432: I Shouldn't Need to Wiggle
27 May 2021Compacted sugar, Jade theories, TV-remote button feel, and looking — but not reaching! — very far upward.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Compacted sugar
- Follow-up:
- John’s Jade/M1X Twitter thread
- Some speculation about the next Mac Pro
- Base-model 24” iMacs have only one fan
- MacBook Air’s rumored “ski feet”
- Apple support document clarifies lossless streaming details
- Bluetooth data transfer speeds
- Lossless vs. Lossy Encoding
- HomePod & HomePod mini will support lossless
- HDMI eARC
- Spatial Audio and AirPods from David Steer
- Apple TV 4K (2021 edition)
- Matt Craig’s tweet
- Installation/Migration Process
- One Home Screen
Settings→Users and Accounts→ [you] →One Home Screen
Accessibility→Increase Contrast→Focus Style- Home-button function
- One Home Screen
- Remote
- Calibration
- Casey’s Apple TV Woes
- Post-show: Casey’s Fan Resolution
Sponsored by:
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
- Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Compacted sugar
- Theories on Jade C-Die 🖼️
- iMac fan variations
- Ski feet
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Lossless audio follow-up
- Spatial audio follow-up
- Sponsor: Linode
- New Apple TV 🖼️
- New Apple TV remote 🖼️
- Apple TV calibration
- Casey’s HOMI Journey 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Casey’s Fan Conclusion
- Casey’s TV Altitude
Compacted sugar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up, and let’s talk about some very interesting tweets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that some, some like super nerd posted. John, John, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siracusa, Siracusa, John Siracusa posted these tweets.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell if you’re doing like a Roderick on the line riff or you’re trying to get back at Gruber with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John above actually. An indirect hit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, actually, I was not trying to get back. In fact, if anything, I need to go on Gruber’s not to yell at him and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remind him what my name is, but actually to yell at him and you, come to think of it, for your absolute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of you, the two of you and Gruber, now I’m all fired up, for your absolute slander
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sweet tarts. Sweet tarts are delicious. Yes, they’re just, you know, compacted sugar, but they’re delicious. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of you, oh, sweet tarts are very good. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big dividing line here between people who can tolerate just like, just give me
⏹️ ▶️ John sugar squished into shapes and people who understand that all forms of chocolate
⏹️ ▶️ John are superior to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I’d say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I was thinking about it. I’m like, well, do you mean like even like the plain Hershey bars that taste like wax?
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I think about it, I’m like, yeah, probably like when I was a kid, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the Halloween candy and you start dwindling, you can always kind of notice like towards the end of the Halloween candy, let’s look
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s left. You know, that really shows you what you actually care about. And I think what would be left would be sweet
⏹️ ▶️ John tarts and the stupid, disgusting, waxy Hershey bar would be gone. Not that I enjoy the Hershey
⏹️ ▶️ John bar, but when you’re down to that desperation, you’re like, oh, what’s left? And you’re looking easy, sweet tarts. You can see that
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible chocolate bar. You’re like, I guess I’ll eat the chocolate bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You absolute monsters. I cannot believe sweet tarts are wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I feel like this is an this is your this perfectly fits with your let’s say I was going to say unrefined. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to think of more charitable reward than I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco refined. But I say your
⏹️ ▶️ John unrefined palate. How about you just give me sugar and paint it a color? I’ll eat it. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, are you sure you’re not thinking of Smarties? Cause Smarties are legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ John no. I know what you’re, I understand. I mean, you’re right. It’s there’s a, there’s a hierarchy, but it’s still as we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John in Slack today, it’s, it’s a hierarchy starting from the bottom with pixie sticks, which is like, let’s not disguise this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and then working your way up to fun dip and then you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey smarties and then you’ve got sweet
⏹️ ▶️ John tarts and you know, all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way up. Now, did, did you enjoy the like white stick in fun dip or were you a like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s just a delivery system and nothing else sort of person.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, when I was eating Fun Dip at all, I think we’d all take a bite of the
⏹️ ▶️ John stick towards the end when you just thought you’re done with the thing. But like I said in the Slack, Fun Dip was kind of a project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well Fun Dip is great. I love Fun Dip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s an activity and a candy. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and as a candy
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not great, but like when you can combine the two things, I mean. Oh, so good. Did you too, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John you two probably missed this, but did you two have candy cigarettes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I never enjoyed them, but I was familiar with them. Did you get the tail end of candy cigarettes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I was allowed to buy them, but they were in the store. Ice cream man
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was a kid. That’s, yikes. It is kind of amazing how long they lasted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now they still make things that look just like them. They just rebranded them as some other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like candy sticks or something, but it’s definitely candy cigarettes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they get rid of the simulated chewing tobacco? That big league chew, remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got that connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s good that you never got that connection. one harm of being a kid and whenever you were a kid, it was avoided
⏹️ ▶️ John by you, but yeah, that was the connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not realize that either, to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had it on the picture on the cover, it’s because we didn’t know about chewing tobacco. If you live somewhere where more adults chew tobacco,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose you would maybe be familiar with seeing the cartoonish adult on the cover with a big lump in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in all fairness, like, you know, people think Ohio is like that when people hear I’m from Ohio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and much of Ohio was, but it started about one mile away from where I lived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love Big Leech. Was it the one that the gum lasted forever, but the flavor lasted like four chews?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is? That’s all gum. Isn’t that all gum? Fair, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John But especially extremely cheap gum that they sell to kids. Yes. Yes. Oh, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like the little strings. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of surface area. So you’re going to really deplete the whatever chemical they put on it
⏹️ ▶️ John that tastes good for two seconds. And then all you’ve got left is just a ball of tasteless gum.
⏹️ ▶️ John least it doesn’t give you a mouth cancer, right kids? Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because massive amounts of sugar have no bad health effects. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s better that massive amounts of sugar is better than chewing tobacco for your mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. It’s it’s a I mean it’s a low bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may all your teeth may fall out but you won’t die of mouth cancer. Oh god.
Theories on Jade C-Die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, here we go. All right. So, John, all kidding aside, you put in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of tweets. Put in? Where are you putting them in? I don’t know. You posted a bunch of tweets. I’m a mess tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You posted a bunch of tweets, and they were the graphic representations of kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the theorizing that you were doing on the show last week about what would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very large M1 look like, or perhaps a series of M1s all kind of squished
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together. So can you talk us through this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John I accepted my own challenge last week when we were talking about those rumors saying like okay Well, you know assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on the same process size here are the rumors Here’s how many cores of the different kinds of the things have
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like just multiply that out just you know we know what an m1 looks like and
⏹️ ▶️ John Again with the caveat that I put 20 times on Twitter to try to defend against people yelling at me about this Yes, we understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s marketing diagrams of its chips They are very little relation to the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John layout of the chip, right? But it’s what we have to go on and ballpark wise
⏹️ ▶️ John the area of an M1 as represented by this thing is a reasonable approximation. If you just
⏹️ ▶️ John say well whatever big an M1 is this square equals an M1 and you know how much stuff an M1 has in
⏹️ ▶️ John it you can get kind of a back-of-the-envelope thing of how big this is gonna be. And I talked about on the show last week but shortly
⏹️ ▶️ John after the show I said you know what I have the graphic of the M1 from the shirts that we just sold
⏹️ ▶️ John I should do what I said and just multiply that out see what it looks like. So first thing I did was
⏹️ ▶️ John I just made a big chip that is like the highest end Mac Pro when they were saying so
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the M1 has four high performance cores four high efficiency cores and an 8 core GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the big honkin Mac Pro rumor one is 32 high performance cores eight high efficiency cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and 128 core GPU. So I made that and I called it M1 XL which is not a real name it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a joke like look it’s extra large just to see how much bigger would be an area again ballpark
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not as if it’s a straight multiplication of the Because there’s other ancillary stuff that ties all this together and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more complexity that we’ll get into just to see the size difference So the size difference as you would imagine is massive. We’ll put a link to the
⏹️ ▶️ John tweet. You can take a look at it It’s way way way way bigger, right? And then shortly after that
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, okay Yeah But they’re not actually gonna make a chip that looks like that because you know It’s not only is
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge but it is if you look at the little diagram It really you know this if they made
⏹️ ▶️ John a chip that was like this It would only be used in that high-end Mac Pro and it’s not like they’re gonna make one for the high-end
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro one for the lower level Mac Pro, one for the MacBook Pro, like they don’t wanna make custom chips for
⏹️ ▶️ John every single one of these things, as evidenced by the fact that, you know, even though we don’t know what they’re gonna do in the high end, we do know that on the low end,
⏹️ ▶️ John they literally use the same chip in like tons of computers, right? So if you’re expecting
⏹️ ▶️ John them to make a totally different custom chip for each one of its high end computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not gonna happen, right? And anyway, what the rumor said, and what Marco was trying to get me to understand last show, but I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John quite getting, was that’s not what they’re gonna do. they’re gonna make these
⏹️ ▶️ John chips with these code names. It didn’t make any sense to me. And I had some info from folks after the show telling me what
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole chop versus die thing meant. Apparently, chop is a term of art
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Silicon world where you, it’s not what Marco was surmising as like binning where
⏹️ ▶️ John you take a thing, you know, a thing that has 32 GPU cores and you just disable 16 of them
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. A chop is, and this is my understanding from a small amount of feedback I got. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John when you take a design that you have for a chip And you say, well, we wanna make a chip that’s like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John with less stuff, but we don’t wanna design a whole new chip. So is there a way we can essentially take like
⏹️ ▶️ John the blueprint for that chip and just chop part of it off and sort of tie up the loose ends, right? As a cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get a smaller chip without having to design an entirely new chip. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird names that I couldn’t make sense of last show were Jade C-Die and Jade C-Chop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jade C-Die was rumored to have eight high performance cores, two high efficiency cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and 32 GPU cores. And then Jade-C chop is exactly like Jade-C
⏹️ ▶️ John die, but with half the GPU cores chopped off. As in they wouldn’t, you know, it’s not like they make
⏹️ ▶️ John it big and cut it off. They cut it off in the blueprint. And then what they print is a thing with 16
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU cores, right? And hopefully all of them work, right? So it’s not as if you make the bigger chip and cut off the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. The whole point is you want to make a smaller chip, you don’t have to design an entirely new chip. You just, you’re able to take an existing
⏹️ ▶️ John design and chop part of it off. That’s my understanding of it. If I’m still wrong about this, someone in the industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John please let me know. But either way, with those code names in hand, now we have what
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is a reasonable graphic representation of what that rumor was saying. Again, we don’t know if these things are true or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here we’ve got the M1. We’ll try to put this in the, Marco will try to put this as
⏹️ ▶️ John chapter art, but I do have a link in the show notes to a high-res ping version of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s gonna be very small to be chapter art. Also, thanks for making it a tall rectangle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, well, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these things in, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will put a link in the show notes to the tweets and also a link to the high res version if you wanna see
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stupid little lines and stuff. Anyway, here is a reiteration of the rumor,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And this gets back to what Marco was saying in the last show that Apple’s gonna have essentially two
⏹️ ▶️ John designs. One is the M1, we know what it is now, right? It’s out there, right? And the other one is this Jade
⏹️ ▶️ John C die thing. And the Jade C die is, like I said, eight high performance cores, two
⏹️ ▶️ John high efficiency cores and 32 GPU cores. and that is a new chip design.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t look like an M1. It looks like an M1 with different numbers of stuff in it, right? But it’s bigger, it’s bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than an M1. And that Jade-C die is the building block for all of their Pro chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be the one that’s in the high-end MacBook Pro. And for the low-end MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a chopped version of that. It’s exactly Jade-C die, but they take the blueprints for that. They chop off half the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores and you get a little bit smaller chip. It’s actually not that much bigger than an M1.
