427: The Apology Remote

22 Apr 2021

It really was a loaded baked potato!

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: ⅓ of ATP has completed their journey on the vaccination train! Toot toot! 🚂💉
• Spring 2021 Apple Event
  • Apple Card Family
  • Apple Podcasts App Updates & Subscriptions
    • RSS Feed Access
    • Podcast Index
    • Robot or Not #141: Podcasting
    • User-Agent string
    • ALAC
  • AirTag
    • Hermès Luggage Tag
    • Gui Rambo’s discovered battery replacement video
    • Press release
    • What to do if you find an AirTag or get an alert that an AirTag is with you
  • AppleTV
    • Ted Lasso Season 2 Trailer
    • Siri Remote Image
    • Thread radio
  • 24” iMac
    • iMac ad featuring the rainbow Apple logo
  • iPad Pro
    • Pro Display XDR
    • Magic Keybaord
• Post-show:
  • Ted Lasso’s Secret Shortbread
  • House of Prime Rib
  • The beer-and-sausage place
  • The vegan Indian place

Sponsored by:

• Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
• Yes Plz: Banish bad coffee, upgrade your morning coffee game, and give YES PLZ a try today. Use promo code TIMAPPLE for $5 off your first shipment.
• pod.link by Podsights: Easier podcast links that work for everyone.

Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

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

Chapters

1. Casey’s heating up
2. Apple Card Family
3. Podcasts RSS Opt-Out
4. Sponsor: pod.link
5. Apple Podcasts Subscriptions
6. Sponsor: YES PLZ (code TIMAPPLE)
7. Purple iPhones
8. AirTags
9. Ted Lasso Season 2
10. Apple TV
11. Sponsor: Linode
12. iMac
13. iPad Pro
14. Ending theme
15. After-show

Casey’s heating up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Casey is very recently fully vaccinated, as in what, a few hours ago?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was given my second shot. I am the first one to complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my journey on the vaccination train. Toot toot!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now the exciting part of this show is that if Casey has the like, you know, fever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of reaction to the vaccine, we should be able to see it slowly happen in real time as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the show progresses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So if Casey is slowly getting hotter as we go on tonight, that might be the reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so yeah, it’s going to be an adventure for all of us. And you know, what’s really convenient is we’re definitely going to be having a short

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show because there’s nothing to talk about today.

Apple Card Family

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am not allowed to start with follow-up, even though I’d kind of like to because there’s some fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stuff here. But I will jump straight into the Apple event. And we start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with a brief moment about Earth Day and then Apple Card family. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still don’t have an Apple Card. I didn’t really have all that much interest in it. But now they’re adding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey family support to Apple Card and that’s making me wonder, maybe I should look into this again. And I think that’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the biggest miracle of this is that Apple has somehow discovered from ancient stone tablets that they dug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up in the desert somewhere, the technology that allows them to merge accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or maybe Goldman Sachs found this technology and not Apple. Maybe Apple, to Apple it is still a mystery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But that was my first question when they announced this. But what if, you gave us the Apple card a long time ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what if like in my family I have an Apple card and my wife has her own Apple card? What are we supposed to do? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like they’re going to let us merge accounts. No, they will. Somehow someone has figured out how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to merge accounts. So that’s interesting. The other thing that’s interesting is that you can actually put your kids on it too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and somehow give them like little allowances so they can buy things with Apple Card. This is, you know, not as easy to give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your 13 year old. I mean, maybe this actually, I don’t know. I’ve never actually tried this, but all I know is when I was 13 years old, I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not have a credit card co-signed by my parents or otherwise. But with the Apple Card, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let your kids buy things apparently with your Apple Card by giving them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some allowance of money. So that’s cool. So I look forward to trying this because I always thought it was a little bit silly that I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have an Apple card that was separate from my wife’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and the thing about equal rights with equal credit building for all members who were on the card,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know a lot about that. But just based on what they said, that’s a pretty cool thing to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, the downside to that is now you’re also kind of like, like they say this in the text

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it gets spelled out, your bad credit history is now shared too. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the card co-owners neglects to pay a bill, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you collectively neglect it, the good and the bad go together. And it’s mostly billed as an upside, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there were some high-profile situations where someone’s spouse had a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much lower credit limit than the other person in the relationship. And it seemed ridiculous, since they were married

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and shared all their assets or whatever. So this is trying to help fix that, and hopefully it does. but be aware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that just like when your parents co-sign a credit card for you when you’re a kid or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re kind of, you know, tying yourselves together and you’re in the same boat. So don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this casually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Would anybody want to tie themselves together in a boat? That sounds like a bad idea in general.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, absolutely. Oh, you tie yourself to the mast during the storm, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, no, well, it depends on the context you’re talking about, right? So I guess you’re talking about your actual body. What I was thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} of is- Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that why they did it in the Truman show? No spoilers. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was actually just thinking to myself, we should rewatch that sometime.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good movie, it holds up. I watched it a couple years ago. I always loved that movie. I love Jim Carrey and I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that role specifically. I think that was my favorite Jim Carrey movie.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is a generational bias, but every time I hear you 90s kids talking about the movies you love, or the music you love,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or really anything you love, I just like, what? But okay, I’m gonna let you have this one. You like Jim Carrey and The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Truman Show? Oh, great music in The Truman Show too. All right, okay.

Podcasts RSS Opt-Out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, then Apple moved on to something like a minute and a quarter about podcasts. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remember how much it was, but it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} not a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which we will now talk about for much more than a minute and a quarter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. In retrospect, that’s what we should have done is timed ourselves and seen if we could keep this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to a minute and a quarter, because if we keep this to 15 and a quarter minutes, I will be stupefied.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, to be fair, like it was a very short segment and they didn’t tell us almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything. So everything we’re gonna talk about now was not things that we learned from the keynote, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that we learned after the keynote by poring over Apple site, et cetera. So there is actually a bunch to know. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just that Apple didn’t have time in the keynote to talk about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m pretty sure we’ve taken longer to introduce the topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} than Apple took to cover the whole topic. True to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey form. Indeed. All right, so buckle up, everybody. Let’s talk about podcasts. Let’s have three podcasters talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey podcasts. So Apple has said that when the podcast, Apple Podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Support launched whenever it was in the olden times. There were 3000 podcasts at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey launch. Now there are millions of them and they’re going to be making some changes. There is a revamped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey podcast app coming very soon. I would guess with 14.5 and the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess, premier feature of this is Apple podcast subscriptions. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is Apple’s attempt at letting people like the three of us, uh, take some of your money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and give you hopefully something in return, and so there’s several different things you can do with this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You can, I’m doing this off the top of my head, but you can do additional content. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do ad-free content. You can do access to older content. So like a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the big names will take their older episodes out of their feeds after a while. So if you’re a paid member,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you could go back to the beginning of time and you can also do early access to content. So sort of like our bootleg.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And there’s a lot here that I think is really interesting. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I appreciate what Apple is trying to do, sort of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I don’t think that this is really a good fit for the three of us for a lot of different reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I’m sure we’ll start talking about momentarily. But nevertheless, I do find this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fascinating, if also very scary. So Marco, I presume you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have the strongest opinions of the three of us about this. What do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think it’s, this might be a long discussion. I think it’s important to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco break up different aspects of this and talk about them separately. Because there’s a lot that they announced, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot that’s changing, and it isn’t all bad. In fact, I think most of it will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably neutral to mostly not going anywhere, at least not affecting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the world like us, like the nerd world. So if we look at it, okay, first, let’s talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about structural things that are slightly different. Now, Apple Podcasts has this concept

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of channels, which is kind of more like, basically, a way for podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco networks to have all their shows grouped together and be able to have people follow their other shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the combined shows more easily. And Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has now also built in this whole backend management system for podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be able to actually upload separate paid or premium

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or locked shows into Apple Podcasts and do all sorts of stuff with them, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco selling access to them through Apple Podcasts and everything else. So there’s like that whole system and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then there’s the subscription end of things, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But I think like most of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those structural adjustments and changes and additions are kind of going along

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what Apple has been doing for the last few years of like adding new RSS tags for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like structured episode data, episode numbering, showing whether a show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is seasonal, whether it should be enjoyed chronologically, reverse chronologically. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that stuff, I don’t think I have much problem with, if any problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There is one minor downside though, is that to date, I don’t think they’ve announced like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any kind of RSS or open ecosystem based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco equivalent to showing things like these channels, these network structure things. I think that’s all just in their backend.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But for the most part, I don’t know to what degree that specifically is really gonna matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If people wanna make their shows look better in Apple Podcasts by adding some of this metadata and managing on the backend,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay, that’s fine. So I don’t care too much about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you lumped the premium content

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} into it too. Oh yeah, I’ll get to that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t worry. I think that is very different from the metadata-related things, which are all fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there’s a second part of this, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as part of this management thing, and I sure hope this is the kind of thing that we spend 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minutes talking about, but then next week, sometime between now and next week, they fix it or take it out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and make this whole discussion moot, but in case they don’t, and in case they need some help with this convincing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they added this checkbox that when you log in to manage your podcast in Apple Podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there is now a checkbox for your RSS feed. And this is for any podcast, public or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-public. I guess only public would have RSS feeds. But there is now this checkbox that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can uncheck. And if you do, your RSS feed URL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does not show up in the iTunes API.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This matters because the iTunes API is what almost every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco podcast app that is not like one of the absolute biggest handful. Almost every other podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app uses Apple Podcasts and the iTunes API as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their directory, so that when you type in a search term, they search Apple’s directory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they return Apple’s results. I do this too in Overcast. I do have my own search,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I combine my results with theirs, and I use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a podcast membership in their directory as a filter for whether I should show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a show publicly or not. So if a podcast is not listed on Apple Podcasts, I consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it private, and I don’t usually surface that in Overcast search results, because either the creators

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually don’t want it surfaced, which is why they didn’t submit it to Apple Podcasts, or maybe it’s something that Apple Podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t allow for content reasons. So maybe it’s like full of pirated stuff, or maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hate speech or anything like that, and I don’t wanna deal with any of that, and I don’t have the resources to do my own filtering. And almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no other podcast app does. Apple maintains a staff of people who speak

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every language in the world, who go through these and review submissions and make sure that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s not a bunch of spam and stuff and hate in the Apple Podcasts directory. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this provides a really, really important service to the ecosystem. And Apple has run this API

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for free without any obvious restrictions for years, years and years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and years. And this is what has enabled small apps like mine to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exist really and to have like a an actual directory that we don’t have to maintain ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that nobody has to submit their podcast to 19 different sites and that 19 different apps don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to maintain their own staff for moderation and copyright disputes and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s really important that the iTunes API for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco podcasts continues to exist and be available to podcast apps. What Apple has added

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was a checkbox that allows podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to remove their feed URL from the results that are returned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from that API so that you could still search the iTunes API and you can get titles and and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that of podcasts, but you can’t then get the feed URL, which means you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do anything with it really. I don’t know what the purpose was for adding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this option at all. And the problem when you add an option like this, it’s kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when the M1 Max came out and we had this wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ability to run iOS apps on our Macs if you want, but Apple gave everybody an opt-out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the App Store, that if you don’t want your iOS app to be available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to install this certain way in the App Store on M1 Macs, you can opt out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What happened? Almost every big company opted out because they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanna deal with the support load or they didn’t even wanna bother testing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they didn’t want the liability or they didn’t have a certain rights thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in some of their contracts and they didn’t wanna deal with that. Apple gave people an opt out and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost everyone took it. Not for good reasons, not for reasons like we test it and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work. Mostly for reasons like we want to cover our butts or we don’t fully understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what this means and so we’re gonna opt out because it’s not worth figuring out what this means for big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies. Well, I think the other big reason they opted out is we have other plans for the Mac where we will make money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if you opt in, it’s all part of like the same purchase of that one app and if you want to, if they say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, we might, we reserve the right to make a dedicated Mac app later that we’re gonna charge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for. Maybe, but I think the much more common case is we don’t fully understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this or want to deal with it, so we’re just gonna opt out because it’s safer. By Apple adding this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco checkbox to the RSS thing so that you can remove your feed from your API results,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the only thing this affects is other podcast apps. Like this doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco affect anything about the show. It’s still, you know, you’re still publishing a public RSS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feed for a free show. We’re not talking about these subscription shows yet. We’ll talk about those in a minute. We’re talking about free shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that have always been submitted to Apple Podcasts and have always had their feeds available through the API for any app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco including Apple’s own app, to read. So it’s changing this, it’s locking this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down, or it’s enabling a lockdown for podcasters to take.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, there’s a complicating factor here that it seems like many, many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco podcasts, including ours, were opted out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this as the system launched. Something went wrong, because we never opted out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Something went wrong, and tons of podcasts were opted out of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And Apple has not, at the time of recording, fixed that yet. So right now, there’s tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of podcasts that are just disappearing from podcast apps, because no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app can figure out what their feed URL is, because it’s based on this API.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And just to be clear, for people who aren’t following this, like he’s been talking about this API and everything, right? If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use Apple’s podcast app to look for a podcast, you can always subscribe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it, right? Everything we’re talking about only applies to non-Apple apps that use Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API to figure out, to find you a podcast, and it will find the podcast for you, but then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those apps can’t subscribe to it because they don’t know the feed URL, because the API returned all the information to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them, title, artwork, so on and whatever, but didn’t return the feed URL. So like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mystery of this box and like Mark was describing is like, why as someone who is producing, again, a free

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-subscription whatever podcast, would you want your podcast to essentially only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be subscribable to people who use the Apple Podcast app? Again, this is a free

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast with an RSS feed that is on the internet and you are essentially hiding the feed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John URL in Apple search results. I can’t think of a reasonable scenario

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where someone with a podcast on the public internet that if you just went to their website, you could probably find the feed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John URL, would not want that feed URL to appear in the search results that third party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast apps see, but only want it to be subscribable through Apple’s podcast app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t even make sense from a strategic point of view. It just seems like a bug, like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this would ever happen. And the fact that it is a feature, I’m really hard pressed to think of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like why you want this to happen. The best I can come up with is maybe you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people to force people to use the Apple podcast app. But in that case, like, wouldn’t you want the search

⏹️ ▶️ ^John result not to appear at all the third party ones rather than to have it appear but just have no feed URL.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s truly baffling. Like why why this feature exists at all setting aside the bug about it being accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John activated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the thing is, if you’re going to offer this kind of feature, you’re going to get so many podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who uncheck the box, or if it’s opt-in, God I hope not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or fail to check the box, who don’t really fully understand the ramifications of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what this means. And I know this because I get emails from people all the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco asking if I can move their feed in Overcast, or if I can rename it, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I can omit it from Overcast because they only have the rights to distribute or podcasts on Apple Podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever that means. And almost always, if I email them back and kind of explain how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things work, they almost always are like, oh, right, nevermind. I don’t understand things fully.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People don’t really understand how a lot of this stuff works, including many podcasters. Many podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are under wrong impressions or they just don’t know the technical backing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a lot of this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or they think Apple hosts the podcast. Like they think people are uploading their podcast to Apple. Like they don’t understand that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an existing system. It’s RSS feeds hosted on people’s websites that point to files that are hosted on their servers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or servers of someone else. Like Apple is just the directory up until this premium stuff that we’ll talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it a bit, right? But like, it looks like, just like everyone thinks, you know, not everyone, just like so many people think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple makes all the apps in the app store, a surprising number of people think that Apple makes all the apps in the app store. Many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people, including people who make podcasts, thinks, oh, my podcasts are in the iTunes store or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re in the Apple thing. but you know, your podcast, the beauty of podcasts, it is an RSS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feed on a website that you control that points to files that you determine the location of, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just there essentially making a directory. Here are the podcasts, here’s the name, here’s the title,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s who makes it, here’s some artwork, and here is the feed URL, and that feed URL is your feed URL

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that points to wherever you are hosting your files for your podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and so I cannot think of a good reason for this checkbox to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope Apple not only fixes the bug, if it’s indeed a bug, that it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like almost every podcast was opted out, which is disastrous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you fix that, by the way, in our podcast? Did you log into the interface?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it took me a long time to be able to log in because their login system was horrendously messed up for a long time as well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I did eventually log in and I did indeed opt us back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in. Good, hurrah! But yeah, so this checkbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a disaster. It should never even have been implemented. It seems like it was implemented

