415: Sent Without Pants

28 Jan 2021

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Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Marco’s new computer (This is not a joke. —Ed)
  • T568A vs. T568B myths busted
  • Reminiscing about the PowerBook G4’s ethernet port (via Travis Pouarz)
  • The 30” Apple Cinema Display and print design (via Ted Barnes)
  • Audio accommodations (via Christpher Klein)
    • Mimi (App Store link)
• Dan Riccio goes into a bunker
  • Creative Selection
• More Mac laptop rumors
  • Bloomberg
  • Patently Apple
• #askatp
  • How much do macOS and iOS cost? (via Brenden Becherer)
  • Do we care about the Sent with Siri footnotes in Messages? (via Rohit Sharma)
• Post-show: What is Tesla doing‽
  • John’s door handle
  • New Tesla Front
  • New Tesla Rear
  • Knight Industries Two Thousand
    • “Steering Wheel”
  • F1 Steering Wheels
  • Tesla Steering Yoke Close-Up
    • …with icons illuminated

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

Chapters

1. New new new setup
2. T-568A vs. T-568B 🖼️
3. Auto-sensing Ethernet
4. 30” ACD for print design
5. Audiogram success story
6. Sponsor: Lickability
7. Dan Riccio’s “new chapter”
8. Sponsor: HelloFresh (code atp10)
9. MacBook Air rumors
10. Sponsor: Flatfile
11. #askatp: Valuing the OS
12. Sent with SIri. Learn more… 🖼️
13. Ending theme
14. Neutral: Model S redesign 🖼️

New new new setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the British are gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love this title. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know how to they do code switching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I’m on my my Mac mini now, I’m on my my new setup my new new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setup So I I kind of restored my iMacs installation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco onto this with you know a few minor exceptions who would fit but otherwise like that’s it’s mostly the iMac installation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I I kind of regret doing that because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I inherited all of the cruft from my old desktop installation and I had been using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my nice, clean, fresh install on the MacBook Air as my only OS for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, what was that, about a month and a half or so? So I’m kind of like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I kinda, first of all, I kinda miss the MacBook Air as my primary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there are some reasons why I’m gonna keep the Mac Mini as the primary for now, but I might do a clean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco install. And honestly, going back to two computers again, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is feeling a little bit more of a burden than a worthwhile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gain this time, because they’re so similar. They’re basically the same computer, but now I just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more ports on it. But the Thunderbolt docks were good enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the port thing that I don’t necessarily need that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are some reasons why I benefit from having a desktop in our current situation in life and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what our household needs here. So I’m gonna keep it this way, but honestly, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Air is so good and so similar in its capabilities that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I might, like, I don’t know, down the road, like we’ll see how our needs change with, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we kind of have to share the podcasting equipment and stuff like that. And so we have some certain needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here that I really benefit from the desktop, But it is really tempting to just go to one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer and have that one computer just be that MacBook Air because that’s what I was doing for a while and it was fine, it was great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So we’ll see, we’ll see what the future holds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s fascinating to me that, Mr. I hate laptops, I don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey laptops at all, give me my desktop pride for my cold, well I guess that’s more John on the give me my desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pride for my cold dead hands part, but you were very devout in your belief that laptops were not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for you and here it is, one different CPU and suddenly the world has changed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the skies have opened, the sun is shining down, the angels are singing, it’s a whole new world, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, in all fairness, it’s a heck of a CPU. It’s no small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change. It’s like when you go from Windows to Mac, it’s like, it’s just an OS. Like, that’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a big deal. And yeah, so in this case, like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a pretty important CPU change. And I was reminded when you were like, your social,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you hate laptops. I remember that scene in Clerks. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I work at a video store, but I wanna go to a good video store. It’s like, I hate crappy laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I don’t hate good laptops. This is a really good laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s the best laptop I’ve ever had. I don’t even like good laptops, so. I know, that’s fair,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but really, like so much of what made laptops suck in the past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is either gone or greatly minimized with this one. And a lot of that’s temporary. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there will presumably still be a larger performance gap between desktops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and laptops once the desktops are all updated. And that’s why, like, this is kind of a unique time to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a Mac user right now, because right now, the best Mac they sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the MacBook Air. That presumably won’t be the case in six months,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe. Or maybe less, maybe more. But like, you know, as soon as they release the iMac, probably, like, you know, whenever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s coming, spring, summer, whatever it is, like, that’s probably gonna have whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1X or similar is, and that’s probably gonna be faster, and it’s gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of built-in ports, and it’s gonna have probably more GPU power, and it’s gonna have, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, the great new design and everything. So, like, certainly the shine will wear off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this, you know, basic, like, entry-level, level, you know, M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Silicon, Apple Silicon Mac, once the newer higher end ones come out. And there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will come a time where I will rationalize upgrading to one of those, I’m sure. But- You? Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like, right, that’s why, this is why I keep trying to sell people on the MacBook Air because like, it’s such a cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing right now that the lowest end laptop is the best laptop in the lineup. Like, that’s such a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool thing that is almost never the case. And really for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of my needs, It’s like all these M1 computers are totally fine. I have yet to hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the fan in the Mac Mini. And yeah, it’s just, these are fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers. And it just makes me so excited that soon these are gonna be considered the low

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco end because the high end is gonna be even better than these. This is just such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a great time to use a Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So actually, let me pull on that thread for a second. Do you suspect that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the high end of any of these devices. So I’m eliminating the Mac Pro. Let’s leave that aside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s kind of its own weird one-off. Do you think the high-end Mac mini, do you think the high-end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 16-inch MacBook Pro, do you think they will be that much faster than the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that are out now? Because, you know, history and momentum makes me think, sure, of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey course it would be considerably faster. That’s the way these things work. But what if it’s not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What if the differences really do boil down to just port configurations and touch bars

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are not and screen sizes are not. I mean, what if we end up with a real iPhoneification

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of let’s say the laptop line, where really you’re not choosing what processor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you don’t choose what processor you’re getting in an iPhone. You’re choosing what screen size you want, you’re choosing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whether or not, or at least in years past, you’re choosing whether or not you want a home button and things of that nature. Do you reckon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the next, whatever the next processor is, it will be a, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bump from the M1 and it won’t be that big. And even the top of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey line, even if there’s like a brand new iMac Pro, it’s still powered by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an M1 with maybe a couple more cores or some special sauce. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know if it’s still gonna be that way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think what we’re gonna see is single core performance is probably gonna be pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco similar across every generation. So M1, anything, M1X, M1, like, you know, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, however, they like, make the chip, like bigger and wider for the higher end models, I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco single threaded performance is going to be very similar across all of them. You know, they might clock the higher end ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit higher because they, you know, they’ll have the thermal and power headroom to do it. But ultimately, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t expect massive differences in single threaded performance, we’re going to see that same core being used across the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole product line, then then the question becomes how many of them you know, how many high performance versus, you know, high efficiency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cores do you get? And then GPU power is the other big question mark. And of course, things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RAM ceiling might also be affected as we’ve discussed. So I think ultimately we’re going to see, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, single core performance being very similar across every model of a given like chip year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, chip generation year, whatever it is. Um, but we will see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certainly like GPU stuff is probably the easiest to scale because GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are, are very easy to scale. just give them more transistors and more heat and more power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they they and GPU performance scales up very easily. And processor performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is close, like up to a point. You know, you can you can add more high

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco performance cores and make this perform even better in parallel stuff. But scaling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the single threaded performance is much harder and has usually you hit ceilings on that much faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than than anything else. you know, even it gets to the point where like even if you try to clock it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really really really high and it sucks down tons of power, you just get, you know, pretty diminishing returns pretty quickly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with that kind of thing. So, that’s why I’m guessing like we’re gonna see everything get wider,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more cores, bigger GPU with itself, more cores, but probably not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco each one being that much faster. And if that’s the future we see, or that we get,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then what’s probably going to happen is the higher-end machines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything are going to be very similar in performance to the lower-end machines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re not doing either high-powered GPU things or very parallel tasks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Which honestly is not that different from the world that we’re leaving with the Intel world. Like, that’s largely where it got as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you look at all the single-threaded benchmarks of Geekbench and everything else, like, most generations, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, like they improve the core occasionally, but for the most part, single threaded performance doesn’t change that much between, between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco model families. Cause that’s just, you know, modern, modern chip design and thermals and stuff like that. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think largely the higher end machines are going to feel like largely the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until you do something like a video and code or something like that where you’re using like massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco parallel operations. And then you’ll probably see differences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is what we’ve been talking about for a while that we still don’t know the answer to, which is how much of an appetite does Apple have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make things more exotic and, and, uh, weirder for the higher end machines? We just don’t know because we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just got the low end ones and low end ones look so much like the iPad chips, essentially. Like it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t, it’s an open question as to how invested Apple is going to be into really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ringing out the power from these things. Um, and I agree with everything Marco said. The, the interesting part here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John though, as compared to the Intel world that we were coming from. and in fact on the Intel world, remember that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the higher end you got the worse single core performance got because when you get the 28 cores in there they couldn’t clock the single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones to match. The highest, the fastest single core one was the iMac with the low number of cores because then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could crank the speed up. But anyway, in terms of what you can do to single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John core performance, the advantage that the armed ships have doesn’t mean apps are gonna take advantage of it, but the advantage they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have is they’re so far below the cooling potential that we know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size class of like an iMac has in it, that Apple has actually the option

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to really turn the screws on it and crank it up to an absurd degree because they’re like, look,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ve got this giant case. We know we can put huge fans in there that aren’t actually that loud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We have so much headroom, even if it’s like Marco said, it’s going to be diminishing returns. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a linear ramp, but it’s like, but we’ve got all this headroom. And are we really going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like essentially make a fanless iMac? We could, because if the case is so big and you could just put a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passive heat sink in there, and it would probably be fine, or an iMac with a fan that you literally never heard, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current M1 MacBook Pro and Mac mini. But if Apple has an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John appetite to really take it as high as they can on a high-end iMac, whether it’s called the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro or not, you could also really just turn it up as far as it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go. make an M something CPU that uses as much power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the outgoing Intel model. And that’ll be a massive, like not overclocking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but a massive increase in thermal headroom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the ship. And now I don’t know where it tops out. It’s not like you can just keep making the clock speed faster and faster and it’ll just run forever, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because we don’t know a lot of details like the pipeline depth and stuff like that of these chips. But that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna be looking at It’s sort of get Apple’s philosophy. Are they going to say we’re gonna take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thermal headroom win across all our models That’s the most important thing to us Like basically you should not be able to tell that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any Mac has a fan They can do that and it will be exactly like Marco said where single-core will be about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same multi-core will be scaling very mostly linearly with the number of cores if you have a highly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parallel task bigger GPUs and The philosophy kind of like the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 10-hour battery life will be Oh max. You shouldn’t hear their fans anymore more. Another philosophy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is whatever case we have, whatever thermal headroom is there, if we can dissipate 200 watts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heat, we’re going to dissipate 200 watts of heat. And we will do whatever it takes to generate 200

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watts, right? We’ll, we’ll make a bigger GPU, we’ll increase the clock speed, we’ll add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more cores or whatever, because hey, we’ve got 200 watts. Let’s just do it. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And and until until Apple lands like their first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non entry level arm based Mac. We just don’t know what their philosophy is going to be. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exciting times coming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. All right. We should move on with some follow-up.

T-568A vs. T-568B

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We have gotten so much feedback about Marco’s Ethernet problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} my eyes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are spinning in my head. Everyone is, and as with our feedback often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goes, everyone is unequivocally convinced they are correct, and generally speaking, they are unequivocally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey convinced that we are incorrect, which both of those things are quite possibly true. However, everyone seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to disagree with everyone else as far as I’m concerned. So I don’t even know what’s real.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not even going to touch this. So John, I guess, do you want to tell me what’s going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sure. I think the biggest correction from last week is the T568A versus T568B.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A lot of people wrote in to bust myths about that, myths that were in that article that we linked and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talked about in the last show. And I think that, from the people who know, it’s pretty conclusive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The difference between A and B is which colored pairs of wires are on which pins.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s the only difference. And as many people pointed out, electrons don’t know what color the insulation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. So the supposed performance and reliability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and interference resistance properties of B are nonexistent. There is none. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are electrically exactly identical, because again, the electrodes don’t know what color things are. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are two different wiring standards, and you shouldn’t mix them up with each other because you’ll mess things up and accidentally make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crossover cables where you’re not supposed to. And all that stuff is true. But that article, which was very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John highly ranked in Google, which is how it ended up in our show notes. And many people who, many similar articles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that tout the supposed benefits of B, those are just, that’s entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a myth, right? They’re electrically identical.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m so happy to hear this. Because like, when I read the article and I was looking at the wiring diagram

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between A and B, I was like, why is it, what’s the difference? Because like, I noticed like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it says like, you know, pairs, you know, like, which pair is split? Like pair number one, pair number three, or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like, it looks like, why would this be different? And I assumed that like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe the pairs themselves are not twisted around each other. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not the same, yeah. If pair one is like diagonally across from pair three versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco next to pair three, like, but I’m like, that’s probably not how they do this. And so, but I was looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at it thinking like, there must be something about this that I’m not understanding because I don’t see what, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this would be different. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how this myth propagated. probably because like B was the new one, right? Like, oh, you don’t, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, when we do it for networking stuff, we do it the B style versus the A. And again, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna stress, if you don’t pay attention to this and make like one end A and one end B, and then just like, it’s random

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throughout your thing, like nothing will work right. Like, don’t do that, right? You do want to pick one and stick to it, but whichever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one it is, it absolutely doesn’t matter. Now, speaking of weird myth stuffs, in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like looking at more research on this and YouTube videos, because Marco mentioned the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird like Cat7 connectors and I wanted to see what the heck are these connectors. So I watched a bunch of videos on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cat6 versus Cat7 versus Cat8 and what the differences are and how to make the connectors and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John At one point, one of the people who seemed like they knew what they were talking about, cause they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were showing how to make the connectors and giving all these tips, whatever they said, they did one of the cables,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it was like in Cat8 or maybe it was Cat7, that they changed the colors around. So in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ethernet cables that most of us have in our home, if you open them up, there’s like a green wire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then there’s a wire that has green and white stripes and they twist with each other. So it’s the green

