422: Sell a Third Box
17 Mar 2021MagSafe in the car, more on family sharing, hope for colorful Macs, and a fond farewell to the HomePod.
Episode Description:
- Neutral:
- The Wheel(s) of Shame™
- ProClip USA MagSafe holder
- Tesla Model Y vs. Ford Mach-E
- Tesla Model Y
- Ford Mach-E
- Follow-up:
- Clubhouse no longer requires contacts access
- Apple/ARM/TSMC
- Long writeup (via Marc Kagan)
- Fabricators
- RISC vs. CISC
- Family photo sharing clarifications
- Moving your data around
privacy.apple.com(via Ezekiel Elin)- Data Transfer Project (via Igor Makarov)
- Got Your Back (via Hung Nguyen)
- Why the iMac Pro was discontinued (via Sören)
- RIP HomePod
#askatp- Why aren’t there more background notifications from apps that aren’t running? (via Nathanael Mol)
- Why does Overcast do processing server-side? (via Michael Hellwig)
- How much of iOS is still macOS? (via Surabh Kulkarni)
- Post-show: iMac Color Rumor
Sponsored by:
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
- Flatfile: Spend less time formatting spreadsheet data, and more time using it.
- Mack Weldon: Reinventing men’s basics. Get 20% off your first order with code atppodcast.
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Chapters
- The Wheel(s) of Shame 🖼️
- MagSafe in the car
- Wireless CarPlay teaser
- Model Y
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Follow-up: Clubhouse and contacts
- Follow-up: Apple, ARM, and TSMC
- More on family photo sharing
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- Follow-up: iCloud photo exports
- Gmail backup
- Follow-up: iMac Pro discontinuation
- Big HomePod discontinued
- Sponsor: Linode
- #askatp: Mac background refresh
- #askatp: Why run servers?
- #askatp: iPhone runs “OS X”
- Ending theme
- iMac color rumors 🖼️
The Wheel(s) of Shame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not going on this show. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can’t. No, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really not. We can’t do this show. I thought it was going to, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it really can’t. You can spend your birthday going through the email of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Blue Dildo. Just sort through them one by one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Happy birthday. Here’s a scandal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really thought I was going to be able to ride the line, but I definitely did not. No, you didn’t think it through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, not even close. No, no. It sounded good in my head. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s start with some follow-up. Jane Mansion Wong writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco clubhouse no longer- Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some car pre-show stuff, because we have to cut your retire pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh yeah, no. That’s true. Marco, can you,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you, I saw on your Instagram story you had a photo of the wheel of shame, and I was super excited. But can
⏹️ ▶️ John you get that picture and make it the show art, please? I sure can. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I find that endlessly hilarious. Let me just briefly explain what it says. Marco, do you want to describe the wheel of shame? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you get it more accurate than I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OK, so when Tesla roadside assistance has to give you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a temporary wheel with a temporary tire that they loan you when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a flat tire and then you can drive on it as long as you need to until you can get to like a service center appointment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get yourself a new tire. When they give you this loaner wheel, apparently they had a problem that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, many cars have roadside assistance that will, or many, you know, insurance things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like AAA, like they’ll offer you roadside assistance where they will bring you a loaner wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s not something you really wanna drive on for very long. Usually it’s like, you know, some like really basic, you know, steel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rim with, you know, just some cheap, you know, low needs tire on it that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just barely fits your car well. Tesla doesn’t do that because they’re Tesla and for various pragmatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, like the fact that most wheels won’t fit over their giant brake calipers. So there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few sizes of rim that will even fit and tire and so they send you an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tire mounted on a real Tesla rim. And apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who would get this installed on their Carver Roadside service would often just never return it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a Tesla rim. It looks like their other ones and why bring it back to the service center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever and have to buy a new tire when you could just keep the loaner tire? People would just won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return them. So to solve this problem, Tesla Roadside Assistance apparently started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spray painting the loaner rims that they would use with ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red spray paint, sloppily applied, so they can tell those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned by Tesla and not by the owner of this vehicle, and it apparently deters people from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stealing them for too long. So I got one when I got a flat tire about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year and a half ago. That’s my first time I’d ever seen one. First time I ever had a flat tire, incidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then recently, I also got another flat tire. Well, a flat tire was gotten for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by someone hitting it when it was parked. So anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought it to the service center and here’s the fun part. So I have my winter tires on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still. The service center that was loaning me the tire until I can get back to my main place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I have the summer wheels and therefore don’t need to replace this tire quite yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t have any winter tire loaner rims. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did however have two summer tire ones. So they actually gave me two of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these for both wheels on the front axle, so they will match and not be lopsided because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter and summers are like one inch different or something. So they had to match, they are not lopsided, they are two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loaner rims, both of them spray painted, so it looks like my car’s been vandalized. The best part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that one of them is silver and one of them is black. So I have two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loaner rims, both of which look totally hideous on my car. But-
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking about this when I saw your picture though. And I have, I mean, it’s not really a question because I have
⏹️ ▶️ John explanations for the answers, but it does really make me, I mean, many things make me reconsider how Tesla runs its business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is one of them, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem of people keeping the wheel, because it’s like, it’s a legit wheel. It’s just like the wheel that comes with your car and then it’s whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John tire is on it, right? I understand why Tesla doesn’t want that to happen because like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an older wheel and it doesn’t match your other, older tire, it doesn’t match your other
⏹️ ▶️ John tire, it’s probably a safety concern, maybe it’s a liability thing, like I totally understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John but it seems that Tesla roadside assistants can arrive or in
⏹️ ▶️ John some reasonable amount of time and give you a genuine Tesla wheel with a tire on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t they just give you a new tire and a new rim at that time? And then you can
⏹️ ▶️ John keep it because the problem would be solved. Why do they have to take it back to Santa’s workshop like the Grinch and do something
⏹️ ▶️ John with the tire and the wheel and then bring it back later. Now I know the answer is probably, well, they don’t know what tires I have on and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got my winter tires and they don’t have a new tire available, they just have this old one. But it does seem weird to me that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to keep you from using and keeping essentially the solution to your problem, albeit
⏹️ ▶️ John a used one or whatever. Like I kind of get it, but it does seem a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, probably the most direct reason, which this might not be a very good reason, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have roadside assistance come, it’s just like some like towing company, Like Tesla contracts with all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies, all these different places. I guess whoever’s closest that is a towing or roadside assistance company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just dispatch them out and then they pay the bill. Like in my case, the first time I got it a year ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was actually a mobile service van that was just some van that showed up and a guy takes a Tesla tire out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back that I guess he carries a supply of them from Tesla and just stuck it on and was in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and out in a half hour. This time, there were none of those in the area and so they had to actually flatbed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tow my car to a service center. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, all I’m saying is, I understand why they don’t want you to use the user wheel. It makes sense, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so close to basically solving your problem. Like, they just need to go a little bit farther.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, those towing companies, you need to have this random Tesla wheel of shame hanging around. And the second thing is, for people who haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at the show art that Marco has hopefully put in, showing the picture of this wheel, if you’re picturing
⏹️ ▶️ John a wheel that has been like spray painted red, like, you know, just sort of rattle can, spray painted,
⏹️ ▶️ John like kind of a drippy paint job, No, that’s not what it is. Imagine a nice Tesla wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ John haphazardly, randomly sprayed, not to cover the entire wheel. It is not spray painted a color. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, and that’s it. Like just literally looks like it’s been vandalized. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And with the first time I saw this, I’m like, oh, they had this problem and they just came up with a solution on the fly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now, multiple years separated in two different geographies, we see the same
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote technique, which is, yeah, just randomly sprayed the wheel with red spray paint. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like the corporate angle on this would be to have a sort of standardized wheel of
⏹️ ▶️ John shame that is ugly and that people don’t want on their car, but isn’t literally,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s randomly, haphazardly spray a few red lines on this wheel, right? Like maybe you could say
⏹️ ▶️ John test wheel, or maybe you could have like, you know, I don’t know, temporary spare or must return,
⏹️ ▶️ John like something, like a decal, or like, you can make it even uglier than red spray paint, because it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of matches Marco’s car. So it just boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind that this is the standard way of doing business, that you have this nice fancy car and they give you a wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks like it’s been vandalized. And now you’ve got two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s kind of amazing. But I mean, it makes sense. Like if you think about, you know, like, so as I mentioned, like the tires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be a certain size to fit over the brake caliper. And so there aren’t gonna be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of like cheap off the shelf stock rims they could just stock their service people with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the same time, they do probably have a supply of like reject rims from manufacturing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made them to sell them and for whatever reason, some of them, they’re messed up or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratched or whatever. So they probably do have like some extras that otherwise would just have to be disposed of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somehow otherwise like written off.
⏹️ ▶️ John saying use a different rim. I’m saying do a nicer ugly paint job on the genuine Tesla rims,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like you could make it look like the crash test dummy thing with the orange and white
⏹️ ▶️ John checkerboard pattern or whatever, you could make it look very unsettling and something that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t want in their car, but in a nice way, in a way that looks like it wasn’t an accident or like it was done on the fly
⏹️ ▶️ John by the guy who drove the tow truck over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and that’s the thing. The way that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Tesla is run is a phrase that I’ve heard Casey use before. It seems very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grab ass. Like it seems like everything’s just kind of done like haphazardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, oh crap, we got to do this. Oh, hurry up Somebody just grab this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know It’s not like someone was rewarded for coming up with the brilliant idea of like I got it I’m just gonna go to the hardware store and get
⏹️ ▶️ John some red spray paint and that somehow becomes corporate policy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it’s you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then no one in the company has the taste to say, okay That was good for you doing on the fly But let’s come up with a formalized
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that that is not quite as embarrassing but fulfills the same purpose like, you know a very fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John decal that looks like a test pattern or some other thing that makes it clear that this is a temporary rim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem, yeah, it does seem like it was just like they, some service center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did this because they needed, they needed to solve this problem. They didn’t have time to work out an official policy with corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Some other service center heard about it or saw it and they did it too. And maybe it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones around New York do this. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. Maybe you have to get a flat out of state. We really need to know, like, Is the red, haphazard
⏹️ ▶️ John red spray paint a national policy, international policy? Please, someone get a flat tire in another
⏹️ ▶️ John country and tell us on their Tesla and tell us if you get the wheel of shame and what it looks like. Wheel of shame
⏹️ ▶️ John from across the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Californians, drive over your non-existent potholes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell us what sound ducks make in France.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, this show has already been well off the rails. We’re barely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John getting started. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Wheel of Shame is ridiculous and hilarious.