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco badly and with some issues on its rollout.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey An Apple cloud service with issues? No. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, right? I really hope that Apple sees like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that this was not, that this was a mistake or this is gonna cause harm and already is causing significant harm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and removes the ability for this opt-out for public RSS feeds, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free public shows. This is not, we’re not talking about subscriptions yet. This is just for free public shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that publish free RSS feeds publicly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That you could find if you went to their website probably. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John publicly available. It’s like, you know, not even security through obscurity. They’re just omitting information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is publicly available in a directory. And the whole point of the directory is to contain this information so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people, it can be vended to people. Like if you’re a directory and you intentionally omit information, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s the point? Like if there was no directory, we would constantly be telling people go to atp.fm, right? because that’s where our feed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. You can subscribe to it right there. Apple doesn’t need to be involved at all. But if you search for our podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in any podcast client, including Apple’s, you will find it because we are in the Apple’s directory of podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has all our metadata, which points to our website and our feed URL.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. So I also want to mention a special thanks. There’s been a project

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco running for a little while now called Podcast Index. We’ll link to it in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is, it’s kind of like an open source alternative index for the podcasting world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is independently run, and you can do whatever you want with it and everything. So today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I actually integrated it as part of Overcast’s lookup system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s about time I supported this. And so now Overcast will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco submit back to Podcast Index any new iTunes ID and feed URL that I discover,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and will submit back to the, and I will check them if I encounter something in the iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco API that is missing its feed URL, I’ll see if they have it. So we’re now integrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I look forward to looking at more of the podcasting 2.0 spec

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff in the near future, but that’s gonna take more time than one day to do, unfortunately. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m glad to be supporting Podcast Index and I’m very thankful that they are there as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seems like Apple is really teetering on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco losing their reputation as a safe directory to rely on. You know, if I were starting a new podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app today, just based on what Apple just did today, based on this RSS opt-out thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would seriously question whether I could trust them to run this directory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a way that I could actually use as a third-party app. You know, when I built Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around it, whatever that was, six, seven years ago, like it was a while ago now, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, things were different then. Now, and Apple has been a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amazing, benevolent steward of the podcast, of the open podcasting ecosystem for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the entire time it has existed. You know, they have a lot of power in this industry. If they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make a slightly wrong step, they could really do a lot of damage. And today they made one of those steps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they are doing a lot of damage. And I really, really hope they undo this. And again, we aren’t even talking about the subscription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff yet. I actually don’t think that’s that big of a thing for our purposes, but we’ll get to that. I’m only talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the ability here to lock out your RSS feed from the API. That should not be there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is incredibly damaging. And I really hope that they reconsider.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I suspect that this is an oops, or even if it isn’t an oops, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a we didn’t realize the ramifications of what we’re doing because Apple, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of the good things that it’s done for podcasting, which is quite a lot, I think, especially when it comes to podcasting, sometimes they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really think all the way through with these sorts of things. And I suspect that’s what happened here. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who knows? Hopefully, like you said, by the time people are listening to this, or certainly by the time the next episode is recorded,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’ll be a non-issue. We shall see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope so.

Sponsor: pod.link

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by PodSites and their new pod.link

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco service for podcasters. One of the great things about podcasting is that you can listen to any show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in apps like Overcast as easily as you can in Apple Podcasts. It should be that easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to share a show with everyone regardless of what app they’re using. But we’ve all seen people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do things like just link to Apple Podcasts as if that’s the last word in podcasting. Pod.link

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from PodSites makes it easier to share links that work for everyone. Every show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco automatically has a shareable landing page with links to subscribe in all the major podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. Whether you’re a fan who wants to spread the word about your favorite show, or a podcaster looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to grow your audience, Pod.link is here to simplify that process. Podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can sign up for free to claim a memorable URL, customize the page to match your brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and add anonymized analytics to help optimize your marketing. To claim your own show, just search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it on pod.link and click claim podcast in the footer of the page. For example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can see ours at pod.link slash ATP. And if you’re looking to grow your show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pod.link works seamlessly with pod sites to measure how your podcast is growing. Learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more about pod.link at pod sites.com slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pod sites.com slash ATP and check out pod link today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thank Thank you so much to PodSights for sponsoring our show.

Apple Podcasts Subscriptions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, hey, are we going to have people subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey instead of through http.fm slash join hint hint hint.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a better question is who is going to do that. It’s not going to be us for sure immediately, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bad feature. I think we just have to sort of describe what they’re doing here. Right. So we’ve we’ve talked about this on this show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s been discussed in many other shows. What is a podcast? Like if you have something like, you know, what defines

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a podcast? Is it just audio that you listen to? Like, are audio books podcasts? Like, is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what makes a podcast a podcast? And the technical explanation that we’ve usually fallen back to is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s an RSS feed available on the internet that has a bunch of items that have an enclosure that’s an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audio file. Like that’s, and then that feed can be read by what we call a podcast player

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that reads RSS feeds filled with enclosures that contain audio files and plays them, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so it’s an open ecosystem because anybody can get a website and anyone can put an RSS feed up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and anyone can record audio and put the file somewhere. And this is a thing you can do yourself. It’s completely decentralized,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like the web. Like, you know, there are services that can help you, you know, you can go to one of our sponsors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and make yourself a website, or you can make yourself a website from scratch on hosting or whatever. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we define as a podcast because we’re nerds. But from a regular person’s perspective, they define podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as when I launch whatever my podcast app is, which I may think is the only podcast app in the world,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I search for something and I find a show and I play it and it’s like audio, but it’s not a song and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not an audio book, that’s a podcast. And it seems like what Apple is rolling out with this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John premium podcasting service is relying on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of more casual, less technical explanation of what a podcast is, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first and most important thing you need to know about these premium podcasts is you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only listen to them in the Apple Podcast app, which is very different from any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other thing that we on this, you know, podcast would define as a podcast because the whole point kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a web website is if you make a website you figure anyone with a reasonable web browser can look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at your website. But if you make a website that literally is invisible, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not looks weird or is broken or doesn’t work right or looks looks different but cannot be viewed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by any browser except for Chrome, people would say that’s probably not a great website. Is it even a website?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s on the web, but you need Chrome to view it. And if you try to go with any other browser,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if you fake the user agent, you literally can’t do it for like basically DRM reasons like we will just deny you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you cannot look at this website unless you’re using Chrome. And now you might say, well, Chrome is the biggest web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John browser, it’s got the biggest market share. So that’s not that bad, right? I don’t actually know what Chrome’s market share is now it’s like 70%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something, it’s pretty dominant, right? But I think it would still be unacceptable because you’d be on your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone, for example, you wouldn’t be able to view the website because every web browser

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on iOS uses WebKit and WebKit is not what Chrome uses anymore and Safari is not Chrome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So maybe you’d have to download Chrome and it would work, but anyway, I’m stretching this analogy too far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John These podcasts that Apple makes, for reasons that make sense from a technical perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but nevertheless really change the definition of podcast can only be listened to in the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast app or in any other part of the Apple ecosystem. You could ask your home pod to do it or whatever, but the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point is Apple controls the software that plays these podcasts. No

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other podcast app can play these premium podcasts. So this is an entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple dedicated play. And right away, as you can imagine, podcasting nerds like our show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not appealing in any way. Like we don’t know which podcast apps our listeners listen to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our show in. We don’t care, except maybe Marco cares. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} We totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do know, by the way. There’s the user agents are reported. Like we totally do know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, but like it’s not a thing that we look at and you could send anything you want in a user agent string. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, you know, there is no sort of, we’re not invested in what clients are using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, except for Marco who sells a client. But otherwise, like we’re just happy that you listen to the show, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the same way that we don’t really care browser you use to browse adb.fm. If you go to the website, again, we could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell by looking through the access logs, but you can also fake the user agent, blah, blah. But that’s the point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s, it’s a podcast, it’s an RSS feed, you can use whatever client you want to read that RSS feed, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be on Android, you can be on Windows, you can be on your Mac, you can have an iOS app, use whatever you want. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a podcast, you can listen to it. And these do not fall into into that category. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for an established show with established listeners, I think there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some barrier to entry to basically say, like, let’s say a big show like this, American Life or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something, which seems like this would fall great. So they have a back catalog that they want you to pay for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? They’ve been around for a long time. They have a lot of people. What kind of show with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an established audience can afford to essentially tell all of its customers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hey, if you wanna hear this great new premium content, pay some money and by the way, stop using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever app you’re using to listen to this unless you’re already using Apple Podcasts. And Apple Podcasts has huge market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John share. It’s kind of like Chrome’s market share, but it’s not 100%, it’s probably like 60% or something, or maybe 70% or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is. But you have to tell 30% of your audience, oh, hey, if you wanna continue to listen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the cool premium version of this show, either the one without ads or having access to the back catalog, great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We have a cool way for you to do that. It’s really easy to pay. You can manage your subscriptions in a central place. You can use your Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID. All that’s great. Just one little thing though. If you’re not using Apple Podcasts, you gotta start.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you might as well switch to it entirely because it’s gonna kind of be a pain to go into the Apple Podcasts, listen to these three shows, but then go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into your preferred podcast app to listen to those two shows. That, it’s not that much of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a speed bump because big services do this all the time and people will adapt. But it’s enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of an annoyance that I think it would make anyone with an established show an established audience, pause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bit and say, do we want to annoy some percentage of our customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John base and force them to use a different podcast app? Can we do that? Are we big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough to basically say for this one show, because this American Life has so many big fans,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re just gonna make all our listeners switch to it and they’re basically gonna switch to Apple Podcasts full-time because who wants to use multiple podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apps? It would be like using multiple web browsers for different sites. Oh, when I go to this site, I use this browser. When I go to that site, I use that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John browser. something that maybe nerds do, but regular people do not. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, again, we’re still searching for who does this service appeal to. If you have no existing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audience and don’t care about any of the things I just listed, because you don’t care anything about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the podcast ecosystem and you just want to put up a show that you can collect money for easily, now I think it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has some appeal. Because kind of like the app store, like think about my dinky little Mac apps. Why did I put them on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac app store? Because they’re dinky. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} have any expectations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’m never making a lot of money, but I wanted some money and I didn’t wanna deal with anything. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple offered the easiest way to do that. We have a store, we have an update mechanism, we have a way for you to get paid from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people. Here you go. And so that I think is the main appeal of this. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t care about the open podcast ecosystem, if you don’t have an existing audience that you want to perturb,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or if you’re so big that you think you can perturb them and get away with it, and you just want the easiest way for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to pay for a thing that’s not really a podcast, but that we call a podcast, then maybe it has some appeal. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as Marco was alluding to earlier, I’ve really sliced that pie pretty thin at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So many people are eliminated for very good reasons than other people are eliminated for just sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, you know, abundance of caution reasons. And all it kind of leaves is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the people who just want to get off the ground really quickly without worrying about much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of anything. And also, by the way, to slice it even farther, you better not have any ambitions, any larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ambitions, because just like in the app store, you’re not going to know anything about your customers. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t own the customer, Apple does. You have no idea who they are, you can’t contact them, you can’t give them refunds,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t give them extra stuff, you can’t give them a discount code on merchandise, hint, hint, ATP members, that’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up eventually, we swear. You can’t give them access to your Discord, you can’t do anything with them because you have no idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who they are and you can’t access their identity at all. You can’t confirm whether anyone is a subscriber

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to your podcast. The only thing you can do are the things that Apple’s store supports, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowing access to premium episodes or, you know, feeds ahead of time and all that other stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their podcast subscription offering does have some appeal, but I think it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very narrow right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think you’re really being fair though, because you get all of this for the low, low price of, Oh, I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nevermind. It’s 30% for the first year. This was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thread that was going on and do either one of you know, I didn’t get a chance to look it up. Is it 30% for the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John near your podcast as part of the service? Or is it like apps where it’s 30%?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just like any other app subscription. So it’s 30% for the first year and then 15% for ongoing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years, assuming you’re not in the small developer program, which doesn’t appear to exist for podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For individual subscriptions, though, like so Joe Schmo subscribes, Joe Schmo has to keep subscribing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for an entire year before you start getting the before they start taking only 15%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Joe Schmo’s money, right? And that’s a per per custom because a lot of people online were saying and a lot of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John articles were saying, Oh, it’s just like if you’re if you’re if you’re a podcast is part of the store. The clock starts as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John soon as it’s part of the store for your whole podcast. And then from year two on you get 15%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it seems very clear that this is built entirely on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app store infrastructure. And that’s how the apps for infrastructure works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I think you’ve got it backwards. The app store is built on the iTunes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s true. Actually, this is going back to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John roots. That’s fair. That’s why all our apps have an artist tag.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, including in the API that I was talking about. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the subscriptions in the Apple Podcast app thing is that big of a deal. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s nice to offer small podcasters a way to monetize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fairly easily with fairly low hassle. As John was saying, very similar to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you wanna put up a small app in the app store, it’s no big deal. You go to the app store, it saves you a lot of hassle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from setting up your own payment system and everything. But most podcasts that have paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco memberships are not small podcasts, they’re big podcasts. And people are willing to pay for them because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well-known and they’re big. And I really don’t see a lot of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanting to do this system, for lots of reasons. I mean, number one, even at 15%,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most big podcasts can make their own platform or use someone else’s for a lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco percentage than that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or the same percentage, and they would at least own the customer, right? So 15% is not totally ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You could find a online service, sort of the podcast equivalent of Squarespace, and there are many things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in tech, Squarespace itself, that’ll do all this for you, but at least you’ll own your customers, and you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be able to do more interesting things with them. And so Apple’s percentage is 30,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then dropping to 15 right now, we think on an individual customer basis, which is just barely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John competitive, but there are so many caveats that Apple imposes due to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iTunes slash App Store heritage that are not imposed by other platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John On the other hand, tons of people already have a way to give money to Apple by putting their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John face in front of their phone, which is the upside. Again, see my apps in the App Store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The barrier to entry to paying is lower, and that’s kind of what Apple is offering. If you asked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, I think, why is this worth 15 or 30%, they would say, well, we have billions of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John customers and we already have their payment information and we make it super easy for them to pay for things. If you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to take advantage of that, you know, well greased slope into your wallet, fork over 15%.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly. And I think the control angle is the biggest problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. I mean, I’ve talked to podcasters big and small over the years about monetization

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options and integrations. You know, should I make some kind of thing where in Overcast you can pay podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for their stuff or whatever. And I heard the same thing time and time again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No podcaster, big or small, really wants middle people to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get in the way between their customers and them, especially when money’s involved. But even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when money’s not involved, podcasting is this wonderful open ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where creators have way more control over the relationship between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them and their consumers, listeners than in almost any other online media today that that’s like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know that has a lot of traffic you know the text is largely controlled by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook video is almost completely controlled by YouTube podcasting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is an amazing success story in having a direct relationship

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between you the producer and your listeners in almost every case there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is no algorithm we have to fight through to make sure the people who actually sign up to listen to our podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually get every episode. And you don’t have to worry about like, you know, paying Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to actually show people who subscribe to our page. The posts we are making like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nothing like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We don’t have to pay rent to host our files in the one and only place that’s allowed to host the files. We can get the host them wherever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we can find on the open market to host our files. Right. We don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We don’t require everyone who listens to our podcast to use any particular app to sign up with any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John particular account system. Like it’s it’s it’s It’s very open, much like the web. I know the web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is kind of blighted by the whole advertising thing and that’s a whole separate matter, but in the end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still today, anyone who wants to make a website can. You can build that website from nothing into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something big according to your own needs and desires. It’s generally an open market of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where am I going to host my website and how am I going to monetize and who’s going to be my payment processor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and where am I going to host my files. Those are all choices where there is competition in a fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open manner for you to make those decisions and podcasting is similar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. All the big podcasters have their own stuff set up. They have their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco publishing systems. They have their own hosting. They have their own ad platforms. They have their own membership platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Their own crappy dynamic ad insertion platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Those big companies built around providing those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes. There’s this entire existing massive ecosystem of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco podcast publishers, big and small, talking and dealing directly with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their listeners. And so even if Apple was offering a very low commission, which they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not, and even if Apple was offering a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data sharing about their customers, which they’re not, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think many big publishers would go for this just because it’s not integrated with the system they already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have, and it just injects Apple as a middle person into their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relationship, and that causes problems. You know, like Apple does not have the market share anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make this be any significant podcasts only source of a paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco program. Like if you’re gonna launch a paid program, you’re not gonna go with only a system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has 60 or 70% of the market share. Because that’s a whole lot of people who don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have that market share. And oh, by the way, the people who use third party podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps are probably more engaged higher end customers who are probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more likely to pay for a premium offering. Just putting that out there. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so if you have a podcast and you’re going to launch a paid premium thing, you’re not going to want to put it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Apple Podcasts. You’re going to want to put on Apple Podcasts and also have your own system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay, well now we have a problem. Now you have two systems for the same membership. So you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to have ways to resolve things, ways for people to transition between them, them ways to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco figure out, okay, if you subscribe to one and then you want to subscribe to the other, how do you, can you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco refund that payment? Can you cancel it? Can you tie it in? Can you roll it over? And the answer to almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all those questions when dealing with Apple’s payment system is no. If ATP with our membership system, which we built

