catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

413: Suddenly I'm the Marco

Apple’s REJI projects, Marco’s Pro Display XDR, John’s AirPods anxiety, the right way to do “computer” speakers, and the olfactory peril of the Waffle House.

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Waffle House 🖼️
  2. Bigger than a breadbox
  3. Feedback feedback
  4. Angry Casey Update
  5. Marco’s Ethernet adventures
  6. Sponsor: ExpressVPN
  7. Racial Equity & Justice Initiative
  8. Marco’s Pro Stand review
  9. Marco’s Pro Display XDR review 🖼️
  10. The pretty, bad TV
  11. Sponsor: Hover
  12. John’s AirPods anxiety
  13. Sponsor: Flatfile
  14. #askatp: Shared Apple ID ➡️ Family
  15. #askatp: Computer speakers 🖼️
  16. #askatp: Home-finance software
  17. Ending theme
  18. Post-show: CES TV advancements

Waffle House

Chapter Waffle House image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I’m going to be disappointed by your answer, and I know I am. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was thinking just moments before we started recording, is there any food of any kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you miss from your couple of years in Atlanta?

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see. You know, I didn’t leave the house much when I was in Atlanta because I was working from home.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s that. But we did go out to eat a little bit. I would probably say

⏹️ ▶️ John Waffle House. Not that I have super great memories

⏹️ ▶️ John of it, because it’s cheap and it’s whatever, but in fact, the only particularly vivid memory I have is of

⏹️ ▶️ John the gigantic cockroach

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco walking

⏹️ ▶️ John across our table at one of the waffle houses we went to. But there is a certain charm for,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a type of fast food restaurant that we just don’t have in the North. Their menu is

⏹️ ▶️ John not really represented.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down though. I mean, the North had plenty of excellent diners.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s different though. It’s not like, I’m very familiar with diner food, and speaking of something I miss, I totally miss Long Island

⏹️ ▶️ John diner food, and there’s lots of imitation versions of that around here that don’t really do it justice,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Waffle House’s menu is different. It just, it’s a little bit, you know, they’re just everything, the decor,

⏹️ ▶️ John the style, the attitude, everything about it, so. The attitude.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean. I mean, I’ve gone to Waffle House a lot because they’re all over Ohio, so like I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to go to them all throughout like high school and, you know, summer’s home from college before I left.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I missed the idea of my friends and I being out late at night,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having nothing else to do except stay up all night and like hang out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We didn’t even, we didn’t drink or do drugs or anything like that. We just like hung out and like played computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco games and occasionally went out to restaurants late at night. Like that’s all we did. Waffle House was always like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was one of only two that were open 24 hours. And the other one was Steak and Shake, which was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better, but way more expensive. And so Waffle House was frequently the choice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was one of those, you know, Ohio highway stops off of Interstate 70 areas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where so many trucks drive through this area that there’s actually a Waffle House on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both sides of the street. So that way, when the trucks exit off the highway, they can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go right into whichever one is on their side and then keep going, you know, get right back on the highway really easily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is really Waffle House country. yeah, I don’t miss it at all. I still remember

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smell, that you would walk into the Waffle House and you would smell the smell of, I think it was just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like old fryer oil, is what you were smelling. And when you left, your jacket

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything would smell like that for the next 12 hours. It was not an appealing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but it was fun because you were going, as a teenager slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco young adult, you were going and it was late at night and you could drive there yourself or one of your friends could drive you all there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you could stay out late, and it was somewhere you could go when you didn’t have anything else to do. And that’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco novel, fun thing when you’re that age. But as a 38-year-old, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would never in a million years choose to go there unless there was literally no other food in a 20-mile radius.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like Ohio is too far north for, it’s not Waffle House’s natural habitat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ohio is surprisingly southern for being so

⏹️ ▶️ John far north. Yeah, I know. Maybe just not the right climate for the cockroaches. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or palmetto bugs, if that’s what we’re gonna call them.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, no,

⏹️ ▶️ John get out

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of here

⏹️ ▶️ John with that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ohio called them water bugs. Oh, that’s even worse. Totally roaches.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I suppose, like, I mean, a couple of times we went to do like random things and there was like a

⏹️ ▶️ John random barbecue place around somewhere and we would go to it. And like, it’s kind of like you

⏹️ ▶️ John miss the, you know, the average level of random barbecue places. I’m sure we never went to any quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote good ones, but just to know that even if you go to a mediocre one, It’s fine, whereas if

⏹️ ▶️ John in Boston area, if you try to find the best barbecue, it’s not as good as like the random mediocre one you find on the side of the road

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Georgia Midland area. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it probably. Is there anything that you miss in Boston other than the obvious? Like obviously you miss bagels,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously you miss pizza, but is there anything that you feel like barbecue, for example, that Boston just does not have covered?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, diners. Diners were our thing, like Marco was saying, when we were in high school, the only place that was open

⏹️ ▶️ John late. Well, it was different. It was two phases in high school. In the beginning of high school, thing that was open late and it wasn’t open all night diners weren’t 24 7

⏹️ ▶️ John but it was like until 12 31 or whatever were diners

⏹️ ▶️ John and we would go to them in general the diners did not want a bunch of high school students in there so they kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of sneered at us but they had cheap food and we ate it uh and then eventually later in high school taco bell innovation

⏹️ ▶️ John started and they were open super late too and they had less of a problem with teenagers but

⏹️ ▶️ John their food was of course it was disgusting i never

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco never eat

⏹️ ▶️ John the taco bell i did get food at the diners yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so So it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John pizza, bagels, diners, and the ubiquity

⏹️ ▶️ John of passable Italian food restaurants.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That makes sense. I don’t know. I try to think of the place I spent the most time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my childhood, because my dad worked for IBM and we moved all the time. And the place I spent the most time in my childhood was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Northeast, was New York and Connecticut. And I miss bagels, although there’s a pretty darn good facsimile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them here. And I miss pizza. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay facsimiles of that here, but not great. Um, but other than that, I can’t think, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do, I do definitely miss diners cause that was a part of my childhood or late childhood, if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, is as well, but as you had said, Marco, like, even though I am not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey above diner food and I love diner food, it’s not something that I find myself craving at this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phase of my life, even though I crave like Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell and other garbage food. I can’t say that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I crave diners very often, but I’m also not up till one or two in the morning just because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a time, it was, what was Curtis’s conference name? Cocoa Love.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was at a Cocoa Love in Philly a few years back. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember I was hanging out late night with Dave Wiskus, and I love Philly cheesesteaks, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get them usually for multiple reasons, not only availability, but also health. Um, and,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I was in Philly for a conference and there was a, you know, my favorite Philly cheesesteak

⏹️ ▶️ Marco places was right around the corner from where we were. So I was like, Oh, let’s go get a cheesesteak. And it was, you know, 10 o’clock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at night or something like that. Normally like the year before one year earlier, I was at the exact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same conference and I did the exact same thing and it was fine. But this year I forget,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I must’ve been probably, I don’t know, 35 ish. I remember I was just up all night

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with just like heartburn and like upset stomach after having a cheesesteak at 10 p.m. I’m like, oh no, those days are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over for me. I can’t eat a bunch of rich food late at night anymore. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not a thing I can do now. And it was a very fast transition. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally one year that I went from being able to do that with no effects to, oh god, I can’t do this anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey JDG That is very sad. I can’t think of a specific moment that is equivalent to that, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve definitely had those moments where like, oh, that was a poor choice. That thing that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey did just a year or two back and didn’t even blink an eye, oh my, I have regrets.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is, man getting old sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That’s the adult version of diners is, I also did this in my family, like after church you’d go

⏹️ ▶️ John for breakfast. Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Denny’s or Perkins.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh I love Denny’s. At

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a diner, not- Denny’s, oh my god. Well when you’re in Ohio, that’s, look, yeah, Ohio we did Denny’s or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bob Evans, which is also up there. And then college, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chain serving that area was Perkins. And both of those I would put significantly above Waffle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco House in my experience. But honestly, I’d rather go to none of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Waffle House is not about the food quality to be clear. It’s like it’s, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John what the correct equivalent of it is. Maybe McDonald’s? Like, because I feel like McDonald’s is the,

⏹️ ▶️ John not the bottom of the barrel, but like the cheapest fast food.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple House is like the diner, the diner equivalent of a dive bar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John go there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was gonna bring up dive bar, but I have so little experience with dive bars, I didn’t know if that was the right analogy.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s funny. Yeah, it’s very cheap, very straightforward.

⏹️ ▶️ John The attitude I was talking about is that, in my experience, the wait staff that work there were very no-nonsense, kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like diners, but the diner people were a lot meaner.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, Steak and Shake was where it’s at, though. If I could convince everybody to pay a few dollars more for each sandwich,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would wanna bring everyone to Steak and Shake because it was so much better. And I could get the Frisco

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mel.

⏹️ ▶️ John Really? Even as a child, Marco was recommending to get the slightly more expensive option.

Bigger than a breadbox

⏹️ ▶️ Casey James JT Troutman writes, the origin of the phrase

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bigger than a breadbox goes back to Steve Allen and the TV game show What’s My Line. Steve Allen was one of the early panelists

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that program where they had to guess the occupation of a contestant. As the occupation often involved a product, one of Allen’s standard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey queries became is it larger than a breadbox? It eventually evolved into a more alliterative form that has since

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entered the English language. And there’s a website we can link to to talk about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think if somebody ever makes a clip show of all out of context follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for our show. Do you think that would

⏹️ ▶️ John make it in? What do you mean out of context? We know the context, we talked about Bigger Than A Breadbox

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple shows ago. I know we know it. Well, you know, you gotta connect the dots. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how history works. You gotta look at all the texts and put them in chronological order and see how one leads into the next.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see. Oh my goodness. All right, moving right along.

Feedback feedback

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The feedback app, if you use it on your phone, runs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sysdiagnose and includes a system report by default. So one of the things that I have lamented

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my bug reports, which I will put them yet again in the show notes because it’s still happening.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyways, one of the things that’s kind of a pain is the incantation you need to do in order

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to generate a sysdiagnose. And several people wrote in to say that if you have the feedback

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, and I don’t know if that’s pre-installed or not, But if you have the feedback app on your iOS device, you can, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s if you create a new feedback, I’m not sure if there’s a mechanism to attach it to an existing one, but one way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or another, there is a way to have the feedback app generate a sysdiagnose and attach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to a feedback, which is kind of convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ John I put this item in here because I filed a bug today and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I filed it on my

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and it reminded me that the macOS feedback app, when you file any bug,

⏹️ ▶️ John by default, it runs a sysdiagnose whether you want it or not,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? What

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco does that mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John I was filing a cosmetic bug, which was like another cosmetic bug. It was the thing I asked about on Twitter today with the, why the heck is my

⏹️ ▶️ John clock low contrast? It was like dark gray text on a black background. The menu bar clock, I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought it was do not disturb. But then I turned do not disturb on and off, and it never changed. And I’m like, all right, well, maybe this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a bug or a feature, so I’m going to file it. And I file it, and I put in the screenshots, and I explain the situation.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I click the Next button, and I realize, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John It always does a sysdiagnosis. it grinds my computer for 10 minutes, right? I

⏹️ ▶️ John think you can turn that off, or I think it prompts you, like, hey, do you want me to always do a CIS diagnose automatically

⏹️ ▶️ John every time you file a bug, or do you want to do it manually? And last time it asked me that, I think that that’s how this is controlled,

⏹️ ▶️ John I said, eh, just run it, it’s fine, because they’re gonna ask for it anyway, right? Little did I know that they’ll ask for it

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway anyway. Like, even though, even though it’s attached by default to every single bug I file through

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, they will still, after three weeks, come back and say, could you do a CIS diagnose?

Angry Casey Update

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have I have an update Mm-hmm. Great. So I open I open

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback assistant to get the bug numbers to include in the show notes. I Had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no idea that both of them have been resolved They’ve both been resolved with invested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey investigation complete unable to diagnose with current information

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you should have sent a cyst diagnose everything of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I go. Oh John. I will cut you. Are you kidding me right now? I I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe they I didn’t get notified. There’s no comment from Apple in this. There’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the top resolution investigation complete unable to diagnose with current information. Are you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding me Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not going to notify you of that because the last thing they want is for you to notice and get and reopen the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case because like that kind of response is a like, oh, thank God. We can boost the metrics by just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying this was invalid rather than actually investigating anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t say it was invalid. I mean, I think the description is probably accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It probably

⏹️ ▶️ John is. They can’t make any further progress without more information. But rather than ask for more information

⏹️ ▶️ John of a specific type, for example, they just closed the bug. And I don’t feel like that solves the problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I would have thought they would have closed it and said, either closed it and said, oh, we fixed that already, then you see the release

⏹️ ▶️ John notes, or said, we’re closing your bug, but little do you know there are 700 other bugs

⏹️ ▶️ John plus one super master combination bug that we’re still working on for this problem

⏹️ ▶️ John writ large, I suppose. I mean, the way to find out is refile it, make a new bug, do all

⏹️ ▶️ John the things, say, here’s the problem I’m experiencing, here’s the OS’s I’m using, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and see if now they

⏹️ ▶️ John close it as a dupe or something similar. You know, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only way to do it. Let me state for the record that Casey List’s personal opinion is never file a radar because it’s a waste of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your f***ing time. Why, Apple? Why? Just, can you try? Can you at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretend? Can you pretend like you care for me, for Casey, for your pal? Just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretend, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I strongly suggest you take calm Casey’s advice here and just stop filing it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more you file it and keep checking on it, the more aggravation you’re going to face. It’s clear that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a hard to diagnose thing. You’re not going to get anywhere. So just hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait until it resolves itself in future software updates or until you restore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone or until everyone in your family using Android stops trying to communicate with you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Lanker Oh, God, I’m so angry. All right.