⏹️ ▶️ John and that you put in your low-end MacBook Pro and maybe your low-end iMac Pro or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then for the Mac Pro rumored chips, Jade 2C die is just
⏹️ ▶️ John two Jade C dies, and in probably a chiplet type arrangement. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think they would actually print these on a single die. The whole point is they just have this one design and they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have some kind of interconnect fabric for them. We talked about this many, many
⏹️ ▶️ John shows back, like would Apple do chiplets? Like AMD does chiplets because it’s cheaper to print
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of smaller chips and then put them on a fabric type thing in a single package or whatever versus
⏹️ ▶️ John just making one big die. And some of the feedback we got was like, well, AMD has to do that because
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t afford to have the fancy expensive process that Apple can have, but Apple wouldn’t do that because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worse in lots of ways. And I think that’s mostly true for things like the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John and Jade C die, which will be in fact a single die. But once you start getting up into the higher
⏹️ ▶️ John end ones, I think Apple will end up not wanting to make a new
⏹️ ▶️ John custom single die for this, but rather end up doing something like chiplets or some other way where you
⏹️ ▶️ John take multiple dies and put them in the same package and connect them together.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Jade 2C die is two Jade C dies, and Jade 4C die is
⏹️ ▶️ John four Jade C dies. So that’s the way Apple can get away with making just two chips, the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever they’re gonna end up calling Jade C die, and then they just either chop Jade C die or multiply it out
⏹️ ▶️ John by twos or fours for their high-end computers. And that covers their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire range. So tell me again, walk me through what each of these is. So Jade C-Die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the baseline, and you expect that to go into which devices?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so Jade C-Die is the building block, and that is the other die that Apple has designed. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got all the little traces, they’re gonna print that, that’s the other design they do, because that is its
⏹️ ▶️ John own design. It’s got four high-performance cores, two high-efficiency cores, 32 GPU cores, and who knows what other
⏹️ ▶️ John things, that it probably supports more Thunderbolt lanes, supports more memory, like all the things that you’d want out
⏹️ ▶️ John of a high-end design. That’s the thing they design. That’s the other thing they design. From that design, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get chips for all of their high-end computers. So the first one is a step down
⏹️ ▶️ John from that, because that one has 32 GPU cores. You get the chopped version that has 16, and that would go in the low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro, right? Gotcha, okay. Right, and the high-end MacBook Pro would, I don’t know how they’re gonna divvy it up, but you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got two MacBook Pro-ish chips, as you can see from the sizes, and you’ll see in the picture. Those are both MacBook Pro-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John sized chips, depending on how important GPU is to you, right? And then what do you do for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? Well, you take multiples of those, either two of them or four of them, and you put them together
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same package or, you know, with some kind of, you know, using chiplets or something like that. I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John they could try to make them on one die, but if you look at the size of the dies, that seems highly unlikely to me. But either way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea is that, rather than being like we said in the last show, like the idea that these would be like four actual
⏹️ ▶️ John chips separated by several inches on the motherboard, extremely unlikely. But they could be chiplets inside the same
⏹️ ▶️ John package for sure. So J2C die, I imagine would only be in like the low-end Mac Pro, probably the one that I would buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? The quote unquote low-end Mac Pro, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the 4C one would be the top of the line 40 core giant monster thing that nobody would buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I’d buy it. Of course you would. Yeah, I suppose maybe. Like here’s the problem, because the GPU is
⏹️ ▶️ John tied up in this, maybe I would end up getting the 4C die
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I’m the opposite. I’m like, can I just have four of the C chops, please? And I, cause I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need all those GPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re tied together though, right? So, because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John want GPU power rivaling Nvidia 3090, you have to get the 4C cause the next step down is half the GPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t care about GPU cores like Marco, but you just want 40 CPU cores, you have no choice. They come together. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John again, they’re on the same die. So, you know, and same thing with these things like where would the RAM be? It’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John high bandwidth memory, stacked all around it. There’s lots of nuances of this how Apple can save
⏹️ ▶️ John money. Like one way they’re saving money is by not making custom chip for the Mac Pro, by just making essentially a chip for
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Pro and being able to do chiplets or something similar to stamp that out to the other
⏹️ ▶️ John higher end Macs. But then you also have to say, what is the maximum amount of RAM and how is that tied to the other
⏹️ ▶️ John things? You can use a cheaper process for things like the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John controllers. Like not everything has to be printed at five nanometers like the main JDC
⏹️ ▶️ John die would be. You can stack the high bandwidth memory because memory gets less hot than the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the chip So you can’t really stack those, you know Your actual CPU and GPU dies because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure how you’d get cooling there But you can potentially stack RAM to get higher RAM amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, this is this is all based on rumors. We don’t know if it’s true, but it is this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John Graphical representation of the rumor we just talked about and I think it is eminently plausible And then
⏹️ ▶️ John they will put some more links in the show. It’s about about chiplets and multi chip modules and stacking things with
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of nice diagrams of showing how you can sort of use your expensive parts to make a bunch of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU GPU dies, stick them in chiplets inside a single package, stack the RAM all around it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it starts to look a lot like something that is conceivable to be in the next Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like once we learned what a chop was, I feel like, you know, that was like the final
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piece in the puzzle of reading into these code names. Like it’s right there in the name,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what these are gonna be. And it’s pretty obvious like how they’re going to use these or how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to sell them and what products and everything. And to me, really the only questions are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last half of which I was talking about it, like how are these packaged? Are the 2C and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4C, are those actually single dyes that are just really big and really expensive? Which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from our previous research into like feasible dye sizes that exist in the industry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like it is possible and reasonable to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Jade 4C die as one giant die if it’s for a high-end, expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-volume product like the top-of-the-line Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The good thing is they’re coming from Xeons, which through no fault or thanks
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple is horrendously expensive, because that’s how much Intel charges for them. So as long as Apple undercuts
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel’s giant profit margin on these Xeons, they could conceivably,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, excuse the incredible expense of trying to put this on a single die. I’m not sure that they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John do that though, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, Apple will pass the expense along to us, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, that’s what I’m saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they can undercut the price of the current Mac Pro and still get huge profits, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be more, like, they may not, this is a good test. How much do they care about the Mac Pro? Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John surely cheaper to do them as chiplets, and I don’t think it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John that much worse that Apple would care about it, but we’ll see what they do. I mean, they are called die, Jade 2C die and
⏹️ ▶️ John Jade 4C die, so you can’t tell. Does that mean it’s just two Jade C dies? Or does that mean it’s a die
⏹️ ▶️ John called Jade 2C, which is like two Jade Cs? These are codenames I still don’t like, but anyway. I drew them
⏹️ ▶️ John as like single blocks. Again, these are not realistic anything. I’m just trying to sort of show
⏹️ ▶️ John square millimeters, I guess, relative size. And if you squint at them, you can kind of see
⏹️ ▶️ John how many components are in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m curious, just as a quick bet that we can revisit later when we’re all hilariously wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you think is the cheapest Mac Pro price that you can get the 4C die in?
⏹️ ▶️ John The 4C die? Oh, that’s hard. I’ve been thinking about whether the base
⏹️ ▶️ John price for the Mac Pro will go down or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna say the cheapest 4C die config you can get is $12,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s the base price of the Intel Mac Pro 5? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’d have to do that to compare. If you get the 28 core Xeon, what does that cost? It’s a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s like a $6,000 upgrade. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of those times where I feel confident, which means I’m definitely wrong. I really think it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they chart, well, see, here’s the thing. I was gonna say it’s not gonna be expensive. Then I was like, well, Apple loves their margins. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be expensive just because it can be, not because it has to be. But we’ll never know one way or the other. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they put the 2C die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like the base configuration and only a little bit more money as the 4C die, I think it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less expensive than any of us expect. And you can yell at me when I’m wrong about this, but that’s my guess. It should
⏹️ ▶️ John be, because here’s the thing, like when you go, I just went to the configurator, when you go and you spec, you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it comes with an eight core Xeon, right? And it’s like, okay, what if I want to upgrade? Again, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not how much it costs for the CPU, this is how much more it costs, is they
⏹️ ▶️ John the default CPU, and in its place, they give you the better one. And Apple charges 7,000
⏹️ ▶️ John additional dollars to swap out. Oh my gosh. To swap out the eight core for the 28 core, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I can guarantee you that nothing, no way that Apple makes the Jade 4C
⏹️ ▶️ John will cost Apple anywhere in the neighborhood of $7,000. These chips are, relatively speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the ARM chips, the Apple’s ARM chips, So much cheaper for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple than getting something from Intel. It’s not even funny. Like not even just like
⏹️ ▶️ John half of it. I mean, have you ever seen like the parts breakdown of like how much does it cost for the stuff on the iPhone? The screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is usually the most expensive component, not the system on the chip, right? The system on a chip, they estimate it like, I forget, it’s like $15 or $30.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the iPhone chip that was like faster than all of our Macs for a long time, or my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac anyway. So how much does the Jade 4C actually cost Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to make? I’m gonna say it’s in the hundreds of dollars, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Which is not nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to like a $15 chip, but it’s not $7,000. So in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, that’s why I keep thinking, Apple could make the Mac Pro cheaper than it is now by passing
⏹️ ▶️ John along some of the savings to us. I don’t think they will pass
⏹️ ▶️ John on many of the savings, but I think that, you know, I think they will be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to undercut. So the 28 core Xeon, if you just take the Mac Pro and the only change you make to the configurator
⏹️ ▶️ John is you click on 28 cores, and that’s $13,000. Marco said he doesn’t think you’ll be able to get a J4C under, what’d you say, 12?