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ourselves on our site using web hosting and Stripe, and we pay like 3%, it’s amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If we decided to also offer our membership on Apple podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not only are we now paying 30% instead of 3%, but we’re also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now not having a way to authenticate those users to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who has bought memberships. So people who buy through Apple, we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look up to see like, is this somebody we already know about? And then do we need to like cancel their Stripe payment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now? Cause now it’s a duplicate. We can’t do that. If they write in and say, hey, I got charged incorrectly for something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or I messed up, we can’t issue them a refund. We can’t cancel their subscription even, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can’t even look up their subscription. We have no way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco validate if somebody, if we wanted to offer something like a, you know, merchandise discount, which we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do, coming soon. If we want to offer a merchandise discount, or if we wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run like our own private, you know, Slack or Discord channel only for members. You can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do that with Apple’s system, because Apple owns the customer relationship and gives you no info about the identity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of your customers. So you’d have no way to offer those same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefits to the people who subscribe in the Apple Podcast app. And so you have all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limitations and way higher fees and support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues and practical issues of trying to run multiple platforms and or offer things that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t quite do with their system. And it’s just a big pain in the butt. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why most podcasters have just kind of enrolled their own system gone to an existing platform provider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who could, you know, vendor that system to them with their name on it. That’s what we actually want. We want that control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Publishing is another area where like, using Apple’s system is now another step to publishing. Their system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not gonna be integrated into our CMS. So now, right now, before this system, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wanna publish an episode of our show, I have to upload two files. I upload the members

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco file, and I upload the public file. And I put them both in the CMS, and the CMS does the work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maintains things, and that’s it. Now, if I want to add Apple System, I have to add

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a third step to this. Now I have to go upload the file to Apple System. Oh, by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way, Apple System, because it encodes your file for you and encodes it into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their DRM format, has to be a WAV. So I can’t use the same MP3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I used for Members. That also means I can’t add chapter markers, I can’t add chapter links, I can’t add custom imagery,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I have to upload a WAV that supports none of those things. It can be a FLAC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too, but not an ALAC, because Apple doesn’t support Apple lossless codec. Which is hilarious.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s probably some open source tool they’re using doesn’t understand ALAC, but understands Flack and Wave.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, which I mean, honestly, what could they possibly have found? Like everything supports ALAC, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco FFmpeg, everything, anyway. So. Maybe they forgot ALAC exists. Maybe. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the actual reality of adding Apple’s system to your premium offering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has all those downsides and then also additional work every time you publish, you have to then go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give that episode to Apple and have them do their stuff with it and deal with their backend. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know any podcasters anywhere ever of any size who say, you know what I want, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I need in my workflow? More steps to publish an episode. No one wants that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a question from the peanut gallery here. My wife just asked via messages, aren’t you just describing Stitcher

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or Spotify? And I think it actually is a little bit similar. Spotify, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John believe does the same thing where you can upload files to Spotify and they’ll host them and stuff for their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote unquote exclusive podcasts, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have absolutely no idea if that’s how it works, but probably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, but one of the other things Spotify does is they will also crawl RSS feeds and vend files

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they themselves don’t actually have, like that are, you know, so they do that. And Stitcher, I think it’s similar. Like a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of these premium podcasts, like if you think about it, this is what I was getting at before with the technical explanation. The reason a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these limitations exist is because of how, what podcasts are, an RSS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feed that’s publicly available on the internet that a client can point to and find files and download, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John user account identity authentication system built into any of that. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want something to be premium that people pay for, you have to somehow identify who has paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a thing and who has not paid for a thing. So, and that’s not part of quote unquote podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not part of RSS. That’s not part of any of this. It’s a thing you would have to layer on top. You would have to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some way to say who you are And then you have to have some way to look up, okay, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know who you are. Have you paid for the thing you’re trying to get? And if you have paid for it, give it to you. And if you haven’t paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it, deny it. Like you need that system. Apple has that system. They use it for apps. They use it for media.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s called the iTunes store, the App Store, whatever you want to call it, Apple ID, right? And I mean, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like they couldn’t make third parties apps. It’s not like they couldn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something like Overcast be able to opt into this system and allow people to authenticate and yada yada. They just didn’t, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the only app that can connect to this system and say, hey, here I am,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is my Apple ID, I would like to get the premium version of this American life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then it can say, okay, I see that you are who you say you are because I validated your Apple ID and now I’ll go look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up on my little directory of who paid for what, just like it does when you try to like watch a movie or play a song or use an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app. Oh yeah, you, this Apple ID, you did pay for this. So here you go, here’s your thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All over an authenticated connection from the Apple Podcasts app. No other third party app can do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because Apple didn’t make any APIs for doing that. So there’s just, those things are just invisible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to third party applications, right? That is one way to do this. Similarly for like premium podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can only get on Spotify or whatever. There’s no like public RSS feed. The whole point is you have to subscribe to Spotify.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why it’s an exclusive or whatever, Luminary or any of the other applications, right? That’s why, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons why most of the sort of premium podcast things that you subscribe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to where there’s some big company behind it, make you use their app. There are many reasons they make you use your app, a lot of having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do with analytics and so on and so forth, but also there needs to be a way to authenticate. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course they build that into their app. If Apple was trying to do this in the spirit of their,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, 15 year stewardship of podcasts, they would make some sort of open system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whereby if you signed in in this way, say for example, you could use sign in with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple to sign into ATP.fm, and then we would know that you subscribe to the show, and then we could still give you a discount code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for your merch, like sort of a more open identity-based system. Or yes, it would still be paying with your Apple ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it would be possible for other third-party apps and websites to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ask the basic question, given who you are logged in as using your Apple ID, using Sign In with Apple or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have you successfully paid for ATP? And if the answer to that is yes, then we can show you a member

⏹️ ▶️ ^John page that has all your other benefits or whatever, or give you access to the Discord or all that stuff. They haven’t done that yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is 1.0, maybe they’ll do that later, but right now they haven’t done it. So it is essentially a completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John proprietary way to play audio files using Apple’s app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and I think, you know, you made the point earlier, Marco, that this is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not insignificant burden on most podcasters’ workflows. And not only do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have to upload not MP3s, which is, you know, making the experience worse for several

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reasons that you cited, like, you know, no chapters and no different art per chapter and so on and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey forth. But you have to do that upload via the web. So there’s no real great way of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey automating any of this. You have to upload to Apple’s website. And as someone who’s used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iTunes Connect, or I guess I should say App Store Connect, more than once in my life, I can tell you that using their website

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do these sorts of things is not fun. And beyond that, I guess the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re insisting on it is for DRM, which is great, but I don’t know. I don’t feel like DRM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is something that I really wanted out of this relationship.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can get Taylor Swift songs with no DRM, but podcasts that’s going to be listened to by a person’s got to be DRM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John encumbered. There’s some baffling decisions here. I guess, hey, why not, I suppose, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly, podcast piracy is not at the top of, I don’t think it’s at the top of anyone’s list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So many weird decisions. It’s there, they can do DRM, it’s supported by iTunes, it’s media files,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I understand but it just seems like adding insult to injury, you know?

Sponsor: YES PLZ (code TIMAPPLE)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Yes Please. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make coffee, you’ve got to try Yes Please. This is a wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco coffee roaster. They’re longtime coffee nerds who are laser focused on bringing you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the best coffee with their subscription service. They believe the best cup of coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you ever drink should be the one you make in your own kitchen. The founders of Yes Please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are Tony Konesny, who is also known as Tonks, and Sumi Ali. These are veterans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of coffee’s third wave scene and fanatical about roasting great coffee. Many of you might remember their previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco coffee roasting business called Tonks back in the day, and they really believe that great coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should not require a lot of fuss. Making the perfect cup can be easier than making a box of macaroni

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and cheese, and it really is that easy if you start with the best beans. Invite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a fresh roasted bag of Yes Please coffee into your kitchen, brew it yourself, and see for yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I personally use Yes Please coffee. Most of the time, I don’t have time to roast these days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, I roasted for a long time myself. I don’t have time these days. And when I wanted to have coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roasted for me by somebody else, I went to Yes Please. Because I knew them from Tonks back in the day. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco known Yes Please since their Kickstarter back a few years ago now. And they are consistent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single bag from Yes Please is consistent. It’s good, it’s fresh, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really easy to make good coffee with. You know, some coffee, if it’s roasted too dark or it’s too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco finicky or it changes too much batch to batch, sometimes it can be hard to consistently get good coffee out of it. You gotta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep changing your settings or your process or whatever. Yes Please is rock solid and consistent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time. You can make coffee the same way every time and it’s always good with Yes Please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So head there, yesplease.coffee, that’s Y-E-S-P-L-E-Z. That’s how they spell it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Y-E-S-P-L-Z dot coffee. And use promo code TimApple, that’s right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco TimApple, to take $5 off your first shipment. Banish bad coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from your house, upgrade your morning coffee game, give Yes Please a try today. Thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you so much to Yes Please for keeping me caffeinated and for sponsoring our show.

Purple iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving right along, there’s a new iPhone 12 and 12 mini in a very good looking purple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is cool. unusual in my mind, but cool.

AirTags

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then we come to air tags. So air tags are finally a thing. If there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever a finally, it’s this air tags are finally a thing. You can get one for 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bucks, you can get four for 400 bucks. And you can get the air maze

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dangly dongle thing for what, like 450 bucks and that you can put your $30 air tag in. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think all the accessories that Apple offers on their website either cost as much as the AirTag

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or significantly more than the AirTag, all the way up to the ridiculous $460 luggage tag.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, this product, you know, it’s been leaked for two years now, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the product that they introduced is essentially exactly what everyone thought it would be. There’s a little bit of good news

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we didn’t know about. I think we’d throw in one, or at least I didn’t know about it because I’m keeping up with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The first bit is it does have a replaceable battery. Apple still knows how to make those. It’s pretty amazing. Not only does it have a replaceable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery, but it is not an Apple proprietary battery that you have to pay, you know, $99 for or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just one of those, what is it, CR2032 coin batteries. You can find it in Walgreens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They cost almost nothing. It’s user serviceable and replaceable and it lasts a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway. So you’re only buying these things once per year. So that’s pretty good. $29 for a tag is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheaper than I thought it would be. $99 for four is a pretty good deal. I think it’s a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bigger than I thought it would be. I expected it to be a little bit thinner, but maybe the battery is kind of defining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the size. Speaking of that, we’ll link in the show notes that there’s a little video that, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was it, Guy Rambo, I think, extracted from iOS of how it works. You just sort of press and turn,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like opening a pill bottle, and there’s the little coin battery in there. And the second bit of fun, interesting news

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is how much thought they’ve given to the privacy implications of having a little tiny disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that could be chucked in somewhere so that people can track you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think maybe this is something that I don’t know. There’s two sides to this. Apple thinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more heavily about this than most people do, which is good. But on the other hand,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re thinking of using your air tags as a way to track stolen merchandise, this kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of kills that use case. It’s more like, help you find your lost stuff, but if someone wants to steal it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the same features that make it harder for someone to track you sort of defeat that. So this is from their,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll put a link in the show notes to a couple of documents Apple has explaining this in more detail, but this is from their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John press release, I think. It says AirTag is designed with a set of proactive features that discourage unwanted tracking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And industry first, I don’t know if it’s a first, but whatever. And that phase, discourage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unwanted tracking, it’s basically like all the cases that you might not think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unless you have a bad relationship with an abusive ex or something, and didn’t want someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be able to slip a tiny $30 plastic disc into some piece of clothing or luggage and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John track you wherever you are on the planet for the rest of your life, right? So that’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the dark case that they’re trying to prevent here. It says iOS devices can detect an AirTag that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John isn’t with its owner and notify the user if an unknown AirTag is seen to be traveling with them from place

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to place, right? So if someone does slip an AirTag into your pocket and you don’t notice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it will let you know and say, hey, just so you know, an AirTag that’s not yours is somewhere near you has been there for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a while. Also, an air tag that has been separated from its owner for an extended period of time will play a sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when moved to draw attention to it. So again, with a thief scenario, like if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put an air tag in something and it gets stolen, uh, and it’s separated from you, it will start making a noise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of alerting the thief that’s there in the same way that you will be alerted if someone sticks an air tag into your pocket

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pocket. So that’s the trade off here. I think it’s the correct trade off because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the theft case, like you’re probably not getting that stuff back anyway, right? because I could just wrap the thing in tinfoil and then you won’t get any signal anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But like it’s going to make itself known to the thief, but it’s also going to make itself known to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if someone slips one into your stuff, right? And so the tech note here is what to do if you find an air tag

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or get an alert that an air tag is with you. So if that happens to you and you’re like, where the heck did this air tag come from?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the nefarious scenario, it tells you how to deactivate it, right? Which you can do without, you know, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it with any you can do with an Android phone, you can do an Apple phone, because it’s got an NFC thing on it or whatever. I suppose you could just open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it up and take the battery out too. I don’t know if that’s listed in the tech note, right? and on the flip side of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you are if you just lost your air tag and like it fell out of your pocket on the train and someone finds it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They can apparently get enough information to be able to contact you and say hey I found your air tag if you want to come get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. So it’s a thoroughly thought-out $30 plastic thing with a battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it. And so for what it’s supposed to do Ridiculously expensive accessories aside. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it’s pretty good product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m really interested in this. I, the thing is, I don’t know what I want to put one on. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I kind of want to try it just to experience the AirTag life, but I don’t typically lose my keys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t typically lose my wallet. I don’t typically lose my laptop bag. Like it’s the, the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing that I’ve lost for more than a few minutes was my stupid expensive flashlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Marco insisted I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} buy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is actually quite delightful. And Michaela had run off with it and put it in her closet, I think absentmindedly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I’d lost it for two weeks. But that’s not, I don’t really intend to put an air tag on my flashlight. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t really know what I would use this on. Uh, I guess my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey keys is the most obvious choice, but gosh, I cannot remember the last time I’ve lost my keys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a choice for you that we’ll get to later, Casey. Uh, but I, but I’m mostly in the same situation as you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in that I can’t think of a particular use case for why I would want these, but you know, products like this have existed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a while. And for people who have tried those other products now having an Apple one that is a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit more thoughtful about privacy and comes with the sort of Apple polish and integration with its products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of makes sense. And speaking of that, so the other little bit of magic this has is that it uses the U1,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So it’s got the Bluetooth low energy and beacon and people walking by with iPhones, like all the stuff we talked about that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they use for COVID tracking and all that, right? But then when you get closer to it, to let you actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find it, because when you, you know, again, as we talked about last show, if it shows, oh, it looks like my keys are in my house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Great, thanks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like I kind of figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that. It’s good to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they’re not back at work. But now just saying in my house, as you run all over the house looking, how does that help

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you? But the U1, the ultra wideband thing that’s been in phones for a couple of years now, what is this even used for?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, finally it’s time to shine. And then, you know, the demo and the keynote showing like, it will give you a little arrow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tell you how far you are from it. And it will actually let you find exactly where it is, which couch is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it in, is it on, is it in someone’s bedroom, you know. you will actually be able to find it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think part of the ongoing like congressional hearings about like Tile, a competitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company saying that I think like only Apple can use the U1 chip for this, but Tile can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what the competitive landscape here looks like, but Apple’s product is very well integrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with all of its hardware and available software. And it seems like its competitors are not yet that well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John integrated. And I’m not sure if they can be, depending on what APIs Apple has opened up for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using the U1 chip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. I don’t know. Are you guys planning on getting them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’m going to get some. I’m in the same boat as both of you of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want them because they’re cool. I don’t usually lose things. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do have a bit of an anti-theft case for them. I’m going to see if there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a good way for me to attach them to our bikes that we use here at the beach.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was just thinking that, especially in the summer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s not really going to be good for anti-theft, though, because when it’s separated from you, I mean, there’s a timer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this too. There’s a bunch of configurable stuff, like how long do you want it to, but like in the end, that tag is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make itself known to the bike thief, assuming they don’t already find it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. And so the question is like, what kind of theft are you protecting against here? I think if you’re protecting against