MagSafe in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have a bit more car follow-up. As I was driving around doing all these errands with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vandalized car rims, I also had some chance to sit in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and wait for a while, as I was waiting for the tow truck to come and everything. So, I installed my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new Proclip USA, previous sponsor, my new Proclip USA MagSafe mount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have experience using MagSafe in the car with my iPhone 12 mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And overall, there are a couple of snags, but overall, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fantastic. Now, snag number one, the MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Puck is USB-C, not USB-A, so I had to change the whole thing. I had to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the extension cable that runs under the console in a semi-clean fashion, all the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 12V plug thing. thing and I had to change the 12 volt plug thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an adapter that has a USB-C output port of 15 watts. Fortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ProClip USA MagSafe mount comes with that. So you supply the Apple cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MagSafe mount is just kind of like this regular ProClip compatible mount that you then like kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of wedge the cable into and screw it in with a tension screw to hold it in place. So total cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this setup is quite high because ProClip USA stuff is already on the a higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end of pricing compared to most like cheap garbage car mounts people usually buy. Although again, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally worth it. Again, they were a former sponsor. I don’t know if they might still sponsor in the future, but they’re awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so anyway, total cost of this thing, once you factor in the Apple MagSafe puck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably over $100, but it’s a pretty great overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outcome once you have it. The other limiting factor, can you guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what might be a problem with a MagSafe mount in a car. This was something I did not foresee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I would assume that jostling it would be the problem, but since you don’t, you said you didn’t foresee it, then I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have other magnetic things in the car sticking to the MagSafe clip? Do you have metal filings flying around the cabin?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah. That would surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Yeah, yeah, all the time. No, so I did expect jostling to be a problem. I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I hit a speed bump, it would fall off. And so far it hasn’t. So far it has stayed perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in place throughout all of my drives, over all of our bumpy New York roads, it has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally fine. Maybe time will tell, maybe I’ll find some situation in the future where it falls off, but so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far I haven’t found it. So that’s great. Now the problem is, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was driving back from one of the things on this really nice, great weather day we were having, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I noticed the screen was pretty dim on my phone. And I’m like, that’s weird. Normally I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways a little bit better than this. I’m like, oh, it’s not my sunglasses. I put on control center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pushed the brightness. well, it was already all the way up. And I’m like, well, that’s weird. Maybe it’s a bug. Sometimes iOS has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird bugs with the ambient light sensor. So put the phone to sleep, wake it back up, turn the brightness down, turn the brightness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. It wasn’t getting very bright. Figure out the problem yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I mean, the ambient light sensor’s on the front. It shouldn’t matter, should it? Heat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? The phone was over thermal limiting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word. And when iPhones get too hot, one of the first things they do before they go into shutdown mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is reduce the screen brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know they did that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s a fairly recent thing. I don’t know if older models did it, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the advantages of car clips usually is if you clip them to your vent or near
⏹️ ▶️ John your vent, you actually have coolish air blowing on the back of them, cooling off your phone a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I do clip it on the vent. However, it was a really nice day and I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the AC off and I just had all the windows open. And so it was getting a lot of sun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not any cooling. And I didn’t have a great charge level from earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that day when I was sitting in like a waiting room for a long time. And so at that point in the day, the MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charger was actually charging it pretty substantially. So it was receiving a good deal of charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was in the sun and it was not getting the AC blown on it. So even though it was only like, you know, 65 degrees, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was enough heat that the foam was actually fairly warm to the touch. and that was enough to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the maximum screen brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just gotta get a lightning cable and connect it to the lighting port and then just use the magnet part, not to charge,
⏹️ ▶️ John but to just hold the phone. Because I guess that eliminates some of the convenience. Now it’s attached with a
⏹️ ▶️ John wire, right? But that should prevent, because I’m assuming the heat is, because it’s the inductive
⏹️ ▶️ John charging and not with the lightning cable. Do you think, have you ever had any overheating problems with
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone and your car plugged into a lightning cable to charge?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Never, but I also haven’t had the iPhone 12 mini in very hot weather before, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came out in the fall. So, although this wasn’t very hot weather either. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, actually John, that isn’t a bad idea to also have a lightning cable that it can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into instead, but that would ruin a lot of the appeal, because if it’s plugged into lightning, it won’t do inductive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging. But anyway, other than the heat issue, which I’ll report back as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer goes on, other than that, it actually worked very, very well. and I loved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having to like slide it into a lightning connection. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lightning connection, probably due to some fault of the lightning cable or the port or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not work a 10th of the time. I would be like halfway through a drive, and realize, oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t been charging this whole time. And the screen’s been on, and Waze has been on, and GPS has been on. So.
⏹️ ▶️ John The lightning connection wouldn’t work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. That’s weird. It started happening when Apple started getting picky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about USB security and whether USB connected devices were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed to even start using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the phone until it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was locked in certain conditions or whatever else. So around that time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that started becoming a problem. I never quite figured out the pattern to it, but I’m sure it was something like maybe it was locked when I slid it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the charger and then I unlocked it once it was in there or something, who knows. But MagSafe gets rid of all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s much simpler. It seems to be always permitted no matter what the lock state of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is. So anyway, overall this is great with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential issue of heat might become a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you get a lower power thing to hook up to your MagSafe thingamabobber so it just charges slower at lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a bad idea either. I could, but even… See the thing is like Qi charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so inefficient that I think even if I just put like a 5 watt charger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on there, should be honestly, possibly not enough to keep up with Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the screen being on full brightness. Like that actually might slowly lose charge, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure that would actually be enough of a savings. Like, cause it’s, it’s gets pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warm even, even just under five watts you’re charging.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe even if you don’t have the AC on, maybe just turn the fan speed up. Cause even just regular temperature air blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back would probably help cool it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I had the fan totally off because it was a really nice day. And I’m like, I don’t, I don’t need climate control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in the climate, it’s controlling itself, it’s great.
Wireless CarPlay teaser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually have a teaser for next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I received an early birthday present from my parents, which is one of the CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wireless adapters. And I have only used it for literally five minutes stationary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my garage. And in those five minutes, it worked pretty well. But similar to what you’re saying, imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how well, first of all, Marco, can you imagine having CarPlay in your car? That sounds amazing. Wouldn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be neat? I would love that. Imagine that, I mean, my car, which probably costs less than half of yours, has CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s pretty awesome. But remember guys, Tesla’s perfect. Anyway, so my car is wired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay, as most cars do. And they sell these little boxes. I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted about it a while ago, and I thought we talked about it on the show. They have these boxes that are basically like bridges.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so you plug the box into the USB port, and then it connects to the phone via,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, Bluetooth. I’m not confident I’m correct about that. And it basically gives you wireless CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so in my two minutes of testing, it seemed to work pretty well. But I plan to be in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several times over the next several days. And so I hope to have some more feedback about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this next week. We’ll talk about it then.
Model Y
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I did forget to mention too, I, um, when I was in the waiting room at the dealer thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw the Model Y for the first time. I didn’t drive it because I was just like in the showroom, but, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I think is going to be a really big hit. If it isn’t already, it probably is, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, it, it seems like exactly like, you know how, like you look around the car market today in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco America, at least the rest of the world has generally better taste, but in America you look around the car market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s pretty much dominated by a whole bunch of cars that are exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. And it’s this kind of like weird, like short length wise, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tall, kind of crossover, kind of SUV, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Every car in America is that right now. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what people buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s what everybody in America seems to want right now. Again, I’m not entirely sure why, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s what happens. The Model Y seems to fit that exactly. The Model 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has already been a huge hit. The Model Y basically takes the Model 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pulls it upwards slightly and gives it way more trunk space because it gives it a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hatchback like the Model S. It looks like it’s going to be a huge hit. I have a feeling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m riding around my S, which feels like a dinosaur by comparison, although a dinosaur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I absolutely love still, I can look at this and say, yeah, they’re going to be busy for a while. and whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you’re hoping for something from Tesla, like the Cybertruck or the Semi or whatever else, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future that is not like really scheduled for production yet, I don’t know how they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have time to make anything else instead of spending all of their manufacturing capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Model 3 and the Model Y because they’re gonna sell an absolute ton of the Ys in addition to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolute ton of the 3s they’ve already been selling. So I think this is gonna do very well for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you didn’t see my link I put in our little neutral slack channel showing the
⏹️ ▶️ John Ford quote unquote Mustang Mach-E beating a Model
⏹️ ▶️ John Y in a range test. The EPA rating for the Model Y is 326 miles and the EPA
⏹️ ▶️ John rating for the Mach-E is 270, but they just ran the cars next to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other on like a 250 mile trip and the Model Y ran out of juice before completing it and the Mach-E
⏹️ ▶️ John did not. They’re both incredibly ugly, disgusting SUV cars that I don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the Model Y might actually have some legit competition because that Ford is just
⏹️ ▶️ John as ugly, which people love. Gets better range apparently in real life. And I think it’s also cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John because unlike Tesla, I think Ford hasn’t, it’s like subsidies
⏹️ ▶️ John from the government haven’t expired. So you get the $7,500 tax credit on the, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even say it with a straight face. The Mustang Mach-E, it’s terrible. Anyway, we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John a link in the show notes to this video and you can watch it. It looks like it’s pretty well done. Obviously there are many variables
⏹️ ▶️ John with the range, but I think the, if you watch the video, they go over lots of the little nuances
⏹️ ▶️ John of the different charging networks and the various pros and cons. But I think the Model Y
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point might actually have some competition if you like this kind of car, which I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And neither does Marco. And Casey kind of drives one of these cars, but he drives the gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John sneaker version. So I guess it’s a little bit different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you hear that? Did you hear my eyes rolling right out of my head? Because that’s what just happened. I can’t continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show. I can’t see anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like, I mean, Marco’s right. This is what everybody buys. This is basically the default car,
⏹️ ▶️ John which it makes lots and lots of people happy, but not me. And so like, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to look harder and harder to find a car that is even the remotely, like the right,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, type of car, you know, like in terms of number of doors, shape, everything because
⏹️ ▶️ John just everyone wants little crossover SUV things and I don’t like them at all. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I also I’m pretty sure like I kind of decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was driving around my car a lot this last week or two for reasons I kind of decided I think I’m gonna buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out at the end of the lease because looking at what Tesla’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re afraid of the steering wheel. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John get around one I bet it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Well But and you know, but they messed up the gear shifter. They kind of messed up the center console
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way I don’t love. Like they it just seems it seems like the the Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S that I have is the last car Tesla designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be driven by the driver. Everything they’ve designed since then including from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the three forward including the current S the current 10 and the three and the Y everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of those cars seem to have been designed primarily to drive themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the thing is they don’t primarily drive themselves yet and they might never do that. Or like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know full self-driving is in beta and the beta is amazing and all that stuff. Yeah I know, I’ve seen the videos too, I know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in actual day-to-day use of actually owning these cars, they’re still mostly driven by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. And the Model S that I have seems to be the last car Tesla made that was designed to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accommodate that and be designed for that primarily. And I just like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. It’s a car that is a really… it’s my favorite car I’ve ever had. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly nice to drive. And at no point do I feel like I am like fighting against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design of the car. Whereas the new ones, I don’t like the center screen only on the 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Y. And I don’t like the stock removals on the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S and 10. And I don’t like that they removed the sunroof also on the new S and 10, which I used this entire time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just it seems like they’re going in a direction that I think they’ll course correct at some point But that hasn’t happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. And so i’m very happy to keep the one I have I think
⏹️ ▶️ John And now you got it all dented and scratched up and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta I still don’t have an estimate on them on the body Work, we’re gonna see how that goes Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, well, I don’t know how financially whether it makes more sense for you to buy this car out and fix it yourself But either way you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a yeah, it’s really yours now because now you’ve damaged it or someone has damaged it for you as you said. Yes.
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Follow-up: Clubhouse and contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, shall we start with follow-up? Oh my word. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jane Manchin Wong writes, Clubhouse no longer requires contacts access for sending invites. In the latest update, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can now directly enter the phone number or use the iOS contact picture, which does not require contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access in order to send an invite. I have not yet tried this, but I’ve heard several people reporting this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s good news. I dig that you can do this by hand. I’m still a little iffy on the fact that it’s using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone numbers, but here we are. But at least you can do it in a less gross way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting because apps like Clubhouse, especially Clubhouse specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John appealing to the sort of Silicon Valley VC startup,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, the subset of people who are using the app are exactly the type of people who might
⏹️ ▶️ John be disproportionately annoyed by giving access to their contacts. I think in general, in the mass
⏹️ ▶️ John population, that would probably go without most people worrying.
⏹️ ▶️ John If this was the hot app and everyone was on it, they would just say, yeah, yeah, OK, and tap their way through
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But because it’s a bunch of nerds who were probably like me, simply refusing to give access to their contacts,
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t getting as much social engagement as they would have expected. Because I never
⏹️ ▶️ John invited anybody. Because I couldn’t without giving access to my contacts. And so it makes some kind of sense that they
⏹️ ▶️ John would actually notice this and say, what are we trying to do here? Like we’re trying to get access to their contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to bootstrap our network, but if they’re refusing to do it because it seems too, you know, too onerous and over the
⏹️ ▶️ John top, these sensitive nerds who care about giving access to their contacts,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not working. So why don’t we just do what we should do in the first place, which is let people invite who they wanna invite,
⏹️ ▶️ John let them use the iOS contact picker, which lets them pick a contact from their list without us seeing what they
⏹️ ▶️ John are and we only get the one phone number that we’re being sent the invite to. So good job Clubhouse
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a fairly fast reaction to a poor design choice. You can follow
⏹️ ▶️ John the link in the show notes to the tweet that shows, Jane’s tweet that shows the screenshots of what the interface
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like. I think it even looks better than the old interface. No more scary dialogue saying give access to your
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts or go away.
Follow-up: Apple, ARM, and TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Apple Arm and TSMC. I think that, John, you probably have some thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but somebody, I think it was Mark Hagen, pointed to a good but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very long write-up, unfortunately on Medium, but nevertheless, a write-up on why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or some theories as to why the M1 is so darn fast. And it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a lot of technical details. However, it does a pretty good job of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving an appropriate amount of explanation as to to what Eric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Engeim is the author was talking about without spending three hours on tangents explaining,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the fundamental knowledge you need to understand every nuance of what I just said. So I breezed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through this, and it was a pretty good article. So we’re going to put that in the show notes. But John, I think you have other thoughts as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Slight disagree on that article, which I’ll get to in a second. This was about last, it was an Ask
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP last episode about like, who is the Sprinkles?