⏹️ ▶️ John I said 12, although now, see, I’m rethinking that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that might be too low because the $13,000 base price of the current Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with its best CPU is still with its worst GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, if you bump up the GPU to maybe the second highest option, then it becomes $18,000, because these are now bound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together. I mean, that’s the thing is Apple is reaping the
⏹️ ▶️ John savings on the GPU as well, because they don’t have to buy one from AMD. It’s part of their thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So. I’m going to go up to 15,000 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my estimate, just for the record. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s conceivable that you get a Jade 4C for $10,000. Conceivable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think 12 is closer to what the reality will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, what I keep wrestling with is, I could see Apple deciding, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re just going to absolutely shame Intel and PCs and say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a not egregious amount of money, say, I don’t know, seven grand or eight grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, look at the performance you can get. And that’s because we’re so fricking awesome at what we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. And so I could totally see them going that route, but Apple really likes money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a lot. So because of that, I’m convincing myself that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would do because as much as they like to flex, they really like money. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think 10-ish is where I’m gonna go. You guys are probably right, but I will wager 10-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is how much it will cost to get a Mac Pro with a four seat eye.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think 10 is plausible. I think 12 is more likely. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting back to my base Mac Pro discussion. I think Apple will try to undercut the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro on cost. I think they will say, here’s the new Mac Pro, and shocker of shockers,
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, the prices, if you try to compare them to the previous one, have gone down a little bit. Because Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John costs are going to go way down, especially if they don’t have a discrete GPU, that means they don’t have to buy ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John overpriced Xeon from Intel, and they don’t have to buy a graphics card from AMD and pay their margins.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s huge savings that I think they can’t help but pass some of onto
⏹️ ▶️ John us, right? Especially if they also make the case smaller, you know, if it’s a half-size thing or whatever, they have to cut out fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John of those little golf ball holes. Like, it’s going to be a cheaper machine. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I think what will happen in the chat when we’re talking about this, Apple’s margins will go up on this Mac at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time that I think the price can go down. That’s how much headroom there is. That’s the magic of ARM, is that the cost to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to build these computers is so much lower than it was when they were paying big, especially on the high
⏹️ ▶️ John end, because the higher end you get, the bigger the margins are. The margins on the 28-core Xeon are way higher than they are on the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John chip that was in the MacBook Air, right? And Apple passes
⏹️ ▶️ John them on to us, passes those costs on to us, and then some.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and once you factor in, when Intel’s making a chip, that’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different ballgame. And you know, when they’re making a giant Xeon, you know, that sells to a certain market, but like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can amortize a lot of that R&D stuff across everything they make, including the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone. Cause the iPhone CPUs are the same high performance and low performance cores, much of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff in the chip. Like much of that R&D cost is shared across their entire product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line. And so I feel like they could, you know, obviously there’s always gonna be the inherent high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs of manufacturing large chips, because they’re always gonna have lower yields and cost more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make just at the Silicon level. But like the R and D costs and everything are gonna be much lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple, I think compared to somebody like Intel, because they’re just able to spread it across the entire smartphone market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to their entire PC business.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Apple is building exactly what they need, not whatever stuff Intel wants to put in them for the server
⏹️ ▶️ John market, because Intel is not really building Xeons for Apple. They’re building Xeons for the enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John server market, or whatever, and Apple has to just take what they have. like, well, here you go. You want a high end chip with a lot of cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what we have to offer. And Apple probably looks at it and says, bunch of that stuff we don’t need, a bunch of that stuff we wish it was slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John different. They can make exactly what they want here. And they, you know, speaking of spreading the cost around, they’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John made the M1. And so, and those are the same cores probably in there. And you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the big amount of work that went in was like, the big hit was the M1. And they’re getting some of that back by using it in the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they don’t have to even do that work again. And it’s all based on, you know, iPhone chips in the end too. So there’s a lot of cost
⏹️ ▶️ John savings. This is, you know, in general, Apple’s tech stack is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty well in terms of not wasting effort. We’ve talked before in the past that how,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s easy to forget that Apple uses essentially a single core operating system from their watches to their
⏹️ ▶️ John giant Mac Pros and everything in between. And, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the software version of that, the hardware version of that is totally true now that they’re off of Intel. They do some
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult core design work once and the debt pays dividends for years and years.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, yeah, we’ll see how much of that savings get passed on to us, but I really hope it’s some, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the high end. Yeah, see, my concern is like, because they have, because according to this rumor, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s most likely that they have combined the number of CPU cores and the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of GPU cores together is like into like two presets or four presets, that if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high amount of GPU power or a high amount of CPU power, you might have to take both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and take the costs of both. So I think we’re gonna have fewer options than ever on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new crop of machines that use the Jade series of chips, including, you know, even down to the MacBook Pro, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like, I think we’re gonna have very few options. And that’s not a great thing for cost management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or future upgradability, but that’s a whole separate thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, can we move on from the Mac Pro? I know that’s a-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pipe dream with you too, but let’s try.
iMac fan variations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about something else I really don’t care about. Hey, how many fans does the iMac have?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of the revelations from the iFixit teardown. Apparently the base model iMac, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John candy colored iMacs, the base model one has only one fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the more powerful ones have two.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and there were some, I was like, oh, what does this mean? Because the only difference is one GPU core and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is actual binning, right? I mean, the other thing is the high-end one has more IO and maybe those IO chips
⏹️ ▶️ John cause more heat. I don’t think there’s a lot of heat going on in there anyway. You know, they have two
⏹️ ▶️ John fans may even be overkill. One fan is probably plenty. These are not noisy machines. I don’t think it’s a big deal, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is interesting to me that Apple made that difference. Why not just have two fans in both of them?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re really trying to make them as quiet as possible. And you know, the combination of maybe whatever extra
⏹️ ▶️ John chips they had to have in there for the extra USB-C ports and the one
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer GPU core put it below the threshold in the low-end one. And so the low-end one, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John might be quieter, might be noisier if that fan has to go on more and go up to a higher RPM, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a strange difference that, you know, it’s kind of, you would think for uniformity purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, they would differentiate the machines, maybe just not putting the ports in and then they were the same thing under
⏹️ ▶️ John the covers, but that’s a pretty big difference. And no one has mentioned that who’s gotten review units. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if everyone got the high-end ones or everyone got the low-end ones, mostly because in general, you can’t hear these things anyway so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly academic, but I thought it was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was kind of curious why they didn’t try a more passive design with the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like if you look at how the M1 MacBook Air is physically designed, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it is fanless, it basically uses the air around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chip’s heatsink as kind of like a thermal buffer because for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various ergonomic safety reasons, laptops can’t be above a certain external temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they didn’t just like bond the heat sink to the exterior casing and transmit all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat to the casing. They kind of like use the air inside as like a thermal cushion slash insulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash thermal mass whatever it is. So the heat sink is not directly touching the outside of the case. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the performance of the MacBook Air is limited by basically like how much heat they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dissipate with a very small heat sink really in a pretty small enclosed space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac is a much bigger space, and I know they don’t have a ton of room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that thickness behind the display, but I’m surprised they didn’t attempt a totally fanless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac as well, and basically use part of that massive display area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is mostly an empty cavity, I think mostly for speaker reverberation or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have just a giant heatsink with a giant air pocket and have that be totally fanless for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much longer time than the MacBook Air can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, well, the iMac is thin, and also that giant screen does produce its own heat. So it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the only thing in there
⏹️ ▶️ John producing heat is the system on a chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John just so thin. Is it thinner than the MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might be, if you include the feet, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s tight in there, and that screen has gotta be producing a lot of heat. I think a lot of the stuff behind the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John might also be for dissipating heat from the monitor, but I think if they made the right call, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s super duper quiet, give the desktop some fans. You don’t want it thermal throttling. It should be one of the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John to having it plugged in all the time, you don’t have to deal with any thermal throttling. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John about the iPad with the M1. There’s no air gaps in there for that thing to be a thermal buffer. Is the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John clocked lower? Same thing with the iPad. It’s not like they’re gonna heat weld that system-mounted chip to
⏹️ ▶️ John the case either because you don’t want your iPad to be hot in your hands either. That’s true. I mean, bottom line is the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 doesn’t produce a lot of heat, so you have a lot of options and it’s generally quiet and kind of cool.
Ski feet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of the MacBook Air, let’s talk about the ski feet. Alex Elkins writes, the MacBook Air ski
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grips could also be so that the grips actually work when the laptop is on your lap. With grips at the corners,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they don’t really do much when the laptop is sitting on top of your lap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess it depends how far apart your legs are. The rumored picture showed the little, you know, rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John skis on the bottom at the sort of at the far edges of the laptop. So if your knees are together, those
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber strips might be still floating in the air. But it’s a theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lord Matthew also writes that the ski feet lines under the new MacBook Air are probably sewed super grippy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the table to help Macs safe function correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bigger contact patch for higher Gs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, plausible, but I mean, like it could just be a style thing as people have pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Like if you look under the horrendously expensive Pro Stand, it also has two rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John strips like that. The iMac, I think also the new iMacs also have two strips.
⏹️ ▶️ John might just be a style thing. I’m trying to think of like a functional reason why, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, why having two strips is better than having like a u-shape or, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I don’t know, on a laptop I think it’s gonna be weird, but we’ll see if that rumor is even true.
Sponsor: Memberful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Memberful. You can monetize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your passion with membership. Memberful allows you to build a sustainable, recurring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue by selling memberships to your audience. It’s used by the biggest creators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web because they offer everything you need to run a membership program, including custom branding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gift subscriptions, Apple Pay, free trials, private podcasts, and tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. Things like analytics, member management, everything you might need to run membership programs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Memberful brings this to you incredibly easily. So you don’t have to build it all yourself, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hire programmers and everything else, Memberful does this all, and it seamlessly integrates with the tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you already use. With Memberful, you retain full control and ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your audience, your brand, and your membership. Your brand stays front and center,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Memberful kind of fades into the background, so like they’re not beating everyone over the head with their branding, it’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and your branding, because you’re selling this to your audience. They have a world-class support team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever need it. They will help simplify your memberships and grow your revenue because Memberful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is passionate about your success, so they always give you access to real humans to help. You can get started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free with no credit card required at memberful.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Once again, get started for free with your membership program at memberful.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.