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wire paired with the green and white wire, right? And so it’s like the green and white wire is like green, white, green,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John white and little sections all the way down, right? And the guy says in the video that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in whatever this higher standard was that supports higher speeds, they said, you’ll notice that it’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John green wire and a green and white wire anymore. It’s just a green wire and a white wire.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which is tricky because he was like, here’s the technique I used not to get them mixed up because basically every colored wire has its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own corresponding white wire. So there’s the white wire that goes with the green wire, then the white wire that goes with the blue wire,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then the white wire that goes with the red wire, right? And the white wires are indistinguishable from each other. So there’s like, he’s saying like when you’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the connector, bend them in like this direction so they don’t get them mixed up with each other. And he mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John offhand, by the way, the reason they got rid of the striping, which seems like a good idea so you don’t mess them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up in that way, was because apparently printing the stripes on the insulation caused interference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problems. What?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And now I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh wait, this is just like 568A versus B again. Printing, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do the electrons know what color is it? Does the printing process change the insulation in some way? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if he was just pulling my leg with very dry humor or anyway. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously none of us are networking experts, but our toe dip into the world of networking has revealed all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorts of strange myths and urban legends, and it’s very uncomfortable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It seems like, again, I don’t know anything about this, but I would guess, I mean, unless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ink itself was like conductive and grounded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the process of stamping the ink or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the like. Right. It doesn’t make any sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can think of is like if the ink has some thickness to it and then maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like Spacing out the twisted pair like every time it passes

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} a stripe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then if you think like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know they have the pairs the twisted pairs have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco untwist for some kind of short amount of distance at each connector and Obviously you try to minimize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that distance to you know To to keep you know noise low and try to keep bandwidth high and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know minimize crosstalk and all that other stuff But I have to imagine like whatever amount that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you whatever amount of like signal degradation you’d be introducing by just having a connector on the end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the wire with that very slight amount of untwisting of the pairs would have to be greater

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than whatever the ink printing wire could possibly do. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and on the flip side of that though why would you ever make this change because as the person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was talking about when making the connector when you’re sort of separating the wires from each other you have to be really careful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to get the whites mixed up. Like if you just have them as a big bundle of wire, like wait, did this white one go with the green one? And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you got to take out your continuity tester and figure it out again or whatever. The system of having green with the green and white

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and blue with the blue and white, that’s a good system for matching them up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right? Well, I would argue though, if you get the whites mixed up, you have probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco untwisted too much of distance of the wire. Like, cause again, like you’re supposed to try and minimize the amount that you untwist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make the connectors and stuff. So I think like if you have lost track of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which whites go we’re twisted around which ones you’ve probably Untwisted to too long of a section

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it’s like when you’re trying to put them on the pins you want you know what I mean like you’ve got you’ve got The eight wires sprayed out in front of you, and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all in order But then two of the whites get crossed over each other and of course remember the twisted pairs are themselves twisted around each other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right through the length of the wire are they I didn’t know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s anyway. I don’t know the answer to this networking is weird a versus B

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are no performance differences, but you do need to know which one you’re doing and just stick to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my.

Auto-sensing Ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And here we are continuing with Ethernet follow-up. Travis P. writes, the PowerBook G4 Titanium

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey also had auto-sensing Ethernet. I bought one in April of 2001, which was before the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Xbox One, One X, Xbox Box X release. So the tie

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey book was January 9th of 2001, the original Xbox November 15 of 2001. I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was interesting, but Margo’s point still stands. The device that most people had that first had auto-sensing Ethernet was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surely the Xbox and not the tie book.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, well, because like at the time, if I remember correctly, auto-sensing, I think it’s part of the gigabit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco standard. So I think all gigabit jacks have always had auto-sensing. At least that’s how it seems to have worked out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But at the time, not everybody had gigabit stuff. And the Xbox didn’t either. It was a 100 megabit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco port that supported auto-sensing. And that was a very unusual combination.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Usually back then, your choices were 100 megabit NICs and stuff that didn’t have auto-sensing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the more expensive, you know, like 50 or $60 gigabit equipment that would all have auto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sensing. So that’s why I think it was weird to, or at least unusual to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a 100 megabit thing in the Xbox that had auto sensing.

30” ACD for print design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, Ted Barnes writes, the 30-inch Apple Cinema display was very impressive at the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for print design. At 30 inches, designers could design a full magazine spread at 100% with room to spare

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for toolbars and panels for the very first time. That was huge. That’s a good pun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} It was huge.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was huge. The Apple monitors, the Cinema display included, are also known for their stellar color fidelity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Most print shops would only guarantee color matching when using calibrated Apple monitors using their custom press

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey color profiles. The print world ran on Cinema displays for over a decade from design through pre-press and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey printing. You know, even though this, I don’t have a lot of energy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to care about the 30-inch cinema display from way back when, it is interesting to me that Apple really did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cater to these kinds of professionals in a way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think they do anymore. And yeah, you can make a really solid argument that who cares about print professionals because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey print is a dying, to some degree, dying art. You know, not a lot of people I know get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey newspapers every day, for example. But I think the point is still interesting that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it seems like Apple would do things that one could argue were explicitly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey directed at certain professions. And I don’t really see them doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot of that anymore. And when they do it with your guys’s ridiculous $90,000 monitors, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doesn’t seem like it’s enough. Like it seems like all the real true professionals that are really, truly wanting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what is it, reference monitors, that they’re still not buying Pro Display XDRs. Do we care about this? I mean, it seems like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bummer to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, we know that they let the ball drop on the pro market, right? That’s why they had to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reverse course, right? Which they’re doing. But in general, I think ignoring the big dip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and neglecting the market, it’s the same situation that it’s always been, that Apple serves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those markets in the way that, I mean, how did it get that market in the first place? it serves them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by basically making a platform that fundamentally has like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John foundational technologies that are suited to the platform. So to give an example in this case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or that are suited to the profession, color matching, color fidelity, color sync, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple made an OS level system framework technology API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for doing color calibration and matching. And that was back in the classic Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS days. And that’s a thing that you could say, well, who cares about color calibration? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the print people do, right? But that feature benefits everybody. Having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computers that are able to control and deal with color on more than just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more than just guesswork, like actually having color profiles and having it be system-wide and having it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John woven throughout the entire OS benefits everybody who uses an Apple computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Most people don’t care as much as the print people do, but everyone benefits from it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you think back to this era, looking at your friend’s PC versus your other friend’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PC, the colors could be all over the place because it’s a PC, whatever, you connect the monitor, you connect the video card, the color

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is what you get. Like who knows about color calibration? And it certainly wasn’t baked into Windows, right? But it was baked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into Mac OS. That’s true of almost every feature that the Mac has, proportional fonts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the retina as an example, and the UI scaling. Like there’s tons of things that Apple builds in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the foundation to benefit ostensibly, oh, just people who care about this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever weird market, but everybody gets the benefits, right? Part of the reason we like using Macs is they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all sorts of nice things and high quality above and beyond what we need. I mean, hell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the entire, all of our computers, maybe probably including Casey, are more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need. And that’s why we like them, because they do give us way more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the bare minimum that we need. And though, you know, we don’t need to have all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this extra color fidelity, or I don’t need 1600 nits, and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way retina works, maybe we don’t need that high DPI to look at text in a code window or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we enjoy it and like it, and benefit from it in sort of an ambient way, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple at its best, that’s how they get those markets in the first place. That’s why desktop publishing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came up on the Mac, and that’s how they keep them. They lose them by just neglecting to give that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John market what they really need. We’re not gonna make a tower computer for you anymore. We’re gonna stop making monitors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, you take it or leave it, right? And that’s how you lose the market, right? But you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it back by continuing to do things like make an FPGA,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a weird custom FPGA card that is literally only useful for people doing a particular kind of video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and building, you know, building support for it into your video app that’s for professional video editors that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you ship on your 1600 nit XDR display, yada yada.

Audiogram success story

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Christopher Klein writes, I never thought listening to a tech podcast would change my life, but thank you. As a 39

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey year old paramedic, I knew I had moderate hearing loss from almost 20 years of occupational exposure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to sirens and other loud noises. I followed your instructions to use Mimi to create an audiogram in the health

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app, used audio accommodations with my AirPods Pro and started playing music. I nearly wept. What an amazing difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it makes. I should try this. I don’t feel like I have hearing loss, but I should still try this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I made a profile for myself. I mean, you want, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some respects, you’re like, I want the feel good story too. But in other respects, you’re like, I don’t wanna have hearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the thing about these accessibility options that we’ve said many times. Accessibility is for everyone, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you if you live long enough. And the alternative is worse. So your choice is death or you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use accessibility features. So you may need them now and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might not know it because you think, oh, I’m not an old person. I don’t have any hearing loss. but try it out. This is a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John built in, this is another example, like serving the market of people who need accessibility features, that benefits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everybody. Eventually, it literally will benefit everybody, again, if you stay alive, but even people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are young and healthy and have no accessibility issues and perfect hearing and perfect vision and everything, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also benefit from having an OS that supports these kinds of features. Even if it’s just preference of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, I can make the text bigger, not because I can’t see it, but just because that’s what I prefer, or dark mode, which has some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accessibility benefits, right? Maybe you just like dark mode because it’s cool, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like those pro features, accessibility features can benefit everybody. Say you have hearing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say you have some hearing loss. And when I took the test, I tried two different apps. I did the Mimi one and I did another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one because I thought the Mimi test was difficult to do, but I tried a different testing app that was a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more conclusive. But either way, they showed that my hearing wasn’t perfect, but they both rated me as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t have hearing loss. they did still make a profile for me and I listened with the profile and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really couldn’t detect much of a difference. Like if you look at my little curves, I’m showing like frequency sensitivity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s just sort of like the expected curve. Like it wasn’t perfect, it would have been better if I took

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it when I was 18, but all of them chunked you into like percentages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever and I was in like the 90 something percent. So the profile did not sound that different than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John regular audio to me. But you know, who knows? You won’t know until you try it.

Sponsor: Lickability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Lickability. Lickability is a software

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Dan Riccio’s “new chapter”

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ♪

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dan Riccio begins a new chapter at Apple. This was a very unusual,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, press release, which I certainly did not expect. And I mean, we don’t typically hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about these sorts of machinations in advance, but this is weird. So, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s Riccio, Riccio, how am I supposed to pronounce this? I’m probably getting it wrong, aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tried to look this up before the show. I’m like, surely his name has been pronounced in a WWDC video. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A, I couldn’t find anything. I was trying to use like Apple’s transcript search and that was just totally failing me. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John B, I realized that half the time, it’s just like Tim says, and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} here’s Dan. He never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pronounces the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey name. So from the press release, Apple today announced that old Danny boy will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey transition to a new role focusing on a new project and reporting to CEO Tim Cook, building on more than two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey decades of innovation, service and leadership at Apple. John Ternes will now lead Apple’s hardware engineering organization

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as a member of the executive team. This press release was a little weird. It seemed to bounce back and forth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between Dan and John, but I guess what we’re gleaning from this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Dan is going into a bunker and will only come out when something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new has emerged, or at least that’s kind of what I took from it. What did you guys take from this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I took the same thing as you did. I mean, it doesn’t sound like Dan Riccio is being promoted into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sky or onto the roof. It sounds like he actually is, like, going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like not not reducing his role, but simply changing it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And, you know, and it makes sense. Like I mean, I don’t know that much about like the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, various machinations. How do you pronounce that of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of of this area of Apple? But I don’t think Dan Riccio would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like slated for retirement yet or anything like that or have any reason to be pushed out or anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. So I don’t think this is any kind of negative thing in all likelihood that that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems unlikely. So it is most likely that they’re actually not BSing us with this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wording and that he actually is just going to something super secret and therefore having to give up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the fairly broad role that he had. You know, it would be hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to continue in the role he had, which was kind of like above all hardware,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if what he was actually doing was going to do something, some kind of big new hardware thing that was one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specific product. And that’s basically what they’re saying here. And you know, we can debate what that product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be. It seems obvious that it’s most likely either a car or the AR stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it honestly, I’m not even sure how much that matters right at this point. But I do actually believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this press release and the way they have like spun this, I think sounds like it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like fairly accurate and not a bad thing and and just just he’s changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what he’s focusing on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nick, given that he’s not being, you know, becoming a fellow or, you know, being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phased out or whatever, it is difficult to get a read on this. But. And also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knowing nothing about what’s going on inside of the company, it does seem to me that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not a promotion for Dan. Now, I could be totally wrong. It’s hard to tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the press release, but like being in charge of lots of stuff actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is mostly like the latter, right? The more stuff you’re in charge of, the higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you are on the ladder. Tim Cook is in charge of everything. He’s at the top, right? So being in charge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all hardware, I mean, that seems bigger than working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on even a very important project. Now that that said, that’s a very sort of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, mercenary way to look at things and maybe if you’ve been in the company for a long time what you want to do is work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the super cool new project, right? Even if it’s just the one thing, you have less responsibility. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are, you know, you’re in charge of fewer things, but maybe that’s just what you want to do. He’s, Dan Riccio

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has nothing to prove to anybody. He’s been there a long time. He’s been wildly successful and has overseen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tons of great products and everything. And maybe this is just what he wants to do. This is the type of thing you don’t get from a press release. We don’t know what the actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John situation is, right? But it still seemed to me in the absence of any other information,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that maybe this is not really like, it’s not, you did such a great job. Now you get to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heavily involved in this new project for, you know, VR goggles or car or whatever the heck it’s going to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But that’s not really what I took from this thing. What I, Casey asked, what did you take from this? The main thing I took from it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that John Ternus is going to be, is to, you’re going to be the new Dan, right? He’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be taking over Apple hardware engineering. He’s going to be on the leadership page. He’s on the executive team. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John Ternus is a name that I just started hearing basically when the Mac stuff was turning around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I know very little about him other than when I started hearing his name, good things started

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happening to the Mac. And I care a lot about the Mac. And so I am very in favor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based on the small amount of information I have, of John Ternus being in charge of Apple’s hardware engineering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This potentially ties into last week’s show, maybe even this week’s show, we went through a litany

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of rumors, all of which were like wish fulfillment for this podcast for Apple hardware, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yay, John Ternes, I think. Go John Ternes, I like you, it’s good, keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing that. And on the flip side of that, Dan Riccio was head of hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when a lot of bad things happened to hardware that I care about at Apple. Now, again, he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also in charge when tons of awesome stuff happened, but if you’re going to try to assign blame

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for dropping the ball on the Mac or bad things happening, The person in charge,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fair or not, shoulders some of that responsibility. Even if the person in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John charge disagreed, or was fed bad information, or whatever, it wasn’t his fault, in the end it is your fault. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the person in charge. That’s the way it works. That’s why you can blame Tim Cook for all that stuff too, because in the end, he