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like casual theft, it might be useful. So like the main reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people steal bikes here is because they’re drunk. They’re trying to make the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last ferry of the night, and they’re late. And so they grab whatever bite they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco find, ride it to the ferry terminal, dump it somewhere near the ferry terminal, and run to the boat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The reality is that’s not like a criminal mastermind at work here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So also, it’s a very dense beach town. Like the houses are all close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco together. There’s lots of people here in the summertime. So there’s lots of iPhones going everywhere all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This may be the ideal use case in terms of density of people with expensive iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and people who are casually stealing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things. Exactly. And if it’s gone missing and I can find it within

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few days before it starts alerting everybody when it moves or whatever, fine. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for casual theft, I think, or drunk theft, it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine. And the obvious use case of where are my keys in the house. But I think it sounds like all three of us don’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where are my keys in the house The only thing that I lose occasionally in the house is one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my pairs of glasses, and my main barrier to finding them is I can’t see without my glasses to find my glasses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you can’t really put an air tag on the glasses, so I guess I’ll have to wait for the Apple AR VR helmet and then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put an air tag on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that brings me to one other issue with this. They have all these accessories they’ve made,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as we talked briefly about, all these key rings and everything. Why didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they, well I know why, because Apple, Why didn’t they design a key loop hole in the AirTag

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco itself? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holes are ugly. The main thing I’m disappointed in is they didn’t use that cool micro suction stuff that you use for your nightstand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stick that on myself, but. I know, but like, so everything that Apple showed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the use cases is you take this disc, you put it in a little holder, which I’m sure you can get right now on Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for $7. So please don’t buy the $50 ones from Apple. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just dangles, right? But it’s a little disc, sticking it on like a spy putting a little tracker

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only you’re tracking your own keys. I mean, obviously key ring can be dangling from there, but like sticking it on, that’s like the main

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use case I can think of. And this thing is a little bit thicker and it doesn’t really wanna hug a surface and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has no way to stick it to things. You have to buy your own micro suction thing or double-sided tape or whatever, which isn’t a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barrier, but I think it was a slightly missed opportunity for Apple to do something cool in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the realm of non-marking sticky stuff, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but ultimately I think like by far like a much more useful thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would have been if there was just a hole in it that you could loop a key ring or a string through. Because that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most people are going to do with this is not keep it loose in a bag. They’re going to put it on a key

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chain or they’re going to like, you know, loop it around something or tie it to something. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the total overall setup that you end up with could be so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smaller and more elegant if Apple would have just put a hole in it that you can loop a keyring through, but instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it made a perfectly round object. Now you have to get some other like, you know, 50 cent silicone thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Amazon that’s going to loop around it, try to hold it on, and then offer its own loop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s like, that’s just, that’s just bulking it up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you just got to learn the cheese makers craft of being able to tie a string around a round object so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, you know, completely encompasses it. You know, there is a way to to do that, but I think you have to get a merit badge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it. But yeah, a hole would be much easier, kind of like tile or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it wasn’t circular. Because if it was square, and it’s got that circular coin battery, the corners are a perfect place to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put a hole. But I feel like most of the accessories that Apple is selling and that everyone is cloning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Amazon as we speak, are a little bit more robust than a string. So we’ll see, maybe they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change their mind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but that also means they’re much bigger and heavier. And I feel like, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco typical Apple fashion, I’m not surprised this is how they did it, but they designed this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a beautiful object and all of their accessories

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re selling for it, I think a little bit optimistically, are all under the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretense that this is something you’re going to be displaying. But no one is displaying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their AirTag. They’re gonna put it in something. Look at this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, they have little fun emoji that you can put on it So your initial, it looks good as a keychain, if you don’t already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have something on a keychain, I suppose, if you want a technerdy keychain and you put a little extremely low contrast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emoji on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, from a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small selection of emojis. Yeah, a selection of emoji inspired line art.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. I love the low contrast though, because it’s like someone is like, we want to put symbols on it, but can you make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them hard to read? Because that’s much more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John elegant. like oh my god i understand i understand the aesthetic but like at what point do we do we decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it’s actually important for people to be able to see things on things anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my work All right, so.

Ted Lasso Season 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Next, we had the most important part of the presentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I will accept no arguments to the contrary, Apple TV time, guys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh man, am I excited. And the best part of this portion of the presentation was definitely the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ted Lasso trailer. Kindness makes a comeback on July 23rd. Holy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey jamoles, I am excited.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I like to think about the Ted Lasso phenomenon. How perfect is it that like, you know, remember all the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple wanted, didn’t want shows that were too dark, and I don’t know, too serious,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or touched on issues that Apple didn’t want. They kind of wanted a squeaky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, and somehow, some way, they managed to get a show that that actually is the shtick, and we all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John believe in it and buy into it. And then they can say, kindness makes a comeback, and it’s not a joke. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re all here rolling our eyes, because it actually is a good show. Like, what a miracle that is. I don’t think you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can plan that, because they made a lot of shows, And not all of them are sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so centrally focused on being counter to the cynical nature of media and Ted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lasso, and Ted Lasso is their biggest hit. And so, yeah, they want you to sign up for their service and they’ve got a hit show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they want you to know that they’re making more of it. So there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I am super, super excited for the return of Ted Lasso. We actually, Aaron and I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey re-watched it, I don’t know, like a month or so ago, kind of on a lark, and it is such a good show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my goodness. If you have not seen Ted Lasso, I cannot say enough good things about it. It is so delightful and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so good. But yeah, I’m super excited for season two and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cannot wait to watch it. But.

Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was talking, I don’t remember if we spoke about this on the show, so I apologize if we have, but I was talking to a friend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of mine the other, the other day, I don’t know. And, and it occurred to me that up until

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this event, the newest available Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that existed was, was older than my three-year-old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey daughter. daughter. So Michaela was born subsequent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the most recent Apple TV up until Tuesday. And that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s just not right. Like it had been over three years since they had updated the Apple TV and that just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ain’t right. And if you recall in late 2019 on Cyber Monday of 2019, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey went to Costco and got ourselves an LG OLED, a 4K LG OLED TV. And I said to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey myself, late in 2019, I says, there’s no way I’m buying a two-year-old or whatever it was, Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right now, they must be making a new one soon, right? Right? Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So to this day, I still have my 1080, like the first generation that had the swipey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remote and all that. I have my 1080 Apple TV driving probably 90% of the usage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of my 4K LG TV because I didn’t want to upgrade. And now, ladies and gentlemen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can upgrade and I am super excited. I will be mashing that button like like I’m trying to get a new iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am super pumped. And not only that, not only that, but it has a new remote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I’m one of the ones that actually, I don’t actively hate the remote. I don’t like it, but I don’t hate it either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But this new one’s looking real good. I am excited.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I’m excited that they changed the remote because they needed to change the remote. And I’m excited kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like the increasingly reliably rumored changes to the MacBook Pro that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they basically went back to something they had before it was better, even though it took them years and years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and years for them to figure it out. If you compare the new remote to some of the older Apple remotes that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John predate the Siri remote, you say, hey, look, some of those elements look familiar. So the first thing they did was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get rid of the diving board, which is the terrible touch area on the top of the existing Siri remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is a deadly area that you can never touch or else it screws up what you’re watching. They didn’t give up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on touch, because they still think touch is a good idea for swipiness. But they stopped making a giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flexi diving board on the whole top of the remote and instead they’ve gone back to what they did on all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John previous Apple TV remotes which is to have a circular thing up there that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a I’m assuming physical clicky directional thing where you can click up down left and right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with like a you know a big circular disc which I still think is worse than like a d-pad type thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s better than just an infinite scrolling surface hinged in one side because you know the various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gestures that you can do on the Siri remote like oh click on the right edge of the diving board. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not an easy maneuver to pull off in a way that is satisfying apparently to the Apple TV. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clicking on the right edge of this disc thing, I think I can probably pull that off. You basically have to tilt the disc to the right, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will probably click down, and you’ll know you’re doing right, you’re doing left, you’re doing up, you’re doing down. In the middle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it looks to me disconnected from the disc, although it’s hard for me to tell without touching one of these, remains the touch area

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which you can swipe up down and left right on. And also the ring thing you can run your finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John along like like a jog dial, like the iPads, the iPods after the one that had the moving,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think only the original one had the moving click wheel, right? I think that’s right. The iPods after that had a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel, but the wheel didn’t turn, you just rubbed your finger along a circular track and it used that as you’re scrolling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this has more options, but most importantly, the directional thing, now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is a way for humans, I assume, to much more reliably do up, down,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John left, right, and center. And center is a big thing, right? So many shows on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John various apps on Apple TV have the skip credits feature, right? If you’re watching a bunch of shows and these credits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start to roll and you don’t wanna watch the credits again, the little thing comes up in the lower right corner that says skip. What it’s telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you to do is, if you essentially press the virtual center button on your remote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will skip these credits for you and get to the beginning of the episode. And with the Siri remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flat on my end table, sitting there mocking me, I’m not touching it with anything else because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remember, it is a deadly zone that you don’t want to touch. The remote is just there on a flat, hard wood

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surface on a stable table. The skip thing comes up. What I want to do is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John press dead center on that stupid diving board, such that it activates the giant white skip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button that’s on my screen and my success rate is 50%. I cannot pull off this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maneuver. I’m like, what do you want from me? I’m pressing dead center, straight down perpendicular to the remote that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not touching in any other way. And you’re telling me that’s not a skip? You think that was jump forward 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seconds? You think that was pause? Like what do you, oh my God. Just merely, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made pressing a button like have a 50% success rate for me. So this I hope has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better success rate in that if I press the center of that circle thing, I don’t think it could mean anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else, especially if I don’t move my finger too much. Then press the skip button, right? Now let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compare though, before we heap too much praise on this thing, to an actual remote. Let’s say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the TiVo remote, which my house is lousy with. The TiVo remote has a giant prominent pause button in the center

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. I’ve never missed that button. I can hit it in the dark. When I hit it, it never does anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else. It never fast forwards, it never rewinds. It never does what it does. It’s a button. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so easy to tell when my finger is over it. It’s so easy to hit it. It’s so easy not to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything else. I find that infuriating. But anyway, I haven’t used this remote, so I don’t know how bad it’s gonna be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It looks like it’s an improvement. The other thing they improved? is it’s thicker. Does it acknowledge the existence

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of human hands? No, it does not. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} doesn’t care about your hands. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care about your hands any more than the Apple TV puck itself does, right? It is just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beautiful platonic solid. It looks nice and is thicker and longer, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is good, but it has no bearing to a shape that your hand would like to hold. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a art object, but it is an art object that is slightly better to hold because it is thicker

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it is, I think, slightly longer. I think I had the stats in the thing here. Let me see. But it’s 3 4ths of an inch longer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 1 1⁄4 of an inch narrower, but almost three times as thick as the Siri remote. And everything else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it, the buttons are basically the same. They improved the glyphs on the button. It is no longer vertically symmetrical,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so it should be much easier to tell which end is up. They moved the little speaker, talking to Siri thing to the side,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I think will be okay, but we’ll see. And the power button is in the upper right corner, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this remote better than the other one? Yes, unquestionably. It’s better than the worst remote ever made. But is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it better? Is it like a good remote? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, this isn’t like, it is an improvement and I welcome the improvement and I’m going to buy one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these. This is another thing, you can buy these and use them with any of the existing Apple TVs back to the Apple TV HD. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to buy one of these remotes from my old Apple TV. And yes, I’m going to get one of these new Apple TVs just because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always get whatever the new Apple TV is. So I’m glad it’s here. Kudos for Apple for fixing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the remote. But did they make a good remote? No, they did not. Like even without touching this, I can tell it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a good remote. It doesn’t mean people are gonna hate it. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna be terrible. I know some people like to see a remote, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a good remote is a remote that is better at being a remote, that has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John higher success rate for the buttons for more people, right? That fits in people’s hands, that is harder to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slip down behind couch cushions, that people don’t fumble with, that people don’t do accidental inputs. Any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stat that you can measure on like, is this a successful remote? All those stats, this one is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna be worse at than the TiVo remote, or then like the most basic, stupid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rubber button cable company remote, because as dorky as those things look, and as covered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as they are in Cheeto dust or whatever, people are able to pick them up and use them and be successful at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pressing the buttons they want to press a higher percentage of the time than they will be with this one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I was very happy when I saw this remote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like shown on screen for the first time, because it’s uglier. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thought, wow, they’ve like modern Apple, they’re learning. They are okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making this thing noticeably uglier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Slightly uglier. Oh no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s way uglier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at it compared to, remember the previous Apple to your remote that was the aluminum thing? This looks very similar to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But they unquestionably made something uglier because the old pretty one didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work very and was hard to use in reality. And they made it, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco appears that it’s going to work and feel way better and actually be designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for humans a little bit more than the last one was. And yeah, I agree with you, John. It’s probably nowhere near a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one like a TiVo remote, but I am looking forward to this. They added a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco couple new things to it. They added the power button to control your TV,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which you could do before through CEC if you held down the home button, but no one knew that. they added the mute button,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which you couldn’t really easily do before. So this can be much more easily your only remote, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for us, like that usually is what happens. The Apple TV remote usually is our primary remote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So- Was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mute button there before? I thought the buttons were the same.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, that was the Siri button before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, that’s right, sorry. Yeah, okay. So there was a button there, but yeah, they moved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Yeah, and as you mentioned, they changed the lifts. Like there’s no more menu button. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s the back arrow, which makes sense because that’s what menu always did. Menu meant back in tvOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it didn’t mean show a menu, it meant back. So it’s nice to have that reflected.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the way I’m looking at the touch surface, it looks like the entire circular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, including the push down corners of it, it looks like the entire thing is a touch surface.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m really curious to see how this works in practice, because as much as we all complained about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Siri remote, there are parts of navigating the TV interface where it actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is nice to have a swipy touch surface. And so it was always this weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco compromise of like, well, you could have the swipey touch surface to navigate and that was better in some ways, or you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could use an old remote and use the D-pad and that was worse in some ways and better in other ways. This looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it’s trying to actually give you both. It’s trying to give you precise up, down, left, right so that you can enter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff more easily and be more precise and less error prone. And precise center. Right, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco precise center, yeah, because that’s like the okay or enter button. but also have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the swiping for navigating large areas or scrubbing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the scrub gesture around the outside and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They added jog to that, which I think is an improvement. Because I think because you have a limited amount of surface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like being able to use a touch for moving the scrubber is good, but you eventually run out of diving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John board. Whereas with the jog dial, you never run out. And that’s kind of a proven interface to touch sensitively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scrolling through stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so I’m actually optimistic. None of us have touched this thing yet. I’m very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco optimistic though. I think this looks like as much of an improvement as we could possibly have expected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple to make and still be Apple. You know, it’s never gonna be shaped like your hand. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never, never, ever, ever. It’s never gonna be big and bulbous. It’s never gonna be those things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m surprised they finally touched it. You know, cause keep in mind, and I’m gonna talk about the Apple TV as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a product in a second, but keep in mind going into this, many people were saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s probably going to discontinue the Apple TV as a product entirely. And so to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show that they put in decent effort into fixing what was probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the second worst thing about it, and the second worst thing that was holding it back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good to see. And this is the thing I was talking about before, where Casey’s wondering what he’s going to do with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his AirTags. Well, you’re gonna put one on this damn remote if you lose it, because the Siri remote does not have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John U1 chip in it, does not work with Find My. So if you do want to find it when it slips down underneath the couch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cushions, which granted it will be slightly less likely to do because it is three times thicker than the piece of paper that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Siri remote, but it is still very small, especially compared to other remotes. So if you lose it, stick an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John air tag on the back of that with some of that micro suction sticky stuff and you’ll be able to find it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, or just, you know, get one of those like, you know, $7 silicone jackets for it on eBay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or on Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can just, you can just connect it to a cinder block like a gas station bathroom key, like whatever. But there’s no key loop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just drill a hole in it, it’ll be fine. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah. Real time follow-up. If you look at the image link I put in the show notes and in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey chat room, it’s from the tech specs page and it’s a zoomed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in view of the Siri remote. And it looks to me like the four up, down, left,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right buttons are quite a bit larger than I would have expected. And that like circle for the touch area is quite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bit smaller than I would have expected.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there’s a cut line on it too. So it could actually be separate. Like that’s what I’m hoping for. I’m hoping both of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things actually move, like that the circle tilts and you can hear it click. And I’m hoping the center thing actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John presses in. Like that is a big part of being a remote that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhat decent. I’m guessing it’s not. I’m guessing the whole thing pushes, but we’ll see. So now that brings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me to the, and it’s great that you can get this for the old Apple TV. That’s great, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, and it’s cheaper than a Siri remote too. Like the other thing, like, so people are disappointed that it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the U1 and stuff, but honestly, rather just have this thing be cheaper. This is basically the Apology remote. It’s their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attempt for it to be the Apology remote. We screwed up the remote for years. We learned some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lessons. We’ve gone back. But we still haven’t actually learned how to make a good remote. It’s kind of like the Apology mouse in that they didn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John learn how to make a great mouse, but they did make one that at least you could tell which way it was up. So this is similar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The most egregious sins of the past are fixed, but they didn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go all the way to becoming good at making MISA remotes. And to that end, like what you said, Marco, like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never gonna make that thing. I think, I’m not willing to believe that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t learn this. Like, it is actually in the spirit of Apple to understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ergonomics. Like Apple made a split keyboard once, way before it was fashionable to make split keyboards. Someone somewhere inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple had said, you know, ergonomically speaking, split keyboards have some benefits, let’s try making one. They didn’t make a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good split keyboard, but they did make a split keyboard. Like there is no reason that Apple, that the Apple ethos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of user friendliness shouldn’t lead them to essentially become the Oxo Good Grips of computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John peripherals, right? It’s just that the current multi-decade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rise to fame has been accompanied by this extremely minimalist,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John beautiful object design that is intentionally divorced from the messy humans that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use their devices in several important ways, right? So I’m not saying it’s gonna happen this year or the next,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I’m saying Apple, hire some people from OXO. It’s okay to make products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people hold and use in their hands that acknowledge the human