Lossless audio follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have some more news with regard to Apple’s lossless audio in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music. Does somebody like Marco want to tell me about this? Because I really don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much. I didn’t see this follow up. Hold on. You
⏹️ ▶️ John want me to take this voice? Yeah, go ahead. Yes, please. So there was
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple support article put out explaining some of the nuances of
⏹️ ▶️ John lossless stuff, right? So this is a bunch of info
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, but we’ll pull out a few highlights. One is regarding the Lightning 3.5mm cable for AirPods Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John In other words, when you connect a wire to your AirPods Max, the support document says, the Lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John 3.5mm audio cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to movies and music. AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing lossless and high-res recordings
⏹️ ▶️ John with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog to digital conversion in the
⏹️ ▶️ John cable, the playback will not be completely lossless. So the in the cable part is the thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John think either I didn’t know or I’d forgotten about. Is there a DAC in that cable? Is that what it’s doing? So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there so you can listen to analog audio sources, but apparently it’s taking the analog audio and
⏹️ ▶️ John converting it to digital for, I don’t understand this. Marco, can you try to explain what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, my best guess is that the cable itself does, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure if inside the cable actually has a DAC, which would be at the lightning end. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do fit, that’s how the little lightning to USB or lightning to headphone adapters work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, that’s what I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you could put a really tiny little crappy DAC in there and it would be fine. But the main reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to become digital in the first place, on the way from analog source to your analog ears,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is most likely because the entire signal path inside the AirPods Max is digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things like the noise processing. So that’s probably why it has to then resample
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any analog input as digital and just do a very, you know, low latency conversion and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing of that. So that’s probably what they’re doing. And that is, you know, common in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry to do stuff like that, you know, in certain areas. You know, even most microphone interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, most of the good ones have like digital processing, which is actually one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the reasons why I still prefer my old sound devices USB pre two, which as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I can tell is like all analog processing stream compared to the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sound Devices MixPre series, which I think does digital processing because I sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slightly different and worse in my own ears on a MixPre than I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a USB Pre 2, and I think what I’m detecting is a little tiny bit of latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the digital signal path. Anyway, so making that very low latency is hard, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know quite how low it could reasonably get and still do any level of processing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, that’s probably what they’re doing in these headphones for all that. So what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically saying is, it’s not going to be lossless, there will be some loss of quality because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the way from your analog source through the analog cable into the headphones, it’s being converted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to digital one more time before it’s processed and then converted back to analog for your ears.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and then Basically, this is just their technical explanation of what we said in the last show, which is you think you’re gonna get a lossless key
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to a cable, and you’re not, in this case with the AirPods Max, right? So that’s their explanation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a little bit confusing because they don’t go into too much technical detail, but what you said, Marco, sounds plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John They also say in the document that Apple’s lightning to 3.5 millimeter adapter that you use to connect
⏹️ ▶️ John wired headphones only supports up to 24-bit to 48 kilohertz, and if you need something higher, you need
⏹️ ▶️ John a dedicated DAC for that. And we knew that like we would
⏹️ ▶️ John see on the last show, it seems like that all of the DACs that are built into the stuff that Apple has, including the tiny cruddy one that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John inside this little adapter, don’t support 192 kilohertz, right? So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want that, you gotta use something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and a few other points to add to this. Number one, people tend to think that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality of the DACs matters a lot between like whether it was the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone port on older devices, or whether it’s like a little stupid little headphone dongle that we were just talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think when people can detect differences in quality in like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new lightning to 3.5 millimeter adapter versus old jacks, I think they’re actually detecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difference in amp power, because the little tiny little amp that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be in that little adapter is gonna probably be weaker than whatever amp was built into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone before. And where that manifests itself in like noticeable way is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re probably not gonna hear like noise differences, but you will probably hear like, if that little amp doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have enough power to like hit a strong bass note or something, that’s like a big power spike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re amplifying something. And usually, like depending on what kind of headphones you’re plugging that into, if you’re plugging it into like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger, nicer, maybe headphones that are not entirely meant for portable use and maybe meant for like studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use or high-end listening, like with powerful amps, you would notice like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds kind of muddy at the low end because it’s not getting enough power actually deliver that big thump for the bass note.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A couple other things to mention here before we move on. The reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth headphones don’t support these lossless codecs, I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Bluetooth data transfer speeds were not as high as I thought they were. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to stick to Bluetooth low energy, which I would imagine Apple probably does whenever possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for battery life reasons, they actually don’t have the bandwidth to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmit a lossless stream above like basic CD quality basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think even CD quality would be pushing it. So yeah, Bluetooth does not have a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data transfer bandwidth if you’re keeping it within a low power envelope. So that’s possibly one more reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why AirPods don’t support the higher range of things. In addition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them just probably not even having built-in DACs that go higher than 2448.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least with losses in particular, they probably can’t stream lossless just for bandwidth reasons alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see how Apple works on that in the future. Like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can compress losslessly, but lossless compression, as I mentioned last week, tends to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco max out at around 50% efficiency. And you can’t guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it will hit that efficiency. Like there will be bursts in certain complex passages where it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit that efficiency. And so you have to accommodate for the full bandwidth of the signal, like the full uncompressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bandwidth, you have to accommodate for that when you’re figuring whether something has enough bandwidth or not to transfer. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to deal with. And then finally, we actually didn’t really spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much time last week talking about the difference between lossless and lossy coding. I spent a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of time and we debated a lot about high sample rate and high bit depth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so basically higher than CD quality sampling of audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we didn’t really talk at all about like compressed formats, lossy compressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formats like MP3 and AAC versus lossless formats like FLAC and ALAC and just uncompressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did want to touch on that briefly this week, but I don’t have that much to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say about it because this has been talked to death for so long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last like 30 years. We all have heard bad MP3s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like the 128K MP3s that we all pirated from Napster in the late 90s. Like, yeah, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard bad MP3s. Like my first MP3 was Bullet With Butterfly Wings. It was 128K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sounded like garbage. I couldn’t even play it at full fidelity because I still had a 486 based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC at the time. And so I had to only play it at half quality because a 486 was not fast enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play an MP3 in real time at full quality. But anyway. That’s sad times. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s all right. My 400 megabyte hard drive couldn’t hold many of them anyway. I only had like four or five songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I had to fill it up. Anyway, so the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MP3 and especially the more modern formats like AAC and especially if you go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the new stuff like Opus, these compression algorithms are so good, almost no one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can hear a difference between lostly and lossless. in these, like if you take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same input and compress it well at reasonable bit rates, like 256K,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no one can hear it. The only people who can hear the difference typically are people who are trained specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like identifying exact certain type of situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the audio that that compression codec is not super good at encoding. And you can kind of picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the problem with the HBO static logo in video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can test how bad a video codec is by playing the HBO static intro from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old HBO show, and you see it just macro blocks up like crazy and it looks terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are audio equivalents of that, that if you’re a super compression nerd, you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some research and you can train yourself to figure out, okay, this kind of pattern in the sound, the compression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithms are not good at reproducing this, especially if it’s below certain dynamics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And so people have trained themselves to try to hear those differences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even those people have trouble doing it reliably when the input is well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encoded and encoded at a high enough bit rate. And even then, it’s like, you would have to be paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such close attention and know exactly what you’re listening for, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the flaw you’re listening for to be able to detect that difference. I’m not gonna say that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can hear the difference. I will say almost nobody can hear the difference And the people who can, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it a lot of the time. So, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference between a lossy codec and a lossless codec is yet one more reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lossless generally is not worth it for almost anybody. As we mentioned last week, you know, the files get way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s less practical in a lot of different ways. But like, the difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the difference is sold to people as a way to have them upgrade to higher end plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and buy higher end gear and everything else. In practice, I’m telling you as a self-professed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audiophile, it’s not something I can hear. I have tried, I’ve tried teaching myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to do it, I can’t hear it. Granted, I’m almost 40, maybe it’s just my ears, but I couldn’t hear it when I was 20 either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so maybe I’m just, I’m too much of a plebe to hear that, I guess, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t hear the difference. And in actual like blind or ABX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style testing, most people can’t hear the difference. almost nobody can hear the difference. So enjoy your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lossy format if you wanna save all your disk space because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we all do for good reason. And if you really think you can hear that difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can really spare a massive amount of disk space and bandwidth and everything else, fine, enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your lossless file. No one’s gonna stop you, but most people are not gonna need that. Well, I think I’ll add to that
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and a bunch of people wanted us to mention this in case people listening don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John How is this possible? How is it that a lossy compressed file that it’s encoded well, 256 kilobit
⏹️ ▶️ John AEC, well encoded, is indistinguishable to most people’s ears from a much, much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John lossless file? How does that even work? It’s exactly the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John that image compression algorithms work, which people may be more familiar with because we probably all see JPEGs
⏹️ ▶️ John on the web all the time. The way these algorithms work is they throw away information
⏹️ ▶️ John that our brains don’t consider important. So for images, you know, boy, our
⏹️ ▶️ John visual system is a mess. You think it works just like a camera where it just gathers all the RGB values of all the pixels. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not how our visual system works at all. Our visual system is massively broken. See every optical
⏹️ ▶️ John illusion you’ve ever seen. But anyway, there are quirks to our visual system that let us throw away huge amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ John information from images and our eyes say, I don’t see anything missing, looks fine to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why if you get a JPEG and you, you know, crank up the quality of a JPEG to a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John level, it looks almost identical to the original ping image despite being like 1
⏹️ ▶️ John 18th the size. But audio is the same way. There are certain things in audio that our brains don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John consider important and don’t really detect. And if you throw out that information, it makes the file smaller. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John when we listen, the reason we can’t hear a difference is because it threw out stuff that we weren’t hearing anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more complicated than that. But like, that’s what these things are called, perceptual algorithms. They use how we perceive sound
⏹️ ▶️ John or vision or whatever, to figure out what they should throw away. Because in the end, if you want to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, and if it’s a lossy codec, what lossy means is they’re throwing away
⏹️ ▶️ John information. And if you just threw away half the information, it would be terrible. But if you throw away the half that we weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hearing or seeing anyway, yeah, it’s not that bad. And again, we throw away 10% and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which makes me think, if you have different perceptions, say you’re a different kind of animal,
⏹️ ▶️ John like cats and dogs or bats or whatever, an algorithm that is indistinguishable
⏹️ ▶️ John from lossless to us is not necessarily indistinguishable to another being that
⏹️ ▶️ John has a totally different sensory set. Like you can imagine, this is a great sci-fi, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most world’s most boring sci-fi short story. We land on an alien planet and we look at their
⏹️ ▶️ John images on their webpages and they all look like garbage because their version of compression throws away information that their alien
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes don’t consider important, but it throws away like all the information that our eyes consider important, so we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read their ad banners on their websites. Anyway, that’s free.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can turn that into a tweet link sci-fi story and post it to that. What is that, a Twitter account? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like mini sci-fi fantasy stories. They post sci-fi fantasy stories that fit in a single tweet.
⏹️ ▶️ John This one will be tough because it’s kind of high concept with the whole lossy compression algorithms and alien web, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John someone could make it work. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I am happy to report that HomePod and HomePod Mini will support Apple Music Lossless. Apple says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they currently use AAC to ensure excellent audio quality. Support for lossless is coming in a future software update.
⏹️ ▶️ John that was nice. Like, we were asking that question last time. Like, what is it about the HomePod that would not allow it
⏹️ ▶️ John to do lossless? Because, you know, it’s got plenty of bandwidth. They’re all on Wi-Fi. Like, it’s not like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we could, they’re all networked together. If we could somehow tell, I mean, the HomePod is a little computer itself. Just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you play the music from Apple Music, and then why can’t you get the lossless and play it? And the answer seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the software team’s responsible. the HomePod didn’t get that done yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco until, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because what it does now is it just plays the AC. But anyway, it’s nice to see that support coming.