Marco’s Ethernet adventures

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheer me up Marco and tell me about, apparently there’s a shocking conclusion to your Thunderbolt Ethernet situation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cheer me up,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is. So I have some follow up. For the last couple episodes, I’ve been talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my various adventures with the Thunderbolt Ethernet docks, or Thunderbolt docks that happen to include

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet ports, from CalDigit and from OWC.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was reporting that both of them, their built-in Ethernet ports would not connect properly at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigabit speed on my port here. And the iMac Pro I had here before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected just fine. The Mac Mini I plugged into test connected just fine,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigabit, you know. The, interestingly, the USB-C ethernet adapter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple sells that actually Belkin makes, that would not connect, but the old Thunderbolt 1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapter through a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 dongle would connect just fine at gigabit speed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So something was weird, and I’m like, I don’t know what it is about this these ethernet ports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these Thunderbolt docks that won’t connect at gigabit speed. Something’s up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did a bit more testing. I even bought a new switch to test a few other combinations of things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I determined that it is not seemingly the dock’s fault.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems to be some kind of wiring problem between the network

⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch in the closet five feet away that and there’s a cat 7 wire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that runs from that through the wall to a wall jack under my desk. Somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between that, between the Cat 7 cable that goes from the switch to the wall jack, somewhere in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that chain, something is slightly wrong in a way that the Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet adapter and desktop Ethernet ports can get around. Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is about it, I don’t know if it’s if one of the wires is crossed and they’re not doing the like auto MDI X thing correctly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know So if it’s like a tolerance issue where like some wire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like very slightly finicky or out of whack and they like transmit at higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco voltage or something, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the physical side of it to know. But whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, my Ubiquiti switch in the closet will not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect at gigabit speed to some things on the other end of this wall jack.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I even tried another Ubiquiti switch plugging into this wall jack as like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an uplink switch, and that wouldn’t do it either. I tried all different settings on the switch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco port, like disabling, uh, what’s the S-tree? SDP! Disabling that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, like in case that was it, I tried locking the switch port to gigabit, like all sorts of things that people recommended I try.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Couldn’t get that to work with a switch on this end. Then I thought, I wonder if it’s two Ubiquiti devices,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that can’t talk to each other correctly. cheap Netgear switch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that little blue Netgear gigabit switch that probably all of you out there have bought at one time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’ve been selling the GS105. I’m pretty sure they’ve been selling the same switch for like 15 years. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I got one of those to see like, oh, let me eliminate any chance of like ubiquity smart stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to each other, trying to work things out, plug in a dumb switch. That could, that only got a hundred

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabit as well. So something’s up, but it is not the Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dock’s fault as far as I can tell because switches can’t connect through this port either. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco originally thought, like, oh, I’ll use a switch kind of as like a repeater in a way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, if I can get a switch that can connect through this wire through the wall, then I can plug anything else into that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch and the issue will probably be resolved. But I can’t even get a switch to do it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, I don’t know why the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter and the desktops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do this just fine and a Ubiquiti Switch can’t and seemingly no one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s that I’ve tried. I don’t know what it is. But you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t get the network person who installed these out here anytime soon so I’m going to have to come up with some other solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So right now my solution is, I am using, I’m keeping both Thunderbolt docks,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am using the OWC one that’s the new OWC Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro dock I think it’s the one that has the three Thunderbolt 3 out ports in addition to the one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco input port because the only ethernet adapter I can get to work at gigabit speed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like that I can plug into my laptop is that old Thunderbolt 1 adapter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I need an extra Thunderbolt port to plug it into but I’m also running my monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the Thunderbolt dock. So my only options, I can either use the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco count digit and then run the Ethernet adapter through the dongle on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco second port on my MacBook Air, but then I have two cables I have to plug and unplug every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. That ruins the whole appeal of Thunderbolt. So I’m keeping instead the OWC one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, which is I can have the monitor and two other Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices plugged in on the hub and then all that still runs correctly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through one cable into the Mac. So that’s the setup I have now. I will talk a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit about the XDR in a little while, but that is the one I’m running. The XDR does, for the record,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work through both of these docks just fine. The CalDigit doesn’t really specify. I think it says

⏹️ ▶️ Marco max 5k, but it works. CalDigit totally works. All it is to say, my Ethernet problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is some kind of wire gremlin in the wall and it’ll be some time before I can get that fixed, so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to deal with hacky workarounds in the meantime.

⏹️ ▶️ John Delightful. How are you testing the Netgear thing? So describe the setup. You’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got a thing coming out of your problematic wall. You plug it into the Netgear thing, and then do you plug from the Netgear switch

⏹️ ▶️ John directly into the Ethernet port of some other Mac you have around or something?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the Netgear switch has status lights on it that indicate its link speed on the uplink

⏹️ ▶️ Marco port. Sure. Well, none of them are uplink ports. They’re all auto-switching, but the one I’m using as an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uplink port that’s wired into of the wall and it always just lights up with 100 megabit.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was just wondering if it would have changed if you put an actual device like your Mac mini or something that has

⏹️ ▶️ John built-in ethernet connected to the Switch, would that change the uplink board? I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I also don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco enough

⏹️ ▶️ John networking to know what controls that type of thing. But anyway, the salient point

⏹️ ▶️ John is that you had the no Thunderbolt docks were in the loop at all. They were just sitting elsewhere. Correct. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John still weren’t able to get gigabit with various combinations of stuff. That’s weird. We should have someone

⏹️ ▶️ John on the show who knows more about networking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried different network cables and everything. Like, it seems to be a problem with, like, the jack or the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wire on the wall. And those are gonna be hard things to solve. So, I’m not gonna solve them

⏹️ ▶️ John now. Do you have continuity testers in your house?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, why would I

⏹️ ▶️ John have that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did, for a very brief time in, geez, probably the Waffle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco House days, I did attempt to make my own network cables. I got, like, one of those crimpers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and the tester

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this big spool of Cat5e or Cat6 cable at the time, I tried making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four or five cables and every single one of them wouldn’t work. I’d have to cut the end off,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco try again, start over, make a new one, and I was just like, you know what, this is not one of my skills. I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco outsource this for the rest of time.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now you outsourced it and you have a bum cable in your wall.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Not super happy about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oopsies. I’m sorry to hear that, but at least you have some sort of a resolution or work around, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco guess.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like right now, it is working fine right now through the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter, and maybe when the new Mac mini

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets here in forever, maybe that port will also work just fine in gigabit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which case I’ll be able to, you know, I guess temporarily punt the issue down the road until I need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug a switch into this jack, and then I’ll have the problem again,

⏹️ ▶️ John but. Next time you’re wrestling with this, by the way, aside from just looking at the lights on the thing and the link speed

⏹️ ▶️ John reported by the OS, do try to do a transfer test to see what kind of speeds you actually get,

⏹️ ▶️ John just to see if like, what I’m interested in is like, say the link says it’s gigabit, but then you try to do a transfer

⏹️ ▶️ John and it gets like 600 megabits or something, because maybe some wire is frayed or screwed up or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, when I do like an internet speed test, I haven’t bothered setting up like things on the Switch, where I could do like a purely local

⏹️ ▶️ Marco test, but I have gigabit internet service here. And so when I do an internet speed test,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it reaches into like the 850s. So I think that’s a pretty clear indicator that I’m probably okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the correct adapters are being used, I do seem to be getting full speed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to use a VPN. Basically, it tunnels all your internet traffic through this third-party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco server, through this secure encrypted tunnel, and then out to the internet from there. So of course, you can use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to not only do things like secure your own content. So if you don’t trust,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, the network you’re on, your ISP, there’s weird stuff people do with Wi-Fi these days,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ISPs are always like selling your data and trying to find new revenue streams that are really creepy for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s lots of people who don’t trust their ISP or who need to use a Wi-Fi connection that they might not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust. This is personally how I use VPNs. Whenever I need to like go on some other Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco network, whether it’s maybe a hotel while I’m traveling or something like that, I use VPNs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And specifically, I use ExpressVPN. VPN. VPNs also have the side effect of making your traffic appear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come from their server, not your IP address. So you can appear to come from somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else geographically, and that of course has other useful benefits like things like accessing your home video

⏹️ ▶️ Marco account when you’re traveling abroad. ExpressVPN is not only a great VPN for things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like privacy and ease of use, like the apps are super easy to use, but also they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so fast. Like when you’re using it for something like a video connection. You would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never expect, like as a nerd, you’d never expect bouncing your traffic through someone else’s server

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not introduce noticeable performance degradation. And trust me, I didn’t notice, I used it to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. Like when I last traveled, I know it seems like forever ago, when I last traveled, I was able to watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my home Netflix account and it was fantastic on ExpressVPN. See for yourself

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Racial Equity & Justice Initiative

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Today, it was today, right? God, it’s been a long day. Apple Today has launched a major

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new racial equity and justice initiative, or several new racial equity and justice initiative projects

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to challenge systemic racism, advance racial equality, and to advance racial equality nationwide.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is what was teased yesterday on some morning talk show with Tim Cook, making some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of recorded appearance, I believe. So, I don’t know, John, tell me about this. What is Apple doing, and are we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited? Are we super excited? What’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is just a continuation of something that Apple announced a while ago, and the announcement was three main things

⏹️ ▶️ John that Tim Cook tweeted about. One was supporting what they call the Propel Center, a global innovation

⏹️ ▶️ John and learning hub for historically black colleges and universities. Second

⏹️ ▶️ John is our first developer academy in the US, which is in Detroit, And finally, funding to accelerate

⏹️ ▶️ John minority-owned businesses. This is the quote from,

⏹️ ▶️ John the longer quote from Tim Gook from the press release. We are all accountable to the urgent work of building a more

⏹️ ▶️ John just and equitable world. I think that is the correct framing

⏹️ ▶️ John for this because whenever Apple does something about, like why is Apple doing anything about this, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And the cynical answer is like, well, you know, companies like to do nice things so people think nice things about them or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the actual reason is that with great power comes great responsibility. And we collectively

⏹️ ▶️ John are all accountable for doing the work to make a more equitable world. It doesn’t just happen by itself. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it also just doesn’t happen if you’re just like not evil yourself. That doesn’t also

⏹️ ▶️ John solve any problems either. You’re not adding new problems. Great. Good job. But you’re not solving anything. He continues,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re launching, this is such a mouthful, REJI, that’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. We’re launching

⏹️ ▶️ John REJI’s latest initiatives with partners across a broad range of industries. working together to empower communities that

⏹️ ▶️ John have borne the brunt of racism and discrimination for far too long. We are honored to help bring this vision to bear

⏹️ ▶️ John and match our words and actions to the values of equity inclusion that we have always prized at Apple. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s typical PR speak, but I think that first bit about that we are accountable,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the second, empowering communities that have borne the brunt of racism and discrimination, recognizing the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ John these communities have had to deal with more

⏹️ ▶️ John than others. And that’s why we need to help.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they’re doing to help, if you look at the bottom line, they’re throwing $100

⏹️ ▶️ John million into these efforts. I think it’s $100 million collectively for all three of them, which

⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like a lot. But someone did the math earlier today, and it works out to be like 8 and 1⁄2 hours of profit

⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple. So if we want to be, again, the

⏹️ ▶️ John most charitable, no pun intended, interpretation of that is

⏹️ ▶️ John this is an initiative, this racial equality and justice initiative. This is not just like a one time thing. This initiative

⏹️ ▶️ John was announced a while back. Here’s three things they’re doing. You do want to try

⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of different things, right? So they’ve got these, you know, the Propel Center, a developer

⏹️ ▶️ John academy and funding for businesses, right? Especially if, like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, you’re kind of new to this whole type of initiative, it’s good to figure out like

⏹️ ▶️ John what works, what works best, what’s the what provides the most

⏹️ ▶️ John benefit, right? Before you pledge $100 billion to it. So that I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like is the most charitable interpretation, which is $100 million, even though it’s not a lot compared to Apple’s profits, it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John plenty of money. And $100 million is a good trial balloon in

⏹️ ▶️ John three different directions to see what’s going to have the most impact. The only question I had about this announcement is

⏹️ ▶️ John is like in the developer academy, again, this is just announced today, so I don’t have time to look into this in depth and

⏹️ ▶️ John many other things were going on today as usual in the world of news.

⏹️ ▶️ John But a developer academy, especially if you’re a company like Apple, on one hand, it’s like, oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John great. Apple’s a tech company, and one of the things they can give is they know tech, and so they could have a developer

⏹️ ▶️ John academy, but it’s like, all right. But nobody wants Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ John pay a bunch of money money to make a developer academy that trains people to be developers for

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s platform only. While that’s great, and while Apple surely knows a lot about Apple’s platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of reads like a kind of a giant ad, like we’re teaching you to become,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple developers because we’re Apple. There’s lots of marketable technology skills that have

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to do with Apple. Is it like if you, you know, I’m again, charitably,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to think this developer academy is just a developer academy, broadly speaking, for people who wanna get

⏹️ ▶️ John into the software world, right? But if it’s just a school where it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna teach you to make apps for the App Store, I feel like that’s a little bit too self-serving. I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how I feel about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco only $100 million,

⏹️ ▶️ John so they can take another shot at it to get it right. But I could be entirely wrong about it. But that was my first thought, is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems, it doesn’t, although it seems appropriate for Apple to allow people to

⏹️ ▶️ John dig into that. Like, hey, we’re the experts on Apple platforms and we’ll teach you how to do it best. And Apple is a very lucrative platform.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are other jobs in technology and it would be great if Apple put their money towards that as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, but still it’s something to applaud. And I think that we should definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey applaud them for doing anything. I mean, anything is more than nothing. And like you said, $100 million, that’s a lot. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot for Apple, but it’s a lot in general. So it’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like this, again, since this is an initiative, I hope to see in the future, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John a read out on this. How do these things go? And then more money and more projects and more money and more just like the environment stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John The perfect example is the environment stuff, which Apple has been on for much longer than they’ve been on. You know, the racial justice stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And environmental stuff. Apple’s been doing environmental stuff for years and years

⏹️ ▶️ John and years. And there’s always announcement. Oh, we’re doing this. So we’re doing that or we’re building this thing. We’re doing that thing. And now we have announced when we pass

⏹️ ▶️ John this goal and we’re taking mercury out of the things and we’re using solar here. And now we’re all on renew. Like, it’s just it

⏹️ ▶️ John never stops. Right. that these are not just like they hire someone to do a thing, they get the good PR and they go away. These are

⏹️ ▶️ John ongoing initiatives within the company that never end as far as, you know, the environmental

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I don’t expect them to say, yeah, we’re disbanding our whole environment thing because we’re not going to do any of that anymore. Right. And I hope

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the same. I hope, you know, every year we’ll see new announcements in this area on the work that

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing, because they certainly have enough money for it.