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s gonna be doing the holding and the using. It’s okay to do that. And the same way they do things with accessibility with what’s on the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything doesn’t have to be a rectangular solid. I swear, nothing bad will happen if you make a remote that is big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and comfortable to hold.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So let’s talk pricing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the remote was, I think, the second biggest thing holding back the Apple TV. I think pricing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been the biggest. You know, as the market has moved on and commoditized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these little TV-connected boxes, the Apple TV has remained surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expensive compared to the competition. And it seems like Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no interest in making it more mass market. Because to make it more mass market,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’d have to cut the price by a substantial margin and they seem like, not only are they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unwilling to do that, but they’re probably unable to do that. And where we were before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, it’s kind of funny how little they changed about it. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think if you would have asked, if you would have said a few months back, hey, Apple’s gonna update the Apple TV in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the spring, what do you expect? I think we would have all hoped for a new remote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I think what we would have expected was a price cut, because that’s what, that’s holding them back so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much in this category and we didn’t get that. In fact, I love this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much. All right, so the new one is the same price as the outgoing Apple TV 4K, 179, 432 gig

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. And for some reason they offer a 64 gig one. Again, almost nobody needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, but it’s $20 more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Again, if that’s what you need for some reason and they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tell you why.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You almost can’t afford not to get the bigger one. Can’t even buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an AirTag for 20 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so that’s amazing. And then the best thing that I love so much about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that they are still selling the non 4K Apple TV HD, which came out in 2015,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and uses the A8 CPU still, which came out in 2014. It’s the processor from the iPhone 6.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They are still selling that at $150. Now, they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kindly update it to include the new remote from all orders placed, you know, from yesterday forward. So that’s nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which remember is cheaper than the old remote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, right. Oh yeah, I guess they didn’t pass along the savings to us. So they are still selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 2015 Apple TV non 4K version TV non 4K version for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hundred and fifty dollars with its A8 processor from the iPhone six

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 2021. That is amazing to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, part of the pricing thing with these with these devices is that like in the end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these Apple TVs are extremely powerful for TV connected boxes, but that power is just sitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there mostly doing nothing except for maybe in the case of like high frame rate HDR or something. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there so you can play games essentially, And if you never play games on this thing, it’s the most expensive way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a video streaming bug. You can buy an air tag size thing from Google, like one of those little Chromecast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that will get the job done and stream you Netflix just fine. But it’s not going to be able to play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the games that even the stupid $150 thing with the A8 can do. And the reason the price doesn’t go down on these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is they keep putting better and better chips in it. The A12 is a pretty good, like if you think of this as a $150 or $180 gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console with no controller, it starts to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little bit more sense, then you realize maybe there’s not a lot of games you wanna play or whatever, like that’s the problem of this product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like if you think of it as a TV streaming device, it’s nonsensical, why does it cost so much money? The only people who buy it are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suckers like us who want fancy Apple stuff and enjoy some part of the experience of using the Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And in that respect, I’m kind of glad and I’m more than willing, me personally, to continue paying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote unquote way too much money to stream Netflix on a thing that I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the interface of. okay, you know what I mean? But it’s always going to hold this product back from being particularly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a mass market. And actually I think with Apple’s new attitude towards its television offerings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s much more reasonable than it used to be because Apple TV now, as we all know, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everywhere. The Apple is totally off of the idea that the only way you can watch, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movies that you buy in iTunes or whatever, like they’re not locking them to their box anymore. So now that you can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple TV Plus everywhere, like shipping on your TV, So much weight is taken off the shoulders

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this stupid little puck, and it can just be a premium product for suckers like us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without damaging their other ambitions. They have sort of paid the strategy tax and divorced it, and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finally this thing is free to be what it wants to be, which is a really expensive rounded rectangle for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who host this podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that, but I guess it does, because I was just looking at it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as like they had this really bizarre and seemingly totally ineffective strategy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for this product and they seem to change nothing about it when they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} updated it. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because now it continues. I mean, obviously if you want to sell more of them, you should probably make a more broadly appealing product. But if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re okay with selling the amount you’re selling to the people you’re selling it to, like we’re all still gonna buy them, right? Then now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve divorced that from your other efforts. And so now it is less stupid and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s more like, okay, well, I guess this is what they want to sell. They want to sell a premium streaming box and not many people want that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple seems okay with it. So there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just, I can’t imagine, like, if you look at this lineup, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one for $150 that is positively ancient and nobody should buy it. Because if you’re gonna spend $150, you might as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well spend $180 and get the one that’s way, way better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then you have one for $20 more that almost nobody should buy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you want that $150 one, just find a sucker who’s gonna buy this new one, because they probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have Apple TVs falling out of their house and they’ll just give you like, Every time we get a new Apple TV, it just bumps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out one of the older ones in the house. So sure, we just give it away like candy. Like just find an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John TV sucker, they probably have that $150 one ready to just give to you for free.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s my advice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But honestly, I’m actually not entirely sure I’m gonna upgrade to this. I mean, maybe I’ll get one for like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco main TV, but I don’t see how I would, or why I would do the other ones if I could just get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco remotes for 60 bucks and use them with the previous one. because when you look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this as an upgrade for the previous Apple TV 4K, I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it makes a lot of sense for almost anybody to upgrade to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I think here’s the pitch for people who buy expensive round rectangles, HDR high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frame rate. So it’s videos you take on your phone, which can do both HDR and high frame rate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now you have a place to watch them in full fidelity on your television. So now I just sold it to you. There you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these are legit features. Like I say, here’s the thing, John, My phone doesn’t shoot that format,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s at high frame rate. Because I don’t have the iPhone Pro. Well, get a real phone. Whoa, whoa, yikes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Getting aggressive, getting aggressive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, it is a niche thing, but again, like, they have all this power, what are they gonna use it for? They already did Dolby Vision,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have HDR, like the last barrier was, okay, but what about Dolby Vision, but also in high frame rate? It’s like, well, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am I gonna get content like that? Ah, from these expensive phones that we sell that can do that at the highest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the high end. Like, that’s future-proofing, really. So if you get this box, three phones from now, they’ll all do 60

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frame per second HDR, whatever, even the mini, if they still make it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} They won’t. Sorry, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, and so that’s, again, a premium streaming box, it better be able to do all the things. It better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support all the features. And they’ve slowly knocked those down, variable frame rate, HDR,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Dolby Vision, support for the different audio formats. That’s what I would want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of a too expensive box, you better do all those things. And this thing has more. Apparently it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thread radio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in it. Yes, for like the new home kit stuff that isn’t actually out yet, but I probably probably become important someday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can you explain to me what this thread radio thing is? Because I totally missed that whole Nope. Okay, great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had to look it up. I first looked it up when I saw that Euro might Euro thing supported or something, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think, or it’s like an euro labs feature some some device in my house has support for it. But And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I saw it on this, I’m like, oh, I know about Thread Radio. We’ll link to the Wikipedia page. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the Wikipedia page. An IPv6-based low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of Things products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is a mouthful, but it’s my guess, based on that one-sentence subscription, having not read the rest of the Wikipedia

⏹️ ▶️ ^John page, is IPv6 has enough addresses to give everything an address. And so maybe you can give everything addresses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your house and they can all talk to each other over this little local mesh network with low-power radio things. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, it’s kind of like the temperature and humidity sensor hiding in the HomePod mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every product that goes into your home these days, there seems to be some hardware that is waiting for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some other shoe to drop. And in the case of the new Apple TV, hey, you get a Thread Radio. Will that be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John useful to you? Maybe, someday, but you know, as we say with various features, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John count on it. Like, just buy the product for what it does now, not what it’s gonna do tomorrow. And speaking of what it does now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not exclusive to the new Apple TV, but it’s a thing they added through software. They have what looks like an extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rudimentary calibration feature where you hold your iPhone up to the screen, because of course you also have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iPhone. You hold your iPhone up to the screen and it runs through a bunch of colored squares and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adjusts the color output of your Apple TV to be more reasonable. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is maybe better than nothing, but it’s not. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not great because the, I mean, I don’t know. So what they showed in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video is hard to tell. It looked like it was just looking at the output of like red, green, and blue, and so on and so forth, but actual calibration,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you really need more nuance than that. You need, in particular, to see like brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John levels, white levels on different screen sizes, because, you know, like if you have like an OLED television,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the brightness is different when you have a small region that is lit up versus the whole screen that’s lit up, and you wanna see the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John correct number of gradations between 100% white and some percentage of gray, and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just looking at, okay, what is the red and the green and the blue output, your television is probably pretty close to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway. Anyway, it’s better than nothing and I will definitely try it, but a full-fledged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John calibration app, of which there seem to be few these days, will certainly do a better job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I do worry that if it messes up in some way or it’s used incorrectly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it could take a television that is fairly well calibrated out of the box. A lot of the higher end TVs, when you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them, they’re pretty well adjusted out of the box these days, which wasn’t always true before, especially if you put on like filmmaker

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mode or one of the other more accurate picture presets that come with these televisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s pretty close and I’m not sure you’re gonna get any closer with this thing. But if you have an older

⏹️ ▶️ ^John television or your television looks weird, it’s good to have this feature built in and it is not exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the new Apple TV. It’s apparently something you can use on the other Apple TVs as long as you have an iPhone. So I give a thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to this feature. I just wish they were more sort of available, consumer level

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Detailed calibration apps for people who actually do want to try to get their TV closer than it comes out of the box

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But again out-of-the-box TV especially higher-end TVs are surprisingly good these days

Sponsor: Linode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco servers. Whether you’re working on your personal project or you’re managing an entire enterprise infrastructure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions to allow you to take your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco project to the next level. That is Linode. You can simplify your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco applications faster and easier than ever. I personally have been a Linode customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for almost a decade. I host all of Overcast there. The ATP website is hosted there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is an amazing place to run servers. If you want to get in there and run your own stuff, whether you’re running apps or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco installing your own custom stuff, it’s just an amazing web host. They have great support, great capabilities,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and great pricing. You can get started on Linode today with $100

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in free credit at linode.com slash ATP or by texting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ATP to 474747. You can get access to Linode’s 11

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco global data centers, 24-7-365 human support with no tiers or handoffs regardless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of your plan size. And you can use $100 in credit on not only their Linode virtual machines, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their S3 compatible object storage, their managed Kubernetes support and so much more. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once again, visit linode.com slash Click on the Create Free Account button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get started or text ATP to 474747. Get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco started on Linode today. Thank you so much to Linode, my favorite place to run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my servers, for sponsoring our show.

iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We also have iMacs, if you are interested in something very colorful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and 24 inches. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco am loving these colors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m loving these colors as well, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m actually, I’m not super into the way it looks from the front, but the way it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks from the side and back is amazing. because it looks like they’re doing a very, very similar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco color lineup as the iPhone 12, which looks fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Where it looks great from the sides, like the aluminum part from the side looks great, and then the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco glass part that’s now used for the chin that is still there, which we’ll get to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s kind of more of like a pastel-y kind of thing. And I don’t think the chin looks very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good, if I’m honest. But the colors on the sides and back, which seems to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the all aluminum surfaces, look fantastic. And I’m so happy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before we get into the electronics of this thing, I am so happy to see Apple release

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Macs in a wider range of somewhat bold colors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like that’s such great progress and I’m so happy to finally see that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s interesting how they split the difference there. As they even said this in the show, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quite want to put those big bold colors in your face, because that could,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I understand where they’re coming from. Like, people like boldly colored things, but maybe you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that strong of a color, like, actually in your face. So all of the surfaces that face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you are a more muted version, more like the phones. But they went big on the back of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very saturated, very bold, still like, you know, not exactly the same. It has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a more sort of subdued vibe than the, you know, the Candy Color iMac, just because it’s not glossy, it’s more matte,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re very saturated and they look really good. They went big with the Apple logo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the back. I think it’s one of the biggest Apple logos Apple has ever shipped on a product. It is very prominent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe making up for the fact that they took it away from the chin. It’s sort of the Neo and the Matrix where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they take away his mouth, like the front of these things. They have no mouth, but they must

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scream with six speakers. But yeah, no, this is great. And the colors are, you know, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case anyone has not picked up on this from all the Apple advertising, It’s the colors of the Apple logo, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know very close to the colors of the Apple logo on the back because they’re actually saturated just like the Apple logo is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s a little bit of like a cool matte gradient thing going on overall. I think they look pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as As art objects the blank chin, we’re just so used to seeing the Apple logo there But honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it is was always a little bit tacky to have an Apple logo on the front facing you at all times And it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more subtle for it to be on the back Um, uh, the chin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they could have removed, but didn’t for reasons we’ll get into. But overall I think these are, uh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m happy that they’re colored. And also I want to give, uh, the Apple event invitation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sleuths credit, uh, for the folks who figured out that the swirly little springy thing on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John invitation was the E and the L from hello, which actually was a hint that hello, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the original thing they used in the original Mac and they used it on the iMac because it was hello again. And this was about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMac. So those dots really did connect and the the background images that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they show on all of the iMacs that look like the swoopy lines that people thought they look like the old like Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X background images are in fact zoomed in portions of the word hello being traced out in script.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So those dots all connected. If you had that on your red yarn board, give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yourself a gold star because that was all real. And that was a real thing that happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One more thing before we leave the superficial elements of this. I’m actually very glad that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco switched the bezel from black to white. The little border around the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, you’re the only one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know. No one else likes this. I mean, first of all, I think if you look at these colors, they’re bright and pastel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco colors, and the front is especially very pastel. So I think it would have looked ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have a black border and then to have that big pastel chin under it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that would look ridiculous. But honestly, I think the white looks great. I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people are upset about it for some reason, and I’m sure people will write it and tell me, maybe it’s about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the white not matching the white on the screen as easily as black can be absorbed, who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I’m sure there are reasons why picky nerds like many of us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many of me, might have a problem with it, but I think it looks really good in these pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far. Again, we’ll see how it looks in person, but we’ve had white-bezeled computers before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’ve used some of them, and I always thought they were fine. And I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for people who are really upset about that, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this might not be the computer for them anyway, because the computer for them might be the one that a lot of people seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to think isn’t gonna happen. Everyone who keeps saying that they shrunk the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down to 24 inches is missing a really big part of this product strategy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because that’s not what they did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Before we get to the tech specs on the white bezel thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one semi-legit reason that people will be upset is what you got at before, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the screen, the white of the screen is never going to be able to compete with an actual white reflective surface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a situation where you have large amounts of light hitting it, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s kind of like if you want your projected image to look good, darken the room, because then the projected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John image will appear brighter and won’t be competing with anything. But if you’re in a well-lit room or sun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is shining on your iMac or something like that, the white of the screen will look dim and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dingy compared to the white of the piece of plastic that the actual light is reflecting off of to your eyes. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it makes your screen look a little bit worse. Now the good thing about white is that hopefully it is neutral.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s better than continuing the pastel around the screen perhaps, because that could throw off the color