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was the CEO when they shipped the butterfly keyboard. So that’s on him, just as much as it’s on anyone else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the higher you are in the org chart, the more responsibility you bear for the bad decisions, even if they happen 20 levels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John below you. So I, you know, I don’t know what the fancy new project is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I’m enthusiastic about the future of Apple hardware based on, again, the tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John circumstantial information I have from the outside about John Ternes and what has happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^John since I’ve been hearing his name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Throughout his nearly 20 years at Apple, Ternes has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey including the first generation AirPods and every generation of iPad. Most recently, Ternes led the hardware team responsible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the incredible iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, and he’s been a key leader in the ongoing transition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the Mac to Apple Silicon. Ternes graduated with, well, whatever. So basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it doesn’t sound based on what they put in the press release that he was that much into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mac until Apple Silicon, but I’m not arguing with anything you’re saying, John. It’s surely more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey meets the eye.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The wild card in all this too is like, the way Apple’s organized, and especially with the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John involved in the past decade or two, it’s never been clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me exactly how much control, let’s say, the senior vice president

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Apple hardware engineering has over what makes the product, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So when Johnny Ive was rattling around in there, he was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, swinging a lot of weight, right? If Johnny Ive insists that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your MacBooks only have USB-C ports on them and you get rid of MagSafe? Does even the senior

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Vice President of Hardware Engineering have the ability to override that? Is that like more of a product decision and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hardware engineering is not at that, you know, like, is that not something that you can control? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know how that decision-making works. I don’t know how like product design happens at Apple. Surely hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and software and design are all involved together, but who is the final decision-maker in those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things? I feel like when Johnny was there, he was the one, the end all be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all. It was like him and then Tim Cook, especially when he was put in charge of software, UI and hardware and design and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. But now that he’s out, I don’t know how that balance works. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should we be blaming anybody in hardware engineering for the butterfly keyboard? Or is that something that was a decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made above them, right? You know, cause again, the higher up you are, the more responsibility you have. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the butterfly keyboard was a Johnny decision and maybe Dan Riccio hated it and just had to go along with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that was the way. And eventually, it got reversed when he left. Who knows? That’s why I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love to read a book about it. Apple, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} all these people retire, somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please write a book. We had Ken Kishenda’s book about the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of things. And I mean, not that it was disappointing. I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was great. But doing software for a living gives me a reasonable feel for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how software works in any company. And reading the book confirms that, yeah, even though they do things a little bit differently there, software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is software. And that’s how that comes together. But I’ve never been a product designer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as in like, we’re gonna make a hardware thing and it’s gonna have a software component and we’re gonna figure out how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do market fit and what should we price it at and what kind of things should we make and what features should it have. I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love to know how that has happened historically at Apple. Someone please write that book.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the thing I would caution us on about like trying to read into the timing of this and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that the way Apple does things like this in almost every case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is usually pretty long, planned out stuff. Probably the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve been seeing more of John Ternus recently, in the last couple of years, maybe they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco planning this for a while, and so they wanted to raise the public profile of John Ternus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over time, so that by the time they finally made the move official, we all knew who he was already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, he was climbing the ladder, like the list of products Casey said, ended with the iPhone 12. If you’re in charge of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPhone 12, probably the previous year you weren’t. You know, like he was into the iPad, which is a lower profile product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but by the time you’re in charge of the iPhone, your next step up is, okay, now you’re in charge of everything, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I feel like John Turner has been climbing the ladder, and then Dan Ricci was there at the top of the ladder,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then the shuffle takes place. And I think he started appearing in meetings because he was climbing the ladder, but you’re right, like these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transitions, especially ones that are not sudden, you know, like something like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what was it, uh… Forestall and I’ve butting heads and having an ultimatium

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that’s where you don’t get a lot of time to react. But things like Phil Schiller becoming an Apple fellow or this transition probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right probably transition for a long time. But the transition takes place because someone has been rising

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the ranks and I feel like half the reason we keep seeing them is because they’re rising in the ranks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah that’s fair. This is probably a good thing or at least a neutral thing

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MacBook Air rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, we do have some more Mac rumors that came out after we recorded. And Bloomberg

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had an article wherein they had several interesting tidbits. Apple Inc. is working

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on a thinner and lighter version of the MacBook Air. This new computer is planned to be released in the second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey half of this year, or at the earliest, or in 2022. It will include

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple’s MagSafe charging technology and a next-generation version of the companies in-house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac processors. Apple’s discussed making the laptop smaller by shrinking the border around the screen, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will remain at 13 inches. The company considered building a larger version of the MacBook Air with a 15-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screen, but Apple isn’t moving forward with this for the next generation. And this is where Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I sob. I wish we were closer and the world hadn’t ended so we could give each other a very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hug. Apple has also developed underlying Mac support for both cellular connectivity and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Face ID, but neither feature appears to be coming soon. They say it right there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developed underlying Mac support for both cellular connectivity and Face ID, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey neither feature appears to be coming soon. Why, Marco? Why did they do this to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} us?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Why? And then it gets even worse for you. I mean, I agree with this. I just don’t feel as strongly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The upcoming MacBook Pro is an example of Apple’s renewed focus on Mac loyalists. The company is planning to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bring back an SD card slot for the next MacBook Pros. Marco, you want a justification to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey buy a new computer in a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} months? Well, there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, they didn’t say Air. This is mixing a bunch of things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh yeah, oh, you’re saying, hold on, you’re saying that if there was a MacBook Pro with an SD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey card and a MacBook Air that didn’t have one, that you would be like, oh no, I want it in my MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, heck no, you would get that SD card in a heartbeat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That depends on my overall priorities and the overall products and everything. I mean, I haven’t been using an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SD card a lot recently because I haven’t been going anywhere. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my laptop mostly travels between upstairs and downstairs. So I actually have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really enjoyed the small lightness of it. I’m frequently carrying like glasses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of water with it. So like I’ll frequently be carrying two glasses of water, one in each

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} hand. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then have the MacBook Air like tucked under my arm. It’s really nice having it be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size and weight it is. So I’m probably gonna stick with it for a while. But, I kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of got annoyed by this. The upcoming MacBook Pro is an example of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s renewed focus on Mac loyalists. The word loyalists

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, I don’t think it’s an entirely positive thing here. It’s typically things that end in “-ists”,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not entirely positive things. It kind of sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re not doing this to make the product better, they’re doing this to please the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fanatics. And I don’t like that framing of anything. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, this is overall, you know, continuing the recent rumor dumps. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the one thing that tells you everything you need to know about this though, is that it says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it uses a next generation version of the company’s in-house Mac processors. Meaning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it uses the M2, meaning we’re not gonna see it this year in all likelihood. This is gonna be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 2022 MacBook Air in all likelihood. So that’s great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s not immediately on the horizon. That being said, these all sound like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interesting changes and what’s nice about it, I think, although I think, didn’t they say somewhere that they’re actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna keep the current MacBook Air in the lineup in all likelihood and have this be like a higher priced one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But assuming not, I like that they’re doing things like bringing MagSafe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to seemingly the entire lineup and not just the MacBook Pro. I’m looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a time when the laptops are, like when they make something better about the laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they all get it. It’s more about just how big do you want it to be? How big of a screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do you want? And how many ports and how much power, basically. But otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if a lot more about them can be the same or similar, and if when something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets better, it gets better for the entire lineup, that’s all good things. So overall, this sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. This is basically what I would hope to happen. when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the rumors of the imminent ARM transition were really heating up over the last couple of years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had held the opinion, and I said multiple times in the show, that I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the launch models, like one of the Apple Silicon or ARM-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Macs that would be shown off at launch would be a totally redesigned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ultra-slim, ultra-small laptop, because I said they would probably want to show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off what they could make with their ARM chips. And they didn’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this time. Like they instead changed nothing about the externals and form factors and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything of the computers they released as the first batch. And so we haven’t really seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them really flex with like what kind of physical design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does this transition now enable them to do? And all the designs that we got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are also pretty old designs. So while they are remarkable computers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they look and feel kind of old. So what I’m really happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to see here is that this is actually coming relatively soon and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will be coming presumably to their smallest entry-level laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s gonna be great. I’m looking forward to it. I was kind of disappointed that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t get it at launch for Apple Silicon, although honestly, again, these computers are so good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m so happy with them that like, I guess we didn’t need it after all. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am very optimistic to see like, what does something designed for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Silicon from the start, what can that look like? And if these rumors are, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, even partly or mostly true, it sounds like it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty cool. The most interesting part of this rumor aside from the sad parts Casey, which we’ll get to in a minute,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the fact that thinner and lighter are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back on the table for Apple product advancement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And for the MacBook Air class of computer, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna keep it as 13 inches, but you’re gonna make it thinner and lighter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lighter is always good for a laptop, but if you’re making it thinner,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re probably going to be sacrificing battery life, unless there’s like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system on a chip shrink between this generation and the next, which is maybe plausible, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think that the, whatever problem the current M1 MacBook Air has,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like its size, thickness, and weight are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that list. Like it’s got a bad webcam. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s… maybe the speakers could be better, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if I would want to sacrifice any battery life on that amazing machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the sake of another millimeter or two. A new design may be a redistribution of mass

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, you know, I don’t know, have thinner bezels on the screen or something, or adjust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the size of the trackpad. They’re never gonna add more keys to the keyboard, but I I would,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are things you can do with the design to freshen it and modernize it, make it come in colors as we’ve discussed before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I don’t really want it to be thinner. That said, I think there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a place in Apple’s laptop lineup that was previously filled by the whatever we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John calling that, what was our, I’ve already forgotten all our names for these things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the adorable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The 12-inch, yeah, the MacBook One, the MacBook Adorable, the, yeah, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 12-inch MacBook. Setting aside the one port thing, Making some product that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, look, the whole point of this product is it’s amazingly thin and amazingly light. They should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John absolutely make that product. It just makes, I just don’t want that to be the MacBook Air,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which goes back to what Marco said of the rumor of like keeping around the fat Air, which has the amazing battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life this current one has, and then having a thinner one. Now, with these rumors, maybe what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about is the updated MacBook Adorable, and they just keep calling it the Air because it’s not like they have the product name stamped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on them. That’s all product marketing. Who knows what the thing will be called. Remember they called the last one MacBook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that wasn’t very helpful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that wasn’t the MacBook or the MacBook. It was the MacBook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s so bad. But anyway, so my objection is not to the existence

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a thinner and lighter laptop. I think there is a place for that computer in Apple’s lineup. And finally, that computer will actually be pretty darn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good. It’ll be for the people who like it. The most important thing about my laptop is how thin and how light it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And by the way, it should also be a decent computer. Bam, we can do that now. Thank you, Arm, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I don’t want this to displace the Air because I think the beautiful thing about the Air, all the Airs that we’ve loved, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current M1, the 2011 design, right? Those computers, it’s because they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re the right set of compromises. They have good battery life, they’re not too big, they’re not too small,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re powerful enough, they’re cheap enough, like that’s what you want. They’re the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Honda Accord of Apple laptops, right? They do all the things well and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could, if you care about something more, you want more power, you want less weight, then you can spread out to the more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exotic models, but that’s sort of the meat and potatoes, right? So I really hope they don’t mess up that balance, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I like the fact that the current MacBook Air is like over-provisioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on battery life. Like the battery is too good. Like they accidentally made the battery last too darn long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple would, no, I don’t think Apple would, I think I said this in the first show, I don’t think they were ever targeting battery life that good,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they didn’t wanna change the case. And so this is how much battery fits in that case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s an embarrassing amount of battery for the M1, and so the battery just lasts all day. And I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fantastic. That’s part of the thing that makes these laptops amazing is they exceed expectations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in so many areas, not just performance, but also battery life. And I don’t wanna go back from exceeding expectations on battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life to just merely meeting, right? So I’m rooting for the fatter MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to soldier on. And as for the 15-inch MacBook Air, I’m intrigued by that idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John partially because If you make a 15 inch MacBook Air, you’re probably gonna end up putting bigger batteries.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just have more square inches because you just, you know, the laptop got bigger. What are you gonna fill that space with? You’re gonna fill it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more battery. Granted, you have a bigger screen to power too, but I’m hoping that net net, a 15 inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air would be like the MacBook Air Max or Plus or whatever. Like it’s the bigger laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the only difference, it has the same guts, but the only difference is it’s got a bigger screen, but also bigger battery. So in the same way the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhones get the best battery life, The 15-inch MacBook Air could be like the battery camel. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the wimpier CPU, like it’s not the MacBook Pro CPU. It’s got a huge battery,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and in exchange for that huge battery, it’s bigger in your backpack, because it’s a 15-inch. I would love that machine, and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of sad they’re bailing on that. For Face ID and cellular,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like the fact that this rumor says that they’re at least considering it, so at least that someone in Apple said, hey, you know what? People are staring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at their Macs all day. Why don’t we read their face? Yes, please, do that. But I’m so sad that this won’t, this is apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John according to this rumor, not coming in the big redesign, because I feel like that’s the, that’s what, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once we knew that they’re not gonna do the radical redesign for the first round, it’s like, okay, well fine. Second round, when you redesign

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iMac, when you make all the new designs, that’s when you come out with the face ID and everything. And we’re like, nah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna wait on that. So the only thing I have left to hope for is like better front-facing cameras.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But honestly, Apple, in anything that sits on our desk that we stare at all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we constantly have to unlock? Face ID, face ID. Cellular is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by far my lower priority, but I understand people want it for laptops and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, it’s much higher for me because Touch ID on laptops works fantastically and so does Watch Unlock.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have to reach your hand out and you have to use your hands? It’s like a baby’s toy. Not for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Watch Unlock. You don’t even have to be looking at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t wear those things. Well, that’s your own fault. You don’t wear that thing either, Mark, or you’re wearing your fancy watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch full-time for a few months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} What? Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} wait, wait, wait, you know, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stop, stop. Marco. Marco is familiar with tide charts. Now we need to like a Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware tide chart to see is the Apple watch coming in or going out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’re not wrong. Wait, what changed that you’re not wearing your fancy watches because nobody else is looking at you. I don’t I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going anywhere. He doesn’t need to be seen. No, the paparazzi. No, and I’m doing a little I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing more fitness stuff recently, And I had the COVID thing, so I was, I wanted to do oxygen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monitoring for a long time and everything. So a bunch of stuff is stacked up such that I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing the Apple Watch full-time for a while now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Have you ever been in a double watch phase?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like wearing two at the same time?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, no, no. I was never at all tempted to do that. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because one is your watch and one is your fitness tracker. So you could just put them on different arms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nope, not for me. Well, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know what you could do? You could just put the watch, the Apple Watch on your ankle. It’ll be a little ankle thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s calibrated for ankles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No? No, but like watch, like what’s great about watch unlock too is that if you’re using clamshell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mode, or if you have a non-Apple screen, or an Apple screen that doesn’t have a camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in it, it still works, which is not true for face ID or touch ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John awesome. Yeah, but then you gotta wear a watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I know, that’s the downside. Going back to what you said a few minutes ago about like the different trade-offs and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I had heard a phrase a while back, like especially during, during some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad old days of Apple’s laptop design, they had apparently justified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making one of the batteries smaller and making the laptop thinner and lighter that really needed its battery life and was giving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it up unwillingly, as I heard described as shedding excess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco battery. And that phrase made me so angry. So I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what do you mean? Like, are the batteries good enough for everyone yet? No, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re not excess. And we don’t have the, we shouldn’t be shedding this excess. It’s not excess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I love, like I had to, this past weekend, I had to take a trip back home, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hops could go to the vet. And so, of course, I brought my MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I grabbed it from the house, like as I was leaving, to take it with me for like an overnight trip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t check to see whether I had plugged it in all day. It wasn’t plugged in when I took it off the table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t know what the battery life was, or what the battery level was. I just figured it’d probably be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I used it at a supercharger for a while on the way. And then I brought it home, and I used it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for various work things that evening, and various work things the next morning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then I came back to the beach. I never plugged it in the entire trip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I don’t even know what the battery level was. I never looked. Because I hardly ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to, because it’s amazing. That’s how I’ve always been able to work with my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad. Because iPads have really good battery life and really good standby life and everything else. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the idea to not be like, is it topped off, is it topped off, is it topped off? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to be constantly babysitting that all the time. And or stressing about it or worrying about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I love that I’m able to take my laptop on an overnight trip