Marco’s Pro Stand review

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, Marco, the time has come. So now two thirds of the hosts of ATP have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy pants monitors, and I am super jealous and have incredible FOMO. Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how amazing is your $90,000 monitor? It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not quite that much. Not quite a little slightly less. Yeah, so I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new XDR. Well, not the new I it’s new to me. I have the XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I listened back to John’s review, willing to in the show notes back in episode 360.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually have many of the same things to say, so I’m gonna try to be a little bit quick. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have some slightly different nitpicks and opinions about it. So first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did get the Pro Stand for $1,000 extra. I do not feel good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that. It feels kind of like when you’re buying a car and you have to pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an extra $2,500 for like, you know, the sunroof package.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like, well, I really like a sunroof. I don’t wanna pay that much extra for it, but I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll suck it up and do it. It’s that kind of thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This happened to me exactly with my Subaru. It was something like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember how much it was, but I remember I was buying the Subaru when I was fresh out of college. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really didn’t have a lot of money. It was a desperation buy because my car at the time had broken down, does that sound familiar?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a package that had, it was sunroof, leather, and one other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. for the life of me, I can’t remember what the other thing was. And it was just enough money, even though I really wanted leather

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I really wanted a sunroof, it was just enough money that I was like, nah, I just can’t swing it. And if I could have, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, piece me older, ad hoc’d it, I would have probably gotten the sunroof

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and left the leather behind because I would have preferred the sunroof over the leather. And I remember to this day, I mean, to this day,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it still bothers me that it was a package and I couldn’t just tick the sunroof tick box. Ah, man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes me sad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, the reason why it’s a package is because people like me who will then buy the whole package just to get like, I really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the heated seats. I don’t need all this other crap, but I guess I’ll buy it, you know, just to get that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now keep in mind, we’re not talking about a package here. This is one item.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It just happens to be an important

⏹️ ▶️ John item because without the monitor just lays on your desk.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Well, frustratingly, when you order the Pro Stand and the Pro Display XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same order, they still ship separately. There’s still two different boxes and they shipped at different times.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so my XDR arrived on a Friday

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t have the stand until Monday. Nice. So I had to wait all weekend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just staring at the box like I actually considered like John’s small child approach like I want to get this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing going.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean the other thing that I think I talked about on the review or maybe in the WWC episode is

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure it will stand on its edge

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like it’s flat bottom. I mean

⏹️ ▶️ John just tell Adam not to run into the room. I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a very energetic eight year old. There is no way I’m doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so after the long wait of waiting the whole weekend for the stand to come separately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did get to finally open them up and I’ve used it now for three days.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And first of all, the packaging is really remarkable. Like I know boxes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are boring to most people, but it is so hilariously like over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco packaged. The packaging itself, it has is like two different layers of boxes. The inner layer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the box seems to not actually be made of cardboard. It’s made of what looks like a plastic,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is like shaped into a corrugated cardboard style shape. The packaging,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then inside of that is like, there’s like, you know, big foam pads that actually pad the item. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand box, empty, weighs almost as much as my LG 5K.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The monitor, like. And the XDR box is, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weighs more. Again, empty. So this is like heavy-duty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco packaging. It’s huge. It’s very secure. Give them credit for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These things are very unlikely to get damaged in shipping. And the Pro Stand is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this very satisfyingly heavy aluminum block.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As John said in his review, the foot of it is way thicker and heavier than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iMac foot. It’s significant. It feels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good to use the Pro Stand, it feels very good to set it up, you feel like your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor will be very secure, and critically, compared to the LG,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not wobble when I type at all. Not even a little. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic. It just stays there. I don’t have to get a whole new desk, try to fix the wobble. It just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stays there. So I am very happy about that. I still feel like a total

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fool for having paid $1,000 for the stand. So why didn’t you go Visa?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And perhaps you’ve talked about this and I’ve forgotten, but why not just get a Visa stand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and call today?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of that is that I wanted the nice clean aesthetic. Like part of the reason I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this monitor is that I didn’t want it to look like a generic PC workstation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of that is that I’ve used VESA mount adapters many times in the past. I’ve used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones from Ergotron I’ve used some other various ones and they’re always okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’ve never found one that I really thought was great I’ve never found one that seemed like especially awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and really stable and furthermore the ones that I have found that were even remotely Good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were all like desk clamp style ones not with feet and I actually wanted a foot But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is nice to have the space under the monitor just floating there, but that also does increase the odds that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will kind of rock when you type. And that’s the last thing I wanted. If you have a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being suspended over a desk by an 8-inch long arm, the physics of that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re holding it out, so any motion on that arm, it’s going to magnify even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the slightest motion and it’s going to shake the monitor. So I didn’t want the chance of anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, I haven’t been thrilled with the VESA mounts I’ve had in the past. So like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine if what you need is to hold up, you know, two or three monitors in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco special configuration and have them be adjustable in certain ways. That’s what they’re for. But as merely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice monitor stands, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that functioned as a nice monitor stand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what this Pro Stand is. And again, I feel like a fool for having bought it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now that I have it, I’m glad I have it, if that makes sense. I try to block out the purchase

⏹️ ▶️ Marco process from my memory.

⏹️ ▶️ John I also looked for a VESA stand for my gaming monitor, actually, because I hated the

⏹️ ▶️ John LG, same thing, and I hated the wobble, right? So I was looking for just not an arm, just like a plain old

⏹️ ▶️ John stand stand. You can find tons of them, but I look at every one and like, oh, these are so ugly. They really

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not that the LG monitor is so beautiful, it’s just black plastic, but I just wanted something simple and nice and sturdy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everything I found was either super sturdy, but like ugly, brutalist architecture type

⏹️ ▶️ John of thing, or equally flimsy or really weird. Like there’s, this is how Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John gets us. I mean, that’s the reason we’re buying this stupid monitor to begin with. Just something as simple as essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John an L-shaped piece of solid aluminum, presumably machined out of a solid block of aluminum, which is why it’s a thousand dollars

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. That doesn’t explain it. But anyway, part of why it costs so much money. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John very simple thing, But nobody makes that very simple thing. And people think they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ John a simple thing, but they end up making something that’s slightly ugly, or at least if not ugly, then doesn’t match

⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple aesthetic. So that’s how Apple got us. We just wanted something that matched.

⏹️ ▶️ John For me, that’s the whole point of the Apple monitor. It has to be nice, it has to be big, and it has to match. And so then $1,000.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I should have, you know, if Tiff wanted to save a little

⏹️ ▶️ John money, she should have listened to the podcast back then and said, look, Marco’s gonna get one of these anyway. As I think

⏹️ ▶️ John I predicted, I clipped it, someone tweeted recently, right? Right now, when I bought mine, they were having a 6%

⏹️ ▶️ John cash back thing for the Apple Card. So that was the time to buy a Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John Display XDR in a stand and hide them somewhere, and then not tell Marco, and then just wait until Marco finally

⏹️ ▶️ John says, all right, fine, I’m getting the XDR, and says,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John I saved you 6%. You’re welcome. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my goodness.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Anyway, so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no, I mean, the matching thing is real. Like, you know, I know like people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are often into technology often think very analytically about purchases and look at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the specs and the pricing and the economies. And I get that. I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way much more in the past. I am still that way on certain things. And I totally get that. And if you look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at like, you know, value and specs, and if you look at like facts, not opinions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not delight, not design, just look at facts. This thing is ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Sometimes I get ridiculous things because I like them and they make me happy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people have some area of life where they are that way, and this is mine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yours? This one thing? I guess I didn’t say

⏹️ ▶️ John only. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco among

⏹️ ▶️ John mine. This is one of mine. I think that would be an accurate statement, because there are areas I feel like where you just

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t go for the most expensive item. Totally.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey To be clear.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are many like them, and all of them are mine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. I’m wearing very inexpensive pants right now. Anyway, save a lot of money on haircuts.

Marco’s Pro Display XDR review

Chapter Marco's Pro Display XDR review image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do actually. So anyway, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like when John reviewed his he mentioned that it was his first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen real estate increase in a very long time. I mine was not as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as his or as significant as his. But this is the first time that I have gained more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen real estate since 2011. So it’s been almost 10 years. You know, roughly. I don’t know when 20. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like March 2011 when I when I got my 30 inch. So yeah, March 2011 I went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from dual 24 inch to a single 30 inch monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And 30 inch monitors had the horizontal resolution of 2560. When

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we went back down to 27 inches as like the big standard screen size among Mac people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we kept that same real estate. We just made everything on screen a little bit smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was the same horizontal real estate since then. Not only have I not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a screen real estate increase since 2011 when I got my 30 inch monitor, but Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not had a screen real estate increase since they made their 30 inch monitor, which was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2004. By the way, I did some quick research earlier this evening.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When they launched that 30 inch monitor in 2004, it was priced at $3,300.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco After inflation today, that would be about 4,500. And this costs 5,000.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, that one came with a stand for free. However, that one also required

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain degree of high-end graphics card, the cheapest of which was $500. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people didn’t have that card yet at that time. So if you were buying that 30-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor, you would probably also have to buy a $500 graphics card. And it would only work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a Power Mac, like in the tower, but that could fit such a graphics card. You know, things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are more expensive today. You know, after inflation, the cost of that display plus the graphics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco card is 5,200-ish. We’re in the ballpark of the $6,000 you need to have a complete setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this screen, but. That was 16 years ago. Yeah, that was 16 years ago, but also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth pointing out that one of the big benefits we have now is that this giant screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being able to be driven just fine by Apple’s lowest-end computer that I’ve plugged into.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s what you would expect, is like the thing that was a big deal back then. Wow, a one megabyte hard drive. That’s amazing,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Becomes commonplace and much cheaper. Much, much, much cheaper. So 16 years later, the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that adjusted for inflation, the monitor of a similar size would be a similar price shows that the

⏹️ ▶️ John XDR actually is ridiculously expensive because you would expect, you know, take a different size, like a 23 inch.

⏹️ ▶️ John How much could you get a 23 inch monitor now versus 16

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago? But I think the comparison is not large Apple monitors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are in the 30-ish inch range. I think the comparison is like, Apple releases a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is above and beyond the specs of what most people have available to them. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s a new high-end monitor size and resolution that is not widely available

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in other forms. It’s like a brand new thing that is mostly above what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people are using. When the 30 inch came out, like there was nothing like that in the LCD consumer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. So like it made sense for that to be very expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ John At CES, they’re announcing 8K monitors. I mean, we’ve already had 8K monitors, but they’re announcing more 8K monitors.

⏹️ ▶️ John So resolution-wise, Apple’s, and size-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s thing are not really at the very top end. It’s just that this is the Apple one. It’s really all we

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted is an Apple monitor, right? So the XDR doesn’t, I mean, the main excuses

⏹️ ▶️ John or explanations for the XDR are the things that you don’t care about, the 1600

⏹️ ▶️ John nits, which is not a factor in your life at all, but is actually a very high brightness level for

⏹️ ▶️ John a monitor with this kind of color accuracy. and so on and so forth, right? And so that’s why it ends up being

⏹️ ▶️ John so expensive. Now, Apple being Apple, and as I think it discusses in the past, you would expect that this monitor will hang

⏹️ ▶️ John around for a while and not go down in price because that’s just a thing that Apple does. So by the end of this monitor’s

⏹️ ▶️ John life, it will be even more of a ripoff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and Apple also, like, I mean, I forget how they were marketing the 30 inch at the time. I wasn’t as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of a, like, a hooked in Apple news person in 2004 as I am now. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, they’re really marketing as like, this color accurate, video

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro, high definition range kind of stuff, or high dynamic range

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stuff. This, they’re really pushing on all those technical things. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part because it helps them charge a very high price for what they’re presenting as a very high end product.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you look at the 30 inch back, what the 30 inch Apple Cinema Display was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a really big monitor for screen real estate,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a nice case. You know, color accuracy wise, that was still fairly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco early days of like, LCDs being, you know, particularly good at stuff like color. It wasn’t very bright.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It had the old, was it CCFL backlights? Before we had LED backlighting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it wasn’t actually an amazing picture quality on that. At the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was considered very good, but like, it wasn’t, I don’t think they sold it as like, you know, this is a pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reference monitor back then. I think they sold it as this is a lot of screen space and it looks nice. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I have some issues with the XDR, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a lot of screen space and it looks nice. That, I like, I 100% agree with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the pro stuff about, you know, video colorists and stuff like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no use for that stuff. I don’t make videos, I don’t care, I don’t know how to judge it on that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I will leave the judgment of that up to people who know what they’re talking about in that area. But as a monitor that offers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of screen space in an attractive case that works well with Apple products, for that, that’s how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m judging it. And it’s a good thing that’s how I’m judging it because there actually is a significant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco visual flaw, but I’ll get to that in a minute before I move on from the screen space thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is so much bigger than 5K. I did not expect,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, I know, you know, the math with the area and everything, you know, when you go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from 4K to 5K, or back in the day, this is the same move if you went from a 24

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch monitor to a 30 inch monitor, you got almost double the total pixels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when you go from 5K to 6K, you get about 50% more. So it’s not as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatic of a change as like when you first went to 27 or 30, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still extremely dramatic And when I first, like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the first day or two of using this, I didn’t even know what to do with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the space. Like, every window, every size I would make it, would look ridiculous. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would either look like a tiny window floating in a pool of wasted space, or I would make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it bigger to actually use the space, and it would look comically large, and, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI is not designed to be this large on this window. Or, like, you know, you’d try to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a safari window really big and like the web page just like looks ridiculous because everything today is designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for mobile or laptops. You know what I would suggest to you, Marco? A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of windows?

⏹️ ▶️ John More windows. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Of course. Can you

⏹️ ▶️ John tell why I love this monitor? Yeah, I didn’t, the same thing. I didn’t obviously resize my windows

⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, take up the room. What it did, it’s like, you know, it’s like getting a bigger house.