⏹️ ▶️ John it arm with Apple Sprinkles? Was it Apple with arm sprinkles? I don’t remember if the sprinkles were good or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea was trying to apportion credit for Apple’s amazing chips in their
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and now in their Macs. Who gets most of the credit for that? And our
⏹️ ▶️ John conclusion, I think collectively, it was Apple gets most of the credit. Apple is the most important part of that
⏹️ ▶️ John formula. And a couple of people pointed out that one other ingredient that we should talk about that we didn’t mention last
⏹️ ▶️ John time is fabbing, right? TSMC is doing the fabbing for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel used to be the king of fabs. They are not anymore. They haven’t been for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. It’s been a sad decline for them. Fabbing is short for fabrication. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John how your chips get made and each new process size corresponds to
⏹️ ▶️ John how small they can make the little things on the chips. And in general, the smaller they can make the little transistors, the better
⏹️ ▶️ John that is overall. And TSMC is currently in the lead. And Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of money, and they use that money to pay TSMC to make their chips using the best process
⏹️ ▶️ John technology that TSMC has to offer. In fact, Apple has so much money that they often buy up as much
⏹️ ▶️ John of TSMC’s capacity as they possibly can to say, here is a huge bucket of money, make
⏹️ ▶️ John our chips with your best stuff, and whatever you have left, you can sell to other people. But if you have no more capacity left,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in the factory is entirely engaged making chips for iPhones, iPads, and Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, Apple doesn’t care. In fact, that’s great for Apple because its competitors can’t use the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John process size for their chips, right? Now, TSMC, just like ARM, are things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are in theory accessible to everybody. Anyone can make an ARM chip. The whole, ARM’s whole business is, we will license you
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU architecture or CPU designs and so on and so forth. TSMC’s old business is, we’ll make your
⏹️ ▶️ John chips for you. We don’t have our own chips. We just make people’s chips. You pay us money, we make your chip. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole business that they’re in. So you would think TSMC, like ARM, would
⏹️ ▶️ John be, would cancel out, right? Because everyone has access to ARM. That was the whole point with Apple being great. Everyone has access
⏹️ ▶️ John to ARM. Qualcomm has access to ARM. Qualcomm chips stink. Apples are great. They’re both ARM chips. So ARM is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the special sauce here. It’s Apple or the sprinkles or whatever the hell it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. TSMC is similar in that they will fab anything for everybody but like I said, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM, which ARM will just give you licenses, there’s an unlimited amount of ARM licenses that they
⏹️ ▶️ John can make a new copy of that ARM license and without any cost to them. TSMC has
⏹️ ▶️ John limited capacity. And when Apple hogs it, that doesn’t leave as much for everybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, most of Apple’s good arm competitors are either
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same process size, maybe not done by TSMC, maybe done by another fab,
⏹️ ▶️ John or close. So the fab advantage that Apple may have is a factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think it is the deciding factor. So if you had to rank these, I would say, Apple is the most important factor
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re really good at making chips and the people who are doing that at Apple are doing a great job. The second most
⏹️ ▶️ John important factor is probably the fab access in that if Apple didn’t have access to the best process,
⏹️ ▶️ John its chips wouldn’t be as good. They would only be 170% better instead of 200% better, right? And then a distant
⏹️ ▶️ John third is ARM. And as for that article, it
⏹️ ▶️ John reminded me of the sort of RISC versus CISC wars from the early 2000s on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Ars Technica website.
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes, which is a 10 year retrospective on risk versus CISC. If you read the article, it falls
⏹️ ▶️ John into some of the same traps. Like I don’t know if most people aren’t gonna do this. Like if you went back and read all the
⏹️ ▶️ John risk versus CISC articles on Ars Technica for that 10 year span, you would see them sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John laboriously going through all sort of the proposed advantages of risks and
⏹️ ▶️ John how that works out in the real world, right? So lots of the things about risk, it’s clearly better than CISC because
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons X, Y, and Z. and then you look at how real world chips performed and how the distinction
⏹️ ▶️ John between risk and sys is not as clear cut as you think it is when it comes to actual chips. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that article is a little bit of a naive view of what makes ARM or Apple’s chips
⏹️ ▶️ John good. It has some good fundamentals that you can learn about it and has some interesting points, but it leans a little bit too heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John on the magic of risk is just better because X. We have decades of experience showing that
⏹️ ▶️ John risk is not just better, right? It’s the individual chip that makes it right. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John PowerPC chips are risk and Intel chips were CISC and Intel was crushing them. Yes, they had a fab advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ John but their instruction set was terrible by any technical, you know, view, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that was mitigated. And as the number of transistors in chips go up, the mitigation that you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do for ugly x86 instruction set becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John It becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your power budget, and therefore a smaller and smaller factor
⏹️ ▶️ John in your designs. And so all the supposed advantages that you have in risk versus CISC can be overwhelmed by
⏹️ ▶️ John other advantages like a fab size advantage or better or just having smarter designers. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would take what you read in that article with a grain of salt. But if you’ve never read anything like that before, it’s good to get a sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John a lay of the land. Just don’t buy into the risk hype too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. Yeah. I mean, it was it was an article worth reading, even if you disagreed with it, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, I remember the risk and CISC debate from especially when PowerPC was a big thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was interesting, even way back then.
More on family photo sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So a lot of people had a lot of feedback with regard to, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our lamentations about family sharing with regard to photos. And a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said in varying degrees of politeness, what is wrong with you idiots? This is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared photo albums is for. And I can understand why people were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that, but that is not at all what I want. And I’m pretty sure it’s not at all what John wants. And I don’t know if Marco really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a horse in this race. So John, would you like to explain perhaps differently, maybe better, what it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would like, what is it you want, Sean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I didn’t do a good enough job explaining the complaint, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole premise was that we get this complaint all the time, and so it’s easy for me to think that everyone knows what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about, because they’re all the people writing in saying, hey, I’ve got this problem, how do I solve it? And we don’t have a good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are lots of people who don’t have the problem, so I should have explained it a little bit better. But first, iCloud shared photo albums.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a feature I use, and this is a feature I think mostly does a good job at what it’s meant to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you make a shared album in iCloud Photos or whatever, you can put photos
⏹️ ▶️ John into it. And in fact, you can make it so that other people can also put photos into it. And it’s a great way to
⏹️ ▶️ John share photos with other people. I mean, usually you’re sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John with people who are sort of outside your family or outside your immediate family, but it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no family relationship, you know, implied or required. It’s independent of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John family support. In fact, it predates it. And so in the general thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, hey, we went on a family vacation, grandma wants to see pictures of the kids at Disney World. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Assuming grandma has an iPhone or a web browser because there’s a web interface too, but the web interface is kind of cruddy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, especially if grandma has an iPad or an iPhone, it’s really easy and convenient to just make
⏹️ ▶️ John a shared album of like our Disney trip. And then everyone who went on the Disney trip puts their, the five or six photos they
⏹️ ▶️ John thought were good from the Disney trip into the shared album. And then on grandma’s phone, a little notification comes up and
⏹️ ▶️ John says, oh, new pictures have been added to your, first little thing that will come up and says you’re invited to a shared album and you click accept.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then anytime photos are added, a little notification comes and you just tap on it and you see the pictures, it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what I use shared albums for. For exactly, for similar things. When we go on vacations or see pictures of the kids
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, we have a shared album that all the grandparents and interested aunts and uncles and
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody and cousins are all in and you throw photos into it and they can see them. I know it’s confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s an example of sharing photos, right? And that’s why they’re called shared photo albums. So like, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem? You’re sharing, right? What I was talking about and what the problem everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has with their, you know, Apple’s photo is not understanding families is
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing in the sense of shared photo libraries within the family,
⏹️ ▶️ John within the immediate family, usually mom and dad or whoever the parents are, right? Or maybe the kids as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just like within the immediate family. And what they’re not doing is sharing photos with each other to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here, you know, here’s pictures of identification, check these out, right? What they’re trying to do instead
⏹️ ▶️ John is have all of their inputs go into a shared photo library. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the difference between a library and an album? Right, this is the distinction that I think, you know, I think Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t yet fully grok, which is why he has a system that he has. A photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple’s sense, in their implementation is a place where your pictures go. You take
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures and you put them in there, they go in there from your phone or whatever, or you take pictures with your big camera and you import them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what you’ve got in there is the original picture, plus any edits you have made to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You’ve cropped it, you resized it, you rotated it, you made adjustments to it, right? Plus all of the face recognition
⏹️ ▶️ John data, plus any tags that you’ve added to, which is a feature maybe nobody uses, but they exist, you can tag
⏹️ ▶️ John it with whatever. Plus, of course, all the EXIF data and the geotagging and the lens and the camera and the date and all that other
⏹️ ▶️ John information. And then whatever album you file it in, if you file it into a little folder or whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John All of that is what makes a photo library. When you share that into a shared album,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of that is left behind, right? I’ll get into the limits of shared photo albums
⏹️ ▶️ John and albums limitation, but in general, you’re just trying to share the picture, but you’re not sharing your photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have access to your edits. They can’t tweak your exposure adjustment. They can’t change the crop. They can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see the face recognition. They can’t adjust the tags. They can’t refile it into a different thing because you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing your photo library, you’re just sharing the picture with them. Hey, check out this picture from our vacation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sharing the library lets the entire family cooperate to manage the
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably hundreds of thousands of photos that make up a photo library. Doing the edits, picking the
⏹️ ▶️ John favorites, cropping them, making sure the faces get recognized, assembling
⏹️ ▶️ John them to, you know, making a smart folder or whatever to make a bunch of pictures that you’re eventually gonna upload to Shutterfly to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the yearly album. like photo library stuff. When only one person
⏹️ ▶️ John can own the quote unquote family library that is the problem we’re trying to solve here that now everyone has to funnel
⏹️ ▶️ John everything into that and you have to log in as the person who owns the library and that’s where you have to do all of that work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And other people have their own little islands of libraries but you can’t do the work there because all the photos are in the library that’s owned by
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever is a designated library family owner. So it’s the distinction between
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing and sharing as in sharing outside the family or sharing within or whatever, sharing in the small circle sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wider circle. And then album, which is just here’s some pictures, and library,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is your photos plus all of the metadata and all the edits and the original and all of the organization
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing to it. Now, some more things you should know about iCloud shared photo albums.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are fairly limited. So even if you don’t care about any of that stuff I mentioned, you’re just like, I’m just going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John the family shared photo album. That will solve my problem. I don’t think you will, at least not for very long.
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, shared albums have a limit of 5,000 items per album. So if you think you’re ever gonna have more than 5,000 photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John a family shared album is not gonna work. And if you don’t think you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have more than 5,000 photos, you might not have been alive very long, because you will. Because in
⏹️ ▶️ John general, in general, you tend not to delete your pictures. Most people don’t delete their pictures. I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to see my 16th birthday anymore. I’ll just delete that when I turn 18. You probably won’t, or you probably shouldn’t anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you have kids, forget it. It’s all, all bets are off with the pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, 5,000 is like a month of your first born. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s nothing. The maximum number of shared albums you can have is you can have 200
⏹️ ▶️ John of them and you can only subscribe to 200 of them. Max video quality in an album is 720p.