⏹️ ▶️ John It probably doesn’t really make a difference if you’re listening on the HomePod mini. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like, to Marco’s point last show, your speaker is your problem there, not really the lossiness
⏹️ ▶️ John of the music you’re playing, but you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, even on the full-blown, big, big discontinued HomePod, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a wonderful stereo pair, First of all, it’s doing so much processing to that audio that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no real benefit in feeding it something like super pure, like pure signal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uncompressed 24, 1 to 2, because it’s going to do the same thing that the headphones are doing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to sample it as digital and process it in a certain pipeline and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another point we should point out, though, before we move on from that, is one of the other pieces of feedback we got, which is not really relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John to our discussion, but now it suddenly is because you’re talking about reprocessing audio. one of the contexts where
⏹️ ▶️ John high bitrate, you know, 24-bit, no 192 kilohertz audio files,
⏹️ ▶️ John where that is actually useful, is in the audio production pipeline. Not the finished product,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the audio production pipeline, because if you’re running it through a series of steps and grinding it up, you really wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John have a little bit of excess quality, because every time you do some processing, you shave off some edges or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as if we’re saying these formats are pointless. We were talking about for end consumers, like when you
⏹️ ▶️ John download a song, this is the final product that you’re gonna listen to. That point, it’s pointless for you to get 24, 182 kilohertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But for processing, maybe not. So to your point, Marco, about, well, the HomePod’s gonna chop up
⏹️ ▶️ John that audio anyway. I still don’t think this is true, given the quality of the speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ John are in the HomePod, but theoretically, if you fed it a higher fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ John file and it chopped it up through its machinery, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John would come out slightly better if it was a little bit of excess quality that you couldn’t hear on the way in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I’m glad you made the distinction because we did hear from a couple people who were like, you know, I work in a recording studio and we record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 24-bit. And it’s like, well, yes, you should record at 24-bit. I’m recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this podcast right now at 24-bit lossless because I’m gonna do stuff with the files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t deliver it that way. It is funny, I actually, as a joke, I wanted to deliver last week’s episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as lossless as an option, but the 24-bit, 192 kilohertz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stereo lossless file was four gigs and I didn’t think it was worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting that up anywhere for nobody to be able to download it and if anybody did it would cost a fortune.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah that was a fun joke. Anyway yeah so there is like there is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason for these formats to exist it but it’s not in like delivering them to consumers after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve already been mastered and mixed and everything at that point yeah there’s not much point. I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the on the HomePod We got this, I don’t think we ever talked about this on the show yet, the HomePod, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size HomePod, and with the new Apple TV now supports this eARC thing. Was this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our list anywhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is kind of amazing. So HDMI ARC is, I think, Audio Return Channel
⏹️ ▶️ John is what it’s called, right? Yeah, eARC is not new, is it? Is it like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think eARC is like ARC 2.0 or something, who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it doesn’t matter. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not new. It’s new to the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so there is a protocol that TVs can use to send audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to send whatever audio the TV is playing back down an HDMI cable to a receiver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. You know, something to play audio. Apparently, the new Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s the hardware that requires it, I don’t think it’s just a software change, I think you need the new Apple TV to do it, but if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Apple TV, and, you know, one or two original, big, discontinued HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It now supports the thing where the TV can, through eARC, connected to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV, can play any TV audio, including stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not playing from the Apple TV, like a game console or something. It can play any TV audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through those HomePods as your TV speakers. Now, there’s a massive disclaimer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. We don’t know how well this works yet. We don’t know how much latency it might introduce, which could be bad for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like games. But I do think A, this is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature. B, I think this is the most ridiculous, convoluted way Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have possibly added a line into a product, and that’s funny. And C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is it only on the old HomePods that aren’t being sold anymore? Something happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the HomePod product line. I don’t know what happened here. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope, I assume that the reason the big HomePod was discontinued while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s seemingly still getting new features that the small one doesn’t have. I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is possibly COVID-induced supply chain disruption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combined with poor sales of that model while they hopefully are preparing some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of new big HomePod, but it just isn’t ready yet. Like that’s what I’m hoping is going on here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I mean, the HomePod Mini is a fine product. I have a bunch around the house now, I like them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the big HomePod sounds so much better. it’s such a nicer experience, like listening to stuff on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big HomePod. I hope that that line is not done yet, as we said before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what we’re seeing now from like, how the big one keeps getting new features mysteriously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when the small one doesn’t have them, or gets them like much later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that supports that theory that Apple’s probably not done making new HomePod models yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably just got some kind of, you know, disruption or ended the big one early because it was selling so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poorly or whatever. But hopefully, hopefully, there will be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large HomePods in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the simpler explanation is who the heck wants to listen to their TV over their HomePod mini?
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s probably worse than the speakers are built into your TV so don’t do that.
Spatial audio follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then final piece of follow-up, I promise. We had an email from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Steer. And maybe the two of you already understood this, but I just could not wrap my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind around what people were saying with regard to this. And this was the first time it really clicked for me. So the question that David was answering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, why is it that the original AirPods, the non-pro AirPods, support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spatial audio, but don’t support it in the context of video, or whatever it’s called when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with video? So you can’t do the thing where if you twist your head while watching a show on your iPad, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change the soundscape. But you can use spatial audio with Apple Music when that’s a thing. And David
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, the reason first-generation AirPods will work with spatial audio is because it won’t be proximity based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for music. It kind of makes sense for video where you have a fixed position in relation to the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, with music, the listener is likely to be moving around, so it’d be extremely disconcerting to have the sound continue to emanate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a single point in space. So what David’s saying is, if you think about it when you’re watching a video, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear theoretical origin of the sound, which is the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you’re just listening to music, there’s no real origin of the sound. And so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to worry about mutating and changing that sound as you move your head, necessarily, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no spot that it’s supposed to be coming from. And again, maybe the two of you are way ahead of me on this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it just did not click in my mind until I read David’s comment, so I wanted to share.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why we were talking about the lack of gyroscope last time orientation versus just accelerometers and all
⏹️ ▶️ John that good stuff. The only thing I add here is that a lot of people wanted us to tie this in in case this wasn’t clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John The spatial audio stuff obviously ties into the AR VR stuff, right? So many things
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple does tie into the AR VR stuff. In fact, we’ve talked a lot about this when spatial audio
⏹️ ▶️ John was first introduced and when the AirPods Pro came out with their transparency mode and how that was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of audio AR. are. Yeah, obviously, if and when Apple ever fields an AR
⏹️ ▶️ John VR product, this technology will surely be heavily featured because it is essential for
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of cool stuff to work when you’re wearing AR VR glasses and or goggles and or whatever.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers. Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing an entire enterprise infrastructure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you deserve simple, affordable and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to develop, deploy and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have used so many web hosts in my career so far, and I’ve been with Linode the longest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way before they were a sponsor. I chose them on my own. I did my own research, I use them myself, and I’ve stuck with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for almost a decade now because they are frankly the best web host I’ve ever used, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even close. It’s by a pretty wide margin. They just give you incredible capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible value, and incredible support if you ever need it. And that’s what you’re looking for in a web host.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can they power your stuff? Can they support it when you need help? And can you afford it? And that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode is just great all around. All their stuff, they have all sorts of servers and new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services and add-on services and different capabilities, different specialties if you need, things like dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compute instances or GPU accelerated plans, high memory plans. They have an S3 compatible object
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage system now, managed Kubernetes support, and so much more. You can see for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by getting started on Linode today with $100 credit. You can find all those details at linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP or text ATP to 474747. That’ll get you instant access to $100 in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free credit. So once again, go to linode.com slash ATP, click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that create free account button to get started or text ATP to 474747. Get started on Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco host and hosting all my servers and for sponsoring our show.
New Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Apple TV 4K. All three of us have received at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them, and by received I mean pay for it. We’ve all got one. We’ve got new remotes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know where we want to start on this other than this delightful tweet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Matt Craig. And the tweet reads, the box leaves little doubt what the selling point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this time around. of the previous Apple TV 4K and a picture of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, the box of the previous Apple TV 4K and a picture of the box of the new Apple TV 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the difference between the two, other than a little bit of size difference, is that if you look at the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV 4K, you see this black box, you know, the Apple TV box. If you look at the Apple TV 4K box,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see the black Apple TV box and the remote is shown right there on the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we’re really excited about it. So I thought that was really delightful and quite funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one of the couple of things that’s a little bit strange and on Apple like about
⏹️ ▶️ John the new Apple TV 4K box, like the packaging that it comes in. Look at the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, see this picture on the chapter, look at the previous Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K. That looks like an Apple box. Dead center is a top view of the Apple TV. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is very sort of elemental and spare. And then look at the new box.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of tight, like the two elements the picture of the remote and the box are kind of jammed
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, and it’s not symmetrical, it’s not a particularly pleasing composition,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like it’s so important that you understand that this thing does not come with the old remote. Like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I wonder if they even considered like, let’s just put the remote on the cover.