⏹️ ▶️ John It gives you room for more junk, more windows.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what do you not like about it then other than the hilariously ridiculous cost?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The very first day, I actually kind of thought, I think this is too big. I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a ridiculous thing to think, but the very first day I thought, it’s so big,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually having trouble seeing the edges very well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally I keep my main terminal windows in the lower left corner, and so anything that’s off to those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco side edges, I feel like I might want to bump the font size up a little bit. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very, it’s surprisingly big. And now, you know, in that, you know, that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two days ago now. So like, I think like yesterday and today, it’s starting to feel a little more normal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is like what happened when John was talking about his, like, you know, you just get used to it and that becomes normal. And when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first opened it up and took it out and, you know, was first using it, I thought, oh my God, this is so big, it’ll never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel normal. And yeah, it’s feeling normal now. Like it’s close enough now.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to feel freaked out again, you should rotate it to vertical because that I feel like physically

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, not that it feels so big, but that you just have to bend your neck and that feels

⏹️ ▶️ John so unnatural to me to have to look up and down. In a vertical orientation, it is just, at least

⏹️ ▶️ John on my desk, on a non, again, like I said on the original show, on my non-standing desk,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way this can be anything but ridiculous and vertical because I have to look up at the ceiling to see the menu bar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean, even in regular landscape orientation, I have it on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom setting on the stand. This is as low as the stand will go, because any higher than that, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s above my eye line, my line of sight right now, with it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at its lowest setting, my line of sight is about 25% down from the top. And I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it any higher than that. I don’t want the monitor to go up any more than that. You don’t wanna be looking up very far.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I don’t know how you could use this in portrait. You could lower your desk, though. You have adjustable height desk, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do, but it’s already at the correct, like if I lower it, I mean, my leg is only one inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco below the bottom of the desk, so it’s not, I couldn’t really lower it that much. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had to move some stuff around the desk to make room under the monitor. Like I used to be able to put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stuff under the monitor, and now I can’t, because it’s bigger. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s interesting, moving up to a larger size, again, for the first time in almost a decade for me, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the longest I have ever gone in my entire computing life without increasing my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen space. Like, I started using a computer in 1994 and this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nine year spin was the longest I’ve ever gone without increasing my real estate. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, it is starting to feel a little bit more normal now. It’s ridiculous. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even, you know, I decided to play a little bit and I set in the, for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit in the settings, I set it back down to run at 5K resolution to see like how that compared.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And first of all, everything looks comically huge at 5K on this screen. But also like, I thought,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh no, this isn’t enough space. The windows are all crammed together. Oh my word. Ha ha ha ha.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, there is one small downside and one big downside.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The small downside to me is the webcam situation. The XDR does not have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a built-in camera or mic. They made a deal with Logitech to basically have a slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specialized version of a webcam Logitech already makes that’s made for the XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sold to the XDR. It basically has a nice little magnetic mount on top and they put the right magnets in the XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that it can mount right on top. Problem is, it’s an ugly PC webcam and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it breaks up the beautiful look of my nice display. A big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the reason I got this display is for its nice Apple look. I don’t want a big PC webcam

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chunking up the top of it. Unfortunately, I don’t need a webcam on my desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often. I use it maybe twice a year. Like I use it much more on laptops for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco various reasons. For on desktops, I hardly ever use a webcam. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Logitech webcam and I put it up there for like a few minutes. I’m like, nope, that’s not staying. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’m just dangling it behind the screen. Nice. And whenever I need to use it, I’ll just reach

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back there and stick it on top. Until then,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be waiting there. I’m surprised you find it so offensive. I mean, I think it is, I mean, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John look like an ugly PC thing. It looks almost apple-ish. If it was made of solid aluminum, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be apple-ish, but I find it mostly inoffensive. Like, what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John looking at is the black, entirely black face of the thing, a very low contrast logo,

⏹️ ▶️ John and a dark gray foot. Yeah, so I leave it there. I mean, I don’t use my webcam much either,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I like the idea that when I want to, I don’t have to go fiddle with anything, and you know, because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so half on the top of the monitor, I barely, It’s not really in my line of sight anyway. Yeah, so I just leave it on all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s fair. But yeah, I can’t abide the look of it. So it’ll be dangling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back there in shame until I actually need it. The big downside for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, which I wish it didn’t have this big downside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of bothersome, but I’m slowly getting used to it, is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the really dim edges of the display. This is something that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most reviews didn’t mention or kind of alluded to in different ways, but there are two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant light fall-off problems as you approach the edges. One is that at the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very edge, and I measured it earlier, I would say about the the rightmost 14

⏹️ ▶️ Marco points of screen real estate, and well not just the right, like around all the edges, 14

⏹️ ▶️ Marco points around all the edges, there’s significant light fall-off. And if you look at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their their marketing page you can see why this happens and they even kind of talk about it like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that it’s edge lit by all those by those little LEDs there’s like these little cells

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the cells can overlap a little bit in the middle like when that when there’s adjacent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco LCD or LEDs around them but the ones on the edge have no adjacent cells on the outer edge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so there is no like you know ability for them to like team light an area along the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge so the areas along the edge actually are noticeably dimmer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you keep a light colored window on the edge, like I mentioned a minute

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, I keep my terminal window in the corner. And I use white terminal windows. I know, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry. I know that’s not cool for nerds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always like light colored terminal windows. I’m a light theme kind of person in general. You’re a monster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, it’s just so much better contrast. Like, I don’t use dark mode for the most part on Macs. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do use it on iOS devices, but not on Macs. Anyway, when you have a light window

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the edge, side or bottom or top edge, well, top’s the menu bar, but side or bottom, you really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice that last 14 points of screen real estate, which is about one line on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the terminal window, it looks like a gradient. Like, it looks like a gradient that goes from white to slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray. It’s very clear. I’ll get used to it, but that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a surprising drawback for something that Apple sells as like a really flawless,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing monitor. The other drawback is not quite that bad, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly noticeable. If you have a large, solid color window on either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of the screen, which I frequently do, like Xcode, for instance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually align Xcode so that it’s against the right edge of the screen, taking up about the rightmost two-thirds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the screen, and then I use the left third for like simulator windows, like that documentation whatever else because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen is so wide you know how when you look at an else at any LCD screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at it off axis so if you like move off to the side a little bit look so you’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it kind of diagonally instead of straight on it gets less bright as you move your head to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the side LCDs get less bright that’s an effect of how they work this monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so wide that just the angle of my head to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco edges is enough to cause noticeable brightness loss to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the rightmost I measured earlier at about a hundred and fifty points on left and right.

⏹️ ▶️ John See when you mention the edge brightness that’s what I was thinking of because I’d noticed the effect too but I had chalked

⏹️ ▶️ John it up to off-axis viewing because it’s such a sharp angle but I just did some experiments and you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John right it’s not the off-axis the very edges, that’s not off axis, that’s just the backlight problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like I, because the thing is so wide, every time I turn, I haven’t noticed the effect you’re talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I only notice brightness changes at the very, very edges. I’m like, oh, well, the screen’s so wide, by that

⏹️ ▶️ John point, you’re super off axis. And I realized that the top of the screen, I had been chalking

⏹️ ▶️ John out up to the weird translucent gradient menu bar,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar, it hasn’t been solid white in so long. So I was looking up So left and right, I’m thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just the off-axis viewing, and that’s kind of a shame. Well, what are you gonna do with LCDs? And the top, I was thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ John stupid translucent menu bar with the gradient, and then the bottom, I never see it, because I never have anything against the bottom, because that’s where my dock

⏹️ ▶️ John is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay, that’s why, yeah. But yeah, so yeah, I’m a side dock person, so anyway. Same. When

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have large, brightly colored windows of solid color areas, like if you run Xcode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right side, you will notice that the rightmost 150 points or so kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of have a subtle gradient that fades to darker color. And it is totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewing. If you move your head over to the side, so you’re looking straight on the edge, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets brighter. That I was surprised. Again, you expect, the way Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold this monitor, you expect it to be visually flawless, and it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those are substantial drawbacks. And if you notice, like, none

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the marketing material shows this, because the marketing material all shows dark backgrounds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in everything. The apps, the content they’re showing, it’s all like, you’re in a pitch black

⏹️ ▶️ Marco room looking at this monitor showing super bright, like tiger in the middle of a black screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think there’s a reason for that. I mean, first of all, just that’s how they market pro stuff in general. Uh, but also like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this monitor is actually not as good as they would like to tell probably at showing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco large light colored UIs. You know, UIs that have large areas of light colored solid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas. If you’re gonna put one of those near the edge, it’s gonna look bad. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually like, I’m still, I’m glad I have it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a beautiful monitor in a nice design that sits nicely on my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk, matches my stuff, the stand is solid, it doesn’t wobble, it’s a huge amount of screen real estate,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doing development on it the last couple of days has been luxurious, as I’ve had all this screen space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, but it does kind of bother me that Apple sells it as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really pro, awesome color, accurate, whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has noticeable brightness problems in regular use as displaying UIs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the way I feel about it is, it feels a lot like that old 30-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor did, which was a stunningly large monitor that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had decent visuals.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, as I mentioned, it had the old CCFL backlighting, it didn’t have the best

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brightness or contrast or anything like that, but it was a big monitor in a nice enclosure that matched your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff and gave you a ton of screen real estate. That’s what this is, to me at least.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if pros have better uses for it and the color accuracy or the XDR-ity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it helps them do their jobs, that’s great. For me, it is a lot of screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco space. It has these two visual shortcomings that I think are substantial, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not substantial enough that I am going to have a big problem about them. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I wish they weren’t there for such an expensive purchase that is sold as something that is so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco visually perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re not selling it as visually perfect. The market they’re selling it into has expectations

⏹️ ▶️ John that match what they’re getting. So in the world of reference monitors or

⏹️ ▶️ John color grading monitors or whatever, there is a parallel market for what are called client

⏹️ ▶️ John reference monitors, which sounds weird, but the concept is, so you’re there,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re working on a movie, right? And you’re looking at it and you’re a super accurate monitor and you’re doing all this

⏹️ ▶️ John work and you’re editing and you’re color grading, you’re doing whatever you’re gonna do. And then you wanna show the director, hey, what do you

⏹️ ▶️ John think of this? What do you think how this looks? You can’t show the director and the producer and whoever

⏹️ ▶️ John else is in the room, all looking at the reference monitor, because reference monitors, as soon as you go off axis,

⏹️ ▶️ John get all wonky, right? So you need a monitor that four people can look at at the same time, which

⏹️ ▶️ John means they’re gonna be off axis, and that’s the client reference monitor, which isn’t as good as the reference monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ John but has better off-axis viewing, so four people can watch it, and the person on the outside won’t say, why is this scene

⏹️ ▶️ John so dim? I mean, that’s the market this is being sold into. So the things you just described would not shock anyone

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s like, yeah, I bought a reference monitor for $35,000, and if you’re not looking dead on at it, it’s all weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is not that bad, but mostly because it’s so darn wide and it’s an LCD,

⏹️ ▶️ John the edges, you’re off axis, because especially if you have it close to your face, like if you push it farther away from you, it actually

⏹️ ▶️ John gets better, right? But if it’s as close as you normally keep a monitor and you have to rotate your head, now you’re at this

⏹️ ▶️ John fairly extreme angle and LCDs tend not to do well there. The things that help actually

⏹️ ▶️ John is, I do wonder if the nanotexture would help, but also other display technologies, like those PVA

⏹️ ▶️ John screens or other ones, do all sorts of distribution to try to make the

⏹️ ▶️ John off-axis angle slightly better. Even OLED, by the way, which is self-emissive, also has

⏹️ ▶️ John off-axis dimming problems. And it all basically comes down to the angle, right? So you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John a similar angle if you’re three inches away than you can if you’re 30 feet away. It all just depends on, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? Like it doesn’t depend on how close you sit to the thing. So I think the problems

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re describing are expected by the customers who want the quote unquote perfect

⏹️ ▶️ John display because they’re used to displays that cost more that have even worse off-axis viewing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But maybe you’re not expected by someone who just wants a computer monitor and they expect it to be uniform

⏹️ ▶️ John from edge to edge. I would also encourage you not to ever fill your fancy OLED TV with

⏹️ ▶️ John a giant light gray background and see what the uniformity issues are there too because it’s actually a fairly hard problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Forget about off-axis, dead on-axis just to fill a screen uniformly with

⏹️ ▶️ John a light gray color is actually a very hard problem. And if you see televisions do those tests,

⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs tend to do better, but it’s something called the dirty screen effect. Just go through

⏹️ ▶️ John a gradient from white to black, a full screen, and you will see all sorts of splotches and blotchy

⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever. And in that respect, the XDR is doing pretty well, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t overcome the inherent display technology. And like I said, neither can OLED. OLED also tints blue

⏹️ ▶️ John off axis and does all sorts of weird stuff. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the many reasons why I haven’t bought a new TV forever. All these technologies for just making displays,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially high resolution displays, they all have problems, right? Not that CRTs didn’t have problems, they had

⏹️ ▶️ John problems too, but you’re always waiting for that one next technology that’s not gonna have limitations, it’s not gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ John burn-in, it’s gonna have great off-axis, great response time, great color fidelity, great brightness, low power.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not here yet. We keep trying. Final question for you, what preset do you have it on?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve spent about one day on each of them so far, on the Apple 500 versus the Apple 1600.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t change the UI brightness at all, as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I can tell. It

⏹️ ▶️ John saves different brightness settings for each one, so I think if you go to the P3 500 nits and

⏹️ ▶️ John crank down the brightness and then go back to P3 600, you’re like, well, this is brighter, but it’s just because I think it has separate

⏹️ ▶️ John brightness settings for each preset.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, as far as I can tell, it always maxes out at, I believe, 500 nits for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco displaying the UI. It’s only when you wanna show HDR content, which I haven’t even tried yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but you don’t have it at max brightness on any of the settings, right? No, I do. What, max

⏹️ ▶️ John brightness?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for most of the time in this house, it’s a pretty bright room during

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day, and so most of the time I do run it at full brightness during the day.