⏹️ ▶️ John Max photo size in an album is 248 pixels in the largest dimension. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you are getting lesser quality, recompressed, limited number of pictures. And of course you lose all
⏹️ ▶️ John of the edits plus the originals and everything. You lose all of the metadata that you may have. like tags
⏹️ ▶️ John and keywords and faces and whether it’s your favorite you lose all of that right so it is a lossy Limited
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, this is probably appropriate if you’re just trying to share photos with your wider circle of people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in them They don’t need the original. They don’t need the full res Maybe 720p video is a little bit rough
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they would like to have a little higher res video than that and you know Obviously Apple can adjust these things But
⏹️ ▶️ John you will eventually run into the 5000 limit to give an example. My brother has had a shared album and he was sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of his kids, but his problem was he just kept having kids. And he hit the 5,000 photo limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John So instead of being like, here’s pictures of the boys, the boys’ shared photo album,
⏹️ ▶️ John now they had to be like, every year there’d be the boys, you know, 2015, the boys 2016, the boys 2017, because you’d fill up the album eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just, you know, anyway. So shared photo
⏹️ ▶️ John albums are a good feature for what they do, but they are not what I’m asking for, and they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution to the problem of having an entire family collaborate to work on their
⏹️ ▶️ John shared photo library together, rather than designating a single member of that family
⏹️ ▶️ John to own the shared photo library, and then having everyone have to somehow funnel their photos from their devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and their cameras and their private libraries into the shared one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really, really tough. And I understand, especially after a bunch of people wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, how hard this can be, Because I think I fell into the trap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a lot of seemingly apple people fall into, which is, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you know, you have you and your wife and your, you know, 2.3 kids and that that’s the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. And people quickly pointed out, okay, well, great. Well, what if you get a divorce? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if, you know, something else dramatic in your family happens? How do you know who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey controls what? And where does this all go? And- Write your names in all your books.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someday. day, you’re going to go 10 rounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure this is a reference I’m missing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know that. I don’t know the rest of that line. Chat room, help me out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s all right. Yeah, I sure. Uh, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it, you know, I think John wrote, John wrote in the show notes, family photo libraries are hard and that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. I mean, there, there are a lot more complexities here than I think I had initially thought about at first glance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless, it seems like this should be, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not completely conquerable, it should be better than it is today. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t bring it up last week and a couple of people called us out on it. And I regret not having brought it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but even though it’s not an apples to apples comparison, like one password for families
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really, really good. And does this really, really well. Again, I acknowledge it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apples to apples, but with one password for families, and I don’t think they’ve sponsored, but they might’ve in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, okay, there you go. Well, they should, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not say enough good things about one password And One Password for Families is a subscription service where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically everyone has their own one password. You know, this is a repository to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold all of your passwords and so on. Everyone has their own one password vault, but then you can have shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaults, which is to say you can have shared passwords. So I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think of a good example. So like logins for like doctors and things like that. Erin and I have in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our shared vault. So either one of us can log into the pediatrician’s website and see what the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is for one of the kids or what have you, or schools, what Declan’s grades are these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even to give another example, I don’t even use one password, but to give another example, say
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a household and you have a Netflix subscription. Somebody signed up for Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it was you, maybe it was your spouse, right? But whoever it was, there’s just one email address and password,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so say it’s 2007 or whenever Netflix came out and I’m like, oh, Netflix is a great service,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna sign up for it. I enter my email address, I make an account, I give them my credit card, great, now we have
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix. Now my wife wants to sign into Netflix on her laptop upstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ John She’s gotta say, what was the Netflix password? And if you use good passwords, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it off the top of your head. Oh, it’s in my password key chain. Well, it’s not in mine. Like every service is like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s another family type thing of like, yeah, probably only one person in the household is gonna sign up for
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix. It’s not gonna, the two people, two adults aren’t gonna each have their own accounts, which means as
⏹️ ▶️ John soon as one person signs up for Netflix, what you want is that Netflix login information
⏹️ ▶️ John to be available to all adults in the household so everyone can sign in. And that’s exactly the problem that 1Password
⏹️ ▶️ John is solving. And you’re right, that it’s easier and it’s just a username and a password and not thousands of photos. But it’s exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same situation that there are things in a household that one person does, like I took the picture
⏹️ ▶️ John with my camera but that become owned, which would be properly owned by
⏹️ ▶️ John default by everyone in the household.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so this is a solvable problem to at least some degree. And I haven’t played with Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey implementation of this in a long, long, long time. But I believe that there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, there are affordances for this sort of thing, both when you’re temporarily in the same place for like a party or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that, or if you’re just members of the same family. But, you know, take that with a grain of salt. I haven’t looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it in a while. So nevertheless, it just seems like there should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than nothing here. And what we’re getting from Apple is nothing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, people, they complain that we’re not actually getting nothing, but we’ve got to share albums. But I honestly think that shared albums
⏹️ ▶️ John are solving a different problem and doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Like they are the, you know, I keep saying like immediate family and extended family, but it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller circle and bigger circle. You want your sort of inner circle, perhaps to share a photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you want a much wider circle with which you can share select photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John and those people don’t need library access. They just wanna see the pictures, right? So I think that they’re for two
⏹️ ▶️ John different purposes. And I put this item in here, photo libraries are hard because a lot of people wrote in about that. I tried to make that point last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, right? This is not an easy problem. Photos are big, lots of weird policy decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John family structures change, ownership is difficult to control. How do you make a UI for this? How do you make it sensible, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The two things I’ll add about that. One, in the degenerate case, it works exactly like it does now. If you don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John any of this stuff, you don’t have to. totally independent Apple IDs, totally independent iCloud photo libraries, no loss
⏹️ ▶️ John in functionality, no loss in simplicity. It’s exactly the way it is now, right? That’s how this should be implanted is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t care about this stuff, don’t do it. Works just like it does now, no problem, right? Second thing I’ll add
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I said last week. I wasn’t expecting this overnight. This is a really hard problem. Takes a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time to work on. It has a lot of foundational components that need to be laid down and you have to really think about it and do well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think my feelings about this are best expressed by a clip from the movie, Gross Point Blank, will be in the show notes.
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Follow-up: iCloud photo exports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also had some feedback with regard to getting your data out of iCloud Photos. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had talked about how you can ask for Apple to ship all of your data to Google Photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ezekiel Ellen writes, you can download your iCloud Photos with the same privacy.apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a zip. It will break it up into file sizes that you choose, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 gigs, which is pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know that. So you can check that out if you so desire. there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Igor Makarov writes, the photo transfer feature discussed in the last episode is part of the data transfer project,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is at datatransferproject.dev, which is an open source protocol maintained by the member companies with multiple adapters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ll put some links in the show notes. The members are Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Igor writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve transferred a Facebook photo library to Google recently, and the only things that I had a problem with were the lack of proper progress indication
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and missing timestamps on videos, but the photo timestamps were OK.
⏹️ ▶️ John A brief real-time follow-up just so I don’t have to do this next week. Max photo size in shared photo libraries is 2048
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels in the widest dimension, 5400 pixels for panoramas. I think I said 248 last time. They’re not that bad. Good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re sorry for the error.
Gmail backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hong Wen writes, the easiest way to back up your Gmail account is to use Got Your Back, or GYB,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which will back up your entire Gmail or G Suite slash Workspace email account into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a directory hierarchy of inbox files, which you can then use to restore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It gets me every time. Which you can use to restore to the same or a different Gmail or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey G Suite slash Workspace mailbox or group. GYB can also upload any inbox file,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including from Google Takeout, to your Gmail. And then Hung continues to write,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my day job, I use it all the time to archive off emails of employees who leave the company, et cetera. I’ve also had occasion to use it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey re-upload an entire email account when employees come back. In G Suite or Workspace, I keep trying to say Workspace.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In G Suite or Workspace, I can create and use a service account so I don’t even need the user’s credentials.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the companion to GAM, which lets you manage G Suite or Workspace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the command line. And these two utilities are extremely useful if you do any amount of work around Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts. You can also see something similar at thehorcrux.com and we will put all these links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, lots of suggestions. Those are just two of them of like tools that will pull down your email to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a local copy. I looked at a whole bunch of them. Obviously, most of these tools want you
⏹️ ▶️ John to enter your credentials to get your email, which is kind of scary. Anytime you take a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party application and enter your mail credentials, just because your email is so essential to, That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the linchpin of security on the internet is whatever your official email address is.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the reasons I tend to use mail clients as my backups. Like I looked at
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things and I just, I usually just wimp out and I’m like, I’d rather, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d rather just run Apple Mail and use Pop to pull my Gmail down through Apple Mail
⏹️ ▶️ John and just never use it as a mail client. Like I just launch Apple Mail, it downloads my mail and then I quit it, right? and that’s essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a local backup of my mail. You know, and plus I do use Google Takeout, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel a little bit better about using a few well-known mail clients like Apple Mail or
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google’s own takeout service than I do about third-party ones. That said, a lot of people use these third-party ones
⏹️ ▶️ John and really like them, so if you’re interested in that, there’s lots of GUI apps that do this, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of collections of Python scripts that do it. Like if you search GitHub, you’ll find all sorts of things because
⏹️ ▶️ John these are mostly open protocols. Just it may take a while to download all your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail. Yeah, I just recently realized that my Google Apps email address,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is my primary email address, I’m like not that far away from my one terabyte limit because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all getting lumped together with Google Photos and my email and so on and so forth. So-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy more. I know, but I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I might just cancel Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since I only have iPhone pictures in there. And even though I like having 17 levels of redundancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Syracuse style, I just, I don’t know. I don’t feel like, since their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uploader is such trash, last I looked anyway, I feel like maybe I should just retire it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was another one of the tips. Lots of other people had ideas of things you can use besides Google Backup
⏹️ ▶️ John and Sync to upload photos to Google Photos. So there were lots of suggestions that were in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John better, because I mean, it’s not hard to be better because that app is really garbage. There were ones that even run on your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t mind burning your phone battery. Like if you have iCloud Photo Library and the photos eventually get on your phone, then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John available for these apps on your phone to upload to Google Photos. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Photo backup and sync has been bad for a really long time. Bad as in it performs poorly
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it doesn’t get all the photos. There are utilities out there. Kind of important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Yeah, two major points on the program, right? There are utilities out there that understand
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s photo library structure. Google’s backup and sync does not. It just finds JPEGs, right? And it does an
⏹️ ▶️ John okay job of not uploading the thumbnails and deduplicating and all that stuff, right? but there are like
⏹️ ▶️ John third party commercial utilities that purport to anyway, understand the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple photo library format and can do a better job of pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John all of your photos out and sticking them into Google Photos that’s the thing you’re interested in.
Follow-up: iMac Pro discontinuation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also had some feedback from Sorin with regard to why the iMac Pro was discontinued.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you had said recently, I guess last episode, that Intel will sell Xeons forever, and it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t the Xeon that was the problem. And according to Sorin, the narrator then said it was the Xeon. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel has officially announced the discontinuation of the entire Skylake X HEDT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Xeon W2000 CPU families. The move is primary due to the fact that said chips have been replaced by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new parts which include the Cascade Lake-X HEDT and Xeon W3000 series family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which has been on the retail market for a while now. The last shipments will be made on July 9th, 2021. Alright, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in other words, they updated the CPU, Intel updated the CPUs a while ago, Apple never used them, and they’re stopping making the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re not even, yeah, so July, like the date is pretty coincidental, the Apple making this announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John and Intel saying the last shipment is July, so. There may have been other parts and and other reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Xeon discontinuation alone is enough reason for them to can it early.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, sad times, but it’s understandable. And I think that’s it for follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We made it. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I need to nap.