⏹️ ▶️ ^John balance of these things. But honestly, this is not a professional thing where people are supposed to be doing professional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John color work probably. But either way, they put a neutral color around it. But that I feel like is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sort of performance-based gripe about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the white bezel, is that it might make your screen look a little bit worse, right? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aesthetic objections are people think it’s a little bit too soft, right? And they were looking for something more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bold, like the back or whatever, and that’s just personal preference, and it’s like, well, you know, just deal with it. So I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s that big of a deal. I agree that black would look bad, I’m not sure what they could have done otherwise, but this is the design

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they came up with. I think white fits with the design they made because they made it softer on the front, bolder on the back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A white bezel is softer on the front. You know, if you look at it next to the keyboard and the mouse, the mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and keyboard, which also are color matched by the way, they have white key caps, they have a white top to the mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It all fits together to me. And like I said, the lack of the Apple logo, I feel like it’s kind of refreshing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and serene after so many years of having the dead center Apple logo staring at me, I just kind of wish the one in the back was a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Also, for those of you out there who are ordering or plan to order one of these things, please don’t get the silver

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s so boring. Don’t tell people not to get the silver one. I like the silver one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Sometimes you want the silver one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s so boring. Pick a color, go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a color, please. Here’s the good thing about the silver one. It is the only one that’s not two-tone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you want the ultimate and serene sort of just, you know, I don’t want any loud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John colors in my face. I want it to be the same on the front and the back. The only thing I wish they did different on the silver one is that should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be the only one that doesn’t have a white bezel, but that has silver all around, just make it silver, silver, silver. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m glad they did that, because if you don’t like any of these colors and you can’t stand it, or you have a room where you have this minimal aesthetic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything is monochrome, you know, with no color and it’s just like grays, get the silver one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like there’s something for, that’s the great thing about this lineup. There is something for everyone. All of the colors look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. The silver one is the computer for people who hate computers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} no. Oh, you are the worst.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is beautiful and minimalist, right? And so I think we should get to the physical design of the thing, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s clear that this is, I don’t know if this is the hangover from the Johnny Ive era, but clearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is in that vein, because the design spec for this thing was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what if we made it as thin as possible? Like what if it was an iPad on a stand, right? A non-adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stand, which is a shame. But anyway, that was the sort of design brief. And everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else flows from that. So many things flow from that, good and bad, that again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with many of these design philosophies, you have to say, was this the right target?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, it’s cool, it’s thin, but in the end, as we’ve said with all these iMacs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do people care that much about it being exactly this thin?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whether or not they do, that’s what they got. So what flows out of this thinness? The first thing that flows out of it is there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of stuff that you cannot put on the computer anymore. You cannot put an ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jack on the computer because it’s too deep. You can’t put a headphone jack on the back of the computer because it’s too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deep. You can’t put a plug on the back of the computer because it’s too deep. I mean like a power plug, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So many things you can’t do because they don’t fit within the width of this thing. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing is as thick as the original iPhone, okay? That’s how thick this computer is. And it is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thickness from top to bottom. So, so many things cascade out of this decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make it thin. things that impact the use of the computer. Now, luckily, and to Apple’s credit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they found clever solutions for almost all of these. And in fact, the headphone limitation, the fact that you can’t plug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a headphone into the back of this because it would poke through the screen, that actually forced them to not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put the headphone jack on the back of the computer, which was a terrible place for it. Now it’s on the side, which is better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s better

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side because then you can find it without craning all the way around behind the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know what’s even more amazing? It’s on the correct side. It’s on the left.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s what Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John likes, because he’s the headphone guy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because that’s, because this, all their laptops still get this wrong. I’m hoping maybe this is a sign that maybe they’ll,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they will relocate it to the left on their upcoming laptop redesigns, because that’s where you want headphone jacks, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most headphones that only have a cable going in one side have it on the left side. And when it’s on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco left, it’s not getting in the way of the mouse. You don’t have to cross it over. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re the only person who’s using headphones that have a wire coming out of one of the ear cups, because everyone else is using earbuds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that come with Apple products. And this is a mood issue. But I see where you’re coming from. But yes, they did put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it on the left and that is good. And so this influenced all the IO. You can’t fit USB-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connectors on this because they would poke through the screen. So I mean, so it’s got USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Thunderbolt, right? And then the rest of, so that’s the design

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aspect. And they didn’t do an adjustable stand, which given the price of this thing, okay, I kind of understand, but it’s still kind of a shame.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the rest of this, from a technical perspective, I continued, this is the longest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tension buildup in recent memory, not as big as the Mac Pro, obviously. But since the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro has come to fruition here, the new biggest tension buildup is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory of Apple tech as far as this podcast concern is?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What are they gonna do about products that are more powerful than the current crop of M1 Macs? And the answer in this keynote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was, stay tuned to find out, because you’re not gonna find out today. Because what is this? It’s an M1,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly like all the other M1s. They found another, like this ingredient, this M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of system on a chip and associated IO, they’ve put in a laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a slightly bigger laptop, a Mac mini, and now an iMac, and it’s the same computer in many, many different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases, which is fine because it’s an excellent computer. And this computer is clearly the low-end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMac targeted for people who don’t need all of the fancier things. but it just means that we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to continue to wait to find out what they’re gonna do. That’s why this one’s 24 inches. You say, oh, I can’t replace my 27 inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMac Pro with this. No, they haven’t shown you that computer yet. They haven’t made that computer. This is, they kept,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s why they kept comparing this to the 21.5 inch iMac, right? They were not comparing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to the big iMac. In fact, when they showed the family slide later, they said, and here’s our Mac lineup. And to the left

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were all the ones that converted to ARM. And to the right were the ones that hadn’t. And there on the right was the 27

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inch iMac saying, here I am, I’m still big. and I’ve still got an Intel processor, I have still not been ported

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to ARM, that’s not this computer, which is fine for this computer and in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great for a lot of people because now if you want a desktop computer with a really nice screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can get one cheap, that’s insanely fast, that I’m sure is gonna be dead quiet, that looks cool,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that comes in colors, right? And you know, the 27 inch iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like, oh, I need a 5K screen and all that stuff, my difficulties in selling people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on any kind of iMac Number one, a desktop computer, what the hell is that? Who even buys them anymore? And number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two, that’s too big. I won’t have that thing in my house. Like, it is, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 24 inch is a feature to so many people. The fact that it’s not 27 inch, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fact that the bezels are smaller, the fact that it is so thin and small and slight, is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lowers the barrier to entry to people who don’t want a giant piece of technology dominating their house, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s so smart that this looks like a fashion item and looks so minimal and is so light, like weight-wise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is again an iPad, we’ll get to that in a little bit, a literal iPad with an M1 chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jammed onto a stand running Mac OS. And that’s a really cool, great computer, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a pro computer. So if you’re disappointed that you can’t get this with more than 16 gigs of RAM or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t have enough I-O ports or whatever, I think you are mischaracterizing this product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, exactly. The other ways they solved the thinness problem, like again, you can’t put a power plug into this, so they didn’t. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made their own weird-ass proprietary magnetic connector. Why did they do it with magnets? because how else are you going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to connect the power to this thing? Again, a plug, like a three-prong, like, you know, computery plug, cannot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fit in, because it’s too damn thin. So they made a little magnetic thing. You’re gonna tell me there’s a desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without ethernet? They solved that problem by putting ethernet on the power brick, which is something apparently the Chromecast Ultra has done or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, which is smart, because like the headphone jack, I don’t need to have an ethernet cable snaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to my computer. I just need it to be connected to ethernet. So if you plug it into the power brick,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, it’s annoying that it has a power brick, but it’s a smallish power brick and that’s where the ethernet goes. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cool. That’s good. I don’t want that cable on my desk. I would prefer to have it somewhere on the floor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe I would prefer even more to have an integrated power supply, but again, the design decision that it has to be as thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as possible. So this is a weird computer and I’m kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of disappointed that the stand isn’t adjustable because again, the iMac G400 adjustable stand, it wasn’t that expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But overall, I think they made lemonade out of lemons in terms of, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the design brief of this thing, oh no, it has to be uniform thickness from top to bottom, it has to be insanely thin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They were able to pull it off, and in almost every case where they had to compromise, they found themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing something that was actually either just neutral and cool, or actually better. So I give this machine a thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think if you view it as the replacement to the 21-inch iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if you look at who bought the 21-inch iMac, like what was that product for? it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does make total sense, and it is a massive upgrade in a lot of ways. So first of all, like, hardware-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is basically what I’m using now with the prettier screen. Like, I’m using the Mac mini, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1 Mac mini. It’s the same guts, although mine has more IO. But it’s the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guts. You know, it’s very similar guts as my MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air that I love so much as well. Like, it has the power if you want it. Yeah, it has the same limitations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 16 gigs of RAM, two terabytes storage, You know, only a couple of ports, same limitations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but, and I know there’s more ports in the higher end configuration, but still. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still the low end of the Apple Silicon lineup, but that is still a really great computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it is still very much a high end computer compared to what we had before, for many people’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs, including mine. So I would be totally fine to work on one of these things. The screen would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a little small for me now, but you know, otherwise, this is a great computer. And when you look at who buys a 21

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inch iMac, it’s a lot of like low end, inexpensive bulk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buys for things like schools and offices. That’s why they have ethernet on there because lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use these in offices. And it’s also frequently used if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a front desk at a business. And you need the person there to have a computer, but because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s the front desk of your business, you also want it to look nice because you want your office to look nice. And so you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a Mac because it looks nice. You get an iMac, so it’s all integrated. Well now, you have a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better looking and way more modern looking option to pick. And the lack of a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the higher end power user stuff really doesn’t matter for that market. What they want is low price,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relatively compact and good looks. In that way, this computer nails it. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a fantastic, because it has all of that M1-ness to it, like all that great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1-ness, which is spreading even more through the product line, as we’ll get to in a minute. but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has it in still a pretty inexpensive and really nice all-in-one enclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that will both meet people’s budgets who are buying these things in bulk for like, you know, computer labs and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and will look pretty on the reception desk at your business, and will fit into your house, and it just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s so many people who buy this computer that this is such a massive, massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upgrade over the previous 21-inch iMac. So this is great. This is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new 27-inch. This is not the new iMac Pro. We’ll see those later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do think, I am a little bit pessimistic now about the timing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the higher end products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All WWDC, right? Let’s do them all WWDC. It’s the pro show, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I would hope for that. I’m kind of thinking it might not be until fall. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe the M1 is only this chip that we know now. Maybe there is no M1X.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maybe all of the higher end stuff, like the 16 inch and everything, and the new iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is probably what they’re gonna call it. Maybe that doesn’t come until the M2 this fall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. But WWDC is not very far off. So if they don’t have it ready

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, I think it might be a little optimistic to expect that they’re gonna get all those products together

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two months from now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, they’re running out of computers that they can, they’re running out of different shapes to put the M1 in. The M1 is awesome, and it fits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in lots of different shapes. And in fact, the show before, when we were talking about things that they could launch where I was pessimistic there’d be any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macs, I said, look, I can conceive of an iMac that can fit with the existing M1, and that’s what they introduced.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There is a role for the M1 in this shape computer, just like there is for a laptop and there is in the mini, but eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get into shapes where the M1 doesn’t make sense anymore and you need something beefier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The other disappointment I have with this redesign, they’re gonna do the big redesign, which they totally did, here it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a design that would not be possible as they emphasized with Intel things. this is the time to do it, go big,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Could they have thrown Intel under a bigger bus? That was amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They didn’t name them. They said, and I quote, the CPU and logic board were huge because of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the old power hungry processor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that wasn’t the only reason they were huge. There was the lack of integration, but yes, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s all true. Like that’s why this design wasn’t possible, but that’s part of why I have my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one biggest disappointment with this machine, and it’s tempered. it’s kind of tempered slash magnified by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another cool thing they did, right? So they put Touch ID on the keyboard, which we had talked about for years and years, why haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they let Macs have Touch ID that aren’t laptops, right? Oh, you can’t do it, oh, it’s wireless, that would have to be wired,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah. They can totally do it, they did it, here it is. Touch ID on the keyboard, it’s awesome. Color coordinated keyboard, Touch ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and yes, they have one that’s not a tiny crippled keyboard, they have a full-size keyboard. And no, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t get one without a numeric keypad still. So, you know, but anyway, Touch ID on the keyboard, great, thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up. Why doesn’t this, essentially this iPad on a stand, have Face ID? Why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, why? Why is the camera so bad? Why does it not have Face ID? The iPads, they’re the same size.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They use the same chip now, spoilers. They support Face ID. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s the same. I don’t, I mean, maybe it’s price. Maybe they don’t want to add the sensors or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they add a touch ID, so I don’t want to say they didn’t do anything, but like, part of the promise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of you moving the Mac to the same processors as the iOS line is that all the crap they have on the iOS computers now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should be much, much easier to put in here. Not that I’m saying this thing should have 5G, but it’s in the same category,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? We’ll see when the high-end laptops come out, right? It’s right there for you. It’s not hard to integrate the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John M1 with Face ID. Like, just do it. Oh my God, just do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the other thing, the camera. You know, it’s a better camera than it was before, but low bar Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John super low bar, right? And I like the fact that they were emphasizing the computational part, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please, please do that. That is one of the benefits of going to ARM. We can take a crappy camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we can make it look really good with the image processing that we invested bazillions of dollars into making good on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our phones. Good, I love reaping the benefits of that. I just really want Face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID because it’s a screen, it’s staring at you all the time. The camera is never obscured. It’s right there looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at your face. Just let me log in with my face, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe we’ll wait for the next generation for that. But Touch ID is super awesome. And the bonus, the super bonus with Touch ID is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can buy these keyboards separately and apparently they will work with any M1 based Mac. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a Mac mini and you wanna log in with Touch ID, you can get one of these keyboards. Now, I know it’s weird, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John face ID would be better. What if you don’t like that keyboard? What if you like an ergonomic split keyboard? What if you just want Touch ID?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, can you get a little single key Touch ID thing that you can put on your desk? No, you can’t. So you kinda have to use the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboard and they rounded the corners and some of the edge keys and did some other weird things that might not be to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John liking. But progress, kinda like using the Apple TV remotes of the computer is being able to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Touch ID powered keyboard with any M1 based Mac is a very un-Apple-like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John welcome surprise. And I love to see these iOS technologies coming to the Mac. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Face ID Apple. There’s plenty of room on this iMac. It really, like I really hope that they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I’m assuming they’ll stick with the design, that the next generation or the generation after that has Face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID because it’s just such beautiful synergy with this computer, like log in with your face,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and a couple of quick things. I think first of all, I think that is probably more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco likely to come to an iMac Pro kind of model. And second of all, the keyboard with Touch ID, you can’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy them separately, but I think that’s a temporary thing. Like whenever Apple has introduced a new set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of input peripherals, with a new color or whatever, for first even the iMac Pro and then later the Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could never buy them by themselves originally, and then later on they become available. So I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just a matter of time, like this is just a new product and new supply and everything, you’ll probably be able to buy them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco separately before too long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All in all though, I think this is a really aesthetically pleasing computer. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have any problems with the silver, you monster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It looks like, when you have a little color picker and you click on silver, it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something has broken on the webpage, like the CSS failed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} load.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would you stop?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Would you stop? It’s serene,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s serene, it’s calming. Sometimes you just want everything to be neutral.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh yeah, yeah. Anyways, I do think this whole, don’t call it MagSafe, MagSafe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey power connector is very funny. And a lot of people were like, why on an iMac? It never moves. Well, yes, I get that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not, I don’t, the MagSafe is not, do they call it MagSafe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like it’s not safe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s nothing safe about it. Like they had to do that because the only ways to connect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a power cord to something this thin in a way that it doesn’t accidentally come out is essentially mechanical interlock,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which they didn’t want to do because it’s inelegant, or fairly strong magnets. Like these are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not going to save you if someone trips over your power cord, I think. This is because-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There may have been another option. They could have actually used USB-C power delivery and had a USB-C 100 watt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some people talked about that, like 100 watts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If it can fit within 100 watts, which I bet it can, like they actually could have used USB-C PD.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the reason they didn’t want a USB-C is because if someone trips over that, that cord’s coming out of your computer and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know your power is off on your desktop computer, right? They need it to stay in. So my understanding is that these are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fairly strong magnets because magnets were the best choice for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a secure Connection like you can yank out a USB C cable pretty easily, especially as the plug goes in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and out, right? So I understand the USB C thought of like 100 watts is plenty but the connector is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well suited to this My expectation is that this power cord will be harder to yank out Than a USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^John C connector because you really don’t want the power cord coming out of your desktop computer ever really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so it’s like how? How can we connect it in a way that is secure but also elegant?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so that’s what I think explains this. And if they call it MagSafe, I don’t understand what part of it is safe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Except for it’s the opposite of regular MagSafe. It’s safe in that it won’t accidentally get yanked out of your computer, losing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of your work. We didn’t talk about the six speakers, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the chin. Why does it still have the chin? Because that’s where the computer is. Why is the computer there? Again, see the design