⏹️ ▶️ John Wow, that may actually be emphasizing the, you know, because you have such

⏹️ ▶️ John challenging conditions, you have it at max, what do I have mine at? Let me see. I’m not showing 1600 nits though. I know, but 500 nits is too much. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John less than half. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple really wanted to solve the, the like, you know, edge dimming problem,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there might be some kind of way for them to just like, slowly ramp up the brightness as you go from the center

⏹️ ▶️ Marco outward.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you know, it’s the uniformity thing. Put a light gray background on the whole screen, does it look uniform? What

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re asking for is a giant halo around the outside is really hard to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, the

⏹️ ▶️ John actual solution is, if you know, then again, new TVs at CES. So this, the XDR has like 575

⏹️ ▶️ John little individual lights as the backlight or something like that. Yeah, 575.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or something like that. The newer televisions

⏹️ ▶️ John have many, many thousands, many thousands, right? They don’t use each individual

⏹️ ▶️ John light as a separate zone, but that’s a separate issue. They have many, many thousands, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget when I mentioned this, Maybe it was, did I mention it last week? Or maybe it was in a Slack conversation. I can’t keep track of what’s on

⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast. But one of the manufacturers was bragging about the fact that they had made their televisions

⏹️ ▶️ John thinner. And the way they had done it is by pressing the backlight,

⏹️ ▶️ John the little, you know, there’s a sheet that has a bunch of little white LEDs in it, right? This is an LCD television.

⏹️ ▶️ John Pressing that right up against so it touches the, what they call the diffuser plate, because the

⏹️ ▶️ John LEDs are little white LEDs. They’re point lights, you know, they’re tiny little point lights, right? but you can’t have a bunch of little

⏹️ ▶️ John point lights. You need something to diffuse that light. And the distance between the light and the diffuser makes the TVs thicker

⏹️ ▶️ John and also adds more shadows. Cause if you can imagine like having a hundred flashlights shining at a wall, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you push the wall really close to the flashlights, you get a hundred dots on the wall. But if you push the wall back, you get a

⏹️ ▶️ John hundred big fuzzy dots and they overlap. Like you were saying with the overlapping lighting, right? To try to make it uniform.

⏹️ ▶️ John Trying to make a uniform white screen with 575 point lights is actually very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John and comes down to the diffuser, right? So one solution is put way more lights in there, right? Put way more

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny lights and pack them closer together. And the second is, if you pack them closer together like that, now you can move

⏹️ ▶️ John the diffuser closer to the thing and make your TV thinner. And there’s all sorts of these efficiency things. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John the final thing that they did this year on TVs at CES is put essentially, it’s not, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s acting like a heat sink, but a big aluminum layer or some kind of metal layer behind the

⏹️ ▶️ John backlight to pull off heat so you can drive them brighter, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And sort of wicks away the heat, which is kind of what the XDR is doing in theory with that weird honeycomb in the back,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, letting all the air out and the fans and all that business. And by the way, you didn’t mention whether you heard the fans or not, but like, nope.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there are lots of advances in how can we do an LED backlit LCD

⏹️ ▶️ John that addresses every single one of the problems you’re talking about, with the possible exception of viewing angle, which is still like

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult and inherent in the technology. But the next great hope,

⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve talked about in the past, is a micro LED where every single pixel has a red LED,

⏹️ ▶️ John a green LED, and a blue LED, and you just turn them on and off individually. And that ain’t anywhere for, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can get that, but the problem is they’re so big now that I think the smallest size is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s measured in inches, I think it’s like 12 feet or something. In my case. Because the pixels

⏹️ ▶️ John are so big, like if you want a 4K TV, it’s cool, they sell them in, I think they sell them in like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget how big they are, but they’re like 40 inch diagonal units. And you have to put together

⏹️ ▶️ John like 12 of those units to make a single four KTV. Right. And so that’s how, and they’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ John way smaller than they were in the past. So we’re not, we’re not there yet. But, uh, the mini

⏹️ ▶️ John led ones, when you hear mini led, all they’re talking about is put way more little tiny leds in the back. And I think that can

⏹️ ▶️ John help with uniformity. Um, and it’s the type of thing you

⏹️ ▶️ John think, Oh, if Apple makes a successor to the XDR, they’ll do that. The XDR has 575 backlights.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t they make one that has 20,000 like these new TVs? And I would be like, that’s not the Apple way.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when it comes to monitors, Apple makes one and then sells it until it’s embarrassingly obsolete, and then it goes away

⏹️ ▶️ John forever, and then you beg for them to make another monitor at some point. I hope that changes. I’m willing to be

⏹️ ▶️ John proven wrong. Please, Apple, prove me wrong by releasing a new XDR that is better than this one, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have great hopes. So you said you can’t hear the fan at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I’m pretty sure they will release a new one shortly because I just bought it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s a possibility. I would suggest now if you’re on this monitor now, you should do you have the aerial screensaver

⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed? Oh, the Apple TV one? Yeah, no, I will though.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been really enjoying the whatever the new default screensavers on my MacBook Air that it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of like, like, fingery blue seaweed looking things, whatever that is. It’s really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would suggest getting it’s a it’s on GitHub, we should find the link for it again. Get

⏹️ ▶️ John the aerial screensaver and then just go to the screensaver preference pane and just watch the little

⏹️ ▶️ John preview window because that will be HDR. Put your monitor on p3 1600 nits and just

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey watch

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll have a little, this is what I talked about in the original review, then you’ll have a little tiny punch out in your 500

⏹️ ▶️ John nit window, this little tiny punch out into the world of 1600 nits and it looks like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it messes you up because you’re like what is this? Like it doesn’t look like a hole in your monitor but It’s so clearly

⏹️ ▶️ John different than the rest of your monitor. It also kind of makes the rest of your monitor look dim and shabby. So try

⏹️ ▶️ John that. And the other thing I would suggest trying is,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, I can give you either URLs for this or I can send you the files, but when I got my monitor, I’m like, well, I want to see what

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing can do. This is before I was able to get Windows to boot on it, because that took a long time, as we can see past episodes. But

⏹️ ▶️ John before I could get Windows to boot on it and play HDR games, I wanted to see, like, show me full

⏹️ ▶️ John screen HDR, you know, video. And I just searched

⏹️ ▶️ John for all these TV manufacturer websites for these sample files and I finally found, I don’t think they’re 6K, I think they’re like 5K or

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, but it’s as good as I could get. And they’re just like footage of this person and their

⏹️ ▶️ John dog in the Italian countryside eating food. And you can run it at full screen

⏹️ ▶️ John and it plays, and put your monitor on the 1600 nit setting and run it in full screen and all of a sudden you will see,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see what your monitor is actually capable of and maybe appreciate why people who are doing production for

⏹️ ▶️ John movies and other things that require the HDR would find this monitor valuable.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then the movie will end and you go back to your dingy 500 nit bunch of windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ha

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ha ha! Well theoretically I’m pretty sure I can just shoot some stuff on my iPhone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In Dolby Pro Vision,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that is? Maybe, but I don’t think you can do it at 6K.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, yeah definitely not. I think 4K is the max there. But anyway, yeah, I will attempt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, I mean, I think the way I see this monitor to me is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like the monitor equivalent of buying a fast car. I’m not a race car driver.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never take my cars on race tracks. And the cars I buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they are fast are not actually made to be track cars. You know, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend more money on them and they might not be flawless at everything, but they’re very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice and they make you happy. Like that’s how, the fast car analogy, that’s how I look at this monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not something I need. This is something that is really nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is completely ridiculous and it costs more than I wanna talk about, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes me happy every time I use it, as long as I don’t look too much at the edge, but it makes me happy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no justification for needing it. I don’t need it, except that it is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive amount of screen real estate. And it has the right DPI for Mac OS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s in a great looking design that makes me happy when I look at it, and it doesn’t wobble when I type.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for all of that, I am happy with this purchase.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would hope so, because it was not cheap. I don’t know if you were aware of that, but not cheap at all. Yep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep reminding me. I don’t know, I am jealous, but I just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t personally fathom spending that kind of money on a monitor, which I’m not trying to imply that you did anything wrong or that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t right for you or whatever. It’s just I don’t think it’s right for me, even though I’m sure it is super

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have to hope that it’s not like Beetlejuice where you have to say it three times to make them introduce a 5K monitor. So do

⏹️ ▶️ John all three ATP hosts have to buy this thing for Apple to introduce a 5K monitor at a reasonable price, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly what we all would have purchased?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So listeners, if you would like for me to buy a Pro Display XDR so that you can buy an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey affordable monitor, please go to etp.fm slash join and sign up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the only way this is going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no amount of members we could get that would make you buy this. No. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, though, challenge accepted.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John There’s not no

⏹️ ▶️ John amount, but the number is so astronomical that it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more than our free audience. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know about that. If our entire audience were members, I would absolutely have one of these, no doubt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad you got it. I’m glad you like it. What are you going to do the 5k?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s getting demoted to a different position, a different studio, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is. It is in the iMac carrying bag, ready to go. I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stop looking at it. It was on my office floor for a couple days. Like, you know, I just moved it off the desk,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved this one on. But I like it right before the show. I packed it up into the bag. It’s staged

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to leave this house. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s too bad because if my iMac Pro could drive it, and if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were to let me steal it from you in terms of how much it would cost me, I would consider doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the LG 5K next to the iMac, not because I need it, but because I think it would be cool. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t even drive that thing from the iMac Pro, if I’m not mistaken.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, no, the iMac Pro can’t drive the XDR, but it can drive a 5K.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re right, I had my wires crossed. Okay, well, if you want to sell it to me for like 200 bones, let me know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I even had a couple people on Twitter ask me if they could buy it. I don’t wanna sell the LG

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not good. One thing I kinda

⏹️ ▶️ Marco glossed over real fast last week when we talked about selling our old gear,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you generally don’t wanna sell something to somebody you know if you can avoid it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’ve seen this go wrong many times with friends and family where you sell somebody a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it breaks a month later. And that’s just really awkward. Same thing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars or any other large purchases. You don’t want to sell it to somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. Ideally, you either sell it to a company that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t even care who you are, or you sell it to a stranger, or you give it away to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone you know. But involving a large purchase with money from somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know invites a lot of risk of bad things, and it’s better avoided.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not going to sell this. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, you’ll just give it to me and I’ll pay shipping and then everyone’s happy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, it might, it’s probably cost like $150 to ship it. Like it wouldn’t be cheap to ship, but, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I’m going to keep it as a, you know, backup secondary monitor or for secondary locations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s good enough for that. And like, and, and heck, I, I, I even thought like maybe I should keep it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here because well, part of the reason I’m going this direction now is like, what if the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR breaks and I have to mail it in for service? I’ll have an extra monitor that I could use with all the wobble.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, But I could use it in the meantime while I wait for this one to be service. Like, you know, so it is useful to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco extras around for, for times like that or at least to have an extra around for times like that. So we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, but I also could just, you know, wait for that time to ever come and it might never come. And if it does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just order a cheap monitor then to use for two weeks while I get rid of this one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Well, congrats. Thanks. So are there no

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real pending purchases for you these days? Your lease isn’t up anytime soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ve got your fancy monitor. You’ve got a Mac mini coming. You have your fancy laptop. So obviously when they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey refresh the laptops, you’re gonna buy one of those, but you might actually, you might avoid the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pro. I’m stunned.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, let’s.

The pretty, bad TV

⏹️ ▶️ John Aside from household stuff, which I’m sure there’s an unlimited number of pending purchases, I think I have one pending purchase

⏹️ ▶️ John for Marco, and that is, well, it depends on how he feels about OLED TVs, because

⏹️ ▶️ John LG actually revised their panels this year instead of just wrapping them in a different case and adding different computer stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John on them. And the new panel, the big feature is that it gets brighter. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I know you have your TV in a bright room. I don’t even know if you have an OLED in the bright room now, but if you didn’t get an OLED because you’re afraid it couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get bright enough, wait to see the testing results on the LG G1 to see just how much brighter it gets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not told you the TV we have in that room because you would be sad. I saw the pictures

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. I know what you got there. It is. It makes me sad. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it makes Tiff sad. She can’t play Last of Us because it gets washed out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not a good TV. It is a pretty TV. It is not a good TV. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big TV.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the other thing that well that doesn’t help you here. But but LG also announced much bigger OLEDs.

⏹️ ▶️ John you can get up to 83 inches now, but the good one only does not come in 83. The good one only comes

⏹️ ▶️ John in a maximum of 77. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one, it’s only 65. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John really? Only. All right, no problem. G1 comes in 65. But it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just tell you, it’s the Samsung frame.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I saw a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco picture of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s a thin edge-lid LCD with bad blacks. I know, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is surprisingly dim. It looks like one of those old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rear projection TVs from our childhood. You know, you walk into some big 80s house

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from like the Rich Friend and it has like this giant rear projection TV and take up the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall. Yeah, it’s not a good TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a pretty risk. We thought this is a pretty, oh hold on, Hops is dreaming, it’s really cute, he’s barking.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hops, you gotta wake up, man.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John wake him up, let him have his happy ending chasing dreams.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, puppy. All right, anyway, yeah, it’s not a good TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very, very dim and we’re even having bugs now where sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the box of electronics that it wires itself up to will just need to be restarted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a very pretty TV. We were putting it in a pretty room and we thought, let’s try a pretty TV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and didn’t realize how much worse it would be than our LG OLED

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out is, you know, at night, you don’t notice it that much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s because you can only watch it at night because it’s so dim that you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really watch it during the day.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the good thing is that the LG G1 is also that style. Like it doesn’t even come with a stand.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a, you know, hang on the wall, you know, very thin frame kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it has the external electronics box, clear if they managed to jam it on the back of it. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John watch for reviews of that in a couple of months just to see what the stats on it are.

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John’s AirPods anxiety

⏹️ ▶️ John So I was I don’t remember why I was thinking this because this is not a new rumor I think we’ve discussed them

⏹️ ▶️ John briefly on the show in the past the rumors are for the next round of air pod revisions

⏹️ ▶️ John that the So right now we have air pods air pods Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John and then we have air pods max which aren’t really our parts forget about the max I’m just talking about the little 30 white things that go in your ears, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John The plain old AirPods are currently on their second revision. I have a pair of those. Whenever they revised them,

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what they did to them. They look exactly the same on the outside, but the case had the little, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John induction charging thing, and I think they changed the innards or whatever. But otherwise, they’re pretty much the same as they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John ever been. And then of course, the AirPod Pros that jam into your hole with the little tips, right? The rumor is,

⏹️ ▶️ John the new round of them, the low-end plain old AirPods without any sort of qualifier

⏹️ ▶️ John suffix at the end, which will basically be the third revision of those or the AirPods 3. The rumor

⏹️ ▶️ John is that those will quote unquote look like the AirPod Pros. There is some

⏹️ ▶️ John debate in the rumor circles of whether that means they will actually be like the AirPod Pros and have those little soft tips that jam

⏹️ ▶️ John into your ear holes or will they merely look kind of like the AirPod Pros but still be like the original AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re just a dangly thing inside your ear, right? And then the other rumor, which I’m not interested in here, but just for

⏹️ ▶️ John the completeness sake is that the new version of the AirPod Pros might be disc shaped or some crap like that. Who knows? That’s all even more

⏹️ ▶️ John fuzzy. I don’t care about that, right? The reason I have anxiety about AirPods is, so

⏹️ ▶️ John on my second, I think this is my second pair, my second pair of these, it’s revision number two.