Big HomePod discontinued
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of sad times. Aww.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s not sad for me. I still haven’t even heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one. You gotta get one while supplies last. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the, this past two episodes have been the get one while supplies last episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, Casey, good news. They’re only available in white now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hooray. Actually, to be honest, I’d probably get a black one if I were to get one, but that’s alright.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I only have white ones there. I think the white looks better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. Alright, so what we’re dancing around around is that the full-size HomePod, the OG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePod, has been discontinued. Apple writes, HomePod Mini has been a hit since its debut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last fall, offering customers amazing sound, an intelligent assistant, and smart home control, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for just $99. We’re focusing our efforts on the HomePod Mini. We are discontinuing the original HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It will continue to be available while supplies last through the Apple Online Store, Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provide HomePod customers with software updates and service in support through AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you couldn’t hear it when Casey read it, but this is an official statement from Apple. I pulled from this TechCrunch article
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’ll link in the show notes. I’m pretty sure they copied and pasted it into this. So this is Apple, Apple wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ John text and it contains a comma splice. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John We are discontinuing the original HomePod, comma, it will continue to be available while supplies last,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada, yada. No, those are two sentences. You can’t just take them and stick a comma between them and say I’ve made a new sentence
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco out of two sentences by
⏹️ ▶️ John putting a comma between them. That’s called a comma splice, don’t do that. And this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you almost never see like grammar or spelling mistakes from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John like official statements. Really weird, I don’t know what’s going on over there. Everyone’s sad that they’re discontinuing
⏹️ ▶️ John their iMac Pro and now the big HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the big HomePod had so little effort put into it that they couldn’t even bother to proofread its discontinuation
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so that’s the thing about the big HomePod, the regular HomePod, the original HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ John the normal size HomePod? HomePod Max. Oh gosh, right. And it’s not, as many people pointed out, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have a product called blank mini, but there will be no blank. So it’s a mini version of a product that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exist. The rumors about the HomePod, the
⏹️ ▶️ John big HomePod, were that it was part of the effort that was involved with like the Apple making
⏹️ ▶️ John its own television, right? You know, some of the research going into like home audio, video
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment sort of medium to high end. Like if Apple ever actually made a television set
⏹️ ▶️ John that in theory some of the work done to make a compact, good sounding speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John that didn’t take up a lot of room could have eventually got folded into the HomePod. This is, so
⏹️ ▶️ John goes the rumor, right? That Apple decided we’re not gonna make a TV but we did a bunch of research on the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff so maybe we can make this little thing. Oh, and it also looks like these cylindrical
⏹️ ▶️ John voice assistants are a thing now. So why don’t we take some of that work we did for the TV set we never
⏹️ ▶️ John shipped and then smush it together into something And now we’ve got our own cylinder that we can sell and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really expensive and big and you know Whatever right and that would explain some of the muddled history
⏹️ ▶️ John of this product and why it Sounds better than it really needs to but what it doesn’t but this rumor doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John explain assuming it’s true at all is okay But then why did the thing just have a power cord hanging out of
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Because if you’re gonna sell any kind of AV equipment for a theatrical television set or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, wouldn’t it have some kind of IO? Like in general, if you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell people audio visual equipment of any kind,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s important that you either sell the whole setup, in which case you can kind of do whatever you want. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to say like, just buy all the stuff from us, then it will all work together. Sony used to do that. Like, did Marco, didn’t you have
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those sets that was like the Sony, like surround sound TV entertainment center thing that came
⏹️ ▶️ John with like all the speakers and the subwoofer and the amplifier in one big box?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, sort of. It’s actually in the speakers, but yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John close enough. Yeah, and still that would hook up to a TV, but generally that approach is frowned upon,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a thing that some people find convenient and it’s a product that you can make. So you either sell the whole thing or
⏹️ ▶️ John you sell components, in which case, they have to connect with standard things. Now you could argue Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John is standard, but especially when they made the HomePod, and I would argue even now, if you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do a home theater setup, you probably wanna buy, unless you’re talking about like the back surround speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re buying something that’s connected to the television, you probably want it to be connected with wires if you can. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of AV equipment that only plugs in with a power cord and that’s it,
⏹️ ▶️ John is hanging a lot on software, eternal software support to make that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John work. As Jason Snell pointed out, he’s got an iPod Hi-Fi, which young listeners won’t even know what the heck
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, but picture a boom box with a place for an iPod to stick in the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it sticks there with a giant, what is it, 16 pin? I don’t even remember how many pins were on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re all so old. Chat room, shame us by telling a 30 pin. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco 30 pin! There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, we’re a bunch of idiots. I was the closest without going over. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John writing right rules. Well done,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well done. The iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John Hi-Fi was like, it had an amplifier and two speakers and a place to connect your iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ John But importantly, it also had a place for standard audio input. So Jason Snow continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to use his iPod Hi-Fi because it just acts as a powered speaker. I set
⏹️ ▶️ John a pair of stereo powered speakers and the interfaces for analog
⏹️ ▶️ John audio to AV equipment doesn’t change that often. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so the iPod Hi-Fi may end up outliving his full-size HomePod because the full-size HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John has no way to get audio into it except for these various wireless protocols combined with the software that runs on the
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod. And if any of that becomes unsupported or changes in some way, the HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may be left with like a very heavy 300 and something dollar plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John and rubber paperweight with a power cord coming out of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. And a ring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under it on the table.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is a very, it is an ill-advised piece of audio
⏹️ ▶️ John video equipment. And obviously it was a very ill-advised voice assistant because that it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a, it’s value as a voice assistant depends heavily on the voice assistant part,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is independent of the audio quality. And if you really care about audio quality, you
⏹️ ▶️ John probably want something that works together with a cohesive system. Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonos is the obvious competitor. Sonos has a whole bunch of things that will integrate both with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also they will integrate with audio video equipment. Like if you buy a television set, or even if you have a receiver,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can, it can all sort of work together. And the HomePod was just this little island with a power
⏹️ ▶️ John cord that was not a very good voice assistant, not its fault, that’s Siri’s fault, but it’s part of the package,
⏹️ ▶️ John was a pretty good speaker for its size. But what can you use that pretty good speaker with?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just was listening to a podcast where Mike Early was complaining that he likes to use his HomePod with his television, but it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John unreliable that like the audio would cut out or pause or something that it’s just not viable for
⏹️ ▶️ John that. If it just connected with a regular audio cable was simply a powered speaker with maybe some
⏹️ ▶️ John DSPs built into it or something, it would be more reliable. Long after Apple abandons
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you can just continue to use it as a powered speaker. But I think the HomePod is going to have a very sad
⏹️ ▶️ John death in that once Apple finally abandons it or the wireless protocols move on or it
⏹️ ▶️ John stops getting software updates, it just becomes a paperweight. Unlike the iPod Hi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was ridiculous and expensive and Steve Jobs loved it, no no one else did,
⏹️ ▶️ John that will continue to work long after we’re all dead because it uses standard audio interfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, when the HomePod was announced and then when it was released later, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all kind of called this, like we all kind of said, like, hey, this is entering a market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where people expect certain things and they have certain prices that they want things to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this thing isn’t as good in critical areas as things like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Echo and the Google whatever, or Sonos’ gear, like the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was great in some areas, but competed very poorly in some very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critical areas, namely Siri and Price. Like that was, those are the two big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas where it just was, it seemed like it would, and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePods, I have I think four of the big ones, and four of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little ones actually, yeah. We use them all the time. As I mentioned in a recent episode, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the unreliability of the latest Amazon Echo, we recently got fed up with it and unplugged it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it into a closet, and now our home is 100% HomePods. They’re not as good as the Echo at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things, but they’re pretty good products overall now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we have the Mini and when the big HomePod no longer costs $350. I think for most of ours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I paid 200 or 230 or something for them. So, the thing is, this product is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, John said it’s a pretty good speaker. I think for its size and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what it contains, it’s a great speaker, the big one I’m talking about. The little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one isn’t, and this is kind of a problem. But anyway, the big one is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good speaker for what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you say that, you mean it sounds good, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really good speaker, because one of the features of a really good speaker is you can connect things to it so that they can output
⏹️ ▶️ John sound that you could then hear through your really good speaker and the HomePod utterly fails in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area. Fair enough. But it is, for what it is of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a standalone plug-in smart speaker, especially when you get a stereo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair of them, which cost- For a mere $700. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John cost at MSRP $700.
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t plug into any of your other expensive equipment. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re the type of person who wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy two speakers for $700, but also does not have any other AV equipment that you wanna plug into
⏹️ ▶️ John them, boy, we got the product for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so Apple made really good hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was completely let down by their services team and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing team. And so the services team, that one’s obvious. Siri still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t good enough. It is slowly getting better, but it definitely lags behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alexa in terms of reliability, speed, ability to pull knowledge out of web pages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. It’s just not as good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Google, I’ll add. They’re also behind Google. I mean, there was another, the most recent flare up was someone showing examples
⏹️ ▶️ John of trying to ask. It wasn’t on the HomePod, but it’s the same. I think it’s the same, Siri, everywhere. It’s hard to tell. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John were asking Siri when the Grammys were on. And Siri’s answer was to give the date and time of last
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the night of the Grammys.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Of course, every other voice
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t get it because they have teams that just say, look, On the day of the Super Bowl,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet a lot of people are going to ask when the Super Bowl is on, so we should probably make sure our thing does that. And the series team, like, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to do special case code for that. Either works or it doesn’t. And guess what? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t. I think what we discovered is that Eddie Q does not watch the Grammys. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other half of the HomePod failure there was marketing. And I don’t mean the fact that they didn’t advertise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it enough once it was released. What Apple considers marketing is integrated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into product development and helps determine what products they even make,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they need to be priced, what kind of features they have, what things are priorities and what things aren’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Product marketing does that at Apple. And I think the original HomePod was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively let down by the direction that should have come for product marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that either didn’t or they got bad direction. The HomePod should never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been released in the state and at the price that it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was missing critical features from the beginning. Some of them were later added via software. Many of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t be like the input, any kind of input.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the thing about the product design, product marketing, wherever you want to say it. They could have solved some
⏹️ ▶️ John of these problems by making it more expensive. Like, so picture this, right? This is something that some high-end
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff does, right? Say you buy your two HomePods, right? And they’re $700 in the original price,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You’re like, oh, the product, you know, the designers say, well, we’re not gonna put an ugly audio input on this thing, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John ruin the design. You know, look how elegant it is, it’s just got the power cord gumming at it, wireless speakers of the future, no one wants wires.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t want us to put a bunch of like RCA jacks or speaker wires or optical, you don’t want wires in this, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad idea, right? Sell a third box that connects to AV equipment
⏹️ ▶️ John and sends a low latency wireless signal to your Apple speakers. And that box
⏹️ ▶️ John accepts all of the audio standard inputs from your AV receiver, your television or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then sends the signal out, right? You’re basically slowly reinventing Sonos or whatever. And then that box you can sell for extra.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then suddenly people who would never consider this product say, oh, but if I buy the extra $200 box,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I can have a stereo pair and it will work with my home theater setup. And my home theater setup just sees it
⏹️ ▶️ John as a normal speakers because they’re just plugged into it like with standard connections. And then Apple handles the wireless connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you have a very expensive, fairly good sounding, hopefully low latency wireless speaker setup. Hell,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could sell five of them and have people do full surround setups, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John without that box, without that middle component, without understanding who you’re selling to and that those people want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it as their home theater system, but can’t, because it’s like, oh, I gotta get Apple TV and get
⏹️ ▶️ John it to connect to the stereo pair and the software is flaky and it doesn’t work. It’s totally fumbled the ball, not
⏹️ ▶️ John because, oh, you made it too expensive. Yeah, they did make it too expensive and the cheaper one is the solution to that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to make it as expensive, you could have by making it even more expensive, just add the features those
⏹️ ▶️ John people want. And I don’t know who they were trying to sell this to besides, I guess, Marco. And he said,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I bought one too. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought one and I used this 300, I paid full price and I bought this thing and I used it to turn my lights on and