⏹️ ▶️ John not even have, because the Apple TV just looks like a black void anyway. It’s a black rounded rectangle, right? You can barely see
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV, you know, the Apple logo and the letters T and V on the top of it. How about we just put the
⏹️ ▶️ John remote? Because honestly, that’s the only thing people touch. You don’t see the little box, it’s under your TV somewhere. It’s black,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got one little light on it, right? So yeah, this is all about the remote. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, the other thing is, I think the box had to be physically bigger because the remote is bigger. So
⏹️ ▶️ John once you had the boxes physically bigger, maybe putting the Apple TV in it started to look a little lonely with all
⏹️ ▶️ John that white space, but yeah, it’s all about the remote. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I figure we can just kind of go through what we have here in the show notes and talk about the experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first setup. Again, I was coming from the first, I don’t remember the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey formal name for this, but the first generation of Apple TV that actually let you install apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d never upgraded since, as we talked about quite a bit over the last few weeks. It’s still 1080, it’s 100
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megabit Ethernet port, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And before I installed my new Apple TV in its place, I remembered that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a thing, and I forget exactly where it is, I’ll put it in the show notes, but I won’t remember off the top of my head, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a thing, and it’s something like use a shared home screen. Again, that’s not actually what it’s called,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but something like that. And I thought to myself, you know what, I should verify I have this on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did find it. It is buried in the menu system. Again, I’ll put the steps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes, but basically I verified it was on on the old Apple TV, and then I disconnected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and I put the new Apple TV in its place, Committing the same sin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did before of using the same power cord that was already there the same sin I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John committed that’s a difference
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is literally a power
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wire. There is no, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know wall wart brick So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m actually safe in doing that case you have power operation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I’ve done that every time I’ve upgraded an Apple TV. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to get behind their TV, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, I did and we’ll get it. We’ll get to that later on but nevertheless I I plug it in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know I reuse all the same cabling and all that that’s there and And the setup process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pretty darn good. You are asked to put your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone near the Apple TV in order to get, I guess, iCloud information and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did that and it all came up on the home screen and it looked like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the default home screen for a few seconds and all of a sudden it started filling itself in and downloading apps and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it all worked pretty well. I do have a couple of test flight apps that it didn’t even consider installing, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a bummer. And the only other thing I’d like to briefly complain about is I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think any non-Apple app persisted login information. So like Plex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed to repair. Netflix, I needed to repair. We actually pay for SiriusXM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for reasons and I needed to repair that. I needed to repair Spotify, which I actually think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wouldn’t work until I turned my pie hole off. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John repair, you mean re-login. Well, yes and no. Sometimes you have to go to companyname.com
⏹️ ▶️ John slash activate. Sometimes they make you enter a username and password. But the bottom line is it doesn’t know who you
⏹️ ▶️ John are. It says, please authenticate with some system that lets us know that
⏹️ ▶️ John you are a person who pays for a thing. Exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And that was kind of annoying because it has gotten way better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the years. Because among other things, when you’re on the same network and in the same iCloud ID or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the requirements are as an iPhone, you can actually do that text entry via your iPhone. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, I use 1Password everywhere. And so it would prompt me on my phone, hey, do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to enter your password for Netflix? And then I could use the 1Password
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration with the iPhone’s password manager, such that it would automatically load
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Netflix password out of 1Password, paste it in the field on my phone, and then transmit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it over the air to the Apple TV and paste it in there. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly as egregious as it used to be, but it’s just a bummer, man. Like there should be a better way to do this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume that there’s APIs for this. Maybe I’m wrong, but nevertheless, that really bummed me
⏹️ ▶️ John There totally is an API for this. Apple has a solution, because Apple identified this as a problem back when
⏹️ ▶️ John they had their first Apple TV with apps. Hey, isn’t it super annoying that you have to re-login to HBO and re-login to Hulu
⏹️ ▶️ John and re-login to Netflix. And you know, I subscribe to a million things. So I get this, like the maximum version of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they made an API for like, hey, if you’re making an Apple TV app, use this thing so
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t have to re-log into your thing. And everyone said, yeah, no thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s a number of things in here. So one of them is the single sign-on thing, which I don’t think that ever went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere with your cable provider.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m talking about. That’s part of it. That’s only things that require cable logins to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s not many of the, doesn’t include things like Netflix or Disney or whatever. But no, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of Apple’s stuff has a way to do this. It’s Keychain and iCloud Keychain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why I think that this is not available on Apple TV is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV has no concept of a local passcode, at least not by default. And the way iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keychain works on other devices is like, Apple tells developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t store login credentials in iCloud. Because don’t use the regular iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store, Key Value Store, or whatever else. Don’t use that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Please don’t do that. But they have Keychain, which is like the local device, you know, secure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage thing that’s encrypted and everything else. And then they have iCloud Keychain, and the way iCloud Keychain works in a secure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way at a high level is it’s not storing all those credentials and stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you put in Keychain directly in iCloud, it’s storing them encrypted. That’s why when you set up a new device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iCloud Keychain, you don’t have to just log into your Apple ID. It prompts you to enter the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco password or passcode from some other device that’s in your iCloud keychain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because then it uses that encryption key from that local device to decrypt a new copy of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for itself or something like that. But anyway, Apple TV doesn’t really have a concept of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local passcode or local user authentication beyond purchases. So that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they don’t do that. That’s a good point. That being said, with the exception of the password stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve replaced a number of Apple TVs over the last five or 10 years. and I do that single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home screen sync thing, and it works fantastically for me, with that one exception. It never saves my passwords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things, but with that one exception, it works perfectly, and I really enjoy that feature. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did the upgrade for mine where I was basically moving to Apple TVs. I did that upgrade in like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes. It was one of the smoothest upgrade experiences I’ve ever had for any product, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that sole exception of entering passwords. But even the password thing was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved by a couple of factors. Number one, I don’t think I have as many video watching apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as either of you. But some of them, like Disney has this thing, and I think Amazon did the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Disney had a thing where if you have the Disney Plus app installed on your phone, you just open it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up on your phone on the same network and it says, hey, do you want to authenticate this new TV? You say yes and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like two taps, right? And then Amazon had a thing where I could just use the phone camera to scan a QR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code on the TV and it did a URL scheme trick to authenticate. So there were a few others. The only one I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to type my password in was Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, but the problem with the Disney Plus thing, which I agree with you and is nice in principle, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for almost all of these apps, when they ask me for local network access, it’s typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey citing a Chromecast as the reason for local network access. So I turned them all off because I don’t have a Chromecast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for a minute there, I was like, why is the Disney app not letting me log in? What is the?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, right. Because it doesn’t have local network access, so it can’t even see the Apple TV. That’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So other than that, I do agree with you. By the way, while I’m talking real time follow up, it is called One Home Screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is in settings, users and accounts. Then you have to click on your user.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for me, it would say Casey List or whatever. Then in there is One Home Screen. So it is one, two, three, four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screens into settings, but it is there. And if you keep, I don’t know how long it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be on, on the old Apple TV, I would I guess, you know, a few minutes. But yeah, if you leave that on and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will sync everything up when you install the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John That should totally be the default. I remember when I first found that feature. I’m not sure if it is anymore, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John remember when the feature first came out, I’m like, oh, thank God, because I was so tired of setting up the home screens because you know I want them to be all the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice because I think most of us don’t have a lot of Apple TV apps, certainly as compared to our iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John apps probably. And so it is actually fairly quick to get everything set up. In terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John the local authentication, all the things you just described, hey, the Disney app does this thing where you can launch it like this, one uses scan to QR
⏹️ ▶️ John codes, sometimes you have to type in a password, sometimes you don’t wanna be logged in. That’s exactly the problem Apple is supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be solving, right? And the single sign-on thing with cable companies was at the time it came out,
⏹️ ▶️ John a good solution because most of our TV was through cable stuff then, and there weren’t as many
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming services, right? And I think they’ve made a couple of efforts at similar things in this to try to get everybody on board, but of
⏹️ ▶️ John course we know Netflix isn’t gonna be on board, It won’t even be in the TV app, and it’s just, it’s too fragmented.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this problem persists. Like, this should be something that Apple should continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to work on solving. If they wanna just go with iCloud Keychain, which I think is a reasonable solution, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the tech to do that, and it’s not like these Apple TV boxes are, you know, too cheap for them to include
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Hey, let’s just put Touch ID in the center of the little pad on the remote, right? And there is your
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode. Make me enter a four or five or six digit code. hell, make me enter an alphanumeric
⏹️ ▶️ John passcode, right? It’s not like we don’t have the technology to put a passcode on the Apple TV. Just do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’ll use my phone to enter the passcode once instead of entering my password five times and scanning
⏹️ ▶️ John a QR code three times and going to website.com slash activate two times and using a Disney
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus app one. Like, it’s too much. They’re too, it’s too different. And granted, I’m an extreme case because I
⏹️ ▶️ John subscribe to every video service in the world. But it kind of really undercuts the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one home screen experience because you think you’re done. You’re like, oh, everything’s back to the way it was. And then you sit down.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this even happened to us. Even I knew this was gonna be the case. I just, you know, it slipped my mind after I had set the thing up because I had to go, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, set up some other stuff upstairs or whatever. And then we go down to watch a show and it’s like, oh, what’s the Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John password? No one knows what the Netflix password is. You gotta get out your phone and then you gotta do the thing. And it’s just, and then you forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John it again. You go to watch something on Hulu the next day. Like, oh, I didn’t sign into Hulu. It’s just this death by a thousand cuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of the things that even Apple controls, they didn’t manage to sync, right? The accessibility setting,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one accessibility setting that I use on my Apple TV, which I highly recommend that everybody use. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Casey will look up where this is, but somewhere under accessibility, I think under like increased
⏹️ ▶️ John contrast or something under accessibility, there is a setting that lets you change the selection
⏹️ ▶️ John contrast. What that means is, and I’m sure there are some people who don’t think this is an issue, but other people
⏹️ ▶️ John will know exactly what I’m talking about. If you ever look at your Apple TV, you know, the television when your Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is in use, and you can’t tell what the hell is supposed to be selected, this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John is for you. The one Apple TV, what TVOS does is it makes the selected thing
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than the non-selected things slightly. And also, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what remote you have, if you move your finger around on the touch pad or wiggle the remote or whatever, you can see the little tile that is
⏹️ ▶️ John selected, slanting and reflecting the light. You know, this used to be a demo they would do. Look at this, it’s kind of slanty and reflecty.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yes, you can figure out what is selected, But imagine if the screen visually told you
⏹️ ▶️ John what was selected in an unambiguous way. That’s what this accessibility feature does. It draws a white outline
⏹️ ▶️ John around the selected square. Imagine that. So then you can look at the screen and say, I know which one
⏹️ ▶️ John is selected. It’s the one with the white outline. But I think we call that highlighting. And it’s been a technology
⏹️ ▶️ John used in graphical user interfaces for many, many decades. And it is extremely effective at
⏹️ ▶️ John letting you know what is highlight. Oh God, it drives me nuts that they just used that zooming thing. I don’t know why there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not more complaints about it. because everyone else is much.
⏹️ ▶️ John never bothered me. You can always tell the one thing is 7% bigger than the things next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if I can’t, if I just think about touching the touch pad, track pad, whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John You find that thing that wiggles. I feel like I shouldn’t need to wiggle. That’s a sign that this is a bad interface. I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to induce a wiggle to say, I can’t tell what’s selected, but let me make it, ah, the thing that moved. My
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes moved to the motion. That’s a selected one. And the worst is like, you never know where the selection, it’s like when an app launches,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, If I want to go to search, say there’s like a search at the top of the thing, how
⏹️ ▶️ John many rows up do I need to go? Where is the selection now? Am I already in the search bar? You can’t tell unless you move
⏹️ ▶️ John the selection out of it. Oh, it went dimmer, so I must have already been in the top bar, so I should have just moved to the right two
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces to get to the magnifying glass. But the only way I can know that is if I swipe down and realize that the top
⏹️ ▶️ John bar now gets dimmer, which means the previous selection was in the top bar. Selection state in tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is a problem. So please go to accessibility and try this setting. I think you’ll like it. But anyway, that
⏹️ ▶️ John setting, hey, draw a white outline around the selected things, didn’t carry over from my one home screen thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s on all of my Apple TVs and has been since the feature was rolled out. Everything else synced, but not that
⏹️ ▶️ John setting. And the second thing that didn’t sync was the function of the little button that has like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. Oh, yep, yep, yep, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on. I was like, I hit- TV app versus home screen? Yeah, I hit the button. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John where am I? I’m on the TV app. What the hell is this? Now, I want that button to go to the home screen. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John my preference on every single Apple TV. It didn’t sync. So I had to manually set those two
⏹️ ▶️ John functions back to their correct things. So yeah, setup in general, easy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like Migration Assistant on the Mac does a better job of actually, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John granted there are advantages here. We already went over the iCloud key chain will bring all of my login information with me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Mac doesn’t drop settings like this. The Mac doesn’t forget, oh, did you allow, you know, right
⏹️ ▶️ John click on your mouse? It’s like, it doesn’t forget things like that. it remembers everything down to like my keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John repeat rate, right? So I feel like the few preferences that I set on Apple TV should also be synced. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can totally understand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a reason why I haven’t mentioned anything about TV OS, because if we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about TV OS, I have many problems that will probably never be solved. And some of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be getting worse. But this Apple TV hardware and the new remote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So before we get to the remote, I would just like to say that I was unaware before tonight that John Syracuse’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey superpower is being able to spot his mouse cursor on his screen the size of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a house without jiggling his mouse. That is absolutely incredible that you can spot it without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever jiggling your
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like saying, how can you spot where your pointer finger is? Like, don’t you always
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know where your
⏹️ ▶️ John just an extension of my arm. It’s like, where’s my pointer finger? I have to wiggle it to, oh, there it is, at the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of my arm. It’s always in the same place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your mouse cursor, you’ve never jiggled your mouse ever in order to find your cursor.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t even have that feature on the drive. Lots of people use this feature. I don’t like it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you need it, more power to you, but I cannot stand this feature. I guess because I moved the mouse too quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS has an accessibility feature where if you shake the mouse cursor, the cursor will suddenly get larger
⏹️ ▶️ John to let you see where it is, which is a useful feature if you have trouble finding your
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, very tiny mouse cursor. But for me, when I turn that feature on, it’s like every once in
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, suddenly my cursor gets big for no reason because I guess I just move my mouse naturally very quickly and it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco interprets that
⏹️ ▶️ John as a shake. So no, I don’t use that feature. Maybe if my vision gets worse, eventually I’ll start using it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for now I don’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, here it was, I thought I’d backed you into a corner and I was really, really proud of myself, but no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently that legitimately is your superpower. Tonight
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you use that shaky feature either one of you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right I do. I always use my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John damn mouse cursor. Well, your
⏹️ ▶️ John vision is really bad, Casey, so you probably need that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, not with contacts. With contacts, my vision is pretty good. If I take them out, I’m basically blind, But with my contacts in,
New Apple TV remote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, let’s talk about this remote. I should have brought it upstairs with me. I didn’t think about that so I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mess with it while I’m talking to you guys, but I really like it. It is not the Panacea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I thought it would be, but it is definitely way better. And I am not a prior remote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hater. I just thought the prior remote was fine. It was annoying in ways, it was good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in ways, it was fine. This is just my opinion, I know a lot of people disagree. But this new one, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like, and I’m jumping ahead ever so slightly. However, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am unconvinced. I feel like the whole world is trolling me because this whole jog dial click
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheel thing does not exist as far as I can tell. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the demo video I put in the notes? I didn’t until just a moment ago and so I wasn’t listening to it. And Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hurley, you know, from Upgrade and Connected was telling me, no, no, no, no, you gotta hold your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finger on it or something. I don’t know, have you made this work? Cause I’ve never made this work.
⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t even occur to me to try that feature when I was actually using the Apple TV to watch TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the first time I saw the feature in action was in this tweet that someone has a video of them doing it. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John interface is exactly what I thought it would be. If you just told me, what do you think it’s gonna look like? Exactly what it looks like. So you,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I’m sure the procedure, but my guess would have been pause the show, put your finger on the jog dial,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then in the timeline, in the little scrubby timeline on your TV screen, where you have the little
⏹️ ▶️ John dot showing your current position in the timeline, suddenly a little circle will appear around that with
⏹️ ▶️ John a dot in it, like a jog dial, around the part where you are. And then as you
⏹️ ▶️ John move your finger on the remote in a circle, you will see that circle roll like a wheel as the
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline scrubber thing moves back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I think part of the problem is, and this was again discussed privately between Mike and me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few other people. I think I had tried this, I feel like I tried this in a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, but Plex was definitely one of them. And I am fairly confident that Plex does not use the out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box video player. So in that case, I think it’s a combination of me not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing how to activate the feature and the app I was using didn’t support it. But I could swear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried it in the Apple TV app because I’ve been rewatching Ted Lasso in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preparation for it coming back next month or two months from now. And I swear I tried it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV app and I didn’t get it to work then. So I’m sure it’s at least in part user error, maybe it’s entirely user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey error, but I really wanna see this and try it. And for the life of me, I just can’t get it to work
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you remember if you paused first or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought so, but again, I’m not confident I did. And since I had this conversation with Mike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had a chance to go down and try it, but I will definitely try it. And maybe we can do a very brief followup
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how much I’m going, I mean, I’ll try it, you know, just now, cause I’m curious, but I’m not, it’s not a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that I was looking for. It’s like, I really, I really need a way to scrub around timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John more quickly. Cause that’s one of the few things that the swipey touch pad was actually okay at, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, I don’t think the jog dial gives, in theory, the jog dial could give you more precision than swiping, but I’m not sure it
⏹️ ▶️ John really does, because if it did give you that much more precision, it would take forever to jog your way
⏹️ ▶️ John any appreciable distance, because you’d be drawn in tons and tons of tiny little circles with your thumb, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ll try it and see what it’s like. But I think with this remote, we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about it a lot when it was introduced, but none of us have one in our hands. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much everything that I said about my expectations to the remote in that episode
⏹️ ▶️ John is the truth. Like if you look at a picture of it, you have a good assessment of its strengths and weaknesses
⏹️ ▶️ John versus its predecessor and versus other remotes. Having it in hand now and having used it on two different TVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it remains too small for my hands. It’s bigger than it was, it’s thicker than it was, all good,
⏹️ ▶️ John better, but still generally too small. The buttons are still, I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to say it, too slight, too shallow, too timid.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Uh, they’re shy. These buttons are shy.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re small and elegant, right? They’re kind of closely packed. They’re not really different sizes or shapes
⏹️ ▶️ John from each other other than the volume rocker. They’re not really great remote buttons. Not terrible buttons, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, whoa, slow down. The click feel on these buttons is absolutely delightful, though. Oh, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I think it’s delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s okay. Lots of remotes. What Casey, I think, is getting at is if you just get a cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy remote, you know the rubbery button feel? That’s not a good button feel in general. Like you want
⏹️ ▶️ John something that feels like you’re pressing something and a really cheap remote will just feel mushy. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have what I’m describing as a button that has a positive click where you’re sure when you clicked it and you’re sure
⏹️ ▶️ John when you didn’t. And it’s also not like one 18th of a millimeter off of the surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. Now that part I agree with. Like, I don’t personally find it a problem, but I don’t think it would be bad for them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be raised higher off the surface of the remote and
⏹️ ▶️ John separated more widely on a larger remote. Yeah, like it is what it looks like. You’re not it’s nothing. You’re in for a surprise here.
⏹️ ▶️ John The the touchpad in the center of the jog thing. I’m kind of of two minds on that now
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing I did immediately find when going through the preferences is there is a setting in there that if you don’t want to use Touchpad
⏹️ ▶️ John at all you can turn it off and then it just becomes a five-way up down left right press the button
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle Right and it will just ignore all touch input And I think that is a great feature to add for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John have motor difficulty dealing with the touch interface Which at various times is me, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I and the you know again we talked about this last time One of the great things about there is remote is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire top of it is not a touch surface So you can confidently lift it off the table by its tiny little sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John which still should be bigger But you can confidently lift it off the table knowing I’m not accidentally doing something to the touchpad because it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John clear that you’re gripping The metal edge of the remote and you’re not touching that one little touch sensitive area in the middle granted The
⏹️ ▶️ John jog dial is also touch sensitive But if you brush up against that, I don’t think it does anything It’s that center thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you have the touch thing on you know, is the danger zone. But it’s very easy to tell that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not touching that danger zone versus the other remote where half, literally half the remote was a danger
⏹️ ▶️ John zone and you could never tell which half it was because they were looked identical in the dark, right? So that’s good about this
⏹️ ▶️ John remote. But I didn’t disable the touch surface because I found through years and years of using the stupid diving
⏹️ ▶️ John board, you do eventually get used to swiping because it is faster than going down, down, down,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And suddenly with the danger of me accidentally hitting the touchpad gone, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John left with only the benefits of, well, when you do wanna go, before I bother
⏹️ ▶️ John to get off the couch and get my phone, sometimes I actually are trying to enter my email address with the little
⏹️ ▶️ John swipey thing on the little alphabet number line thing, where you’re trying to go from A to Q
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Swiping is good for that. And even just going around on the home screen, just looking around for something,
⏹️ ▶️ John swiping is good for that too. So I don’t know if I’m going to keep the swipe function on, but for now I’m still seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John some benefits of having the little swipe here. And you would think the area is too small to be useful for swiping, but it’s not. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, you’re just, you know, flick, flick, flick, you’re not, it’s not like a track pad where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging your fingers around. It’s more of a gesture pad, right? So that I think works maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better than I expected. The one good feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that I didn’t anticipate about this remote is the fact that the back button
⏹️ ▶️ John is like more concave, I guess. I don’t know, do any of you have the remotes? None of us thought
⏹️ ▶️ John to bring it with us. Nope. Anyway, the back button feels
⏹️ ▶️ John different than the home button that’s right next to us. Imagine that, making buttons feel different. It’s the same size,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same shape, but it’s like, its indentation is different than
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button. So when it’s dark and you’ve got the remote in your hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is no longer symmetrical, and you’re moving your finger off of the touch pad onto the back button,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very clear to your finger that you are on the back button because it feels different. I’m pretty sure it’s more concave
⏹️ ▶️ John than the others, right? Maybe the other ones are totally flat and this is the only concave one. It doesn’t have a big white outline around it like the menu button
⏹️ ▶️ John did. This difference in feel is merely the top surface of the button feels
⏹️ ▶️ John different and that tiny little thing, it’s like an ice water in hell, as Steve Jobs would say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, imagine that, different things feeling different on a remote, in a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way, in the smallest possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way. It doesn’t, because again, if you look at the photos, it’s been everywhere to pick this up, but it makes such a big difference. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you want out of a remote. You want different things to feel different so that you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the great things about the TiVo remote. You pick that thing up in your hand and you can feel where the buttons are
⏹️ ▶️ John with just your finger without looking at them and you will be sure that you’re on the one that you expect because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a, you know, I don’t know how you describe it. Like, it’s like a map. Everything is a different
⏹️ ▶️ John shape and there’s no ambiguity, right? When you’re on that pause button or on the button to the right or the left of it or you move
⏹️ ▶️ John up to the five-way pad, everything feels different. And this remote, one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing feels different, and that’s the back button. And it’s a super important button, so I’m glad that they did that. And you know, the five-way feels
⏹️ ▶️ John different as well. So that is an advantage that I didn’t expect. I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John some complaints about the play, pause, and mute. Oh, that’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s me right here. That’s being in different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positions. Yep, yep, yep. Oh, it’s driving me bananas. So to back up, just to establish context here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the prior remote, There were three buttons kind of below the fold,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will. And of those, the upper left was the Siri button. The bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left was play pause. And then the entire right side was volume up and volume down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, where the Siri button was, which is the button that I never hit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now play pause, which is the button I hit more than any other. In the bottom left, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the play pause button used to be, is mute, which is a button that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do want to hit from time to time, but like a 10th as much as play pause. And then the right-hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side is still volume up down. So in effect, they’ve taken the play pause button, moved it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a different spot and then taken a entirely new to the remote button, the mute button and put it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where play pause used to be. So every time I play pause, I hit the frigging mute button every single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and it’s driving me nuts. And I’m sure I will eventually retrain myself, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving me absolutely batty. And I don’t I don’t understand why they did it that way. I just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think I understand it a little bit in that it’s kind of like on, you know, we talk about our iPhone home screens and people
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder why my apps are the way they are. Some parts of the remote are easier to hit with your thumb than others. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the far lower left bottom, I think is harder to reach, especially if your thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John is mostly on the five way and then occasionally on the back when you’re navigating. I feel like the, like
⏹️ ▶️ John to the extent that this remote acknowledges a hierarchy of controls, which is just what you’re describing, Casey, which things do
⏹️ ▶️ John you use most often? second most often, third most often, to the extent that this remote acknowledges that that hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, it expresses that through the positioning of the buttons. Because they’re all the same size, they’re all the
⏹️ ▶️ John same shape, and they’re all in this one little skinny remote and there’s not that many of them. So it doesn’t really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would imagine that if you were designing a good remote, for example, you’d realize that play pause is probably the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important playback control in the entire thing. Five way is probably more important for navigation, but in terms of while you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John watching TV, play pause is probably number one with the bullet, right? So maybe make that central and
⏹️ ▶️ John huge and feel different. Nope, Apple says, no, no, no. But they did give it a position that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is easier to get to than the mute button. And yes, it’s the reverse of the
⏹️ ▶️ John previous arrangement, which is messing with all of our muscle memory. Because the remotes are similar
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, if you ignore the five-way, right? The buttons in the middle, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like three circles down the left side and then a circle and a lozenge. It’s exactly the same, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’ve spent years with that terrible Siri remote reaching for the middle button
⏹️ ▶️ John of the three buttons that are on the left, or the bottom button of the three buttons that are left and having that be play, pause. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom button of the three buttons left isn’t play, pause anymore. And again, they’re all the same size, all the same shape. You just have a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John symbol that you can’t read on it because it’s dark when you’re watching TV, right? So I think our muscle memory will
⏹️ ▶️ John remap, but this just highlights another instance of this remote refusing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing, which is put an actual hierarchy in the buttons. And by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, I understand why they do this. It looks nice and everything. Game controllers suffer from the same sin.