⏹️ ▶️ John These are the ones I like. I don’t like the ones that go in your ears. My wife has them. I just don’t like things

⏹️ ▶️ John inside my ear holes. I suppose I could get used to it if I really, really had to, but I don’t like it. I like

⏹️ ▶️ John the original AirPods. They fit me really well, that whatever shape they are that they first came up with, I must have the

⏹️ ▶️ John average ear. So they stay in, they don’t fall out. They’re super comfortable. and I like the fact that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not in my ear holes. They’re just kind of in there, right? And so I’ve been waiting for the announcement

⏹️ ▶️ John of the new revision of the AirPods because if the new ones are, like the new low-end

⏹️ ▶️ John unqualified AirPods are in ear, I need to scramble as soon as they make that announcement and quickly

⏹️ ▶️ John buy one, possibly two, knowing me, pairs of the original ones before they go out of stock

⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t want them to go inside my ear. And the problem with the AirPods is no replaceable battery and eventually the batteries get

⏹️ ▶️ John crappy because they’re so tiny and I use my AirPods so much. Every single day I use

⏹️ ▶️ John them, I love them. So I’ve spent a lot of time like just idly flicking around on my phone going,

⏹️ ▶️ John should I just buy new AirPods now?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I’m like, no,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, you don’t know that they’re gonna replace the bottom end AirPods with the other ones. Maybe they’re just gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, they look like the pros because they have stubbier things, but they’re still not in here. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I spend so much time almost buying new AirPods. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I like this product. The ones I have are getting old, but I’m not sure Apple will ever make

⏹️ ▶️ John another iteration of this product in this style. It’s exactly the same situation I was in with my cheese grater.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the cheese grater all over again. And-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to clarify, you’re talking about the actual dairy cheese grater, not the Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right? Both

⏹️ ▶️ John interpretations of that sentence are true. Because remember, I had bought a Tower Mac and I wanted another Tower Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they weren’t making one. They made the little trash can. I’m like, I don’t know if they’re ever gonna make another one of these. So I was

⏹️ ▶️ John stuck with this old version of a product never knowing if they’re going to make another one. I didn’t want to buy another tower cause it would

⏹️ ▶️ John be the same as an old one. I wanted a new tower, but they wouldn’t make one. And yes, same deal with the cheese grater,

⏹️ ▶️ John although they don’t even make that cheese grater anymore. So I mean, I was thinking of it mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of the actual OXO grater of dairy cheese, right? Because I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John bought a whole bunch of those and they’re stockpiled in my basement. I don’t want to have to buy a whole bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods too. like the current model of the non-in-ear ones and stick them in my basement

⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t think they’ll age that well. And I want, like, unlike a cheese grater, I want the technological

⏹️ ▶️ John advancement that will presumably come with the H2 and the H3 and whatever, who knows, whatever they’re gonna do.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t just pre-buy five pairs of AirPods 2 because I like that design. That would be stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know, I’m having anxiety about it. Thus far, I have not ordered

⏹️ ▶️ John another pair of AirPods. My current plan is the second they announce new AirPods, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC tickets all over again, I need to quickly look at them, assess whether they have any models that

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t go in your ear anymore, and then quickly make a purchase. If

⏹️ ▶️ John they have the low-end ones that don’t go in your ear but are a different shape, I’m gonna have to make two purchases. Buy one backup pair

⏹️ ▶️ John of the old ones and buy one of the new ones and see if I like them. But if they’re in ear, maybe I’ll immediately

⏹️ ▶️ John buy two pairs of the old ones and just say this will hold me over until Apple changes its mind

⏹️ ▶️ John about the whole jamming little things into your ear canals.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you have a lot to worry about there. I wouldn’t say you definitely don’t, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you never know, but Apple has been making earbud style earbuds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m talking about the style of fit that it is where it’s just kind of resting, you know, in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little curvature of your ear, not actually inserting into the inner ear canal part.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve been making things of that style since the original iPod 20 years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. They have never stopped making things, like making earbud-shaped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco earbuds. That’s what you want. They have made those continuously the entire time. They haven’t made the same ones the whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, but they have never stopped making them. It is such an incredibly popular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mass-market, you know, widely adopted shape. So many people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love it. It has so many advantages, and it is the preferred style for so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people. I can’t imagine them making only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the in-ear kind, because ever since the AirPod Pros have come out,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’ve been raving about how good they are for me. I love them. I continue to be very happy with them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The original style, earbud style AirPods don’t work for me. Most earbud-shaped earbuds don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for me, which is why I’m so into this, because I’ve been on the other side of this. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems to be like, not quite a 50-50 split, but it seems like a large percentage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the population of the world prefers only one of these two styles of headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not the other. And so it seems like they’re pretty much always gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to address both general fit types if they’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to have widespread market appeal. And for the AirPods, that’s what they wanna do. They’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well at it so far. They’re gonna keep doing well at it as long as they continue to have broad market appeal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, no matter what kind of ears you have, there will be an AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ Marco model that will be comfortable on you. And I don’t see them going back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. And so to stop making the style of earbuds that everyone likes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except me, but everyone else likes a lot and has been the primary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or only style of earbuds for 20 years, I don’t think they’re gonna stop. If they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen to stop though, I think you’re gonna have way more time than you think to buy the old ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you don’t have to buy them now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like, you can-

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope so. I don’t know what kind, I wouldn’t buy them immediately because I’d be afraid they’d go out of stock. But yeah, I mean, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the other fear is not just that they stopped making them, but like I said, that they make a new one, but it’s a totally different shape. Because the earbuds have changed

⏹️ ▶️ John shape a lot over the years. And some of the earbuds that the Apple’s made, I found very uncomfortable back in the iPod days. But the

⏹️ ▶️ John specific shape of the plain old AirPods works with my ears. And speaking of

⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods and what Apple thinks about the default AirPods, there was this,

⏹️ ▶️ John was it some, it was like a conference call published on YouTube where Patton Oswalt talked to the stars

⏹️ ▶️ John of Ted Lasso, right? And it was like, you know, six heads

⏹️ ▶️ John or nine heads or whatever across the screen in little squares. And Ted Lasso was a show on Apple TV+,

⏹️ ▶️ John and presumably, like on the show which features Apple hardware everywhere, presumably Apple gave

⏹️ ▶️ John every single one of the stars of the show, AirPod Pros, to do this PR thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So every single one of the actors has AirPod Pros in their ear. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I tweeted this last week or whenever it was that I watched it. Watching that thing, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John delightful, and Ted Lasso is great, and the people are great, and it’s worth watching. It’s a 45-minute video

⏹️ ▶️ John filled with these actors fiddling with their ears, trying to press the

⏹️ ▶️ John AirPod Pros into their ears, just constantly messing with them in a way that I’d never seen

⏹️ ▶️ John anybody mess with the earbud style ones, because Marco’s things, the earbud style ones, he says like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John they are uncomfortable. And some people say when they exercise, they fall out. But these people were sitting still staring at a screen

⏹️ ▶️ John and they could not get these damn AirPod Pros to stay in their ears.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the record, that is exactly how regular AirPods fit on me, even when sitting still.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have to constantly fiddle with them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so, I mean, part of the problem is that they were using them as mics too. So every time they fiddled with them, you got like,

⏹️ ▶️ John please don’t fiddle with the mic, right? And one of them fell out of Jason Sudeikis’ ear, literally fell out of it. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John he had to bend over and pick it up, right? And this is after just, you know, 30 minutes of him

⏹️ ▶️ John shoving it and making static noises or whatever. So I do really wonder, I mean, obviously it could have been maybe they all had the wrong tips,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they didn’t do the tip fit test or whatever, you know. I don’t know what the problem is. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John the Bud style has a higher success rate, at least

⏹️ ▶️ John in my, you know, personal experience of seeing people wear them, not just the Ted Lazzo thing, but in real life and in general.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s because having three different sized tips is just too complicated and people can’t deal with it and they make bad choices, but maybe it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John because jamming into someone’s ear hole is always gonna be a harder fit than just kind of rattling around in

⏹️ ▶️ John their ear. So I hope they don’t, I hope they don’t can them. I hope they don’t think the pros

⏹️ ▶️ John are the way to go, but I’m assuming Apple gave everyone the fanciest of everything. Oh, you’re stars of our shows,

⏹️ ▶️ John you all get the fanciest iPhone, you know, you get the fanciest AirPods and those are the pros, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John so we’ll see. but I do have a lot of anxiety about it. And most of my anxiety is because, kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like my cheese grater, it’s not like a minor thing in my life. Like I use my AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ John probably more than any other single Apple thing, because I use them when I’m sitting down on my computer sometimes,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I just have them in my ears all the time. I use them as microphones to talk at work, right when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John doing teleconferences at work and everything. I use them to listen to music on my thing

⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m going for a dog walk or podcast or whatever. I’m always using them. And if

⏹️ ▶️ John you took those away because Apple decided they’re not into that specific design anymore, I would be sad.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, I’m, you know, the flip side of it, like I said, I’m open to the idea of new earbuds

⏹️ ▶️ John that are like the AirPods that are even better. Like, that’s the whole reason I’m not buying five pairs of them

⏹️ ▶️ John now, because I want something better, but I just don’t want the thing I have to be taken away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t think it’s a high risk. I mean, because, you know, what you said about, you know, the AirPods Pro not fitting this whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cast of people, I think that illustrates a key thing here. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so long, Apple seemed to be of the product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design opinion by their actions that one size fits all. That for so long,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they only would make one type of earbud at a time. And then AirPods came

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And when we went wireless, there were lots of headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were decent. I mean, I had a few that I liked a lot myself, but nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except AirPods provides the total level of system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration and the level of features with iOS devices and everything that AirPods do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple for whatever it was, a year or two, only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made one kind of AirPod. And it was a wild success,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they still only made that one. And as somebody who it didn’t fit, that kind of sucked for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, and I think we were the minority. I think most people seemed fine with it. And then that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it was such an amazing thing for me when the Pros came out. Not only is the AirPod Pro just a really good product all around,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the first time I could wear it comfortably. I could actually join this world of convenience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everyone else had been enjoying for years, and I never had. I’d never had a nearby that fit me. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole experience of, even before that with the wired ones, where people would be able to have their headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrapped around their phone in their pocket, I could never do that. They never fit me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My headphones never fit in my pocket until AirPods Pro. And so it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing when Apple finally left the world of one size fits all and finally made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that happened to fit me really well. But when they did it, they didn’t stop making the other kind. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people, the other kind fits fine. That’s why they could make, it’s kind of one size fits most.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they’re gonna stop making the size that fits most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and only make the one that seems to have a pretty high percentage of people saying this isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. So I think you’re fine. I wouldn’t expect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to do this. If they do tweak the design, as you said, great. I think they probably will. Based on the current rumors, they are probably gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the stems shorter, but I don’t think that requires them to change the fit style. I think it’s perfectly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re perfectly able to make the stems shorter and also still have it be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a traditional earbud style kind of resting in that curve fit.

⏹️ ▶️ John The room or shape though does look like the pro. Imagine the pro shape but without the tip. That’s kind of what they look like. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nothing like the old shape. It’s a different, that little blop. So it could

⏹️ ▶️ John have been a place where all of a sudden they make a new shape and the new shape still works for most people, but suddenly I’m the Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t work in my ears, you know? You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never know when it can happen to you, John. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Usually it’s about spending a pile of money. In this case, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about- I did that

⏹️ ▶️ John too. You did it first. That’s right. I just waited 10 years to do it.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show.

#askatp: Shared Apple ID ➡️ Family

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Ask ATP. This question comes from Peter Yang, but it may as well have come from me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s it like to switch from the time-tested strategy of a shared Apple ID used by multiple people for iTunes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the App Store, in-app purchases, et cetera, to family sharing? Would it make sense to make that previously shared Apple ID the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey progenitor account and then have my spouse and I as members with our personal Apple IDs?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or should I scratch the old Apple ID entirely and use my personal Apple ID as a starter? What happens to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my in-app purchases? I assume the three of you are all enjoying family sharing. So I am not. So the way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve done this—I think I’ve talked about it in the past—but the way we’ve done this is the thing that most people used to do is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin uses my Apple ID just for the purposes of the App Store, but she has her own

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple ID for literally everything else. And then my Apple ID is kind of the—it is my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage, which is my everything, my iCloud ID, and it’s also my App Store ID, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s everything to me, and it’s only the App Store to Aaron. And I know that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to move to family sharing. I know I do. I’m not debating it, but I’m so scared to mess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with what is mostly working. So please, one of you educate both Peter and me as to what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right approach is here.

⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to put your mind at ease. First of all, I guess this is another thing I had forgotten, but it’s just like finding out you don’t use iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John Photo Library. I didn’t know you weren’t using family sharing. So this scenario described,

⏹️ ▶️ John Peter Yang is in the exact same situation I was, right? And what I chose to do was his first suggestion,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is to make the previously shared Apple ID, the progenitor account, so fancy, and

⏹️ ▶️ John then have my spouse and I as members with it. Well, not, not quite the progenitor account. Like it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what he means by progenitor. I thought he meant like make that the, the, the family owner, like the

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s family sharing, you can have like, what is it called? The family manager or the family owner or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I did. Apple ID was used by everybody for App Store purchases, right? And I made that

⏹️ ▶️ John the family owner, manager thing, whatever. I started the family, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John then, you know, and that Apple ID has always been quote unquote, my Apple ID, right? And then

⏹️ ▶️ John I added my wife as a member of the family and added all the kids as members in the families and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ John My wife already had her own Apple ID, the kids had their own Apple ID is like, so we didn’t change anything. We didn’t make a new

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. And the suggestion of like scratching, you know, getting rid of the old Apple ID

⏹️ ▶️ John entirely and just making new ones. Don’t do that because you can’t transfer purchases. You can’t merge Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John IDs, right? I was gonna say for better or for worse, but it’s 100% for worse. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John does not let you do things like merge Apple IDs or transfer purchases from one thing to the

⏹️ ▶️ John other in any reasonable way, right? So you’ve been making purchases for years and years and that

⏹️ ▶️ John one shared Apple ID. Great. So is everybody that Apple ID needs to be in your family. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I would suggest not making it like an unowned random person Apple ID. You could do that, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, make up a family member like I had this whole saga where I made up a family member my thing for Apple reviews and

⏹️ ▶️ John took me six months to delete it or whatever. But don’t do that make a person

⏹️ ▶️ John own whoever whoever wants to be the person who owns all those purchases you made over all the years.

⏹️ ▶️ John Fine, make them the family owner, give them that thing, make the family and then just shove everyone else in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And all there is to it. Like it’s only upside by putting people in a family as long as you don’t try to merge Apple IDs or

⏹️ ▶️ John delete Apple IDs and make all new Apple IDs, which will end in disaster. And just keep the Apple IDs you have

⏹️ ▶️ John and put them in a family together. Now suddenly, all of every single member of that family

⏹️ ▶️ John has access to all the app purchased by that shared Apple ID that every day purchased in, right, you

⏹️ ▶️ John just have to know how to do it if like go through in the store, go through the rabbit, you go through purchasing, get the thing that way. They

⏹️ ▶️ John can also do individual purchases if they want, or they can continue essentially allowing

⏹️ ▶️ John the one account to buy everything and then the family members just get access to it. It used to be

⏹️ ▶️ John that in-app purchases were excluded from that in various ways, but now Apple at least has the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John for app vendors to make their in-app purchases also shareable through family sharing. And in my experience, a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of them are doing that because there’s not many downsides to doing it. So I wouldn’t be afraid of

⏹️ ▶️ John family sharing. It was super painless and I did it like on day one, you know, when there could would have

⏹️ ▶️ John been many more hitches. And as long as you just take your existing Apple IDs and put them all in a family, you only

⏹️ ▶️ John get benefits and there’s basically no downsides.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there’s a Mac Power Users episode 522 from about a year ago that I listened

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a long time ago thinking, oh, I’m gonna do this now and then I never actually did it. So yeah, I need to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this at some point. Marco, I presume you’re in the family and everything’s hunky dory.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we also jumped on family sharing pretty early. We never had the shared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID purchases thing. You know, Tiff and I have always maintained separate Apple IDs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we don’t actually have a lot of overlap in our purchases,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there wasn’t a lot of stuff we ever had to buy twice between us. It was minimal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we always kept separate Apple IDs. It would always made sense. And then once family sharing was launched, we joined it pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco early as well, and it’s been fine. We’ve never really had any problems with it, So I definitely can recommend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the family sharing setup to anybody out there. It works great.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just looked up what Apple calls it. I am the organizer of our family. Not

⏹️ ▶️ John sure that’s better than manager or whatever, but yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m the organizer. Better than owner.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my wife is listed as parent slash guardian, and then the other ones just have their ages listed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. All right.

#askatp: Computer speakers

Chapter #askatp: Computer speakers image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gennaro Diaz writes, I know Marco has described with detail the headphones and mics that he likes and dislikes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was wondering about his speakers and amp for computer sound. I would love to know the sound setup of John and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I have always found, throughout my entire computing life,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer speakers are garbage. They are just garbage. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is, even when good speaker companies make computer speakers, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. I have never found a pair of computer speakers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was anywhere near as good as even basic entry-level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small regular speakers that happen to be on your desk. Maybe I’m just missing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that part of the market that’s good. Never found it. I’ve tried many at many different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price points and prestige levels and different brands. your speakers, in my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience, are garbage. So my solution has always been, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every few years to try to get back in and try to buy some kind of, you know, self-powered pair of nice desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers from somebody, realize they’re garbage, return them and go back to regular speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My approach has always just been, put regular speakers on your desk and have something to amplify them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, what that’s been has changed over time. Like at first, back in, like in my earliest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, I had this little like, one of those little systems that a lot of people had in the 90s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was like, it looked like a stack of components, like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cassette deck and a radio and everything, but it wasn’t actually a stack of separate components. It was just like a rectangle with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dividers like in the plastic molding that looked like a stack, but wasn’t, you know what I’m talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one of those. Yeah, those like integrated stereos that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the speakers were separate,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the speakers were separate.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still have those speakers, and they are holding up my current speakers. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Jeff

⏹️ ▶️ John Foxworthy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco style?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they are literally stands because they’re just the right height and just the right footprint, you know, to just have a black

⏹️ ▶️ John nondescript rectangle to hold up the speakers that are actually the right and left channel to my television.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so anyway, so I started out with one of those, this Pioneer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, and it sounded way better than the computer speakers that existed in 1995. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I started out just wiring one of those, That’s when I first discovered the famous mini

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jack to left and right RCA connector Y adapter cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those have been around for quite some time and I first started using it back then.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you have an amp then? Could you drive speakers that big off of your computer?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no. Well, back then I would just, I ran my computer’s output to the line in on my Pioneer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stereo thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, so you were actually using that big stack of stereo crap.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. Because it had a line in function. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not space efficient.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not at all. But anyway, so I eventually moved on to different things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a while, I had this giant pair of, Sony had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a self-powered home theater speaker system that was a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-amplified left and right where the amp was just all shoved into the left speaker, but they were floor-standing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers. So a powered floor-standing speaker with a giant woofer on the bottom half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And I used that for a while, like throughout most of college and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And eventually, you know, to downsize back to desk-sized stuff, I, again, I mean, I’ve tried so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different ones that have been self-powered desktop speakers, and they’re all so bad. Even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I even, just this past summer, like I was setting up the new setup at the beach, and I was trying, I tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple different ones that came very highly recommended on, like on Amazon reviews and stuff, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were terrible. Like honestly, they were terrible. So what I have used with most success is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular stereo bookshelf speakers. Bookshelf speakers are, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a size category. They do fit on a desk. They’re not made for this use. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them this way. They’re not made usually to be listened to quite this close up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can improve things slightly if you want to by like tilting them towards you slightly. They call that towing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in, where like you have them not pointing straight out, but pointing kind of diagonally into a triangle towards your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears. Certain desktop bookshelf speaker stands will have little angles so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they tilt up slightly. Because also having bookshelf speakers on your desk typically makes them too low

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ideal listening. So if you can have them point a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards your ears, like up and in instead of straight out, that improves the listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco physics of using bookshelf speakers this way. But again, using bookshelf speakers this way is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found by far the best setup. And I have yet to find

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pair of self-powered bookshelf speakers that is worth its price at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even for, like, so my first favorite pair of bookshelf speakers for this use was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Paradigm Atom series. They’re like 300-ish dollars for a pair,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you need an amp. And I’ll get to that in a second. So that was my first pair. Paradigm also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a self-powered one, and I tried it, I tried that one first,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sounds way worse than the powered one, or than the passive one. I don’t know why,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they just use different components or what, like for whatever reason it sounds way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse. I also have tried, so my current favorite,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while the bookshelf speaker world was really obsessed with this entrance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from KEF called the LS50. And I have never seen an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco LS50 in person. They didn’t pass muster visually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my use. And they’re also, they’re very deep. Be careful if you look in their dimensions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But KEF made a desktop version of something that looks a lot like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the LS50. I think it’s the LSX, LS10. And I tried those this summer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are not good in my opinion, or at least they weren’t good for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they also make a version called the Q150 that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very similar in many ways to the LS50, but a little bit more traditional styling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cheaper. And so on my desk right now is a pair of KEF Q150s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the aforementioned terrible TV upstairs setup, I got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Q350s, which is very similar to the 150s, but is a slightly larger driver,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. And these speakers are incredible. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why speaker nerds have been talking about the KEF LS50 for so long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so effusively. I’ve never heard speakers that sound

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this good in especially the mid-range. I am a self-professed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-range snob, as you all know. When you put on like, like Apple has this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on Apple Music they have this like acoustic singer songwriter channel, something like that. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put that on, it is incredible to hear like a vocalist and a guitar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s all you need, like put that, or like a person singing and playing piano, like put that on these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers and it sounds incredible. This line of speakers, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the KEF, this new line that is based on this new driver technology they have, it has amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-range. And for me, that’s fantastic. Even the 350s upstairs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even have enough base that I decided not to get a subwoofer. I was allowed to get a subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had it allocated in the political landscape of our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco household and declined to get it because I didn’t need it, because they even have good enough base

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the 350s. The 150s that I have on my desk aren’t great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for bass, and so I actually do have a separate subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget what it is. I’ll have to put it in the show notes. It’s some kind of white

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon recommended thing. It’s kind of like mid-range, smallish subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the Q150s, I do recommend that, and it also makes good footrest. My

⏹️ ▶️ Marco primary goal for when I was, when I decided to get a subwoofer for my desk, my primary goal was let me get one that is a good footrest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shape first, because I don’t care about the particular quality of the subwoofer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, and then that’s all driven by, I have this SMSL,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of, I’ll put it in the show notes, some kind of inexpensive SMSL amp. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole category of, they used to be called Class D or Class T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amps that are basically like $50 to $100 desktop speaker amps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can usually push about 50 watts per channel, which is plenty for this kind of use. If you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have a pair of bookshelf speakers on a desk, that’s the way to go, because it’s really small. I have mine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Velcroed to the bottom of my desk, so I don’t even see it. I control the volume separately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco via my headphone amp setup, and that’s what drives them. And the combination of a $50ish class

⏹️ ▶️ Marco D amp and a pair of regular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco passive bookshelf speakers sounds so much better than any pair

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of self-powered computer speakers I’ve ever found. So that’s what I use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Q150s, some kind of subwoofer, I’ll put it in the show notes and this SMSL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp that has, I had to get a slightly higher tier of the SMSL to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a subwoofer output. But I’ve also used the now famous SA50,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s called. They’re like entry level model, it’s about 50 bucks. I’ve used that one before and that’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. If you’re not gonna have a subwoofer, that one’s totally fine. So that’s it. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not, I really don’t have anything good to say about any like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco active self-powered computer speakers I’ve ever bought or heard. But Bookshelf

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers from regular speaker makers are great. They have lots of good ones. My favorite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is the KEF series, but that’s the way to go if you want good sound quality.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not small, it’s not simple, but that’s the way to go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I should have looked up the model number of my crappy computer speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m using computer speakers. I’ve always used computer speakers, and most of the time

⏹️ ▶️ John I leave them turned off, which tells you how much audio I ever have coming out of my computer. It’s basically like I have my computer

⏹️ ▶️ John in silent mode, because they’re plugged in and selected as the output, but they’re not on.

⏹️ ▶️ John So no noise comes out of them. I mean, again, the AirPods, I stand in front of my computer, I pair them, like that’s where I can get sound.

⏹️ ▶️ John When, in the rare occasions when I want to hear sound, like I’m watching a YouTube video, I turn them on just for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that gives you the level of the, you know, the type of, what kind of audio am I listening to? I’m watching a YouTube video.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m not watching movies and not watching anything like that. I think my speakers

⏹️ ▶️ John are, they’re from Creative, the Sound Blaster company. I think they are the Gigaworks T40 series.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have, each speaker has three drivers, two medium-sized ones

⏹️ ▶️ John and one tiny little tweeter-y thing. I pick them mostly based on their footprint.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have very small footprint, but like those speakers you have, Marco, they are huge. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John huge in every dimension, but yes, the depth is massive, right? So I wanted something that was small,

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t take up a lot of room on the desk, and these have way better sound quality than my previous crappy computer

⏹️ ▶️ John speakers that had single drivers. And they have controls on the front of them for volume and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John although I don’t use those controls, I just use the computer controls, right? They also have headphone jack on them, which

⏹️ ▶️ John at various times, depending on where the headphone jack has been on my various tower computers, from the G3

⏹️ ▶️ John to the first G’s greater to this one, it sometimes actually is convenient to plug my headphone

⏹️ ▶️ John directly into the front-facing headphone jack of my computer speaker if I have a wired headphone, but I really

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use it that much. I used to have a subwoofer attached to a different pair of computer speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ John These things have no bass whatsoever. My PlayStation speakers,

⏹️ ▶️ John I am a big fan of, I have no idea what it is. It’s like some Logitech setup where they

⏹️ ▶️ John give you these two, again, very small footprint speakers with the power button and the volume button right on them front-facing,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then a very big subwoofer underneath. Because for games, I really like the subwoofer for like explosions

⏹️ ▶️ John and gunfire. And I’m not listening to music and it’s not accurate or realistic

⏹️ ▶️ John in any way, but the subwoofer right at your feet really gives a good kick. I don’t rest my feet on it, but on the computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John since I rarely use the speakers at all, I no longer have a subwoofer underneath there at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have an amp, they just connect directly to the computer. When I had a subwoofer, the subwoofer itself was doing the

⏹️ ▶️ John amplification and accepting the signal from the computer and then it would feed

⏹️ ▶️ John the two speakers. There’s really not a lot of, I’m with Marco in that if you’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ John for like a good 2.1 system for your computer, there’s really not a lot of good options until you

⏹️ ▶️ John go and get your own amp, because any of the self-powered ones, they’re just not very good if you care

⏹️ ▶️ John about audio quality. And further, like the Logitech ones that I have on my PlayStation, the cords are

⏹️ ▶️ John just like, it’s like a SCSI cable coming out of the back of the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s such a

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little speaker, and I swear it’s the thickest cord in my entire house. There’s another reason I love the ones that

⏹️ ▶️ John speakers that I have on my Mac Pro, because they just have a tiny little wire coming from it It looks like a speaker wire. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not, because they’re self-powered and it’s actually, you know, there’s a power brick somewhere that’s powering

⏹️ ▶️ John these and the power is coming to the speakers through those little cables, but they’re very small, very thin