⏹️ ▶️ John off. So, that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and the thing is, so many things about it are the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It hears you better than any Alexa thing I’ve ever seen. It takes a little while to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco respond, but it does hear you really well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it tells you to chill. It’s like, what is it, just a moment,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or whatever it says, working on it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. The sound quality is better than all the other smart speakers I’ve ever heard at any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price point. It is better than everything I’ve heard from Sonos. It’s better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly anything I’ve ever heard from Amazon, but that’s not saying a lot. It sounds really, really good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a smart speaker, and it sounds pretty good for speakers, period, you know, in its size class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least. I also, I love that it’s just an AirPlay 2 terminal at the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day. Like, one thing that I absolutely love is when something is playing on the HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just shows up as an entry in Control Center under the playback thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can open that session in the music app on your phone and you can control it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to ask what’s playing, you can just see it right there on Control Center. You can add whatever’s playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your Apple Music Collection if you want to right from there. You can control the volume right there with your finger, You don’t have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell it up, volume 25, volume 30, volume 40. Like you don’t have to go through all that. You can just do it on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without saying anything. Anybody in your house, on your wifi network with an iPhone can do the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can control it. Like so it’s very like family compatible in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. It automatically recognizes me and Tiff without us having to create profiles. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just recognizes us both separately and can play our separate collections of music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if Tiff asks for one of her playlists, it has it. If I ask for one of my playlists, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. She can ask for a personal request to it, like have things added to her reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. I can ask for the same thing. And it just gets it right. There are so many things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it does really well, and that’s why I’m disappointed that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flubbed the marketing and pricing and market targeting of it so badly, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they seem to probably be killing it off with apparently no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher end model that seems to be in sight, because I think if they were going to do a higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end one, I think they would have kept this one around until the high end replacement was ready and then just replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But it sounds from their statement and from the discontinuation of the highest one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like they’re just gonna do the Mini indefinitely and not any other ones probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of the Mini, like everything you just said that you liked, the Mini also does with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ John of it not sounding good, right? And so like, because literally everything, like it does all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can recognize you, it does all the things, it’s like it is exactly equivalent, it’s just a crappy speaker, right? So you can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine having the Mini, right? And then what if Apple just sold, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John a pair of really nice sounding powered speakers that connected and then you could have the Mini controlling those
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers and broadcasting sound to them. Like you don’t need, if Apple’s thing is like, we were
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this work on home theater and we found out a way to make a fairly small, you know, fairly compact smart speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John that figures out the room and makes everything sound good or whatever, then do that, right? But you don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John tie that up with the voice assistant thing. The voice assistant is all the problem you gotta solve, but all the features
⏹️ ▶️ John you said that you liked, those are all embodied in the $99 Mini. And for people who don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about sound quality, because let’s say they’re primarily not going to play music through it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mini is so much a better deal. Like it takes up less room in your house. It’s explicable
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to just have a power cord dangling from it. Like it is a well-established product category. It charges the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple premium because it’s a little bit more expensive than equivalent products from other companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John It answers your questions less well than the Google Home Minis that I keep getting
⏹️ ▶️ John sent for free that are apparently like 20
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But like that functionality, that is a product that is a established
⏹️ ▶️ John product category. Apple now has an entry in it and you’re fine. What Apple no longer has is a bunch of nice speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, as with so many things, Apple, if you have good technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that can make a product that, especially like a product that is a little bit more expensive that people
⏹️ ▶️ John will buy, you can sell that, just like you gotta figure out how to package
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like if you just sold the whole pod mini and then transformed the big HomePods into just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like HomePod speakers, and all they were were speakers and you needed a mini to work with them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would probably sell just as many of those things. you’d probably sell just many to Marco because you don’t care that
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily that there are, hell, leave the microphones in them, right? You don’t necessarily care that
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini is the thing like controlling the show or whatever, right? You just like that they sounded good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were fairly compact and nice looking and stuff like that. Like they had a winner on their hands. They just didn’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just didn’t know what they were making, right? And now they’re just gonna give up and say, well, it’s just minis forever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I agree with you, Marco, that if they were gonna replace them with some sort of high-end speakers, they probably would have done it at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s just such a shame to see Apple make a move in this direction and because they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get it right, just retreat entirely and say, no, it’s just mini. Like, they just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John show sort of like stick-to-itiveness. It’s okay to get it wrong when you start, but you really should,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, realize what parts you had right. And I think one of the things they had right was
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone more or less agrees that for a compact, fairly unobtrusive speaker that works
⏹️ ▶️ John in many different environments, that was the impressive part of the HomePod. and there is a viable product
⏹️ ▶️ John in there waiting to get out, they just need to take another run at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and actually fully asset this time, instead of the half-ass job they did with the first one. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry that Apple will learn the wrong lesson from this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, they put out their first HomePod offering, and I worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the lesson they’re going to learn is, well, I guess the market doesn’t want a really good smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker. I can totally see like Apple’s executive culture like kind of leading to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that conclusion, right? But that’s not what happened here. The actual lesson they should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn is we didn’t nail it on our first try, but the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does want a good smart speaker. Like the market has room for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just didn’t do a good enough job nailing it the first time with a whole bunch of factors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if they took a second try at it, I think they could do well. it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either can’t be $350 or it has to really earn its $350 price tag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the first HomePod did neither of those things. It was too expensive for the mass market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but wasn’t good enough with the features and the expectations of the high end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope that they keep making, or at some point soon, I hope they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a larger HomePod again that is better than the first one. I would love for it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a faster processor so it can respond faster, it can support more advanced software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates and everything. I would love for it to have the cool half-woofer design that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had that allowed it to have really pretty good bass response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a pretty low frequency without being super large. I love the microphones in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certain things we don’t need. we probably don’t need it to fire all the way around 360 degrees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause most people don’t put speakers in the middle of a room. They put them against something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that’s one area they can economize. Maybe some of the, you know, processing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it does to like detect when it’s been moved and like reset its EQs. I’ll be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some of that stuff, maybe, maybe that can go in the name of value. Um, certainly if they want it to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the materials a little bit simpler on the outside, that’s a quick, that’s a way to save some, save some money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bill of materials and stuff like that. If they want to rethink that weird LED screen thing on top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that starts playing music every time you try to dust it, that could use some rethinking as well. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to make an amazing HomePod that is larger and more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the HomePod Mini and also a successful product. The fact that they didn’t do it the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time doesn’t mean the market’s not there, it just means they didn’t do a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hope the lesson they learned from this is not, well, I guess there’s no market. I hope the lesson is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we didn’t hit it right that first time, but we can do it if we really focus and really like follow through,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can make another run at it. That can be better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, when when they came out, the thought of having one or maybe two really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fantastic speakers that basically I could plug in anywhere in and of itself, that sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really appealing. And I was all in, especially because we know how I am with, you know, missing out on things. And we know how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I love to buy new Apple toys. And so I was all in and then I saw the price tag and I was like, ooh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. And then at the time, and I don’t think this is true anymore, but at the time you certainly couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Spotify with the HomePod. And I don’t know if this is true anymore or not, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think it is, but one of my favorite features of the Amazon tube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that we can call out to it, hey, add such and such to the grocery list. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then that integrates with any list, which is a particular app we like for doing that sort of thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll add something to our shared grocery list within any list. And neither of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were possible when the HomePod came out. And those are the two things that we do most with our Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is play things on Spotify and add things to, you know, grocery or other shopping lists. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you combine no Spotify, no real third-party integration for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like apps or things like that. And a $350 price tag, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no way for me to use this with anything but the Apple ecosystem. Get it, get out of here with that nonsense. There’s no fricking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way I’m paying that money for it. And then it would go on sale periodically at like Best Buy or whatever. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think about it, but I still came back to like, I don’t think this fills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a need I have in my life. And yes, I can go on myself about how potentially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if dangerous is a bit overblown, but I can’t think of a better word. Dangerous it is to have an Echo in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. But golly, if I want to be able to just shout into the ether and have something and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have what I want to happen, happen, I don’t think at the certainly not at the time of launch a HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be that thing. And maybe it is now, but I don’t know if I want a crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to trade one crappy speaker for another when I know this one works. Why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mix that up? And I think a lot of other people are probably in a similar position. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for a thing that was rumored to have been part of their television set development it’s so weird that it launched
⏹️ ▶️ John and still to this day without an obvious story that’s clear to customers and how you can use this thing as a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John for your television. Even today it is more complicated than you might think and apparently unreliable
⏹️ ▶️ John according to Mike Hurley who actually tries to do it that way. If it doubled as a normal speaker or
⏹️ ▶️ John had a breakout box or had any kind of standard connection it would be clear to everybody that if you buy this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah you can talk to it and it does stuff or whatever and maybe it doesn’t support Spotify but you know I’m just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John use it as my TV because most people don’t have any nice, they just use the speakers that come with their TVs. And so the
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the pitch of this is like you said, Casey, it’s fairly compact, it’s small, it’s simple, and you can put it anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And boy, wouldn’t it be, it would be a big upgrade to the sound system on my television to use the HomePod instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of the built-in speakers. But there was no story for that. It was like, a customer would look at it and say, but it’s just got
⏹️ ▶️ John a power cord. How do I do it? Oh, well, if you have an Apple TV and the right software, I was like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple TV and I don’t want an Apple TV. I’ve got a television set. Can I use this speaker with my television?
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, well, it just, you know, it didn’t have a good story. And still, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it still doesn’t have a good story with that. If I have to be selecting inputs and trying to get it to recognize stereo
⏹️ ▶️ John pairs, it’s like, that’s not how, people buy speakers and they hook them up and you put it into place and you connect it to your TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe at worst you have to like switch inputs or turn on something or whatever. But in general, people just want that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to work. If there’s any futzing involved, oh, there’s no sound coming out of the TV or it’s coming out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John built-in speakers again, no one wants that. It’s just, it’s death in the AV market. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think Casey, if you could have gotten this on day one and use it as your television
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker without thinking about it, it would just work as your television speaker. I bet you would have done it because you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any kind of TV speaker setup, do you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the simple answer to your question is no, but it’s actually more convoluted than that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem that I have though with using this as my television speaker is that my television does not exclusively play the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV. We still have a cable box. We
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I’m saying. When you have a story for hooking up to your television, no one buys, sells you by a speaker surround
⏹️ ▶️ John sound for your thing for your TV and they say, oh, but this will only work when you watch things through the Chromecast. No, no one
⏹️ ▶️ John sells speakers like that. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like saying, you just, if I’m buying speakers for my TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything I play through my TV has to work with those speakers. It can’t be like only when you’re watching Hulu will it go through the speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a bad example because they don’t even have surround support on the Apple TV, which I’m still mad about. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, like, and that’s what I said, but they didn’t have a good story for it. They shouldn’t, it should have just been obvious to
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone looking at the product that, yep, you can just, you can use these as your TV speakers. No ifs, ands,
⏹️ ▶️ John or buts, right? And anytime you have to have an explanation and like, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the stereo pairing didn’t come support even for Apple TV, the stereo pairing support didn’t come for a while. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ John such a mess. No inputs, doesn’t work with your TV. And so, so many people who might’ve bought it were exactly like Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, it might be neat to have audio, but it doesn’t support Spotify. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t use it as a TV speaker. And then as time went on, people learned, oh, I’ve got one, I’m gonna use it for a while. I turn
⏹️ ▶️ John the lights off or ask it to play songs, but it doesn’t work with Spotify. Do you use it as a TV speaker? No, because I can’t or can’t figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how or it doesn’t work well. And oh God, what a fumbled ball. And like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, it’s not because there wasn’t promise in this product, right? You have a product that has qualities that people who bought
⏹️ ▶️ John them like. It shows that there’s something you can do there. And you know, I’m just missing the mini. The mini
⏹️ ▶️ John is a great thing that they should do, which is like, well, we missed this market, which is the cheap, small things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are voice assistants. And so let’s make a product in that category. Great, good, you should do that because $350 is the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John price for that whole category, right? Especially for a thing with no screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because that’s the other thing of like, if you want to do this, you can have a screen on it and go all sorts of fancy stuff. But on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other end is this nice consumer, prosumer speaker thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that, the raw materials are there for you to make a couple of different cool products if you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John care about that market at all, which so far it seems like Apple doesn’t. And by that market, I mean audio
⏹️ ▶️ John visual equipment, things that Apple doesn’t want to make, like wifi routers and AV receivers
⏹️ ▶️ John and television sets and speakers. I think Apple could do well in all of those markets if it wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to, witness Sonos. But just seems like they tried the HomePod and
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly retreated to essentially making a $99 Echo Dot. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is actually kind of expensive for what it is. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it should sound absurd. A $99 Dot? Right, aren’t those $15?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any real honest look at the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market would reveal like, okay, we’re going in two different directions here. There is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge market for these little smart speakers people put in their kitchens, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market for that needs to really want them to be as cheap as possible. And it can be small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cheap, and people don’t really care about garbage sound quality because most of the entrants there have garbage sound but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t care because they were small and cheap. And then you also have good speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And where people almost always want to put good speakers is their TV setup. That,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like even when they’re listening with them, you know, even when they’re using them for music, they’re so often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also used for TV and they’re in the same spot, that if there’s no way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play the TV sound out of the good speakers, most people don’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a justification for that in their homes or a place to put them. The other thing that you mentioned is like, you know, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make things that feed it. Oh, they totally do. You know where I would love to have HomePod input support?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On Macs. There is no way to use a pair of HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of your system output on the Mac. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they just added stereo pair support for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or is that only with iTunes? Oh, did they finally? Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or music. Music supports it in a really hacky and incessant way. It’s, I think it’s similar to like, when you try to use the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV to output to HomePods, where you kind of have to reset it up a lot. I do it occasionally where I’ll play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something from my laptop while I’m sitting on the couch to the HomePods that are around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to the AirPlay 2 Sonos amp thing that I have at the TV. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePods are great as desk speakers because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are small and they sound good and they look nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why was that never even prioritized? Again, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so many missed opportunities here. And again, it’s not that the market doesn’t want these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The market just wants Apple to deliver something that fits them better. And the HomePod Mini does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that, but the HomePod Mini is not a good enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker to be the entire product range. If they’re going to keep having a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range of HomePods, of whatever that means to them, If that product range is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep existing, there has to sometime be a higher end one that is for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher end needs, bigger rooms, higher audio quality, et cetera. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope that they actually go back to the drawing board and make that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen as opposed to just leaving this product line to wither away with just one product