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not plug it in the entire time and be fine. That’s amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I really hope that we get to keep this, you know, battery camel aspect, as John called it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love it so much. It really radically changes the relationship you’re able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have with a laptop. That’s one of the reasons these M1s are so good. And so I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do hope that the hardware engineering team at Apple has not decided that this is a lot of excess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco battery they need to shed. When I, you know, operate my MacBook Air, when I’m carrying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, when I’m handling it, when I’m using it, at no point have I ever thought,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is too thick, this is too heavy, never. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while I respect the former market of the 12 inch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably wants something in that range, that’s great. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hope that, assuming Apple does get something that’s closer to that, presumably in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part by shedding their excess battery, I hope that they don’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that trade-off the only trade-off. One of my main criticisms

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the bad years of the laptop design is that they applied the same priorities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the same trade-offs to the entire lineup. So if you wanted something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that had more ports, a better keyboard, you know, the things that you might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think would require like a bigger, bulkier design, but that’s what you wanted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you didn’t have any choice in the entire lineup at any size, at any price. There was no option for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because they were applying the ultra-thin, ultra-light priority set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the entire lineup. So I hope that they have learned from that. And I hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that while I’m not saying keep the laptops giant bricks or anything, the reality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is they’re not giant bricks now. They’re already very well proportioned for their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size classes and compared to everything the PC market is doing. I would like to see them do things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like shrink the screen bezels, that’d be nice, that’s something where they’re falling behind in the design department a little bit from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the PC world, but I don’t really need my MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air to be substantially thinner or lighter. And if they do make a substantially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thinner and lighter computer for people who do want and need that, I hope that they don’t apply those same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trade-offs to all of the other laptops because people have different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs and different priorities and something in the lineup whatever your priorities are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something in the lineup should come pretty close to being your ideal computer rather than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forcing them to all be like ultra thin and then doing something terrible like that like the bad keyboards

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco although God what one of the most frustrating things about the keyboard thing is that when they brought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the magic keyboard to replace them they didn’t have to make the computers bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Which is like, so wait, so you didn’t even need them to be that thin?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, they never did the MacBook adorable with that keyboard. That’s true, that’s true, that’s fair. But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, and it was just uniform when you fit the other ones because they have the same keyboards everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To be clear on the thinnest thing, the MacBook Air should continue to get thinner and lighter, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not at the cost of something else. Like, oh, we can make it thinner and lighter if we shed excess battery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, well, have you affected battery life? And is the battery life good enough yet? Like, if you look at the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air over time, it has gotten thinner and lighter, as it should at a steady rate. We don’t want that to stop. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not saying this is how big a laptop should be forever. 20 years from now, we better have a thinner and lighter MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air if that product is still around. But what we’re saying is don’t take current technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then make this particular trade-off. Like you were saying, Marco, make the same trade-off on all of the lines. And I think the Adorable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a good sign in that regard. It’s like they clearly there was one computer that was making an extreme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trade-off. It’s just that they never really made different trade-offs for the rest of the line. So this will be a good test to see how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much diversity is there in Apple’s lineup of computers. I think the M1 MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a great data point because it exactly fills the 2011 MacBook Air’s role.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John $999, fantastic laptop that does everything really well for almost everybody is the easy no-brainer recommendation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That spot in the lineup is filled, good job. Now we’ll be seeing, okay, what does the 16 inch Pro look like?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What is whatever this super thin light thing look like? And what choices they make. And related to that is this SD card, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John last week was the rumor was more IO ports. And I was, you know, my mind was boggled that you could have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumor but not know what the port is. Now we have a more concrete rumor that said, oh, it’s an SD card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What computers, if any, will this appear on? It should probably appear on the bigger ones. So they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have more space inside and you won’t be cutting into battery life and all that other stuff. SD card used to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the MacBook Air, if I’m not mistaken. Yep. And it didn’t destroy that computer, so that’s plausible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too. Wherever they wanna put that, that’s fine. You don’t need to put it everywhere, but it shouldn’t be nowhere. Put it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the computer, and the people who care about that will get it. And you know, the main use that I have of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing is going on vacation, you can’t bring your desktop Mac with you, you have to bring a laptop. And if you wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pull photos off and edit them on your powerful laptop, it’s great to be able to just take the card

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out instead of having to deal with the cable or trying to do a wireless and all that good stuff. So in some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John respects, it’s maybe like almost too little, too late given the vastly improving connectivity options

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on modern cameras, but late is better than never. So I endorse the SD card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I mean, the SD card, it’s an obvious thing because again, as I’ve been arguing for a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco typically if you need SD cards in your workflow, nothing about the advancement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of ports is likely to remove that need. Certainly now, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had significant market pressure since 2016 when the Touch Bar with laptops came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out, we’ve had significant market pressure from the computer side for device makers and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pros with their workflows and tools and everything to move away from SD cards. If it was reasonably possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to move away from them and all we needed was a motivational push from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple, we’ve had that and we still need SD cards for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of things. And like this, you know, this says, so users can insert memory cards from digital

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cameras, which kind of makes it seem like a point and shoot, like kind of quaint, outdated thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nobody does anymore, until you realize that’s a, you know, that’s like a Bloomberg style guide, simplification

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably, that’s actually really useful for video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cameras, which people use a lot. And it’s also useful for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco audio recorders, which people like us use a lot. And it’s also useful if you do any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of, if you have any kind of embedded hardware that uses SD cards as its medium or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for configuration. Things like Raspberry Pis and all, there’s so much stuff out there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that uses either SD or micro SD. And I’m aware that there are newer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco card standards in certain high-end cameras and stuff, but the fact is, if you’re gonna put one media slot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for some kind of flash media, if you’re gonna pick one of them to maximize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the utility for the broadest segment of the population, it’s SD. And you don’t need to take my word

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it. You can look at what has happened in the market. If you look at the dongles that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single person who has bought an Apple laptop since 2016 has had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or chosen to buy, you don’t see a huge variety of different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco port types on these. And you don’t see them changing much over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What you see is the exact same three ports on every single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dongle out there. USB-A, HDMI, and an SD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco card slot. Every single dongle out there has those three things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that people are actually buying because the need for those ports is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going away anytime soon for almost anybody who buys these laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think the most likely answer And the most useful answer, if they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco add more ports to the laptops, is those three things, USB-A, HDMI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and SD card. And I know the USB-A is a stretch, because they wanna move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forward and everything. And that’s the one that over time is slowly, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco painfully slowly, the need for that is decreasing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I feel like we’re turning the corner on USB-A, or close to turning the corner on USB-A.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and I think it seems, like it kind of feels too old for them. So I think, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is a larger port, you know, it would be hard to fit that. So I don’t see that coming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, and that’s why also on the SD card thing, like CF is the main competitor and CF continues to advance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s just too darn big to fit in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco laptop. And the fact is like, it doesn’t have as broad of compatibility as SD does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s like super high end pro, be great for the super high end pro models, but kind of like HDMI and ethernet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has been sized out of the edge of your laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and yeah, that’s the problem with HDMI. Like I’m like, I don’t think they could fit HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I hope they wouldn’t do something like, you know, like one of the micro HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} standards. Those- Oh, I was just gonna make that joke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You took it from me. Like that wouldn’t solve the problem in a great way. Like it would possibly be better,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it wouldn’t solve the problem in an amazing way. So- Nobody likes micro HDMI. Yeah. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m assuming what we’re gonna see for the new ports is just MagSafe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and of course keeping USB-C and the addition of SD. And that might be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. And that’s fine. I mean, if you think about, you know, by adding MagSafe back as a power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco option, you effectively add one more port to all of the computers, assuming they don’t lose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any of their USB-C ports in the process, because so often, we’re using one of our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco USB-C ports just for power, and so it’s kind of wasted, which is another reason why this is a weird engineering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decision to go in this direction. And so, to basically be able to offload the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to its own dedicated port, you are effectively adding one USB-C port to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every computer they make, which is fantastic. So I do hope to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see that happen and the SD card slot and everything. I do think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ideally, they would have a single USB-A port for those times when you don’t have your USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dongle with you or whatever, and a single HDMI port because so many people need it. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see those happening. That being said, I do wanna push back on one other little quick thing before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I let go of the floor here. You know, earlier when talking about the thinness trade-offs and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like that. So often, when we talk about things like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this would be a lot more useful a lot of the time if it just had like one USB-A port and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an HDMI port. So often, the response to that is, well, they can’t, it wouldn’t fit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s too thick. And the thickness of your laptop lineup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a self-imposed, self-created problem. And so if a product line

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could benefit from something that would require the case of the laptop to be a little bit thicker,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it shouldn’t be blanketly ruled out as, oh, we can’t do this because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s too thin, period. Well, you can change the thickness. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every computer, again, not every computer has to have the same trade-offs. Not every laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple makes has to prioritize thinness over everything else. So for instance, at some point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as we get into these smaller and smaller case designs, we will start hitting limits of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, how many USB-C ports can you fit into the thickness of something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a MacBook Air, or especially a next generation MacBook Air? Like can you still have two side by side?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or will the case tapering become so severe or so thin at the starting point that you can only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have one on each side, like the old 12-inch had, like with, you know, just the headphone on one side, USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the other? If that’s the case, you can’t fit more ports because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s too thin is not a great defense for not having the number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of ports that you would need to make it a useful product. And so I wanna keep that framework in mind,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like as we judge future products, like if it comes out with, you know, there’s a new MacBook Air, and instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of having the two USB-Cs that the current one has, it goes down to one USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on one side and one headphone on the other, like the little 12-inch, or if they get rid of the headphone jack and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have one USB-C on each side, I would argue that was a bad trade-off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the computer didn’t need to be made so thin that it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to lose the useful ports. Like that is a self-imposed restriction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that there’s a trade-off to everything and that trade-off should not be made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a way that reduces utility on other computers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you remember the original MacBook Air, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the design- I sure do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the first unibody and it has to be beautiful and elegant and curved. And it’s like, oh, but with this beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John design we can’t put any ports on it. And they solved that by making a door, right? Cause they didn’t want to give up the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the curves essentially on the side. Like people don’t remember the original MacBook Air, the sides were not flat. They were, it was kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like curved like an airplane wing in all places, right? And there was a little door and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John folded it in a door and there was a flat surface with the USB-A port and whatever the other port thing, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the headphone was on there

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} as well. Headphone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and monitor out. It started out being a really weird, like custom, like mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco HDMI kind of thing, or mini DVI thing. And then later on it moved to a Thunderbolt, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and so that was an example where, okay, well, so design dictated this thing had to be shaped like an airplane

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wing. But they didn’t say, well, that means we can’t have any ports. Right, because they didn’t have that much courage back then. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead they put a door in. And the door wasn’t elegant, but if Apple ever finds itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in that situation again, where they really want to include a port that has just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been sized out of laptops, but it’s still super useful, there are things you can do. You can find the fatter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John edge. You can put a port on the back or something. You can have a little bit of a door or something that folds down, or you can have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just a little area that is a flat sort of port,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a dock

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} on the edge of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your computer. Like, you know what I mean, like a dock on the water, as in the side of your computer is beautiful and thin and curved,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there’s this little bulge area to just give you enough flat space for a USB-C port. Something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would seem inelegant, but is solving the customer’s problem, because having dongles is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we’ve all learned, mostly worse. And getting to this final item here, which is even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up in the air, random rumor, patent-related thing. When I think about the area where Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptops can improve, aside from like having a thinner, lighter model, or have a bigger model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with more ports and more stuff, the main thing I think about as time progresses is not so much at this point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting thinner and lighter, although I still think that should happen, but the main area where Apple’s laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are lacking and all laptops are lacking is durability. Right now, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very vulnerable, as Casey will tell us, to liquid in a way that our phones are not. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. If you drop a laptop, they don’t like that. They’re not as durable as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones, obviously, but phones are lighter, so it’s easier for them, but I don’t even think they’re as durable as iPads. I know, because I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seen my kids drop their iPads down the stairs so many times, and I’m amazed they haven’t broken yet. If they had dropped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of our laptops down the stairs like that, it would not survive. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple wants to concentrate technology wise on physical advancements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the design of their laptops, I wouldn’t encourage them to water seal those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suckers and make them more durable to drops, right? As they make them thinner and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lighter and as they go into book bags, I don’t want them to be subject to compression cracking of the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t want them to be, if you drop them and they land on a corner from a foot and a half off the ground that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they shatter the entire screen. Like aluminum is great and it’s very durable and there’s no moving parts and there’s no spinning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard drive. And we’re all set except that keyboard is a giant place for water to destroy your computer and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the screens are still very breakable. I don’t know what they can do about this. I don’t know what the solution is. This is a very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem. It’s not like Apple is behind in this area in general but even just something as simple as one model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptop that’s essentially made to go into a kid’s backpack and go to school. having just discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the last show, searching for cases to put these beautiful, expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aluminum laptops inside so my kids can take them to and from school as kids do and not worry that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re gonna break them. I would love a laptop that is ruggedized for that purpose. Arguably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the crappy plastic Chromebooks that every kid in my kid’s school get are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more durable than the much nicer looking, much better Apple laptops. They’re made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of crappy plastic and they’re ugly, but I feel like that crappy plastic is more resistant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to denting and maybe absorbs more energy rather than transferring it through the screen. That said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first week my son had a Chromebook when he was in middle school, he broke it in his backpack. So, you know, laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are more fragile, but that is a potential area of advancement. And this final little bit of rumor here is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a patent that Apple came out with, I don’t know, I think it’s an older patent, we always find out these things after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fact, about using titanium parts, in and showed a little picture of a laptop, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously Apple already made a titanium laptop, but this was about having a sandblasted surface texture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s glossy and it’s all this crazy, you know, patent jargon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the description. But the bottom line is, it’s a patent about Apple using different materials to make their laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they already did titanium once, but titanium is, you know, lighter and stronger than aluminum, also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more expensive. It has different materials trade-offs. I would love to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an advancement in Apple laptops that really uses some different materials. Titanium, carbon fiber,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John God forbid plastic. We love the unibodies, they’re great, they’re wonderful, but in the spirit of diversifying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their product line, I would love one, one model of the laptop lineup that’s the rugged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one for kids, for education, for anybody who just wants to chuck it into their backpack without treating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it gingerly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} The same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way people do with their phones. Yeah, and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} should- Years ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey y’all, years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they should all be waterproof, to be clear. I think they should all be waterproof. I know it’s a hard problem is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve got the keyboard and everything, and you don’t wanna screw up the keyboard feel and stuff like that, but they should all be waterproof.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Especially now with the Arm Max and how tiny the motherboard is because of the system on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chip. Like if they could just cordon off and seal off the motherboard elsewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so then you could like spill water into it, and then just like let the water drain out through the keyboard and the computer would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine. I don’t, again, I don’t know what the solution is, But if we’re thinking what areas, what physical design