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brief. Must be as thin as possible. You could have put that tiny computer on the back of this thing, but then it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t be that thin, so we need some place to put the computer. And the chin is part of the thing, so it’s, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making, mostly making lemonade out of lemons. We have to find somewhere to put the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hey, we can put the whole computer in the chin and still have room for a bunch of these extremely thin speakers that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really hope sound decent. But either way, at least they tried. It’s not just one driver shooting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out into the desk and hoping for the best. to have these very thin drivers that, hopefully they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reaping the benefits of their experience making very thin speakers on like the iPads

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound semi-decent, and now the iMac gets to benefit from that technology because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, because now the iMac has to be as thin as an iPad. Why? Because Apple says so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I’m optimistic to an extent on that. I mean, iPads sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good for podcasts, not so great for music, because it’s really hard to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the iMac Pro actually had surprisingly good speakers too. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is obviously a lot thinner, as they kept pointing out. So we’ll see what it actually sounds like. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve done some pretty amazing work with the audio engineering of their Macs in recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it actually does sound good. So we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One final note on the iPads. I’ll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video of an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ad that actually features, I think for the first time in recent memory in a non-nostalgic way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rainbow striped Apple logo at the end. Now granted, the logo is supposed to reflect the colors of the iMacs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are shown in the commercial, but of course those colors are from the Apple logo and it kind of scrambles the things at the end or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, but it does show a real old school rainbow striped Apple logo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in an official Apple advertising campaign, which even though they didn’t put that rainbow striped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John logo on the actual computers, it’s nice to see it again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and they also have a 4.5 K display, which I thought was a little bit interesting And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey additionally the base model only gets you four colors the upgraded models, which are $300 Excuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me $200 more it gets you the other colors. There are some definitely weird choices on this no inverted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey T unless you get the The big keyboard that has the numeric keypad on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. There are odd choices, but all in all I am super into these I don’t think it’s the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey computer for me me, although I honestly would probably get silver if I were to get it, ahem. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I… It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the white car equivalent of this computer. He’s got you there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that is. I walked right into it. Anyway, the point being, I really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really think these are great looking computers. I’m really interested and excited to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what happens with a 27-inch equivalent. And this looks really, really good. I don’t think I’m buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this, but I’m I’m definitely, like I said, in for an Apple TV and potentially an AirTag,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but the new iMac looks really good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, prices are good too. We didn’t talk about that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} prices are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good. Like all the M1s, because these computers are so tiny and apparently inexpensive for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to manufacture, you get a really nice looking screen and a really good computer with reasonable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very good performance and reasonable storage and memory for not too much money. No, you can’t get one with eight gig, eight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terabyte SSD. you know, you can’t get one with 15 cores or whatever, but for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the market this computer is aimed at, it does all the right things. And they do bifurcate it into the two port

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and four port version and the eight gig. And you know, there’s this typical product segmentation that Apple is able to do within the M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John platform, like Casey said, down to the colors, but all fairly reasonable. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any, like kind of like you can just recommend everyone get the M1 MacBook Air. If someone wants a desktop computer, not that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have many choices, but like this is the clear winner over a Mac mini because the Mac mini is like, okay, then what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hell do I do with keyboard, mouse and monitor? And that is an extremely fraught discussion. It’s like, forget about all that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Spend 1500 dollars and get a beautiful, extremely fast, really pleasant,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dead quiet, colorful desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer. I do hope though, that when they presumably make the big one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever it’s called, iMac Pro most likely, I hope that it is a completely different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco design direction. I hope what they go for with that is something more like the XDR,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like with a computer on the back. Because they don’t need the, you know, presumed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco future iMac Pro, they don’t need it to be this thin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, they didn’t need this one to be this thin either. That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like, they needed to have room for bigger, hotter components,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and more and bigger I-O ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What bigger, hotter components, Marco? Well, right. So it’s the mystery, what? What are they gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in it? Is it just, they’re just gonna take three M1s and tape them together and just.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but you can be sure that those are gonna need more cooling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, no, I totally agree with you. It’s just the mystery is killing me. Cause like just every new computer they put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, it’s like, oh, it’s the M1 again, which is great and awesome and we love it and it’s great, but like, what are you gonna do? But yeah, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. When you say XDR, do you mean like in terms of thickness or do you think they’re gonna have the little triple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hole melon baller holes in there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It wouldn’t surprise me if it had like a simplified version Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the issues, if they’re gonna make a giant iMac that looks like the XDR or is anywhere near screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size of the XDR, they’re obviously gonna run into price point issues in making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it too close to the XDR. I think the, I would assume that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco melon baller case of the XDR and the Mac Pro are kind of expensive to manufacture. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m guessing they wouldn’t go for that that look quite the same way just because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would just be a place they could save some money and offer it at less than $7,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re gonna also have to pay for the computer somehow that’s inside of it, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The computer’s like 10 cents in the corner, it’s just a little.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know, right? What I’m hoping for is a hopefully chinless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco design that uses the thickness of the screen to store the components, and therefore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will have room for deep ports, more ports, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably some giant heat sink somewhere in there so that they wouldn’t have to run fans super,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super fast. And they don’t even really need that big of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heat sink if they’re sticking with the Apple Silicon thermal range that we know so far. I mean, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I know it’d be higher, but it wouldn’t be like, I don’t think it’d be like 300 watts or anything. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I think it’s gonna-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it depends on the GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All depends on the GPU. That’s true. But anyway, so what I hope is that what we see from what we’re thinking is probably gonna be called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac Pro in the 27 to 30 inch screen class. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hope that’s a completely different physical design also that allows them to make fewer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco compromises as this did for its thinness and cool lookingness and just goes all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out as like here’s the pro thing and it’s a thicker thing probably has a black screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bezel probably is offered in more boring colors even though I hope they don’t, but I bet they will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But hopefully, it’s a design that makes fewer compromises.

iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, we’ve got the iPad Pro. It’s gotten refreshed and much to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey surprise, it’s featuring the M1. There’s no asterisks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple just cannot allow logical naming to stand. They just cannot do it institutionally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We seem to have some names that make sense here. So much sense that people actually predicted that the M1 might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be the name of the first Mac ARM chip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} What can we do about that, people? I know, I know, wait,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you there in the back. Can we put the M1 in an iPad and keep calling it the M1?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And someone’s just like, excellent. They just, I cannot believe, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put the M1 in there, fine, but just give it a different name. But no, no, they cannot allow logical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John naming to stand, and now we have no idea what the M stands for, other than, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. Maple Silicon. I mean, I think it’s, my bad. What’s interesting about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, so there’s a couple things about this. So like, number one, I think it’s interesting that, like, you know, the M1, it has a lot of similarities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in like the cores and stuff to the A14. And Apple does ship an iPad with the A14, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most recent iPad Air, and they call it the A14. So I think that’s interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But so this was a, you know, overall somewhat similar chip called the M1. But what’s also interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that, first of all, I don’t think we have exact confirmation that it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same silicon as the Mac version of the M1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We can assume that it is though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like it certainly seems like it would be very close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it has the same feature set, it has the same RAM amounts. Like, here’s the thing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the M1 being in this, and same thing with in all of the M1 computers that Apple shipped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now, including the iPad. Even though it is the same system on a chip, I assume, in every single one of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, and basically the same type of system, they all have very, very slightly different trade-offs related

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to cooling and clocking, right? You know, so, you know, down to the Air with no fan versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the MacBook Pro with, oh, yeah, It’s just, it’s a 13-inch MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a fan, two fans in the iMac, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously no fan in the iPad. That influences, you know, cooling, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John high you can clock it, right? So are they all at the same clock speed? Are they all the same clock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed all the time? There are variances here, even though this is quote unquote the same system, but the variances

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seem to be small given how low power the M1 is. So I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expect the M1 in this to be somewhere between,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere around the fanless MacBook Air type of performance but not be able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John match, let’s say, the iMac with two fans in it, right? By small amounts that you would have to benchmark to measure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that is a consequence of it being an iPad and not being a Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but it’s interesting too, like when the M1 was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first being speculated about and then even when it was released, Many of us thought like, well, they’re gonna make different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trade-offs to make a Mac chip with just even the design of the chip, the things it has, the things it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have, how much of its die real estate it devotes to things like, you know, ISP processing for a camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Macs don’t usually have much of, you know, versus other things like, you know, maybe it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amp up certain things that Macs use more of, it would have a Thunderbolt controller and, you know, iOS devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have no use for a Thunderbolt controller, right? And then what happens is it comes out and it seems like it’s basically the same chip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it has a Thunderbolt controller and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they did make all those trade-offs. It’s just that those trade-offs are also suited to the top-end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad. They’re not suited to the phone. Like, there’s totally not the trade-offs you’d make for a phone chip, but what is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one iOS device, or sorry, iPad iOS device, that is closest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the trade-offs that are appropriate for the Mac? The big iPad Pro, and so that’s what they put it in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s true. But also, you know, the 11-inch. You could, like, it makes some sense why you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put it in the 12-9, but to have the same thing in the 11 is also kind of remarkable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the fact that it can support it in the 11 and still get good battery life in that case is a testament to the power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, it’s a little bit over-specced, probably, for the 11-inch, but, you know. I mean, so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets to the heart of the deal with this thing, right? So, it’s the M1, which means that, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it comes in eight and also 16 gigs of RAM. No, you can’t spec that separately. It’s tied to storage in the typical Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird way. You can get it with two terabytes of storage. Like, this is the M1 in another case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} We’ve got an M1 in desktops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John M1 in laptops. It’s the same feature set. Like, are you getting it? These are not five different computers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s one computer and we’re calling it the M1 and we just put it in different packages, right? But this one is running an entire, entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This one’s running a different OS. It’s not running Mac OS, but it’s the same feature set. And so people are looking at this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and saying, this is an insanely powerful iPad. And I’ve heard some people say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like there’s two threads to this. One is, what the hell am I gonna do with all of this power? The CPU power is 16

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs of RAM, two terabytes of storage. I can’t use that on an iPad. My current iPad is more than fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough. We said this on this show. I think the threat of like using resources

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, I understand where people are coming from because it’s true for most use cases, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is trivial to find use cases that will use all these resources on an iPad. Just use a single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John application, like say Photoshop for the iPad or anything that deals with video, and you will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John immediately use all that RAM and all of that computation power and be waiting for things to be done, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because in the end, it is an M1 computer with 16 gigs of RAM. And it is very easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to run one single application that you use for your professional work and just swamp those resources, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is not a reasonable argument. The much more valid argument is, okay, but I don’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what I do is I run a bunch of different applications and iPad OS is getting in my way. I have all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RAM that I could use and all the CPU power, but your stupid OS and the way it does multitasking and windowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever you wanna call it, gets in my way. If I had these same resources on an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMac or on a MacBook or something, I could do the same job better because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS lets me use those resources in a more efficient way. And that is a 100% valid argument,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I do think that it’s not ridiculous to sell the top of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the top end iPad Pro with these huge specs because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who actually want to do like art on there with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Pencil or otherwise, or actual photography or video on their thing, a 16 gig

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer with two terabytes of storage and an M1 in it is a good computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that, but it’s by no means overpowered. Like this is the reason people keep buying these Mac Pros with afterburner

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cards is that you really, it’s so easy to ramp up media such that it crushes this computer into dust,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So I say kudos for Apple to continue to push the envelope on the power here and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just feels like an instance where, I hate to say this, cause it’s just like, it’s, you know, setting yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up for disappointment every year, but let’s say it together. Maybe at WWDC, they’ll revise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPadOS in a way that allows people to take better advantage of the huge amounts of hardware power that are available on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t hold my breath

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} on that. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, and I don’t fault Apple for like, yes, you should really, if that’s gonna happen, right? By all means,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John release the hardware now, because again, if you’re using one single application that uses resources, you’ll take it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, as Jason Snell wrote in an article, it’s like, this platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is being let down by the software features related to juggling multiple things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the same time that are inherent in iPadOS. And we keep waiting for improvements there that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are slowly trickling out, but the hardware is racing away from the capabilities of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software to juggle all this stuff. Even, so we talked about this last show, how are they gonna pitch, how are they gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell us on this Thunderbolt port, which we all thought it would have and lo and behold it does, because that’s part of the M1 feature set. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got one of them, kind of not great, but anyway, it’s an iPad. And the way they pitched

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is exactly what we said. They’re just gonna say you can do faster stuff with storage and run an XDR, yep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what they said. You can get stuff from storage faster, and you can, and the XDR support,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not like you can suddenly put your iPad OS apps on the XDR and fill the screen, they didn’t change that, because again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would be a software change. All they’ve said is like, okay, now we can drive that display for applications that know how to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show video on a big display Like it’s we’re capable of driving it But the fundamental nature of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how iPad OS deals with external screens has not yet changed so again, we are left waiting for WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and iPad OS 15 or whatever to Potentially do more with this hardware, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hardware is very capable and I don’t think it’s a waste to release this now because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it is a viable and important machine for people who just need more power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on their iPad to do the things they do with it within their one or two applications that can use all this power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it really is impressive. I’m rocking the original of the Touch ID, excuse me, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say that every time, original of the Face ID capable iPads. And I love that thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I use it pretty much every day, but I don’t feel like I’m longing for more power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I don’t really think there’s anything about this that is making me go, yep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I need one. And that’s fine, that’s not a bad thing. There are definitely some really great features in it. And we should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talk about 13 inch in particular in just a moment, but I couldn’t agree with you more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s so much hardware here and it just, it’s screaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for software to support it. And I don’t see that software yet, but I have a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey strong feeling that it’s coming sooner rather than later. The three of us have been making all of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of half-hearted predictions or slash, you know, requests for WWDC this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this is the one that I feel most confident in. I really do think at WWDC we’re going to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some reason for all of this hardware to have appeared in this iPad. And I feel like this is not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey first time I or we have made that speech, but there’s so much hardware here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It seems so overkill and so silly for the software that we have today, but we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just a couple of months, not even a couple of months, less than a couple of months from WWDC, and I have a feeling a lot of that is gonna change then.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And again, it’s not overkill for, in this specific use case, if you use a single application that needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all this power, just Photoshop alone, just pull in a huge number of megapixel image and try running filters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it, you’ll swamp the M1, and you’ll use up all your memory, keeping giant bitmaps in memory and scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around in them, and same thing with video, right? If you think of the high-end iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as like essentially an application console where all day, every day, like on set,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re messing with huge images or video. I keep bringing those two up because they’re the only use cases I can think of that can use this power,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they can. Images and video can use all of your RAM. 16 gigs is nothing to them, and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can use all of your computation and all of your GPU very easily. That’s available right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John today. There are no software limits that are preventing you from using this, but it’s the same way that I think people look at,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, Mac users who buy the Pro hardware. They say, well, my iMac from 2015,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it does everything that I need. I don’t understand why you need these fancy iMacs and you’re like, well, I compile software and like, well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know what that is. And I never do that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} care, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s the same way all of us are satisfied with the power level of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our iPads if we have modern ones. It’s just because we don’t use our iPads for anything that is demanding. And many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people don’t use their Macs for anything that is demanding. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use your iPad for something that’s demanding, every time a new iPad comes out, like they must be dancing in the street at 16 gigs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that is a big upgrade in maximum RAM for an iPad, right? Maybe they even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care about Thunderbolt disk access because they actually use external storage with their iPad, right? You know, there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use cases for this, but you know, the other thing you can do with more resources