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#askatp: Mac background refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nathaniel Mall writes, why does macOS not support background notifications for more first and third party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps? The only apps I’ve found that have background notifications are messages, calendar, and Safari site notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes it hard to use certain apps that I want to get notifications from, but not have running. For example, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mail. Is this not a thing developers can implement, or do they just choose not to?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this took me a couple of reads before I understood what was being asked about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if certain apps, like Messages, even if Messages isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running at all, you can still receive like an iMessage or a text message and it will show the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notification in Notification Center. That’s not true for Mail, as Nathaniel had written.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In order to get a notification with regard to Mail, Mail has to be running. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a degree the complaint, but given, and we just talked about this a few weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, given that you can close all the windows of say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail and yet it is still running. I don’t really understand why that’s a problem. Like why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just close mail, which is what I do when I’m done working with
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s mean to close all the windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, you can just hide it.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean it’s mean? No, I mean, I put this question in here because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an interesting situation because the Mac is technically
⏹️ ▶️ John capable of doing exactly what is described in this question. Right, there are no, just
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear about that, there are no technical limitations. Any, literally any Mac application can do
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Like the Mac has facilities where you can run things in the background, faceless background processes,
⏹️ ▶️ John through run, launch through launch D that can constantly be checking for whatever it is, whether it’s Slack messages
⏹️ ▶️ John or new email or whatever your app does, you can run stuff in the background on macOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, it is way easier to do it than it is on iOS. So why from a user’s perspective, does
⏹️ ▶️ John it seem like Mac apps don’t have, don’t support background notifications like they do on iOS?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason is because there is a well-defined facility for background operations
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS. That it used to be, but eventually there was. It was very well-defined, very limited, very controlled.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you want to do something in the background on iOS, this is the one and only way to do it, right? There’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t just make up your own thing and say, I’m just gonna run arbitrarily whenever I want and run for as long, like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible on iOS. So it funneled everybody on iOS into this one channel, this one well-supported
⏹️ ▶️ John API. On the Mac, that doesn’t exist. There’s a whole bunch of different APIs and a whole bunch of different facilities
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can in fact write your whole own thing from scratch. Like you have so many options. It is a complete green field where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do anything you want. And that means individual app developers have to sort of roll
⏹️ ▶️ John their own solution. How do I want to hook into my thing? How do I want to cause my thing to run? Which facility, which of the umpteen
⏹️ ▶️ John facilities that are offered by macOS that could be used for this do I want to use? And then I have to write my own thing and control
⏹️ ▶️ John how I run and make sure my process doesn’t spin out of control and make sure it comes up and goes down at the right
⏹️ ▶️ John times. And how do I handle debugging? And how do I interface that from my app? And there’s so many choices for you to make
⏹️ ▶️ John that because the Mac is more flexible, fewer developers do it because there’s no one
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious, well-paved path for you to go down. And that’s true, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a microcosm of the entire iOS versus Mac OS experience. The Mac is so much more capable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in many respects, iOS has more mature sort of paved roads
⏹️ ▶️ John for certain things that all apps want to do. And it just so happens because the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone and the iOS platforms started life not having this facility at all, and
⏹️ ▶️ John people wanted it. Then when background processing finally came, It came as
⏹️ ▶️ John a singular feature that everyone jumped on, whereas the Mac has always been capable, almost
⏹️ ▶️ John always has been capable of doing random stuff in addition to the programs that you’re quote unquote really running.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even in classic Mac OS, you could do weird stuff and have memory resident processes running and all sorts of, you know, hacky
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. That they never really evolved into the singular thing on the Mac with a basic
⏹️ ▶️ John API to do this thing. In fact, I think the individual Apple apps, whether it’s messages or whatever other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are throwing notifications when they’re quote unquote not running, I bet they all use different technologies because the
⏹️ ▶️ John history of Mac OS is filled with different technologies and frameworks that can be used to accomplish this exact
⏹️ ▶️ John task. So that’s the answer, that because the Mac is too capable
⏹️ ▶️ John and has always been too capable, Apple has never come out with a sort of one
⏹️ ▶️ John standard, normal, constrained, very easy, obvious path to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s up to individual Mac developers to do it and most of them don’t, or they do it in weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, can we go back a step? Why is it mean to close the mail window when you’re done using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Why do I have to hide it? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just like, I want you to be running so you can check new mail, but you’re not allowed to have any windows open. Why not just hide it? Just option
⏹️ ▶️ John click away from it, right? Don’t close the window, that’s mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m blue screening as I’m sitting here. Why is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hiding better?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like snipping the flowers off, snipping the buds off of a flower. It’s like snip, snip, snip, snip, now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just a bare branch because I don’t want to see those flowers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, that’s exactly correct. Why would I hide it? Especially since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it involves more action than just clicking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the nice little red- You just hold on
⏹️ ▶️ John the option key when you click away from it and now the window is open, but you just can’t see it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, first of all, I didn’t even know you could do that. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I knew you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hide it. I didn’t know that that was a mechanism to hide it. But there’s a nice red
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circle in the corner of the window. Why would I not click
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m mostly joking, but the practical
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey answer of why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you wouldn’t close the windows
⏹️ ▶️ John is because you don’t have faith that when you try to bring a new
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent window back that it will be anything like the window that you just closed. So say you had your mail window positioned
⏹️ ▶️ John and sized the way you wanted it. Do you have faith that the next time you want that window
⏹️ ▶️ John back, it will come back in the same place? Mail’s pretty good about that, but things like web browsers
⏹️ ▶️ John are not. I don’t know how many users actually have the correct mental model that
⏹️ ▶️ John matches the program model of how web browsers decide the position
⏹️ ▶️ John and size of a new web browser window? Do you two have that in your head? And does it
⏹️ ▶️ John match your browsers? Like if you hit Command N, pick your web browser, any web browser, switch to it and hit Command N,
⏹️ ▶️ John but before you do, predict how big the window is gonna be, what shape it’s gonna be, and where it’s gonna be on your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, same. And do you know what influences that? Like if I say, okay, change
⏹️ ▶️ John that, make the window skinnier or fatter, or in a different position. Do you know how to do that? Got
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I think most people have no idea where it’s gonna appear or how it
⏹️ ▶️ John changes and are surprised when they hit command then and a giant window appears. And they’re like, it’s just one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things they just live with, right? And so closing windows is a potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John destructive operation in that some of your setup of how you had arranged things may now be destroyed
⏹️ ▶️ John and you may not be sure that you can get it back depending on the application. I think mail actually is well-behaved in this
⏹️ ▶️ John regard but not all applications are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Listeners, this is for you. This isn’t for the two of them, this is for you. The same people who bust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my cajones over all my tea ceremony for my records
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you have to get everything set up just right and it doesn’t make a difference, these are the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, mostly John, that are saying that his windows must be just right. And if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the slightest bit off, even just a few pixels off, everything is ruined. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the one that’s too particular.
⏹️ ▶️ John they were. You think they’re gonna appear and be a few pixels off? No, they’re gonna be wildly off.
⏹️ ▶️ John final thing is mostly about the fact that you have all the ceremony and then you get worse audio quality. So that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John applicable to the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Your mail window
⏹️ ▶️ John will be the same quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Move on, move on.
⏹️ ▶️ John The equivalent would be you have to go through some long ceremony and what you get is a child’s drawing of the mail window instead of the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, please move on. Just talk about Tesla or something safer. Heheheh
#askatp: Why run servers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael Helwig, that’s a great surname. Michael Helwig writes, triggered by Marco’s recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweets about database issues, a question I meant to ask for a long time. What is the reason for doing any processing or storage server side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Overcast? The Android podcast app I’ve used so far stored data exclusively on my device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all the processing of feeds and whatnot also happens there. What is the benefit either to you or your users for doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what stuff exactly on servers owned by you? Didn’t Castro used to do everything locally? I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it still does, but I thought it used to be local.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco asked himself the same question a lot. What is the point? In fact, recently he may
⏹️ ▶️ John have found himself asking this question a lot. Why am I doing all this stuff on servers? Marco, please enlighten us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I mean, part of it is there actually are legitimate, significant gains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from doing that. One of the biggest is the gains for the users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app. Every single time they want to check for whether they have any new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes of their podcasts, they don’t have to download like 50 RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeds all to their phone from their origin servers. And those RSS feeds could be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well over a megabyte each depending on how many episodes are in them. So there’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of bandwidth and power savings from knowing when new episodes are out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you also know about new episodes sooner because my servers are the ones hammering all those feeds every few minutes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when they get an episode, they send notifications to everybody that and then everyone’s devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can download only the changes and everything. So there is a significant efficiency and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed of updates, speed of getting new episodes advantage to server-side stuff. There’s also just some practical stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if I discover some way in which my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parsing of an RSS feed is wrong or needs to be changed in some way, or there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like some podcast is messing up an overcast, there are fixes I can do server-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fix it instantly for everybody as opposed to if it was app only,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have to figure out what the bug in the app and then fix it, put it into beta testing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through Apple’s process and then submit an app to AppReview and it might not be in my customer’s hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for days or possibly a week or more, depending on how long that takes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are certainly areas like that that are just like, it’s just practical, it’s better to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on the server just for the result of how the app works and how to maintain it. There’s also certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features that require some kind of service backend. One of the things I wanted from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beginning was sync. I wanted a way to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to have Overcast run on any number of iPhones, iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, and have it work and have it sync, and then also, if your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fell in a lake and you had to restore it or whatever, that your stuff would be there. There would be some kind of sync account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it that you wouldn’t lose all your podcast subscriptions and data and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So sync, there are ways to do it, which I’ll get to in a second, that don’t involve you running servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s a lot easier if you run servers. The biggest reason, though, that I run the servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I built this entire system. I designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app, I designed its architecture, I built the infrastructure in 2013 and 2014,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that was a long time ago, and things were different back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had more of a tolerance for running servers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CloudKit didn’t exist yet. And now, if I was starting over from scratch today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would try to do it entirely with CloudKit. Now, there are some limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. I would probably end up still running my own servers to do feed polling and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to notify the apps when there were changes in the feeds. but maybe I wouldn’t use my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers to store user data necessarily, like to store your list of subscriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I might migrate to that over time. I could move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a setup like that over time where I reduce the need to run my own servers and I reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re doing down to basically no user data features and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doing feed parsing, normalization, and notifications. And actually, and to answer your question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, I think that’s what Castor does, but that might be outdated now. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the main reason is like, A, there are pretty compelling reasons to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server stuff, and B, I designed this like eight years ago, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when alternatives like CloudKit didn’t exist. And the reason I run my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own servers as opposed to some kind of higher level abstraction or managed service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like all sorts of like managed database services and stuff that I could be using that would abstract away a lot of the problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have to sometimes deal with. The main reason I don’t do that is cost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That right now, I spend something like $5,000 a month on servers. And to do the kind of query and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do on a managed service would cost tens of thousands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars a month. And I’m getting it for $5,000 a month. And that’s the main reason I do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even though it is, you know, it’s a lot of headache
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hassle sometimes, but the vast majority of time, everything just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs and takes almost no interaction from me at all. Like servers mostly run themselves when you set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them up right, and occasionally you have to deal with something, but it’s not the common case. If it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the common case, I would get myself out of the server business, but because the The trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is relatively unusual, and most of the time it runs just fine and saves a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money and gives me some really nice abilities and really nice features. That’s why I do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I were designing stuff from scratch today, I would use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of a server component.
#askatp: iPhone runs “OS X”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, Saurabh Kulkarni writes, back in 2007, Steve Jobs proudly announced on stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the iPhone runs OS X. How much of that is still true today? How many core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey components of iOS do you think are still present or dependent on macOS? John, tell us what
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I mean, the public face of this, of how Steve Jobs said iPhone runs OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John and what the heck is OS X, because at that point they hadn’t, you know, they hadn’t dropped the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John from it, and it’s just, there’s a lot of confusing naming, But under the covers, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has never really had a split OS strategy. Underneath iPad OS, iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John watch OS, whatever the heck, what is it, audio OS? What runs on the home pods?