⏹️ ▶️ ^John areas can Apple advance in laptops, merely keeping the exact set of current trade-offs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we have now in terms of it’s a single piece of aluminum that’s carved out, has a screen in it, and has a system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a chip and an SSD, and if you put water on it, it dies, and if you drop it, it dies. It’s time to revisit that. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really hope, if not this titanium rumor or the various carbon fiber rumors or whatever, I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hope five years from now, Apple’s making some inroads on the physical design

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of their laptops that have something to do with factors other than how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thin it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I keep coming back to what I was talking about earlier during follow-up, which is, if the processors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are the same throughout the lineup, and let’s just go bananas, and let’s say even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the amount of RAM may be the same. So the things that vary may be SSDs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and maybe that’s it, like GPUs may be the same. If the only thing you’re really choosing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe how big an SSD or how big an SSD in RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why wouldn’t you also get the option to upgrade to cellular for 130 bucks or probably 200 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s always more expensive than it needs to be. Like, why wouldn’t you get the option to upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or maybe not even upgrade as like a line item, but choose a different line that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the super duper pro that not Pro Max is in size, but Pro Max is in more pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where you get the SD card slot and things like that. And you get an HDMI port Maybe you have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey education version, which is, you know, a, not a tough book, but something like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, and I feel like I’m probably underselling in my own mind,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how many different SKUs Apple has. And I know that there’s all these different laptops and all different sizes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with all different colors, with all different SSDs, with the different CPUs, with different RAM, with different GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in some cases, like I, I, I, I understand that if I really properly think about it, there’s a lot more variation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the lineup today than I think there is. But I, for one, would really strongly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey consider or be willing to trade the ability to choose how much RAM I have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is something just an episode or two ago I said is something I feel like I want more than 16 gigs, but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yet to hear anyone complain about 16 gigs, including Newmarco. So I would almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be willing to make the trade-off that I don’t get to choose the processor, I don’t get to choose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how much RAM I get to do choose SSD and like one or two other things. And that might be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey worth it to me because I don’t care about what GPU I get. If the RAM really doesn’t matter. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey care how much RAM it has. I do care about how much storage I do care about cellular and I might care about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDMI and SD cards. So I don’t see Apple going this way. I don’t think this is the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this isn’t the style of computer manufacturer they want to be. They don’t want to be the gateway two thousands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the late 90s, but it would be really sweet if they did. It would be super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean to be fair, I would love more RAM. I just don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more RAM, and I’m choosing these computers right now because they are so good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overall, like as overall like rounded things. But if more RAM was an option, I would definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take it.

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#askatp: Valuing the OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, we haven’t done Ask ATP in a long time. So let’s see how long we can go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and how many of these we can get through. Starting with Brendan Beckerer, how much do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think macOS or iOS costs? People pricing out Apple’s new hardware seem to want to take all the components and add

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up their costs and say the rest is Apple’s margins. They seem to ignore the software component as a cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the device. And I’m curious what you think that is. This is a great question and something that I think I forget about as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In terms of a number, oh golly, I can’t even imagine. I’m sure some way somehow we could compute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it and I’m sure we could guesstimate like how many source lines of code there are and about how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey each line of code costs and things of that nature. But that’s all, that’s something that I’ve never found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey particularly interesting. I don’t even know how to put a finger in the wind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to guess. I don’t know. John, what do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The most salient point is not actually the cost. It’s the difference in these kinds of costs. So Mac OS and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS are fixed costs. You need to make that once. Right. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other costs you’re talking about, when like telling Mac Harbor, those are variable costs. Right. And so every time you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a new Mac, you have to pay for making that new Mac. You have to pay for the materials, the labor, so on and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so forth. And the more Macs you sell for every single new one you sell, you have to pay whatever the cost to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make that Mac. Not true of the OS. That’s fixed. You made it once no matter how many Macs you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make, you don’t have to keep paying for that OS because you’re not licensing it for Microsoft, right? So the reason most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people don’t talk about this is because compared to the number of things that Apple sells, the fixed cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to develop the software that runs on them is dwarfed by the variable costs of the literally millions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of individual instances of that product that get produced. That’s why people care more about how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does it cost to make a physical iPhone object than how much does iOS cost. So if you had to do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John math and you said, okay, well, iOS costs Apple $150 million this year, right? And every year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it costs that much, or whatever it is. Divide that by how many iPhones are sold, and suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re like, oh, it’s like two cents of every iPhone. And who knows, obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they already have MacOS and iOS, so the costs on a year-to-year basis that I’m writing it over from scratch, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever they paid to make it in the first place, whether it be MacOS 10 or the classic MacOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the original iOS, that gets spread over years and years and years. So I think the reason it’s not discussed is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the fixed costs are so diluted by the volume of things Apple sells that the variable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John costs are really dominant.

Sent with SIri. Learn more…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Rohit Sharma asks, if you use Siri to send a message, I recently learned that Apple now includes a bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of text that informs the recipient that you use Siri. That text is also a link to an ad within iMessage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to use Siri. Is it just me or does this feel like an email signature that you can’t turn off and is not a great move for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey privacy-conscious Apple? I don’t know how to put this gently, but I could not disagree more. Like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is just letting somebody know that if there are transcription errors, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey probably not that person’s fault, it’s probably the fault of the robot that’s doing the transcription.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if anything, I almost feel like this is a very un-Apple thing to kind of implicitly say, hey, if we screwed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up, it’s our fault.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I can see, I guess, how Rohit got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to this perspective, but I very strongly disagree with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lyle Troxell I very strongly disagree with you. Steven Penn Okay, tell me why. Lyle Troxell Yeah, so this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this thing that I started When the first time I saw one, where under somebody’s message, an iMessage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it said, sent with Siri, learn more, dot dot dot, I thought, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, I wish they didn’t do that. To be clear, part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is a privacy issue, I think in the sense that it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unintended and undisclosed to the sender, information disclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about this message and the person who sent it and and how they sent it. I don’t want people to know how I typed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. What if it said, sent without pants? Like what if I was sent from the bathroom?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like that could be a fun one. You don’t want to send that information as metadata to your messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unless you’re aware of it and you choose to do that. And so to have Apple be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco adding metadata to the recipient, unbeknownst to the sender, you don’t know that it’s going to say sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Siri and be an ad for Siri on the bottom of the message that you sent?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What if you don’t want the person to know that it was sent with Siri? What if the fact that it was sent with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Siri implicitly discloses something to the recipient that you didn’t want them to know? Like that maybe you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the go right now? It’s a recipe for potential problems and the goal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it achieves… See, I didn’t think of it as to excuse transcription errors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I thought of it, especially because of the Learn More link that is is literally like an ad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for using Siri, basically. I looked at that more like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple is adding promo stuff to my messages for their benefit. This is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get people more using Siri. Please, come on. There’s been an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issue in the OS recently that Apple has been adding ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more ads for upsells into their services into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco various parts of the OS recently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That I agree with, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, and people who don’t subscribe to all the stuff Apple sells are really getting quite annoyed about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, they’ve been egregious in the music app for a few years now. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more recent, even more egregious ones are like the entire like banner in settings that will appear,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hey, try Apple Arcade or whatever. Like at the top of your settings screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as like what looks like a setting, but then it’s actually just a promo for some Apple service that you haven’t signed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up for yet. Like, they’re walking over a lot of lines that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t think they should be walking over for user experience or even in some ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly ethical reasons, all to promote more of their own services and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to their existing user base, and I find that really gross. It’s probably just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relatively unavoidable side effect of them becoming more of a services company for their revenue growth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This kind of stuff will definitely happen. Like anytime a company benefits significantly from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upselling you with stuff you already bought from them, they’re going to slowly ruin the user

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco experience to sell more of their crap to you because that is directly tied to their most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco important area of revenue growth. So this has been a long time coming, but Apple’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gross feeling and kind of overstepping promos are infecting the UI of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their products to a degree that I don’t think they should be comfortable with because they’re supposed to be a company with taste

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think this oversteps that line. And while the Siri promo that we’re talking about in this question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, Siri itself is not like an add-on service for Apple that they could make more money with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco directly if people used it. So it doesn’t quite have that same feel as like sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Apple Music Premium or whatever. Like it’s not quite that bad, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the ballpark of that kind of thing where this seems like a promo that Apple has inserted without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your knowledge or permission, and as far as I can tell, no way to turn it off, like for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the sender to turn it off, to not disclose that you sent this message with Siri. So it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco information leakage of the sender’s implementation details of how they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sent this message, how they composed this message, for no really clear benefit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the sender. And seemingly a benefit only to Apple. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gross, and I think it’s a mistake, and I hope that they revert this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I could not possibly disagree with you more. It’s not a fricking ad. It’s not, you can’t buy anything in there. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an ad. Then why is the learn more a link there? What’s that for? If they take out the learn more, sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Siri, I still would disagree with the information disclosure, the like, you know, unintended

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco information disclosure. Because again, what if it’s sent from the bathroom? Again, like I know that’s a common

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} example. But that’s not what it says.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} you can imagine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can you imagine a situation in which you wouldn’t want someone to know that you sent a message with Siri?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, you know what, Marco? you could use a kitchen knife to murder someone. You could imagine that that’s possible. So we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shouldn’t have kitchen knives.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, all right. I have to come in and settle this for you too. So it’s all the things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you all said, right? So it’s not just one thing, right? So Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right that the services infecting the UI is definitely a thing that’s happening. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} even in those- Oh yes, and I agree with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But even in those cases, like there are multiple aspects to it. And it depends

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like whether or not, how you value those aspects, they do definitely exist. one aspect is absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for sure to excuse transcription errors, right? It’s kind of similar in a strange way to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John original sent from my iPhone signature that was the default on like Apple Mail and stuff and the original iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was partly there to yes, advertise the iPhone and show that you were cool, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very quickly came to serve a function in our society of excusing the idea that I typed this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with my thumbs on a little phone screen. So maybe excuse some typos, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So regardless of the intention, sent with Siri, and I’ve seen this in real life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for myself, absolutely functions as a way for you to parse whatever gibberish that just got sent in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John message to say, what is this? Oh, they sent it with Siri, that explains it. They’re not having a stroke, it was just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Siri transcription, right? The learn more link serves multiple functions, most of which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are advertising promotion. And I would say that there is something they want you to buy if you get used to Siri, which is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HomePods and stuff, right? Because it is a value-added product. but it also serves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the function of letting people know that this is a thing that their phone can do. Bingo. And it’s difficult to walk that line,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but part of designing the OS is to make it so that all the features you worked hard to put into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone, somehow the person who’s paid all that money for it realizes that they can use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone to do this thing. Like Apple does it themselves and like, hey, did you know you can scan documents with the Notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app? Nobody freaking knows that until Apple starts telling everybody. And yeah, they’re advertising that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a feature of their phone, but also people who have phones and don’t realize that there’s a magnifier on it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are missing out on a feature that they paid for. And so you want to tell them the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that their phone can do, but you don’t wanna nag them, because that’s terrible. So, you know, and again, it feels worse if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, hey, pay for this premium service. But in general, trying to figure out how to make people aware that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their phone can do things, one way to do it is to say, hey, your friend talked into their phone to send you this message. Do you know that’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can do? That you can talk into your phone to send a message if you can’t, like, don’t have time to type right now, or maybe you have difficulty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John typing? And it’s also an ad, right? And it is also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an unexpected information disclosure. All of that is true. You just have to look at this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature and say, are these the correct trade-offs, right? I think we would all agree that there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should be some way to turn it off. We could debate whether it should be on by default, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But like, it serves all of those purposes. And I think it’s less important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Apple’s motivation was for putting in, and although I can imagine having worked in big companies, that everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just said to justify it would absolutely be used to sort of explain why we have to include

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the feature, when in reality, maybe someone’s motivation is like, we should drive up brand satisfaction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Siri and sell more HomePods or whatever. But regardless of what their motivation is for putting the feature,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it does serve all those functions in real life. And some of those functions are good, and some of them are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so great. So I don’t think this feature is as bad as Marco’s saying, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not as good as Casey’s saying. You really have to decide for yourself what you think about it. I would imagine the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing we can all agree on is disclosure and options are better because then if you don’t like it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can disable it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco See, and I appreciate the value that you’re talking about, about like telling people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what the features are and improving discoverability.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And explaining why the message is garbled mess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, those are all, those have positive value, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is an inappropriate place and way to do it. And I think the downsides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are significantly worse than the upside. Like for example, and just a separate version of this, almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every feature that is annoying to a lot of people has benefit to somebody or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has upside to somebody. Like there’s this feature that’s been in mail I think since about iOS 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or 13 where if you move a couple, if you do like a multi-select

