is ultra, ultra fine. Well, anyway, so I would not be surprised if you end up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey liking that setup so much, like, and you’ll still have problems with it, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately, once you were compelled and forced to live with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Air in 5K setup, I wonder if you’ll find the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that offend you about that to be less offensive than Apple saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you, well, we looked at it and we jiggled some crap around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hope for the best, okay? I wonder if you’ll end up preferring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that for any number of different reasons. So I think you’re right. I think your iMac Pros days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are numbered. In fact, I think if you’re still using it by January 1st, if you’re still using it full-time by January
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1st, I’ll be slightly surprised. Now, in your defense, I am still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flabbergasted that you have not bought a Mac Pro. Now, today, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last couple of weeks since these new Macs came out, it makes a lot less sense, but I am really stunned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco Arment, of all people, has said no to spending a pile of money on something frivolous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have to commend you that you have impressed me and proved me wrong. So who knows what’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen. But I still, if I’m a betting man, I say you’re going to be using that MacBook Air a lot more than you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, I would almost go so far as to say you might buy yourself a MacBook Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of reasons. I don’t even know. Something about the MacBook Air isn’t fast enough, so you need the Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes Marco trips in his house and buys a laptop. Yeah. Falls on his phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a, you know, I haven’t ruled that out. Like I might, like this is one of the reasons why I don’t wanna buy the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Display XDR right now to solve my problem right now. Because I don’t necessarily wanna spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge amount of money with any kind of assumptions about what my setup will be in the next few years. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s gonna be a lot of possibilities and a lot of potential changes. Like because everything’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flux with this transition, it radically can change the landscape of like what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it, what do I need, what do I not need? Like the things the Mac Pro offers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mostly things I don’t need. Like, I don’t need expansion slots for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. I don’t need that many CPU cores. Like, I have 10 in my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and that’s great. I don’t, like, even when I bought the iMac Pro, I didn’t get the 18 core model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the 10 core model because, like, I didn’t need the Macs. I don’t need pretty much any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU power. And that’s, again, one of the Mac Pro’s main focuses is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive potential for GPU power. I don’t need that at all. I don’t use GPUs for anything. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need GPUs to display images. That’s about it. Animate my windows moving around, like very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little. So, you know, I don’t really need anything super there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need like huge amounts of RAM. I have 64 in this and that’s a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can now, can you get that now in the 16 inch? I thought so, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I do buy is a big SSD. Like in this, I have the four terabytes. That was the biggest that was offered at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they offer eight in some of the things and I would love to have that. Ultimately, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I would be totally fine to do all of my work on a 16 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be fine if I had a big monitor and everything. But there are parts of that setup I don’t like as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do like having a laptop that doesn’t have my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and document and file bloat from my desktop. I like that that’s kind of like a clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It’s like, it’s almost like having two cars in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good way. It’s like, if you have like a giant conversion van full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all your crap, and then you have a Miata, you don’t want all your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap in the Miata. Like you want that to be like clean and lightweight, it’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like, I like having a laptop that is a different software setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s lots of advantages to it. And there’s disadvantages, certainly, Like it is a pain in the butt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have stuff synced in a lot of ways. It is a pain in the butt to have to like set up all the software twice. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice though, like if one of them’s in use or if one of them breaks, you have another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Like so there is some benefit to having multiple, to having a desktop and a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but the point is like, because the entire Mac lineup is getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like turned on its head right now in all good ways, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s being totally shuffled up. Right now, the best computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I own is a MacBook Air. That blows my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have never guessed a year ago that that would be the situation I’d be in right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And things that are super important to me are things like fan noise. Well, you know what, maybe. I mean, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably none of the M1 or M whatever based Macs are gonna have bad fan noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point. But like, if they do, I have a great model here that’s fanless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s wonderful. Maybe my solution can be, instead of buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a super high spec desktop every three years, maybe I buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a medium spec laptop every two years and have that be it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don’t know yet. It’s way too early to sell until we see the rest of the Mac transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the ARM chips and see what those products look like and what they’re good at, what needs they serve, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re bad at. I don’t wanna commit to anything. My mind is open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all possibilities here. And that’s why I don’t wanna buy another LG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5K, and I don’t want to buy an XDR. I don’t wanna invest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really heavily or make any assumptions in any particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan for what I’m gonna buy next or what I’m gonna use over the next few years because I think it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. and I want to leave my options open. And that’s why, again, I can assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will probably want the next iMac, but until it shows up, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. We don’t know what it’s gonna be. Whatever it is, I might not want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, or I might not need it. And maybe whatever the next Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is, maybe the next Mac Pro is something that I end up not wanting or needing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe my next computer is a Mac Mini. I don’t know. Like, until we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this lineup plays out, I want as few assumptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and massive upfront investments as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes sense. It is an odd time to want to buy a new Mac. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, unless you want one of the two that has been released, then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the worst times to buy a new Mac. I would argue it’s almost worse than butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time because in this case, you really don’t know what you’re getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas with the butterfly keyboards, like, yeah, we all thought eventually one day, maybe they would backpedal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they eventually did. But up until that time, you were getting a really great computer with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the keyboard. So why not just go ahead and do it? Whereas now, you don’t know what you’re saying no to. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what you don’t know, John. Or no, you don’t know what you know? Oh, god, I’m failing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this like the known unknowns thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, exactly. Donald
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rumsfeld. Yeah. Anyway. I got that reference, John.