⏹️ ▶️ John cables that are easy to route and easy to put wherever I want them to go. Yeah, the Logitech ones

⏹️ ▶️ John just have, I mean, if not a SCSI cable, then at least like a monitor cable from a CRT.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s super thick and hard to manage. And only to one of them, because, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ John subwoofer goes up to the one speaker that has the power button with the SCSI cable, and then from the SCSI cable speaker to

⏹️ ▶️ John the other one goes the little skinny cable. So I do really like those speakers. I actually bought another set of them for

⏹️ ▶️ John my son’s PlayStation, and I will probably buy another set if I can if they ever start, if they

⏹️ ▶️ John stop making them, I’m gonna be sad because I love how small they are and they have

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really good sound. Another thing

⏹️ ▶️ John to stockpile. Yeah, well, I’ve already got two of them. The problem is they have, like the damn cheese grater,

⏹️ ▶️ John they have a fatal flaw, which is that the contacts on the

⏹️ ▶️ John power button and the volume knob get like, I don’t know, dirty or gross or like,

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually you get to the point where when you turn the volume, you hear that like static sound. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John power button is a push in and it sticks in and then click again and it comes out like a clicky pen, you know what I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That eventually when you click in and click out, you hear a bunch of static come through the speaker or whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been resuscitating them with electrical contact cleaner, which

⏹️ ▶️ John fixes the problem for like two years, but then it comes back. So yet another product with a fatal

⏹️ ▶️ John flaw, but that I really like for the purposes of playing my, you know, playing Destiny

⏹️ ▶️ John on my gaming monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, and this is like, this is yet another reason why I hate like computer speakers. It’s similar to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the iMac problem, where you’re combining multiple roles into something. And like, if any of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things break, the whole thing is ruined. Whereas if you have regular passive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, like you can use whatever cables you want. This is one area where I do make my own cables, is I buy a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spool of cheap speaker cable. You know, I have like, I think it’s Amazon Basics brand. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a spool of speaker cable costs nothing. That’ll last you forever. I have a basic wire cutter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that can strip the insulation in a nice clean way and everything. So I use one of those, you know, whenever I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like rewire my desk and I need a different length of speaker cable, I just cut a new one. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great. You know, you can, wiring speaker cables way easier than network cable because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really hard to screw it up. Like it’s very low intensity, it’s very low precision,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can use lamp cord and it doesn’t matter. So it’s, you know, you can make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you want. And, you know, a passive speaker, in computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment terms, effectively never die. Like you’d have to really try hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kill a passive speaker. They basically last forever. Like not quite, eventually you’ll have to like, you know, replace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the surround if it like rots out, if it’s like after 30 years. but they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively last forever. And so the cheap electronics that you might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco find in an amp or a volume control, yeah, those might have problems over time. So you can replace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only that after 10 years when it breaks. You know, if my little SMSL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp breaks, spend another $75, get a new one in 10 years, fine. Keep my nice speakers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you have separate components here, you gain so much more durability,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexibility, customizability. The thing also is like computer speakers that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have built-in amplification and everything aren’t even cheap. You’re not saving anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really by not having a separate component system. You might be saving one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small box somewhere. Like that’s all you’re really saving by going that route. It’s not worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for most people. It really isn’t. If you can have a separate setup,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I highly recommend it because it’s just better in every possible way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my answer is extremely complicated. I, for my computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the onboard speakers on the iMac Pro, I think they’re fine. For the kind of music listening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m doing when I’m working, I don’t need incredible audio fidelity. And if I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really am listening to something and want that fidelity, then I’ll plug in either my Beyerdynamic headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a set of Ultimate Ears canal phones that I have. but that happens almost never.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iMac Pro speakers are surprisingly good. And it’s funny because my dad had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey set of like, small bookshelf speakers that were Bluetooth powered, or Bluetooth, not powered, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bluetooth enabled. And he gave them to me because he was just gonna throw them away. And I had them connected

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my iMac Pro for like a day. And I realized that the iMac Pro actually sounds better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I just gave them to my brother-in-law and said, here, you can have these, because I don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Obviously that’s not a very useful recommendation in this context,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for me, I’ve actually been very surprised at how good the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro sounds, given that it’s a computer. I mean, I would not say that it is a good speaker

⏹️ ▶️ Casey system, but for the, again, for the kinds of listening that I’m doing, it’s more than sufficient for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly, that’s not that far off. Like that’s, like in one of my adventures last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, I brought the iMac Pro to a beach rental for a weekend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did like a work retreat weekend last fall, and I brought my iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, and I set it up on a coffee table in this rental house, and I used its built-in speakers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and played Phish the whole time, the whole weekend. It was me in an empty house

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing Phish from my iMac built-in speakers, and I was surprised how decent they were.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I wouldn’t call them good in absolute terms, but you’re right. For built-in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers on a thin computer, they are quite good for what they are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for many people, that’s fine. Not for me, obviously, but you know, like in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the context of like, I’m just gonna use the built-in ones for occasional use, The iMac Pro speakers are surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good.

#askatp: Home-finance software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gage Benny writes, what do you all use to track your finances, investments, budgets, and so on?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I use Prior Sponsor Banktivity. It works well

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my uses. Basically, I only use it as kind of a glorified spreadsheet. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to keep track of, you know, where we’re spending what money, and so I have a good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey view as to how much money we have in a more real-time sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, I could use my bank’s website to do 80% of this, but I don’t know. It’s a habit I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 20 years and I’m probably going to keep going with it. But yeah, I like Banktivity and they have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS apps, which actually just recently they got revamped and are working even better than before. They have desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps. I don’t know if they have a PC version, but certainly on all Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms, they’re there. I like it a lot. I don’t know. Marco, what do you use?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a good answer. I have a couple of spreadsheets. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just did my annual profit and loss for my business accounts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my taxes for 2020. And I have a PHP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco script

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that I run against.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I export the transactions for the year from my bank website into QFX format.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I run this script I wrote a few years back to automatically classify everything and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generate a P&L that I can give the accountant to do the rest of the taxes. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a monthly spreadsheet for monthly stuff. But I don’t have a good solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, part of the problem is that I’ve been self-employed for 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that entire time, I’ve had just really spiky income. Self-employment,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have apps in the app store, it’s hard to know, it’s hard to have a smooth,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco predictable income. It goes up and down like crazy. And so it’s hard for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to have a very organized system when what’s happening is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco disorganized, if that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Back in the day, when I first had finances at all, I used Quicken,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which

⏹️ ▶️ John was an abomination on the Mac. But it was a very common program. Everybody understood

⏹️ ▶️ John it, and I got to know it. But since we’ve been married, my wife has essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John done all the finances. So I was like, oh, we should use Quicken. And I showed her how to use it enough

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to get by. But in general, she wanted to be in charge of the thing, but she did not like Quicken. So for years and

⏹️ ▶️ John years, she would use Quicken, but hate it. I liked it because after she used Quicken to do finances, I could go

⏹️ ▶️ John into Quicken and open it up and learn about what’s going on with the money, where it all is and how much it is

⏹️ ▶️ John and profits and loss and all that type of stuff. Like I had a bunch of saved graphs and charts and it was,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, a terrible Mac program, I’m not a good Mac citizen at all, but I knew how to use it and it did all the things, but she

⏹️ ▶️ John hated doing it. And she was the one who was doing it. I offered to take over the finances, but she didn’t want that to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John So she still does all the finances. And eventually she phased out Quicken. She said, I’m done with Quicken, especially with the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John like Quicken 2007 was like the latest version for a long time. And then Quicken wasn’t supported.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then they have this new web version that didn’t do all the same things. And Quicken became an even more of a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, that’s it, we’re off Quicken. So we stopped using Quicken many years ago. And my wife switched

⏹️ ▶️ John to a program that I always call YabNab, but that’s not actually what it’s called. Oh, yes, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John yes. The actual, it’s actually all caps YNAB, which I suppose is pronounced Y-Nab

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. But because it was such a mouthful when she started using it, I’m like, okay, well, you can use YabNab.

⏹️ ▶️ John It used to be a native Mac app that was actually better than Quicken in terms of being a good Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John citizen. Eventually, they too phased out their native Mac app and went to this web

⏹️ ▶️ John technology-based thing. But she likes it and the web thing actually looks much like

⏹️ ▶️ John the native Mac one, in the spirit of Electron apps or whatever. Lots of the times if your UI is sufficiently

⏹️ ▶️ John on Mac, like you can replace it with web technologies and it doesn’t actually seem that different. Because she loves

⏹️ ▶️ John to have a budget, right? And I never used any of the budgeting features in Quicken. I just wanted to know like how

⏹️ ▶️ John are we doing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and what does

⏹️ ▶️ John the income look like? And we categorize all the purchases. You can see how much are we spending on food and how much are we spending on gas

⏹️ ▶️ John and rent, you know, like all the stuff that you would do. but she wants to have a budget as in, here’s how

⏹️ ▶️ John much I’ve allocated for food, for utilities, for mortgage, you know

⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Like, and then she would make, she loves making budgets. Like, oh, here’s the vacation

⏹️ ▶️ John budget, and here’s how we’re gonna save money for our Disney vacation. Here’s John’s computer budget. And

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, so she does it all, and she uses YabNab, which is not pronounced YabNab.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, yeah, I know a lot of people who use You Need a Budget, YNAB.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never tried it, but it seems like pretty much everyone who has swears by it. It’s like fricking Peloton

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or fricking Tesla.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John As far as I can tell, it’s not a cult. It’s just a program. I don’t particularly like how it, uh, how it handles

⏹️ ▶️ John things, but it does what she wants it to do. So there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My name in T is that my name is T in the chat says much like Casey and Beachbody. YNAB

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a good budgeting application, but it also has a cult associated with it, which you can just ignore and get the benefit from the app.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ John an MLM though, is it? I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not even a subscription

⏹️ ▶️ John app, I don’t think. I think it’s like a one-time purchase. Let me see, what is it? Is it a subscription? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t price it. If you were doing the finances, you would know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just read it. Oh, it is, it is a subscription. Annual plan, $84 a year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it classify itself as like a safe expense like in its things, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to make you not look at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John much?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you have to budget for it somewhere. You need a budget. We’ve got like 900 budgets.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got too many budgets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It automatically classifies itself as essentials. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Quicken in that it’s not just like budget or whatever. You can put everything in there. You can put your 401ks in there

⏹️ ▶️ John and tracking your investments or whatever. I don’t think it has all the integrations that Quicken did with tracking stock prices

⏹️ ▶️ John and all that crap or whatever. But it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. It’s a glowing endorsement. It seems fine. John Syracuse.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s much more opaque to me because I don’t know how to use it. So I can’t dive in there and get all the old reports

⏹️ ▶️ John I used to have in Quicken. I have no idea how to get them out of Yabap. So I’m kind of in the dark now. I’m assuming I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John broke.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, ExpressVPN, Hover, and Flatfile. And thank you to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join them and become one of them by going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to atp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him,

⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, 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, check podcast so long

Post-show: CES TV advancements

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of display advancements, I finally remembered where I ran about this must have been on rectifs But rectifs

⏹️ ▶️ John is so delayed from when it comes out that you’ll hear that episode in like two weeks. But anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John the big thing at CES this year for all the televisions aside from the panel stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John is you know directly in line with my 2013 blog post which was entitled

⏹️ ▶️ John CES worse products through software This year, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all, I mean, you can practically guess it. AI image processing. Isn’t that what you want

⏹️ ▶️ John on your TV? That every single manufacturer is touting some kind, and they all decided they’re gonna say AI and

⏹️ ▶️ John not ML, because I guess ML is too much of a tech term. AI image processing, which is exactly what it sounds like. They

⏹️ ▶️ John have their stupid processors burning cycles to figure out, are you watching an action movie? Are you

⏹️ ▶️ John watching sports? And then they modify the picture on the screen, specific elements in the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John to look better and they even modify the sound as well. So if they can find the edges of the buildings

⏹️ ▶️ John in a sky shot, if they’ve classified your thing as a movie and you’re showing pictures of buildings and they’re gonna detect

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s buildings because they train their stupid machine learning thing to identify buildings, and they’re gonna sharpen just the edges of the buildings

⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re gonna find a human face and they’re gonna smooth the face over and it’s like, stop screwing with the picture.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is the last thing I want any television to ever do is to literally alter

⏹️ ▶️ John the picture, like based on a bunch of AI rules, not even like on a setting that you could,

⏹️ ▶️ John so, you know, basically it’s just, if you get one of these new TVs, it’s just one more thing you have to turn off.

⏹️ ▶️ John All of that motion stuff you have to turn off, turn off all of the AI processing, turn off all the reality

⏹️ ▶️ John creation or whatever the hell they’re gonna call it. You gotta turn that camera off.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But it amazes

⏹️ ▶️ John me that they’re willing, because I know we have the tech to do this, but like, man, I mean, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it seems so ridiculous, but if I think about it, that’s what the iPhone cameras do. They find faces, they know what they’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at. They detect what kind of scene, Like they are messing with your picture not just as a giant grid of pixels,

⏹️ ▶️ John but with an understanding of elements in the picture, some understanding of elements in the picture, at the very

⏹️ ▶️ John least understandings of human faces, which has been around for a while, but their processing takes

⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff into account. But to do it in real time on a television set, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want that to happen ever. The sound thing was driving me nuts. It’s like they can localize sound. So it sounds like it’s coming from

⏹️ ▶️ John the person’s face because their speakers shake the screens, you know, the speakers that are behind the screens.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so they can figure out who the speaker is and make the sound come out of where their face is. Or make,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re watching sports, they can give the sound more like stadium reverb. It’s like, please, no, please

⏹️ ▶️ John stop. Stop destroying the signal that I’m pumping into the back of you with an HDMI cable. Would you just show

⏹️ ▶️ John it the way it’s coming out of the cable? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maddening. Can’t stop the signal, but you can alter the crap out of

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, apparently. And you know these systems are not gonna work well because these companies are not Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s just gonna be like, I pity the poor tester. It’s gonna be like, is this TV

⏹️ ▶️ John broken or is the stupid AI image processing just, you know, like a dog with a bone and it thinks

⏹️ ▶️ John that mountain is someone’s face and it’s softening it because it doesn’t want to show wrinkles.