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and do a move to a message to a folder, a folder. Sometimes it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to figure it will try to guess what folder you’re likely to move it to based on something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it will put up instead of the folder selection screen it will put up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an action sheet first saying move messages to junk mail or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other full or like other and you got to click the other to then bring up the sheet to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pick the folder and I can imagine the discussion that into designing this feature of like, hey, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can guess based on like the senders of what you have selected,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where you’re moving these three messages, we should ask the user to be cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and smart and do that. Maybe that’ll delight them. The problem is, for me at least,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this feature guesses wrong the vast majority of the time. And it only comes up about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe a third or a quarter or a fifth the time that I try to move messages. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my experience of using this is I try to move messages in mail and most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the time I hit the move button and then the sheet comes up to move it and it lists all my folders and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I tap the one to move it to. Sometimes I’m interrupted in this workflow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by this sheet trying to be smart and trying to guess what I want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If it guesses right I can tap that top button and I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saved no taps, I have saved no time, I’ve just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been kind of like jarred, kind of interrupted because what I was expecting to happen, which happens most of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the time, this this was different this time. So I would say that’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clear benefit actually, it’s at most a lateral move. If you think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the even worse case, which is for me the more common case, which is it guesses wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now you’ve interrupted me, you’ve jarred my flow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I have to do now an additional tap that I would have had to do before to say like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know other or whatever that button is. And then I have to pick my folder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that wasn’t the thing it guessed, and by the way it never learned I’ll make the same mistake tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so this is a feature where like yeah it It sounds like a good idea on paper,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it does have some kind of potential benefit to somebody maybe, if you think about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But in practice, the downsides should outweigh that. And the downsides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are clearly, okay, when this guess is wrong, it’s really bad. When it gets right, it’s only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kinda good. So that feature should be removed. I don’t know why it’s still there, it should be removed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s been there for probably two or three years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just need to improve that, because Apple’s just bad at doing those features. But I love apps that keep track

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what I do and give me the most common things. But like if you do it badly like that, where it’s a two tiered system, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also it gets us wrong, of course, that’s just terrible. But like, just to give a simplified example, if it just did it based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on recency, and sorted by recent usage, and had a single list, and everything was on the list,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only difference would be what sorted to the top, you’d never need to go to another screen to find another one. And if it was working, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ones that you do use would be at the top. So you know, like, like that type of feature can be done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. I give it you’re saying that this is a feature that has Downsized that way the benefits in the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of sent with Siri I mean it really depends about how you feel about all the things that we just outlined

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much value do you apply to keeping it a secret that you sent with Siri and You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know having ads thrown in your face versus the benefits of maybe this will teach people how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use the phone better Versus like the you know, even stuff like that with the learning This is the tricky part about learning learning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features Once you know that your phone can do this, you should never have to see that message again from somebody else. But how does the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone know that you know that your phone can do this? That’s why it’s difficult to make those kind of features and not have them annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I would guess that most people don’t even know this feature exists because they never even look at that text.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and also, I would assume, I’ve only seen the Sent With Siri

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing a couple of times. And I don’t know if that’s because my friends don’t usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use Siri, or if it has some kind of time-based throttling where maybe it only shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it once a day from a given recipient or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. Or it could be like those annoying things, these drive me nuts in macOS, where when you first install a new version of macOS, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John learn about the new features of Big Sur, and the only way to make it shut up is to click the link, click through it, and say, fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open the webpage for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} me. Right, and then instantly close it. And now I never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna see you again. So I do wonder, if you hit learn more once, does that make it go away? This is also, by the way, for people who don’t know, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty sure the solution to most of the terrible ads in Apple stuff for you to sign up for their services and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crap is to click through them and sort of begin the process, but then bail.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then you can usually make the thing go away, which is terrible. I’m not promoting this. I’m just saying like, if you want to solve the annoyance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem on your phone, like people just like leave it on their, the setting screen forever and they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get angry about it. Go into it and say, set up Apple Wallet, set up Apple Wallet. It’s like, but I don’t want to set up Apple. Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start the process and then bail. And usually it will stop bugging you in the same way that when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it wants to tell me I have to click show, let it open a page in Safari, and then hopefully never have to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Casey just sent us a test message. And what’s interesting, I see it on my phone running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iOS 14.4 RC, and it says sent with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Siri, but it does not say learn more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No way, are you serious?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I have sent with Siri and learn more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think I did once tap on that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} to see what the heck it’s doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna learn more now. Oh no, don’t learn more. How am I going to learn more? All right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a tiny single page. It just says, this message was sent using Siri. And then it tells

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how to use Siri, blah, blah, blah. But that’s it. And there’s just a Done button. So now I’ve hit Done. All right. It still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says Learn More. I’m back on the Messages screen. Let me go out of the conversation and back in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It still says Learn More. You want to send me another message, Casey? And I’ll see if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sent. Send a message to John Syracuse and Marco Arment. What would you like the message to say? Hello, fellas, period.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Would you like me to search the web for HelloFellas? The worst.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got it again. Same thing. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right, so now the previous message just says, sent with Siri, but the learn more only appears on the newest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John message. Oh, that’s weird. So it’s sent with Siri, and the next one says, sent with Siri, learn more. What if you force

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quit messages and go back in? We’re not reflexively force quitting our apps anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Casey. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I go back. I just did that. No change. OK, it’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a shot. The point is, I do not think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is an appropriate use of this kind of thing. I don’t think that the messages stream

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is an appropriate place for Apple to inject any kind of promo, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think this type of unintended information disclosure is a good idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or appropriate for iMessage. Regardless of whether the benefits that this feature has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of possibly excusing typos and and everything else. By the way, I mean, when you type a message in messages,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s full of typos, because autocorrect sucks. So, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} people are used to that, right? But there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are different kind of typos, like, because Siri really can just be completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not even close to what you said, in a way that autocorrect, at least, like the letters are probably near on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the keyboard, but Siri is just in the wilderness sometimes, and you get things that look like someone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having a stroke, or just like a mark-off chain, right? And I never see that kind of failure mode with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John typos. you see maybe one or two words, you can guess what they were trying to type. But I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this feature is very much like read receipts or read receipts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John depending on how you wanna pronounce it, in that I think it should be something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people can opt out of if they want. But in the case of Sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Siri, I think the default should be on. Kind of like in the new versions of the OSs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not that they default read receipts to be on, but they prompt you. Like, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think there’s no way to set up a new phone or a new Mac without, and use messages without it asking you, hey, do you want to send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John read receipts? And you having to at least answer that question. I wouldn’t prompt people with the same with Siri.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it should just be a setting, but I kind of think the default should be yes, just because until they can make their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transcription better, like that should be their goal. Make a transcription better enough that that feature of this is no longer useful,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then it shouldn’t be on by default. But you know, it really depends on how you value,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what values you place on the various aspects of this feature. It has upsides, it has downsides. Marco clearly puts way more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weight on the downsides and so thinks it shouldn’t be there. I bet most people are neutral on it because they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care about this crap. I fall slightly in favor of leaving Sent with Siri to explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the inexplicable messages by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco default. And what if it said, Sent from the iPhone 13 Pro Max?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But as Casey said, it doesn’t. It doesn’t say that. Like, it’s a slippery slope argument, right? It says what it says.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s true. what if the feature that it was advertising was only available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the newest phone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, no, it could be worse. Like, I don’t disagree that it could be worse. Like, and there are, as you point out, there are things that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worse. Like, hey, sign up for Apple TV Plus and add stuff to Apple Wallet. Those are worse, like unequivocally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they’re more annoying to get rid of. But that’s why I think I’m mostly okay with this one, because it’s not worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I mean, we could find a million ways where I would find it to be really gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But the thing is, it just says, you know, sit down with Siri, learn more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is another data point in the trend, though, because they basically have opened

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the door to doing this, to putting in little messages under messages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Slippery-slippery arguments say once they’ve done this one thing, they’re going to do the most terrible thing. But there is some argument to be made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they have coded up the ability to communicate this sideband data and display it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in little messages. And that makes it ever so slightly easier for them to do something else. So it’s worth watching.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, as soon as this is possible to use for more direct promotional, like financial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gain ways. I think this increases the odds they’ll do it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, the other aspect of it is like I talked about, like, you know, the learning aspect is absolutely true. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that is actually something they should do in the OS. Like when you send someone money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the question made it with Apple Pay Cash or whatever, they’d be like, how did that work? How did that happen?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a question a new user is likely to have. And just in time info that says, hey, you just figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out how to receive this money from this person, you can send them out to other people too. Click

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here to learn more. Like right there at the time it happened when you might have that question. That’s a, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, you have to strike the right balance, but I think that’s a useful thing that the OS should do to teach people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are using it what it can do for them at the right time in the right context. And I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something like this qualifies. Like I’m not against having decorations on messages,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, because Apple Pay happens in messages, to explain the features. is just that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t nag people about it. You don’t want it to seem too spammy. You don’t want to disclose information that you don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, so on and so forth. So the Apple Pay Cash is a cleaner case and it’s like, you know, set with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pay Cash. You know they set it with Apple Pay Cash. You’re using Apple Pay Cash, right? But maybe you have no idea what Apple Pay Cash

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is and you think it’s cool and would like to use it and you want to learn more. That’s the time to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that little blue link, right? Yeah, so it’s tricky. OS design is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tricky. You don’t want to seem creepy, but you also want to progressively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disclose functionality to people who otherwise wouldn’t show it. And you do want to explain your ridiculous typos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s funny to me because there are two examples of things that I don’t think are promotional, but I find to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey far more frustrating, both with regard to messages. First of all, I have the feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I think came out a couple of iOS’s ago, the feature where it’ll announce incoming text messages if you have AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in. So it’ll say, you know, message from Mark Warman. Hey man, how’s it going?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Does that work reliably for you, by the way?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, it does not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have that on and it seems, at first, like you know, it seems like it’ll read about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one to two thirds of the messages I get. And the other ones, it just won’t read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I can’t figure out why. It’s like some of them are short, some of them are long, some of them have pictures, some of them don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pictures. I can’t figure out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the pattern. Have you, like, had it explained to you that it’s bailing, that it’s not gonna read it because the message

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is super long? I think it’s been very consistent for me because I get, for whatever reason, I get a lot of messages when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like doing dishes, right? So I have my AirPods in and 100% of them are announced in some form, but sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think there’s one like phrasing or line where it’s like, you got a message from this person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’m not gonna read it cause it’s super long. So if you wanna read it, go to your phone. Like it’s not, it’s obviously not what they say, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the gist of it, right? And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I kind of appreciate that cause I don’t want a giant long message to be read, but it’s been pretty consistent. The only time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it totally messed up is I got a message the other day And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Siri does this not just in the context of messages being announced in your AirPods, but just in general. You know all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the videos of Siri getting caught in a loop or something? This happened. It was reading a message,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then Siri just started saying, si, si, si, si, si, si, si. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never seen that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} For a very, very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. And I went and looked at the message, and it had an E with an accent on it, you know, like the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John E with a little accent-ay-goo or whatever on the thing. That’s the only weird character in the message.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was a short message. It did not have the letter C, the word S-E-E, or any word that sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And just Siri said, C, C, C, for, I don’t know, a good minute.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve never had that happen. But the thing that happens to me constantly, when this is what I was starting to bring up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait, can I guess real fast? By the way, did you know you can reply by saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} reply? Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey God, it’s so annoying. It’s so annoying. Like the first time, the first time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was genuinely like, Oh, I didn’t know that. I, I have now learned more. This is excellent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But, but it happens all the time. And what’s even worse to me is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in like one session, like, you know, I’ve put my AirPods in, I’ve received several text messages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then I will later take them out in that one time between the time I’ve put in the AirPod

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or AirPods. And the time I’ve taken them out, I’ll receive that frigging prompt like four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or five times. And it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} annoying. I got it. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like learning more about Big Sur. You have to maybe once say, did you know that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Answer and say, yes, I did know that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or just actually reply. But like, no, I’m with you, Casey. I get this all the time. Or do it once, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It like sets me on fire every time because usually what has happened is I’m walking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhere, my hands are in pockets in the winter or they’re pulling a wagon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco full of stuff or something, so I can’t easily like operate the controls and I’m trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listen to a podcast. And so all I want, when I’m hearing it try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco read out the automated message that my bank is sending me that a bill pay check

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco went through. And so, by the way, I will never need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to respond to the contact that is the five digit code or whatever that my bank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco texts me from. But it always says, by the way, you can reply. And I’m like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just read out this huge long message that I don’t even need to hear, and now you’re adding this long promo to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the end of it. I just want to get back to the podcast I was listening to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s an example of trying to explain functionality gone terribly wrong, because it is good for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to know that once, or maybe twice, but not constantly. And the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem with it is if we’re complaining about Siri, my major complaint with Siri recently has been, Siri refuses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to disengage. Siri will activate because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will try to summon my sweetie, And that unfortunately sounds like Siri. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t, I, in fairness, I chose the pet name for my wife long before Siri existed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unfortunately, it sounds a lot like Siri. And so Siri often activates in my home and I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get Siri to disengage because whatever I said after that, Siri’s off to the races with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, let me tell you about, you know, the restaurants near your house or whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the haircutting place is open. There’s like, I don’t know what Siri heard or whatever, but it goes off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this thing and it’s like, do you want me to, you know, it tells me at a restaurant, do you want me to call this restaurant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and make an order or whatever? And it’s like, I want, you know, it’s the classic,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even wanna say if it’s a Dubai Friday or back to work, Alexa, stop, right? I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} want to end the interaction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want, I want just cease, desist, no more. I did not summon you, go away. And I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure out what to say to Siri to make that happen. Siri, stop, Siri, okay? I don’t want to have to engage and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say like, no, not that restaurant, because then she’ll read the next restaurant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just, I need to, like, that was something, maybe that might’ve been Google, I forget which one it was, but one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the voices in my house misheard something and was giving me a litany of things to choose from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I couldn’t figure out how to bail out of there too. And it’s like, do I have to now order food from a restaurant to make this stop? Like, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there no way to say, I’m not going to pick any of these, I wasn’t, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John misheard me. So operator, there needs to be like command period

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for voice assistance of just like whatever, escape. No more, like I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not summon you, you have misheard me. I’m talking to my wife. Whatever it is that you’re doing, stop it immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To be fair, most voice assistants, including Siri, are pretty good about like they’re playing audio and you just want them to stop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if they’re trying to engage you in what they think is this useful interaction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about whatever the heck they thought you said, I can’t make them stop. Please, Siri, disengage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Have you tried asking, learn more? Oh, God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like I mean, that’s what I said. Maybe I just have to order food. It’s like, oh, well, that’s the rules. You got to order food

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. Just pick one of these restaurants in your area and buy food from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So my favorite thing with the, did you know you can reply, is that oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the failure mode for a reading out in incoming text messages, a new message from Aaron