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is do more of your small things more efficiently, and that’s the software limit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we should talk about the screen, which as the rumor said, would only be on the big one, and it is. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the screen is fairly amazing. Um, it’s not XDR level in terms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of its full capabilities, or maybe it is, maybe it’s actually close to XDR. But as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I say- It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kinda

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. I mean, it has the same like, you know, peak nits. It’s a thousand nits full

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen, 1600 peak in like regions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s so clearly newer technology though, because the Pro Display XDR is a, you know, is a dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backlight with 576 regions, right? And you know, the televisions have been using this technology forever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and in general, televisions are judged by how many regions they have because obviously, ideally, like in an OLED case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every single pixel is its own little region and then you don’t have to worry about any of these issues, but with LCD technology, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t do that, but the more regions you have, the better, because the smaller you can make the regions, the less you get sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of haloing and blooming around things that are bright, right? And so the XDR has 5,000, no, it has 576 regions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the 12.9 inch iPad has 2,500 regions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is a huge number of regions for a high-end television.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this thing is 12.9 inches, right? So this screen on this iPad is fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing, right? It’s got 10,000 LEDs. This is true of televisions as well. In general, they tend to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more little light sources than they do zones, because every zone you have is an independently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controllable area that software has to essentially know which ones to turn on to what intensity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at what times, right? So as you scale this up, it becomes a computational problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 2,500 local dimming zones is very good for a 55 inch television, let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John alone a 12.9 inch iPad. So the screen on this iPad is amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they made the screen, they made the iPad thicker to accommodate this, which I think good trade-off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because if you want the best possible viewing experience for your pro video or photography

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your portable little iPad app console thing, yes, by all means, make it thicker, make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heavier, add $100 to the price because this is the top of the top of the top end of iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think this screen, just from the specs is incredibly impressive. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think the people who want it will be overjoyed to get it and will be more than willing to pay for it. Because remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, the iPad is so expensive now. It’s still like $1,100 for, you know, and you get this screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the $1,100, you know, iPad. Granted you have to buy the pencils happily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, but like, I think this is a pretty amazing product. Does it come with a stand? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Exactly. You can get an inert piece of aluminum for that price to put your lesser Pro Display XDR on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So real time follow up, the Pro Display XDR brightness, a thousand nits sustained full screen, 1600

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nits peak. Oh, there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Contrast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ratio, a million to one. This is the exact same statistics as the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Liquid Retina XDR display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And obviously it has fewer pixels, right? And fewer and fewer inches because it is of course an iPad. But still, 2,500

⏹️ ▶️ ^John regions in that tiny amount of area is fairly amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it really is incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is the same tech that’s rumored to go into the next 16-inch MacBook Pro. And so that could be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think we’re going to see that next, and it’s going to be pretty amazing there too. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know what I should do is I should get one of those $1,000 stands and see how I can like duct tape a 13-inch iPad to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then I can use Sidecar, and I will effectively have as good,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if not a better monitor than than you guys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, see, here’s the thing about like, yeah, so the quality of the individual pixels is fine, but I’m gonna think you’re gonna find it a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little cramped. Sidecar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} sidecar, sidecar. I just say, like, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So obviously the big headlining feature for the XDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John above this is that it is huge. It has way more pixels, and that is very important for our desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the display technologies, and obviously in a laptop, that’s the ideal use case for this, because you don’t want the laptop screen to be 30

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inches, because that’s ridiculous, right? But for a 16 inch one with these specs, that will be an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptop screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I’m gonna be real sad when my beloved 13 slash 14 inch does not get this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the 16 does, because I am really happy to be off the, you know, 15 or 16 inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lifestyle, but oh, if it had this fancy pants display, I would really make me think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey twice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this bodes well, I hope, for the big iMac, right? Because if the big iMac has this screen, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like combining, it’s, you know, That’s exactly what you would want a Pro iMac to be. Can you take the Mac Pro and the XDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and squish them together into one computer that’s thinner and better in a bunch of ways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and has more dimming zones, and has an equally capable monitor? Like, yeah, the future, the future

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks bright. It does actually look bright, though. These products are great, and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technology that they embody promises even better products, assuming they can figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out what to put in them to be the CPU and GPU, which is still a mystery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s portstolbyatmos, whatever it’s called. It’s made of a bunch of recycled stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Starts at $7.99 for the 11-inch, $1,100 for the 13-inch. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as with most things that we’ve talked about, not everything, but most things, you can order on either this coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Friday or April 30th and then available, quote, the second half of May, quote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This looks good though. This looks real good. Again, it’s not something that I feel like I need in my life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it does look very, very good. and I am excited that whenever the time comes that I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like I really need a new iPad, these things, hardware alone, these things are looking so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phenomenal. And I could have 5G on it if I wanted it, which is kind of neat too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, this is the only M1 computer that has a 5G LTE radio

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good point, good point. But it shows that it’s possible, so now we have even more reason to be angry when the Macs don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have it. Yep. Because it’s the M1, and apparently 5G can be part of that feature set,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which was still, you know, we didn’t know that for sure yet, because obviously 5G is part of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone chips, but the iPhone chips are different chips, right? And so is the A14, again, a different chip. But now we know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there’s no barriers to doing it in an M1 either, so Apple is running out of excuses there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John These iPads present me with a bit of conundrum because I’m still using my old iPad and I wanted to replace it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really want that screen, but I don’t know if I can deal with the size, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, for my iPad TV watching. And obviously, even though the screen is amazing, Given

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that a lot of my time is spent watching shows on my iPad in my bed with the lights off with my wife trying to sleep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next to me, increased brightness may not, increased brightness in HDR may not be a feature. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to think about it. I think I’d have to make like a mock-up iPad out of cardboard and just hold it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and see, could, is this too much for me? I’ve never had one of the big iPads. Obviously I’ve seen them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and used them briefly in real life, but I’ve never had one. So I don’t know how an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that big will fit into my life. but boy, that screen is really tempting me. You definitely don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna be holding it up. No, I’m not holding it. It’s always on a, I would get a little flappy folio stand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, you know? Yeah. And I think the prices are still reasonable given what you get. Like, it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a MacBook Air without a keyboard for MacBook Air without a keyboard prices with a way better screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cool, all right, well, thank you very much to our sponsors this week. Apple, obviously.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple and Apple. Also, our real sponsors, Linode, Podsight,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Yes Please. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join at http.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash join, and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long.

After-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Poor Mac mini has to be in the after show where we tell everybody that for a hundred extra dollars You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now get an m1 Mac mini with 10 gig Ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as exciting as that is and that is exciting There’s something more exciting that we need to talk about. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have a fear yet? No, but my arm hurts like hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only prescription is more shortbread

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is more shortbread. You are exactly right So I was watching as we all were I was watching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the presentation And I had a couple of hiccups during the presentation where I needed to like refresh the page

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that. And it was very brief. It was no big deal. It wasn’t like hearing, you know, the wrong language like we did when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they were first starting to, uh, uh, stream these things live, but as I’m watching, I’m watching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the credits because reasons. And I noticed there’s a adorable little like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bit of clip art that looks like the Ted Lasso pink shortbread cookie box

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and or biscuit or whatever. And then it says Ted Lasso secret shortbread makes about one box. And as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s scrolling up, all of a sudden it cuts out and that’s that. And I’m like, no, I want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see this. I would love to try these. And I assumed that it was just my feed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and that something had happened locally. Well, come to find out that’s not the case and who better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to go spelunking and digging, trying to figure out what this was all about. Then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dear friend of the show, underscore David Smith and breaking shortly before we recorded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey underscore has in his opinion, and I am inclined to believe him, has found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the original source recipe, made a batch, and says it is delightful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I know that I am going to be trying this probably over the weekend. I am super stoked to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh man, I gotta try this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the secret, by the way, which you will see from looking at the images and his blog posts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that any cookie you make with that much butter and sugar is always going to taste good. So just… It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} kind of hard to screw up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, why did this cookie taste so good? It’s basically butter and sugar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, I think with butter sugar who knew

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but and that makes for good tasting things So if you want to if you want to treat yourself, give it a try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, so I am super stoked to try this god. I’m so excited to buy that stupid box for way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey too much damn, buddy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really I honestly might just get like two of the remotes and call it a day. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Get the high frame rate HDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I think I’ll get one because the upstairs one is a 4k the downstairs one is still the old HD one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I think I’ll move them down a level and replace

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HD one. I don’t own a 4K TV, this will be my second Apple TV 4K.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, the Apple, even if you don’t, look, even if you don’t have a 4K TV, the Apple TV HD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a terrible box. So it’s amazingly slow compared like. Yep, that’s why I wanna kick that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of my house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s what I’m rocking right now. That is my primary Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they die all the time and they’re unreliable. Like they, I’ve had so many of those fail. I’ve never lost a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 4K, but I’ve had, I think, all of my HDs except for the current one here, which is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only reason this one has survived is that it’s the beach one. So before this year, it was only used two months a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So like, that’s the only reason this one still is alive. Those, they die constantly. They’re terrible, they’re unreliable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And even when they work perfectly, they’re slow. And so even if you don’t have a 4K TV, nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should spend the $150 to get the Apple TV HD model, when for $30

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more you can get the far better, far newer one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Why they didn’t just keep the old 4K and just drop it down in price, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I might get the bigger one with more storage, in fact. It’s $20, what can you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from Apple for 20 extra dollars? Nothing, you’re gonna double the storage for $20? I’m sold.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Two

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} thirds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of an AirTag. Yeah, or one 80th of a leather pouch for it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from a fancy maker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s true. All right, I am fricking wiped.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, we did a pretty good job here. We got out in under three hours.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, under three is a record for us on an event day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I didn’t even get to say in the whole podcast, this was a loaded baked potato. It was actually loaded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The potato

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loaded. I meant to say that. I didn’t make notes for myself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How do you take your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John baked potatoes, John? Loaded. Bacon, sour cream, cheese. Chives.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loaded. smaller potatoes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you eat the skin or are you a no skin kind of man?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did when I was a kid at restaurants I tend not to. Really, why is that? I don’t know. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know if I trust restaurant skin. What? A lot of stuff goes on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in restaurants. You’re a little bananas, but that’s all right. Marco, what’s your loaded baked potato situation? All the fixings?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t order baked potatoes. They’re too filling for all the starch and everything. I’d rather have better stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that reminds me of, I forget what the sides are at House of Prime Rib, but one time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I definitely did get the baked potato and that in and of itself was like six meals. It was ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Potatoes are filling. If you’re at a steakhouse, you don’t want very heavy sides. You want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco light sides so you can try a lot of them and still have room for the steak.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, I miss House of Prime Rib.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, what side do I usually get at House of Prime Rib? Maybe I get the cream spinach? What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the choices?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s spinach and corn. I think those are the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} options there, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The corn is good if I remember right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the corn is deceptive, because you would think that would be terrible, but it actually is pretty good. But no, I go spinach

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually at a steakhouse. I go with green sides whenever possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, you have to have some greens to cut through the heavy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fatty steak, and so it’s of course spinach covered with cream.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yes, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and that Yorkshire pudding? Oh, gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah, those are really good. The best way to have sides at a steakhouse is to have the communal ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the middle, and then you can kind of get one of everything with a big table, and everyone can try them and share. But in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a context where you have to pick your own and you’re not doing all that big sharing, yeah, I’ll go greens or broccoli

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dinner accompaniments included with the prime rib dinners. A salad bowl, oh, so good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, remember that dressing? It has the shredded, is it shredded beets in there? Like, what is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have no idea. I think it’s shredded

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} beets. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is good stuff. Mashed potatoes or baked potatoes, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there you go. And then you automatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} get- I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I might have had mashed potatoes at least one time when I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you get Yorkshire pudding by default and cream spinach by default.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I, you know, I’ll tell you what, I miss nothing about San Francisco except House

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Prime Rib.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do I miss anything else about San Francisco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want anything else in San Francisco. Like San Jose, like I like seeing everybody, I like the sausage place

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in San Jose and the good vegan Indian place. Those are fantastic. Yep, agreed. There’s nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in San Francisco that I miss except House of Prime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Rib. Samovar, whatever it was on the hill where the bash used to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} be. The tea lounge?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that one wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t say I miss it, but it’s not bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t miss it. I can make my own tea, it’s fine. I can’t make my own steak.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey miss House of Prime Ribs so damn much. Oh my God, I miss it so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very bad cooking steak, for the record.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey House of Prime Ribs is so good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh my God, so good. And it’s such an experience. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco House of Prime Ribs so much, and I hope that, first of all, I hope that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I get back there before it goes out of business or closes or whatever, but that doesn’t seem like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s that big of a risk, honestly, for that place. But yeah, I hope that someday we have a reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to go back there because logically, there’s not much of a reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think if there is an in-person WWDC next year, I think we have to get ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an Uber up to San Francisco one night and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Even though it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be like an hour. It would be like a ridiculous long drive to go to one restaurant, but I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be willing to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, I kid you not, I would absolutely go on a date with you to the House of Prime Rib.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah, I would do that. I would do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it in a heartbeat. Absolutely. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John God. I would petition to go at the old person time, though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, yeah. I’d go at an old person time. I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah. What, like, you know, six?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh, hell yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, five.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean, absolutely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Beat the crowd, get there before everybody. You know, you’re going to have a long trip back and you’re going to be full. So go with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, I’m, I’m big on the old person time for restaurants. I want to be so early that the staff is like, people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are here for dinner already. Yep. That’s me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ll do that. I am, I am more than happy to accommodate. So there’ll be an ATP date

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at house primary whenever we’re all in San Francisco or San Jose again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s totally, totally worth it. And again, I literally want to see nothing else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that city. I just want

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} to go there. I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Moscone. Moscone is nice on

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the inside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s true. It’s kind of scenic. And I like the Yerba Buena Gardens thing. It’s kind of nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What you miss is the conference center. It’s a nice conference center. It’s much better than McHenry or whatever it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Compared to the San Jose. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fair. No contest. No contest. See, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} perfect answer is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take House of Primary but Moscone and drop

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} them in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John San Jose and then I’d be good to go. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you want that though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because it seems like there’s something about San Jose that’s kind of like a little bit of a mystery. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. drop them in San Jose and then I’d be good to go. Well, do you want that though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because it seems like there’s something about San Jose that makes it impossible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for most restaurants to be able to be operated well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Touche, touche. That’s a good point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to blame them, but it just seems like it’s not a thing that can happen there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Except the beer and sausage place and the vegan Indian place. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Miraculously, somehow the people who run the beer and sausage place understand how to take your money and give you food in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exchange for it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in a timely manner. Who’d have thunk it? No one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else understands, but I remember the first time I went there and I made an order and then someone showed up with my food. I’m like, who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you? Wait, what? I just sat down. I didn’t give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money like three minutes ago. I just sat down at my table. How can you be bringing me my food, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John correct food that I ordered and it tastes good?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is so true. I cannot begin to tell you. Maybe San Jose is phenomenal any other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time a year, but during WMDC time, it is so difficult to get a meal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in and complete in less than like 14 hours and have it correct. It is preposterous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so, yes, I cannot imagine what that felt like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, you’re lucky. What we’ve seen in San Jose, you’re lucky if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go to a restaurant during their stated hours of operation and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} open. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s actually open. It’s so true. Like all the basics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not a given in San Jose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John San Jose’s a lot like those movies where like a stranger goes into town and all the locals are hiding from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. Like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like, where is everybody?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know all the locals. Like the town is filled with people, because you came in as a stranger, everyone is like hiding,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And so every time you go into San Jose, you’re like looking around, it’s like, did they see me coming? And all the businesses like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flipped their sign to closed and are hiding in the back and turned off all their lights. Like where is everybody?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, and actually going back to our Truman Show thing earlier. It’s very much like, it’s like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco arrive and everyone there is actually just an actor and they’ve never had to do their job before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of a sudden,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco asking them to do their job and they’re like, I don’t know how to do this. I’m supposed to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} a waiter? What’s my motivation?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. Do we actually have food

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to serve this person? We need to get something they made an order.