⏹️ ▶️ John All those OSes are based on the same underpinnings, which is the Darwin
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of underlying low level operating system, which is an evolution of the BSD underpinnings from Next,
⏹️ ▶️ John which they bought in 1997. Their core OS is, that
⏹️ ▶️ John foundation is the same under all of their platforms, not just the iPhone, all of them. Now granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things are changed, but the underpinnings are modular enough that say when they wanted to field the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could make a variant of those underpinnings in let’s say, turn off swap file.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still had virtual memory, but they said, well on the phone, we can’t afford to swap. So the part of the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system that takes memory pages and writes them out to quote unquote disk and reads them back in, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to include that component or we’ll turn that component off. Various other things that you can change. If you have good
⏹️ ▶️ John modular underpinnings, you can take that same OS, which is just like a Unix variant with the mock microkernel
⏹️ ▶️ John and a BSD layer and all that stuff. It’s flexible enough that you can run it on a watch. You can run it
⏹️ ▶️ John on a discontinued home pod. You can run it on your phone, you can run it on your Mac. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as like, you know, if you take a computer science course, that is the operating system. Now I know people see
⏹️ ▶️ John the Finder and Springboard and funny graphics on the top of their discontinued HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they think, oh, these are totally different operating systems, but that is a much higher level component that really isn’t part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system operating system, right? And technically speaking, the operating system is the thing that mediates access to the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if you go up a few levels above that, that shared foundation is across all of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John products. So how much is still true today? The same amount as before. Both of those operating systems
⏹️ ▶️ John have evolved. They’ve gotten new features. Features that were designed for the iPhone have come
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac and vice versa. I mean, now the Mac is using a thing that I think is still called
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile update to do its operating system updates because it’s basically the iPhone update system. But that is all like sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of things above the layer of the operating system. Under the covers, it’s all the same OS that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think Steve Jobs said it was gonna be our next OS for the next 15 years and it has gone well
⏹️ ▶️ John past that because it turns out Unix is really flexible and Apple has just continued to tweak it
⏹️ ▶️ John and develop it and improve it. and they’ve done many, many things to improve it, including, up to
⏹️ ▶️ John and including things like rolling out a new file system, right? And you know, they haven’t needed to change it fundamentally
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is a flexible system that it underpins everything. And so that’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has been able to do what it’s done. Like they don’t have, every time they wanna come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John these new products, they haven’t had to say, oh, well then we need a whole new platform strategy and we need a whole new this, like they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve done a really good job of saying we have one tool chain, one IDE,
⏹️ ▶️ John We write our own compiler, we make our own operating system, and it underpins everything. And even though from the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John to a Mac Pro, they look so different, but there’s so much that’s shared, it allows Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to support these platforms without feeling like they’re doing 20 different things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Linode, and Flatfile. And thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join and become one of those wonderful members, atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks everybody. 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, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
iMac color rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John But can we talk briefly about the iMac color rumors?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, can we yes will we probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not so the rumor is simple and we’ve talked about this before There’s gonna be a new iMac’s gonna have an ARM processor
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac dashboard needs to be redesigned Wouldn’t it be neat if you could get the iMac in colors? Yes, I mean more than just
⏹️ ▶️ John gray and slightly darker gray And so there’s this little mock-up picture in this 9 to 5 Mac article from
⏹️ ▶️ John many weeks ago showing or look like a bunch of kind of squared off big iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ John but instead are iMacs, in a bunch of pastel colors, like similar colors to the iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s anodized aluminum, but there’s a pink one, a blue one, a green one, a dark gray one, a white one,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And I don’t want to dig too much in this specific rumor, but basically the idea is desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs that are colored, not just like a little splash of color, but the whole thing comes in a color.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do we think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? I think this mock-up looks good. I mean, it’s hard to say, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, since it’s clearly a mock-up, but I think I like it having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entire case full of color. I don’t know that I would choose it. I tend to choose very boring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking devices, like iOS devices. I tend to choose black for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most part, although my last couple of iPhones have been like that year’s special color. Looking at this particular mock-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I know you’re not really trying to perseverate on it, but looking at this particular mock-up, I don’t think I would choose the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pinkish or the bluish or the greenish. I would probably choose the thing that looks most like my iMac Pro that I have now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I like the idea of having the option and certainly if I had a more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy or trendy looking office area in my house, having like a pastel color would potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work better. But I don’t know, that’s not my taste but I like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve advocated for a while that I think Apple needs to have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun in its product designs, especially at the higher end of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They seem to be okay making colorful iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the quote cheap iPhone, like whatever the entry level base model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re fine to make colorful versions of that. And they make colorful iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Airs now. They made colorful MacBooks for a while. but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as soon as you get above the cheapest model, no more colors for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at most, silver or dark silver. That’s it, right? And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would love to have more color brought back into the product line across larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of it. One of the criticisms I have of the late Johnny Ive era, which you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said before, is that the products got stripped of a lot of their humanity. They became a lot more serious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designs by fairly cold, precise kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal, and that’s it. To have more of the humanity brought back into it, to have more personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more fun brought into the physical design of the product is a welcome change. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope that they do introduce more colors over time. Like I remember there was a rumor like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year and a half ago that they were gonna possibly bring back the rainbow Apple logo or some other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of rainbow design in something. And I think that would have been awesome. I think it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing to have like the redesigned M1 MacBook whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had a rainbow Apple logo Like that would be so cool, and I was hoping they would take the M1 transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an opportunity to do that They didn’t yet at least But you know just that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I would love to see that kind of thing I love my stupid red iPhone mini every time I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my red iPhone I like it, and I’m glad I got it in red even though the back of it is totally not red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never see the back, I see the sides and they look great. Like I love that my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air is it’s weird goldish, pinkish, orangish color, even though in certain light I don’t even like the color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I love that it is a different color and then it looks fresh and new. And like I think if they’re gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting the amount of effort into the Mac that they have been putting into it, I think it deserves to look fresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and new because it is fresh and new. The insides, like the changes with Apple Silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like these are such amazing Macs coming out of this era now. They will probably continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be more amazing Macs coming out of this era. I think they should reflect that in their design. It shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just look like the same boring computers we’ve had for many years now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors are a really easy way to do that. They’re a really like big splash way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show this thing is new, this is different, it’s the hot new thing, you want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of people buy tech gear based on factors like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are lots of people who will make decisions on what computer to buy or what phone to buy based on how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like, that’s a factor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of many factors people might use to choose things. And so for Apple to make a splash and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put out new designs of hardware that actually look fresh and new and actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun colors again, I would love that. So I hope these rumors are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash were true. I hope Apple does introduce more color into their product lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hope they release some bold choices, like not just the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe, very pale colors they’ve used like on the iPad air. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s all it is, okay, fine. That’s a good step one. But I hope they also release products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have bold choices that aren’t just that aren’t just like, here’s a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bluish tint on space gray. Here’s a slightly pinkish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tint on silver. Like, let’s go a little further than that. Let’s make it a little more bold,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show a little bit more personality, which, I mean, you know, might not be the strong suit of a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple leadership right now, but I’d like to see that brought back. I’d like to see like personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought into the hardware, where we haven’t really seen a lot of that recently. and the little bits we’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there have been very welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the iPhone, Apple’s been better about the iPhone in terms of like making it in colors at various times. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5C had lots of very bold colors and in the current era, the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John ones tend to be boring, but the slight step down models have more interesting colors
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s just like, even if the product red is like the most bold one, but still some of the other ones, you know, make a statement.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on phones, there’s a couple of factors. One is that most people put a case on them and the cases are incredibly brightly colored. You see
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s phones out in the real world, people pick cases that they like, and some of them, they’re not shy. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John very vibrant, interesting, you know, extremely varied cases on people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, any phones, right? And for something as large as an iMac, like especially
⏹️ ▶️ John now that the screens are so big, right? That’s a little bit of a different kettle of fish. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a very bright purple case for your phone with like leopard spots
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, so what, right? but if you did that same pattern on a 27 inch iMac, some people would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, whoa, that’s just too much. I don’t want that. And so I understand why Apple might be shy of
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but I’m totally with Marco. I’m reminded
⏹️ ▶️ John of a time in Apple’s past when Apple itself was not afraid to do exactly what I described,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bright purple, huge thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll put it on the link in the show notes to Jason Snell’s 20 Macs for 2020 podcast series
⏹️ ▶️ John where I talked to a bunch of people, including me, about old Macs, and there was a couple episodes on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs I’m about to describe. And in fact, Jason’s been releasing the sort of unedited longer
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations with all of his different people. So if you wanna hear hours of me talking about old Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John in a format that I didn’t think was gonna be released. So it’s kind of casual or whatever. Anyway, there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. But one of the things that came up was, was whatever, I’m so bad with years,
⏹️ ▶️ John but after the iMac came out, everyone remembers the iMac, the original iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you weren’t alive for it, you probably know what it looks like, the kind of teal gumdrop looking computer, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Bold colors brought to computers, right? Apple had pro computers then too, and they were big,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They were big towers, and they even had big, they weren’t, you know, LCDs, but they had big CRTs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sold a 21 inch CRT, which if you’ve never had one of those is way bigger than you think it is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John way heavier, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John tower computer and a 21-inch CRT. And after the iMac came out, when Apple fielded
⏹️ ▶️ John its updated line of those products, it made them bright and candy colored
⏹️ ▶️ John like the iMac. You can get a 21-inch gigantic whale-size monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John that was bright teal, way bigger than any iMac there in terms of like total surface
⏹️ ▶️ John area than they’re gonna put out now. And the tower computer matched it. The blue and white Power Mac G3,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was white and teal. They look like a tower computer, an iMac that was suddenly a tower computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with a matching monitor that was also teal. They were not shy about the colors of their
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, even the really big ones, right? And that phase eventually ended and eventually the
⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G4 started to get all silver and gray and boring again. But it just goes to show that when they
⏹️ ▶️ John did that, first of all, people didn’t refuse to buy those computers because of the colors. Even if you didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John them, you’re buying them because they were cool, right? And they were good computers and maybe you didn’t like that color teal, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John wait a year, you could get the slightly darker blue the next year or whatever, right? Just like buying phones. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that big of a deal. And second, it was so much fun. It matched the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system Mac, because the Aqua interface had stripes that were reflected on the outside of the iMac and
⏹️ ▶️ John also reflected on your blue and white G3 and also on your monitor. It was just so much fun. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John such an aesthetic, such a fun aesthetic design. And of course we know the iMacs went on to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John fall colors and all sorts of different things, grape, sage, snow,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was white, but it was kind of cool looking. Then of course, flower power and Dalmatian. The end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac, the CRT iMac line, where they really went out and literally did basically leopard spots, although it was
⏹️ ▶️ John flower power, not leopard spots. But you know, those computers existed and
⏹️ ▶️ John people have fond memories of those. Even if you never bought a flower power iMac, you’re just happy to know
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was out there. And some people bought it and liked it. And maybe you never had a grape iMac, but the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was a purple computer that you could buy was cool. And if you saw one in a school or a cafe, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would make you smile. Same deal with these iMacs. Yes, they’re bigger than phones. Yes, it seems weird to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a saturated purple, gigantic 27-inch display. Yes, you only ever see the front of it most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the time anyway, so what’s the big deal? Just do it. It’s fun. I really hope they
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. I really hope they get out of this sort of pale pastel anodized funk, because
⏹️ ▶️ John as the sides of Marco’s phone show, It is possible to anodize aluminum with a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more saturation and a little bit more boldness. Even if you were just doing like
⏹️ ▶️ John a black iMac that had a similar finish, like a really deep black iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be less timid than the slightly darker gray of the iMac Pro, which was cool and I liked and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but my advice to Apple is A, totally do this and B, be bold,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I know I’m sitting next to a giant silver computer with a bunch of weird holes in the front of it. I would buy
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these in a bright color too. Maybe not bright yellow, maybe not bright purple would be to my taste.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jet black, that would be super cool. Midnight blue, super cool. And if you wanna make one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s bright yellow and put an arm CP unit, someone out there will probably want it. Make it like bumblebee colored, black
⏹️ ▶️ John and yellow, right? Like Apple needs to not be afraid to do that because I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they think either people won’t take it seriously or will turn people off. And past evidence
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that neither of those things are true. even when Apple’s taste was questionable, like even,
⏹️ ▶️ John even like the Dalmatian iMac, I’m gonna say that’s a, and the Flower Power iMac, that’s some questionable taste,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it did not sink the company, and it is not thought of in hindsight as like this
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible mistake that Apple made. Instead, it’s a fun thing Apple did once, and no one blames them for
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and many people have fond memories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. I’m just so tired of gray and black.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, even as someone who buys gray and black, I love that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love the thought of having the option not to. And again, like my phone for the last couple of years has been whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quote unquote colorful Pro One was. And you’re both right that it typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a very loud color. And that’s okay. That actually fits me better. But I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree more. And we’ve said this many times, all three of us, that the quote unquote cheap phones seem to have all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the better colors. And that’s really a bummer. And I wish that wasn’t the case. And it’s easy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to say all these things because we don’t have to manage all these different SKUs and so on and so forth. But I really think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that adding a little more pop into the line would be nothing but a good thing.