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Liss. Did you know you could reply? Like it skips the actual message.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so it’s like, yes, that’s f***ing wonderful that I can reply, but I don’t know what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey replying to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unfortunately, Erin probably doesn’t listen to the program, but if she did, I would tell her the next message you send to your husband should be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did you know you can reply to Siri? Make that the text of your message. And then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get like double bonus points if Siri inserts that declaration before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reading the message, which contains the same text as that declaration. Oh my God, it’s so bad. Maximum trolling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then really quickly, the other thing that drives me nuts, it’s message related, but not Siri related, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as I’ve mentioned a couple of times on the show, I am in several group conversations with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mixed phone OSs. So some Android users, some iOS users.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I understand why this is the way it is, but oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will find myself doing a tap back in these mixed mode conversations. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey instead of, well, I guess if I recall correctly, my phone will parse the tap back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey correctly. So if I like some other message, it will show the little thumbs up on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But everyone else in that conversation, including other iPhone users, will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see Casey liked some other message, blah, blah, blah. And it’s so frustrating. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if tap backs aren’t a thing in SMS and MMS, that’s fine, but don’t give me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the fricking option. Like I get it’s consistency or whatever, but I don’t want the option. Like, it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey frustrating. And it’s especially bad when you’re like sending images back and forth in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey group chat and you’ll see, Aaron List liked an image. Well, that’s great. Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fricking image did she like? Did she, you know, like, oh God, it’s so frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The worst part about the text version of that is because what you did in your UI was you pressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the menu or whatever and picked a picture, which was a thumbs up. And then, you know, their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system is saying, I know you picked a picture, but I think I know the words that represent the feeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you meant when you picked that picture. So I’m gonna send those words, which is so dumb because there’s a thumbs up emoji.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So just send the thumbs up emoji. It’s the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} picture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} or less.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, like imagine if when you typed emoji, that when that appeared on Android,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was just the emoji names

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} replacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} it. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey God, that’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be so bad. Right, especially with emojis that we use in contexts that don’t match the names,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right? Right, yeah. Because of what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look like. I mean, that’s the danger of emoji in general, is that you don’t know what it’s gonna look like on the other person’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why are you always talking about peaches and eggplants? But yeah, tap backs, tap backs are useful, but I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the text iteration of tap backs could be much closer, especially in cases where there’s a very similar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emoji. Thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our sponsors this week, Flatfile, HelloFresh, and Lickability. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thanks to our members who support us directly. You can do that if you want to join us at atp.fm slash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco join. You get things like ad-free shows and the raw unedited bootleg and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. And thank you very much, everybody. We will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 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, Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean to Accidental, tech podcast so long

Neutral: Model S redesign

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m clearly a little punchy tonight and so I think the only way to make myself feel better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is for the three of us to agree that the Whatever these pictures are that flew by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my screen right as we started recording of the new model s interior holy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Crap, they’re bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh What’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here’s the thing? What we’re all talking about and why we’re all moaning I think is 90

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something percent about the steering wheel So let’s ignore the steering wheel for a second and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at the rest of this interior. It’s got a big screen in the middle of the dashboard. It’s landscape instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of portrait, but otherwise does not look that ridiculously different than the Model 3. And in fact, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really that different from the Model S. It’s got a little instrument cluster in front of the steering wheel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that looks like a regular instrument cluster over the screen. It looks fine. And everything else in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the interior looks not that radical. It’s got a center armrest. It’s got places for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like phones to go. It’s got a rear view mirror on the windshield. Everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks pretty much normal. So is it fair to say that we are entirely moaning about the steering wheel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or is there something else about this interface that you think is awful?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t like that it’s landscape, I don’t think. Now, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little unfair of me, more than a little unfair of me to make this declaration because although I have driven Model 3s and I have driven

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Model Ss, including back to back, I haven’t driven either in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at least a year, I don’t think. But I think I much prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the portrait operation of the old Model S like Marco has, than I do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey landscape operation of the Model 3, because it feels to me more like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey everything is nearby. And maybe that’s my own hangup, I don’t know. But it feels like everything’s nearby, whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey within landscape, it feels like there’s that crap way over on the other side of the car, and then there’s the crap by me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco, is it just the steering wheel? Or I know you don’t like the Model 3 and you like the Model S better, but would you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, ignoring the steering wheel, would you pitch a fit over the landscape screen? Or is it mostly just the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John steering wheel that’s freaking you out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco First of all, I think wheel is a generous term. I think it may be the steering bucket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} not getting there yet. We’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, we’ll get there. We’ll talk about the steering bucket in a minute. But the things I didn’t like when I test drove the 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were not necessarily because the screen was landscape. That being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said, I do like the portrait screen of the Model S, and I think the only reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re doing this is for, again, reasons that benefit them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but not necessarily the drivers. So you can play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Witcher on it, because Witcher doesn’t run portrait.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I love the game, they’re showing if you can play games in this, one of them’s Stardew Valley. Yeah, I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Stardew Valley. I would never play it in my car. I’m not gonna sit in my car for hours on end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco playing a deep, involved

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re at the supercharger killing time and because you have kids in the car, that’s why there’s a screen in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backseat. Like I understand why they’re advertising gaming as a feature, although I think it is absurd to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the promo shot for your car to show games. Like it’s great that they can do that, but this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John isn’t a minivan or a camper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think the reason that they are moving the Model S to a landscape screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is for reasons that benefit them, specifically, so that they can share more of the UI and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff between the Model 3 and the Model S, is the Model 3 has a landscape screen. I think that’s the main reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re doing this. It’s not because it’s better. What they’re doing is basically making everything be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to share the same UI and parts, regardless of whether it’s the better choice for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that vehicle or not. And so I see why they’re doing it. It makes sense for them to do it. Doesn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it does anything for me. As for the actual being landscape instead of portrait,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the stuff that’s gonna be on the far right of that screen is gonna be very hard to reach. Stuff on the left is closer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that being said, this is not gonna be a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I’ll get used to it, but I’m not gonna like it for the first little while, if I ever get one of these, and I’ll get to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a little while. But the main reason I don’t like the 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much is the lack of having the directly in front of the driver screen. And this, fortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was afraid they would get rid of that second screen on the S. Well, first, first I was afraid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they would never make another S, and they would discontinue it. Because they sell so many more 3s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the S really is not a higher priority for them. It’s their Mac Pro, basically. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t think, I thought there was a reasonable chance that the S would never get redesigned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would eventually stop being made in favor of their higher volume cars. So I’m glad they’re working

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on it. I’m very glad they’re working on it. And I’m glad that they have put in the effort to make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new in some way, even if it does look like that they are trying to, by doing this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco redesign, trying to reduce the amount of work that they’re putting into it by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing things like giving it the same, you know, screen layout and stuff as the 3. Anyway, that being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said, so glad they’re working on it, glad they’re updating it, and I’m very, very glad that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco retained that directly in front of the driver second screen, because I find that screen very important.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And one of the things I don’t like about the 3 is how much you have to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the center screen because there isn’t that second screen, and how much you have to look at that center screen, again, because there isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that second screen. So, by having the second screen at all, I’m very happy about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The rest of it, John, you’re right, this looks largely like the current Model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S in many of the general themes, again, leaving us at the steering bucket for a minute.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One thing I’m disappointed that they didn’t change, apparently. Every Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far has done something stupid with opening the doors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Model S has its pop out door handles. The Model 10 has the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gull wing thing. The Model 3 has its weird handles where it’s like if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco push it the way that it looks like you should push it, it yells at you that you pushed it wrong and that you might have hurt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Tesla makes amazing drive trains

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they have a lot of really good ideas, but it seems like they are desperate to prove their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco innovation in areas that we don’t really care about like doors and door handles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and when they do that they make problems for drivers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the way they choose to do that is usually finicky or unreliable or unintuitive or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all three. The Model S, I’ve had two now, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only problems I’ve ever had with the Model S are mostly door handle problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The first one, I had, I think, two of them, like, just die and have to be replaced. Even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the current one, which is about three years old, almost three years old,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the current one, I haven’t had any failures with the door handles, but I will often have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing that every Model S owner has at some point had happened, where, like, you’re walking around the car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, maybe you’re loading it up, and so it unlocks itself because the key is nearby, and then as soon as you go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to grab the handle to get in, it’s about to retract them. them. And so you grab the handle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it kind of bounces back out because it’s like it’s like canceling the retraction that it was about to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then you get stuck in this loop where you just grab it and just bounces and you grab it and just bounces you kind of have to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lock the car from the key in your pocket, let it retract all the way, then unlock that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let you know open it back up again. It’s just Oh, and by the way, they don’t work in the ice. That’s another fun thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I see ice freezes them over so that that makes them work a lot less Similar problem with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco auto folding side mirrors. And used to be a problem on the charging door. It’s a little bit less of a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there now. Anyway, so they have this cool door handle that makes it look really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool and futuristic a little bit I guess, but it makes problems in practice for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco owners of it. It makes it less reliable, less predictable, and it causes problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in extreme conditions like cold, like super cold weather. And I understand that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason why they have their tractable door handles is in part to look cool, but in part because it probably also reduces

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco drag by some very tiny percentage. That being said, a redesign of the car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would expect to identify whatever significant problems existed in the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version, and try to fix them, try to address them in some way. And I don’t know how anybody who’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever owned an S could possibly ever say, Keep the door handles exactly the same. They have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, there are no problems. Like, I hope the next S keeps these same door handles. Nope,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never. I don’t know any owners who have not had problems with door handles at some point. So that’s the first thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would have fixed. Fix the door handles. Put regular door handles on there. I’ll take the 0.5% reduction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in range. Fine. Just put regular door handles on there and make them operate like regular door handles. And I would say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about literally all of Tesla’s models because they keep messing with door handles, And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know what they’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t even need it for the aerodynamics because like every electric car feels they need to do that for mileage. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you don’t have to have a weird door handle for it to be smooth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I was thinking of this, I mean, obviously this is not in the same price class, but there’s some Ferrari that I was watching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a review of and they had flush door handles. Like it’s just entirely smooth over the surface of the door. Nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sticks out. So aerodynamically it’s the same as all of the Tesla door handles. The whole point is they’re flat. They don’t stick out into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the airflow. The only difference is there was this little outline and you basically shove your fingers into it and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little door that opens inward. And once you tuck your fingers into there, you pull on what is now the handle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you’ve looped your fingers over, right? And that uses the advanced technology called

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a hinge. It’s not electronic. It’s just a piece of metal that hinges

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, right? Unlike your gas cap or your charging cap that hinges out, right, this one just hinges

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. It’s not as good as obviously, the other thing I just posted in the chat, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a picture of my door handle, which is the epitome of door handle, but my door handle is not aerodynamic, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understand, right? But my door handle is the handle that you grab with your hand and it works every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single time. And it is fairly resistant to ice because you have a big metal thing to grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^John onto and you just yank it and it cracks through the ice, right? The aerodynamic ones where you have to poke

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, I can imagine them being more vulnerable to ice, but yeah, you’re totally right. This is not the area to innovate. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talked about this many, many moons ago when we were talking about Tesla. Part of it, especially in the beginning, was to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Tesla seem futuristic and cool because that was part of the selling proposition. It’s part of what attracted buyers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it. And it’s part of what made you think you were cool for owning it because, hey, look, the door handle come out. But at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tesla needs to let go of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s like- It instantly loses its cool the first time you can’t open your door in public.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, yeah. No, I’m not saying like it is, if it was 100% reliable, it would still be kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of annoying, but if it’s unreliable, it’s terrible. But like, as far as Tesla’s concerned, they’ve already got your money, which is why they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have revised it sort of when the second round of Tesla buyers were buying their next Tesla, because the novelty is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worn off. They don’t want the unreliability. It’s like, just put a door handle on it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s the thing, like the door handle aerodynamics, it’s real, you can measure it, but it is much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less significant than say the wheel covers, right? And tons of Tesla owners pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the less aerodynamic wheel covers because they look nicer. If Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had the option to pick a normal Honda Accord door handle, but people would take that in a second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s less annoying and they don’t care about the aerodynamics. Those, you know, the coolest looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheels destroy your mileage much worse than those door handles would.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. You know, the good news is though, Marco, since they’ve solved all the other low hanging fruit, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, panel gaps and build quality and things of that nature, I’m sure the door handles are coming next.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, they took a second sewing at it with the 3 and their solution I think is probably more reliable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the five-star handles, just because it doesn’t involve electronics, but still not great. And I think kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of weird and awkward. So they should keep trying, but apparently they’re not trying. But anyway, we need to talk about the five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John steering. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get there, we’ll get there. One other major change that I am very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sad to see is that in the latest builds of the S, like before this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change that was announced, like it just recently, new build to the S, lost the ability to have a sunroof.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the S no longer offers a sunroof. The 3 has never offered one. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if the 10 ever did, because it has that same solid glass roof as this. I probably didn’t. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they no longer make sunroofs, it seems. I don’t like that at all. Again, I love my car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which has a sunroof and is fine. I don’t know why they would delete the sunroof. I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was, again, for some kind of parts savings thing, like make things more uniform across the line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefits the the like all glass panoramic roof has you know maybe but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love a sunroof and I really don’t want to buy a car that doesn’t have one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I can avoid it. I use it all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Been there, been there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know I use it all the time I just used it again on this trip because it’s the winter and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of times in the winter it’s too cold to have a window open right next to you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but a little bit of ventilation from a sunroof is nice. It’s just, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know what they’re doing. Anyway, so that’s one of the things I was, when I heard that they they’d stop offering the sunroof,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was hoping that was like a temporary thing as they, you know, cleared out inventory. And then when I heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there was a refresh, I thought, oh, maybe they found a way to put it back. But nope, it’s just gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s really too bad. Very quickly, one thing that I really do like about this, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know how to verbalize why I like it, it. But the front

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and rear look more like car fronts and car rears than they do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like I think it was your second Tesla, Marco, where it was just like a slab of plastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That yeah, that’s that’s the current. That’s what I have now. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this looks like it has a front air dam like in the front. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey repetitive, but you know what I mean? It looks like it has an air dam in the front. The back has some like lines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on it that aren’t remarkable, but there’s enough difference to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey eye that it makes it look far more appealing and far more like a car-shaped car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than it used to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’ll give you that. Where do you have a good picture of the new S back? I don’t see the-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey On the Verge article, I will put a link

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s also, they have a whole configurator up. You can go on the website and look, and there is one up there. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think the front is a downgrade. I actually like Marcos front, because they added

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like flaps and gills and wrinkles, and it looks too busy. The back looks like it has a bigger,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more emphasized sort of diffuser area. I mean, really these are the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of tweaks that you would expect within a generation from model year to model year, only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Tesla you gotta wait like five years for that to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would also argue I don’t think either wheel option is good for my needs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like I don’t like the default Tempest wheels. I don’t like that weird kind of like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, two color weird flat design they have. And I would never get the 21s because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I live in a place with winter and that I would break those skinny tires in a second. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because we have potholes here and bad roads. So I would need to get 19s and these 19s are terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The Arachnid wheels are very pretty, but yeah, you do not want 21

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey inch wheels, I don’t think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We appear to have lost my light wood interior option as well. Like there’s very few options

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, which is they’ve been going this direction for a while, but there are way fewer options than there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used to be. And none of them have light wood anymore. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let’s go to the steering bucket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why are you calling it a bucket? Why does this resemble a bucket to you? It doesn’t look like it contains anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco U shape. It looks like if you cut a bucket in half, like the cross section of a bucket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a reach. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Hey, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know what? If you guys ever wanted to drive a Knight Industries 2000, now’s your chance. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, it’s a little bit different than I ride around. Like, so this is part of the trend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have it kind of started with flat bottom steering wheels from race cars? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe flat bottom steering wheels came into race cars just because race car cockpits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are incredibly cramped and it makes it easier to get the driver’s body and legs under the steering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel in tight quarters. Does that sound true to you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Casey? I don’t know if that’s factual, but that absolutely sounds true. And my Golf R does have a flat bottom steering wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if my recollection of how flat bottom steering wheels started to be a thing is correct

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in racing, then flat-bottom steering wheels in non-race cars is essentially skeuomorphism.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a physical feature that no longer serves a purpose but is carried over just because it’s done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that way in race cars. And it’s not just skeuomorphism, but it’s also like aspirational. Like, well, race cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have flat-bottom steering wheels, so your car has one, so that makes your car more like a race car. When in reality,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if your car was as cramped as a race car, you would never buy it because you would say, this car has no room in the interior

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I can’t fit in, it’s ridiculous, right? And so they had flat bottoms for a while and Ferrari steering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheels and supercar steering wheels have been getting even flatter bottoms. Meanwhile, in the actual race car

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world, like F1 steering quote unquote wheels have looked unlike wheels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely. They don’t have flat bottoms. They are essentially fighter pilot kind of airplane

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yoke things that are like, well, there’s a thing attached to a thing that you turn,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it is not a wheel. It is not round. It’s not even continuous. It’s more like the Knight Rider thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, there is a handle on the left and a handle on the right and a bazillion buttons in the middle for all your functions of your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John F1 car. That’s what race car steering wheels look like at the, you know, in the Formula One type things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, cars don’t yet look like that. So the logical conclusion of constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chasing race car steering wheels because race cars are cool is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way F1 steering wheels look, slowly our car steering wheels start to look like that. Ferrari steering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheels do look a lot like F1 steering wheels, but they’re still a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continuous shape in a, you know, you start with a circle and you squish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sides of it and you make it flatter and you make it bulge here and you put some spokes on it or whatever. Tesla, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the first, at least the first mass market car company or close to mass market car company that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has decided they’re going to finally ditch the, the idea that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is a shape like a ring of any kind. And Instead, like Marco said, it’s more like a U.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it looks like, kind of like an airplane yoke, only you can’t push it in and out. You just twist it from side to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side. But it’s not a wheel, it’s not a ring, it’s a rectangle. And the rectangle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of extends downward from the center, which is great for visibility of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instrument cluster if you’re going straight, because there’s nothing blocking its view. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad if you have any fondness or appreciation of the utility of a wheel, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John means that you can turn it hand over hand, can slide through your fingers as it unwinds and do all those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that cars which have a way larger distance, you know, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of rotations lock to lock on the steering than say an F1 car does. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really, really question what it’s going to be like to drive a normal car with a normal turning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John radius with a thing that is not a wheel and that is very rectangular and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very low. So I, having not used this thing, are giving it a tentative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Double thumbs down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Agreed. I just, I don’t, I can’t imagine why it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this would be an improvement in any way. And I could swear, and I can’t back this up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I could swear that I had read an interview with like Hasselhoffer, a stunt driver or something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saying that it was really dangerous to drive the, the Knight Rider car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on account of the wheel. And that it was so unlike anything else. And it was, you, you would go to grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it and it wouldn’t be there. And it was just terrible. And I can’t believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I’m looking at a configurator where this is the wheel. Like I, I could totally believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that some promo shots had the wheel in it. Like when we were looking at the verge article, that’ll be linked in the show notes. Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of course they have this ridiculous yoke, whatever, that’s fine. But Marco, I didn’t realize that the configurator is up and I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the configurator and it’s there and it’s scaring me because there, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an absolute deal breaker for me. I mean, I would test drive one, I suppose, but unless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was bowled over by how much better and easier it was than I expect, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in and of itself is a deal breaker for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And to be clear, like in the case, this wasn’t clear from my earlier explanation, the reason this works in race cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, race cars, you don’t have to turn the wheel like three and a half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revolutions to go from full left to full right. Their steering is much quicker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you can go from all the wheels as far left as they can go to the wheels as far right as they can go without doing multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revolutions of the wheel and in general racetracks don’t have lots of places where you have to do hand over hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turning. It’s mostly just twist the wheel to the right, twist the wheel to the left, two hands of the wheel the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, no crossing of your hands, no need to ever fully rotate a race car steering wheel. But we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drive race cars, we drive regular cars with normal turning radiuses and steering ratios

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that often require the wheel to turn more than 90 degrees to negotiate turns in a parking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot or whatever. So you will be, unless they’ve massively changed the steering ratio in a terrifying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way in this car, you will be in fact rotating the steering wheel through more than 90

⏹️ ▶️ ^John degrees, which means, like Casey said, maybe you’ll reach for that wheel when you cross your hands over and the wheel won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be there because there is no wheel, it’s a rectangle and now you have to keep track of where the grabby parts of the rectangle are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is why steering wheels have utility. So it’s hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say without actually driving this how terrible it’s going to be, but I can imagine many problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with this. And of course, the main problem, even if this was vastly superior,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that people are used to wheels in cars. And so, especially for old people like us who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are set in our ways or whatever, it may be difficult for people who are used to a wheel to suddenly not have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a wheel. And I do wonder how many people are going to get into accidents just because they’re not used to not having a wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even this turns out to be the better design. Like, in the future, all cars are like this. This is a superior design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For something like a car that’s been so similar for so long, messing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the primary controls is dangerous because there is a population of people who are just used to the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it used to work. You really have to change things slowly to sort of allow the old people to age out and die

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and allow the young people to learn the new thing. And this is not a slow change. This is, hey, you had a wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now you don’t. Now it’s a weird rectangle. Good luck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and it gets worse, I think. Well, actually, no, that’s the worst part, is the wheel shape.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco However, they’ve also deleted the two stalks that were next to the wheel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which served a lot of functions. Just use the touchscreen. And well, you see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the closeup picture of the Verge, I’ll place the link here. The closeup picture that the Verge has suggests

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that there are touch controls now on the wheel for things like your turn signals.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} hell no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Speaking of Ferraris, the new Ferrari thing also has touch controls in the steering wheel. I’m like, touch controls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the steering wheel? How does that get out of the first brainstorming session? It’s like, your hands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are all over the steering wheel, especially if you’re gonna be crossing over on this weird rectangular steering wheel, grasping your hands,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidentally activating every capacitive touch thing all over the friggin’ thing. Touch controls in the steering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel? Please, manufacturers, just say no. What are you even thinking? Your hands are all over there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like the touch bar all over again. Yeah, and like, you know, people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see the Model S before, but have not driven one, or don’t have a lot of experience with one, often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think, mistakenly, to date, that you have to do everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco via touch screen, and that’s kind of odd, and maybe unsafe, and certainly not a good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the reality of driving the S up until now is that it actually has physical controls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for so much of the most common stuff that you don’t need to touch the touch screen constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco during driving. The most common need you would have to touch it would be either navigation, which I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine to have that be a touch function. It’s actually better than any other car I’ve ever used for that purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or things like adjusting the climate control. You do have to tap it for that. But the common stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your turn signals, windshield wipers, volume up and down, track forward, track back on audio,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of that stuff you can do now via physical controls either on the stalks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are next to the wheel, or on a handful of buttons and the little scroll wheels that are on the wheel. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets rid of the stalks, and looks like it might be moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like turn signals to these big flat touch areas that are on top of it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I really, really don’t think is going to be a good move, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having to do everything via touch controls for a device that you’re literally not supposed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or allowed to and safely can’t because you might die, look at while you’re operating?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s not a good idea, I don’t think. And even, you know, little stuff, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the S to date, you’ve been able to adjust the current cruise control set speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco via a stalk on the side. On the Model 3, as far as I know, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think that was ever an option. I don’t think the 3 has enough stalks to do it. So on the 3, you’ve always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had to adjust the set speed. again as far as I know, correct me if I’m wrong please, via

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the touchscreen. And when I drive with cruise control, adjusting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the set speed is a very common operation for me. Maybe that’s just me, it’s very common that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make adjustments to that speed. One of the big reasons why I’m not interested in the 3 is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it makes that harder, and I don’t want that to be made harder. What this new version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the S appears to do is make tons of stuff that I do all the time like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turn harder and I don’t know why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they would do this in a way that would result in anything that’s better. It looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the actual controls of using this steering wheel for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything the outgoing Model S steering wheel was used for from steering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to all the controls that were on and around it they They all appear visually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be worse with this new one. And I have to wonder what the hell they’re thinking with this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And when I see this, this makes me not want to ever upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. I don’t blame you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m looking at the steering wheel closer on this picture, the closeup picture. And not only do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turn signals appear to be on capacitive buttons on the steering wheel, but they’re both on the left side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah. Isn’t that great? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be clear, Turn signals on the steering wheel is fairly common in the industry now. And it’s actually pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, like in some ways it is superior to stalk. Some ways it’s worse because the stalks don’t move and the signals do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’ve never seen anybody not take the obvious design, which is button on the left,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the left side of the steering wheel and button for the right turn signal on the right side of the steering wheel. It kind of just makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But no, Tesla didn’t do that. But yeah, capacitive is just, is maddening. I’m looking at what these buttons are. The horn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is one of them? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, there’s a horn icon on the right side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The turn signals, the horn, the headlights, like, just imagine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like the Apple TV remote. The whole part, and they put the rotating ball except they have scroll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheels on either side, which are cool, hey, hey, physical controls. To get to those physical controls, you must reach across the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no man’s land of the capacitive touch buttons, which can turn on your turn signals. Yeah, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} spray the windshield. Your windshield squirter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. People who are gonna be driving this Tesla are gonna have one of their blinkers constantly on, their lights going on and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off, their horn occasionally blaring and squirting going on in their

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} window,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then activating the Hey Siri microphone thing. What is that in the lower right corner?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, it’s their voice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John control thing. Now, we don’t know that these are capacitive. We don’t know that they’re Apple TV, or maybe you actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to press on them or something, but either way, they do not have anything that lets you feel for them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So even if they are pressure sensitive and they won’t activate when you brush across them, like maybe we’re wrong about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, to figure out where the left and the right are, you’re just gonna have to memorize the zones they’re in, because there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no ridge, there’s no indentation, there’s no physical way that you can feel for these controls, which is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dumb. Like, look at the F1 steering wheels. Not a lot of capacitive touch controls on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an F1 steering wheel, because they don’t have time for that crap. They need a button that they can press and a wheel that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can turn. That’s how you don’t have to look at things if they’re just where they are. Do you have to look to find your left and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right turn signal on the stalks on your car right now? No, you never look at them, you just use them. It becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unconscious because they’re physical controls. This is such a terrible idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t see anything about this new steering wheel that makes me think, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wanna try that. That looks interesting, or that looks good, or that looks like an improvement. It looks like 100% regression.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, it looks like they made everything worse. Well, the one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John improvement is you can see the instrument cluster more clearly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I can see it now. When you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going straight, it provides a clearer view of the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can see it now. There’s a hole, there’s a big gap when you have a steering wheel between. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depends

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on how tall you are. That’s actually a tricky problem because.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can adjust the wheel. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} height adjustable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you can adjust the wheel so it’s the right distance for your arm comfort, or you can adjust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the wheel so you can see the entire instrument cluster without obstruction, but it’s hard to do both. And plus your head

⏹️ ▶️ ^John moves around when you’re driving because you’re looking for traffic. So that is the one, I’m gonna give that one, the yoke

⏹️ ▶️ ^John style steering wheel gives you a less obstructed view of the instrument cluster. Now, on the flip side

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that, the Model 3, not having an instrument cluster gives you a slightly less obstructed view of the road, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for people who are not tall. So there’s a benefit to not having that cluster there. What is it, Toyota Echo style,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever the first car to do that was to get rid of the- Saturn? I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Saturn might’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} first. Might’ve been. No, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Echo, yeah, that might’ve been the first one. Boy, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} was a terrible car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t see zero benefits, but whoa, the downsides are so massive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And some of them are just like, you know, like the capacitive stuff. Like I said, Ferrari has capacitive controls on one of their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new models. And they have a steering wheel, a regular steering wheel with a flat bottom. But no, capacitive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controls on your steering wheel are just a bad idea and I hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not too many people have to die for us to learn that. Both turn signals on one side is a bad idea independent of the thing, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then the shape, you know, I feel like we all have to have an open enough mind about this that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the shape does have advantages that we’re not seeing, but right now I think it’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know how any Model S owner can look at this and say, ooh, I want the new one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It just looks like it made so many things worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like many things in Tesla, Like I don’t think any of us have, it’s not a mystery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why this car looks like this. The reason many things at Tesla are the way they are is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because somebody important, probably Elon, thought they were cool. The Cybertruck,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at half the weird, look at the fricking door handles. Like sometimes things are the way they are. A lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the things that are good about Tesla are because there is someone in charge who just, you know, Steve Jobs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John style dictates that you’re gonna do a thing because it’s cool. And clearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone thinks this steering wheel is cool. And I think a lot of buyers will also think it’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And maybe they’ll be thinking that just as they reach for the steering wheel that’s not there and hit their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brand new Tesla into the corner of a building in a parking lot, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it just, to me, Tesla is more like Twitter than Apple. They have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some incredible assets and they do certain things so incredibly well, but it seems like they’re always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to innovate in ways they don’t need to, in ways that actually don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefit their customers, and that possibly suggest that they don’t understand their appeal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe they don’t understand why they make such good cars and why people love them so much. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they innovate on weird things. They make tons of self-owned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mistakes that are totally not necessary to make.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They did throw a giant steel ball bearing at their new car window.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, yeah, exactly. Live on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stage and it shattered. So that is a perfect that is a perfect good. I would say it’s a metaphor But it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another instance of exactly what you’re talking about No one forced you to do that Tesla you threw a steel ball

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into your own car to try to brag about the window and it Broke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you made this steering wheel you did to yourself like people would be excited about this car If you just made it better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the s in in incremental ways, but you said, you know what? Let’s scrub a steering wheel.