⏹️ ▶️ John See my long episode of Hypercritical about this, right? In most video game controllers, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a button that gets hit more often than any other button. And then there’s a second most often button, right? There’s a primary button.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, ask anyone who has both a PlayStation and a Switch how much they can’t stand the fact that the
⏹️ ▶️ John primary action button is bottom of the four buttons on the PlayStation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but is the right of the four buttons on the Switch, it really makes navigating menus very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult if you try to have muscle memory on both of those things. But either way, the correct solution was what the GameCube
⏹️ ▶️ John came up with, which is if there’s a button that you hit most commonly, make that one the biggest button.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the button you hit the second amount, make that the second biggest button. And then maybe the tertiary button should even be a different
⏹️ ▶️ John shape. The Tivo remote does that, this remote doesn’t. Right now we’re all suffering from bad
⏹️ ▶️ John muscle memory. I think we’ll mostly get over it. I mostly just sit here trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to enjoy the one good thing about this remote, which again is the concave back button that actually feels
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny bit different. I just celebrate that every time I hit back, but play, pause, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get used to it, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but you say that, but I challenge you on that because for me, I am still going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use the Siri remote on the now upstairs Apple TV because- No, you’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could. Why would you do that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yourself? Why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spend $60 for this new remote if I don’t have to?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s $60 well spent. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this right here, this is the reason. That your muscle memory for play pause is going to be totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken until you consolidate in one of these remotes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s exactly what I was thinking to myself five minutes ago. I was, oh my god, I am going to buy one of these stupid remotes for that stupid Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because it’s going to drive me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like a soft closed toilet seat. You can’t have just one of those in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just have one of them, you’re constantly be slamming it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Yeah. You gotta convert the whole house or none. Yep, you’re not wrong. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my only complaint about this is that I agree with some of the Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who have been complaining about the button click, feel and sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of feels and sounds cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, hard disagree, very hard disagree. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds great. You also like the butterfly keyboard. Honestly, it kind of feels and sounds like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butterfly keyboard. but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel rubbery, which is one kind of cheapness for a remote. So for sure it doesn’t feel rubbery, but I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John cheapness comes from, it is smaller and lighter weight, and it is kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not gonna get a solid kachunk from a plastic button of this size and thickness in
⏹️ ▶️ John a remote this size. You’re just not going to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, but if you look at the Siri remote that preceded this, it had the exact same size buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they feel and sound better.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are less clicky, I think. And it depends on if you really want that positive, like you have clicked
⏹️ ▶️ John the button versus you have just pressed down and felt something go down. I feel like the Siri remotes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are, but I think that makes them feel a little bit nicer and more luxurious. Like the last thing you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like your TV environment is to hear loud clicks from your buttons on your remote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t feel high quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like we’re getting with the volume control, cause you might be adjusting the volume while you’re watching
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t wanna hear Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. So I see what you’re getting at there. It’s just that I never use the volume on this thing anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, then you’re not even qualified. This is my, I’m using it exactly as Apple says. It’s my only remote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vast majority of the time. The old one was too. Like a lot of people didn’t realize that the old one had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to turn your TV off as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco held down the home button for a few seconds then it would say sleep all devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanted to buy into HDMI CEC, sure. Yes. Yes. Marco and I are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works for everybody except you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Nope. Yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of that though, the power button they added to the top of this, like, so there’s a power button on this, which is nice. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the, you know, I was confused by it because I thought, oh, this is great. This remote has an IR,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, emitter on the front of it, I assume, because there’s a big black thing up there, right? So I’ll just be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John let this thing know what kind of TV I have. And then when I press that power button, it will send the IR
⏹️ ▶️ John signal that my TV needs to turn off. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV does supposedly understand what kind of TV I have, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not, doesn’t, as far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no way for me to get the new Apple TV remote to send
⏹️ ▶️ John out an IR signal to turn off my TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you dug around the settings? Because the old one could actually learn an IR remote for volume control and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can, so you can, what you can do is you can tell the Apple TV to
⏹️ ▶️ John learn like any other remote. Like I use the TiVo remote with my Apple TV for years, right? So you can say, hey, Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about your old remote. This is your new remote, learn this, right? You can do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I looked for the thing that said, can I tell you Apple TV what kind of TV I have so that the power button
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Apple TV remote will do stuff? Basically what I found in documentation was like, don’t you worry about that. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV knows what kind of TV you have and it will support stuff. And it does support things like the volume, like the volume buttons work. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t use my TV’s volume, I use my receiver’s volume, right? That’s a different remote, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s any way, like it knows what kind of TV I have and in theory it knows what kind of IR signal that should emit
⏹️ ▶️ John to turn my television off, but it’s just not gonna do it. And if you look at the support document, it says, hey, you want Apple TV to turn TV
⏹️ ▶️ John off? Use HDMI CEC, and that’s where I say, nope. But it’s your own fault, you
⏹️ ▶️ John TV setup, I’ll try it again. But my current setup, I have tried HDMI CEC, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John very bad with my current setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for what it’s worth, my TV is turned on and off via the Apple TV via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CEC, but I am, like you, controlling the volume of a receiver that is completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and utterly unrelated from the television. And that all works, no problem. It did with my prior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV. It does with this TV. I guess I just have a better TV than you is what it boils down to, because it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you do. Remember, I don’t even have a 4K TV. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. That’s right. I forgot. I knew it was plasma. I forgot it wasn’t 4K. Don’t worry. I’ll make you feel a lot better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about my TV situation. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no 4K plasma, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fair. I just don’t keep up with it as much as you. All right.
Apple TV calibration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who wants to talk about calibration, which is something I haven’t done yet, but should probably do
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah We talked about this a few times in past episodes and the main my main objection being that it doesn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John calibrate your TV It calibrates the output of your Apple TV, which has many limits calibrate
⏹️ ▶️ John your brain, man Yeah, which has many limitations to it, but a lot of people did a bunch of tests on this
⏹️ ▶️ John My favorite HD my favorite television techie YouTube channel, HDTVTest,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that the host of that channel tries to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a sexual innuendo joke in every single one of his videos, and every single time I’m like, I’m begging you,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop doing this. Stop doing, anyway. Other than that, the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John content is really good. And he did a test of the Apple TV calibration. We’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes if you wanna see this video. It gets very techie into the details of calibration.
⏹️ ▶️ John basically says the same things like hey there’s a bunch of settings in your TV that Apple TV can’t change so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you actually want to calibrate your TV actually have to calibrate your TV
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not a professional TV calibrator like the person who runs this channel and you just want to use this feature to make your TV better
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if your TV is on some horrendous preset that really mangles the colors it can get you closer to being
⏹️ ▶️ John calibrated so I figured I should try this on my TV too just to see how it works
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s because my TV is super duper old as we just established it is a It is a non-4K plasma
⏹️ ▶️ John television. This Apple TV calibration feature
⏹️ ▶️ John is extremely confused by
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my plasma television.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen like a slow-mo video of what a plasma TV
⏹️ ▶️ John does to put its picture on the screen, especially older plasma TVs, it is not what you
⏹️ ▶️ John expect. It is not as if there’s a line scanning from top to bottom. It’s not as if it
⏹️ ▶️ John changes the image on the screen and then waits and changes the image to something else. It basically builds the
⏹️ ▶️ John image from a series of colored dots that are put up on the screen sequentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you see it in slow motion, it looks like nothing. But if you see it in full motion, it looks like a picture because again, see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco human visual
⏹️ ▶️ John system being messed up. So I tried to use the feature. It said,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, look at these sparkly things. Hold your phone one inch from the screen and inside this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that for a surprising amount of time. And it would just be like, Are you sure you’re holding
⏹️ ▶️ John it within an inch? Hold it within an inch. Make sure the top edge of your phone is within the rectangle. I’m like, it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m here. This is an inch. Should I do it farther? Should I do it closer? I tried every possible distance. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it would start showing, hey, I’m gonna show you red, I’m gonna show you green. It would say, up, where’s your phone? Did you take your phone away?
⏹️ ▶️ John Put your phone in the rectangle. I spent a long time, it was like poltergeist episode. I spent
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time, my arm was getting tired, holding my phone. Yeah, is this the right distance?
⏹️ ▶️ John How far away should I be? Closer, farther? Try to, oh my God. I think it just doesn’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John to make of like the cameras in my iPhone. And again, I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro, the latest Apple TV. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing that’s ancient in this setup is my stupid TV. Eventually I got it to go through a calibration
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle. What was different about the, you know, five minutes into this, the 90th time I tried this and
⏹️ ▶️ John the other times, I have no idea, but it was super finicky for me. I don’t blame the device, I blame my ancient TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, after it did everything, it gives you a screen that lets you swipe back
⏹️ ▶️ John and forth from like, I forget what it says, like original or calibrated, you know, basically like A-B test. Like it shows you
⏹️ ▶️ John a video of an aerial view, probably like a drone footage of like a beach with water,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it lets you switch back and forth. Here’s what you were like before, and here’s what we calibrated you to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And kind of like the 256 kilobit AAC and the lossless version of the same file,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would switch back and forth, I’m like, is anything changing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you change anything? Because like in some televisions, like if you use Dolby Vision,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your television supports Dolby Vision at all or something, it just says, oh, we refuse to try to calibrate, your TV’s probably fine, which
⏹️ ▶️ John A is not true, but B is it’s way of saying, look, we’re not going to be able to make any improvements here because we can’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John heads or tails of this. But anyway, my TV as previously established is I think reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ John well calibrated. And the fact that the Apple TV calibration thing
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t make, like, I spent a while going back and forth and staring at certain sections of the image like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it look a little different there? Let me turn the lights off. Is that sand a little bit browner?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s hard to tell. A, B, A, B, A, B, and I’m going back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, I guess that means that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John my television was close enough in the areas that it was trying to calibrate. There was a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually I could tell if you could look at certain structures or certain sections of the wave, because it’s just a video loop and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve seen the same video loop 100 times. I think it did take a little bit of blue out of my picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is, is that the right thing to do or not? I don’t know what this beach footage is supposed to look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it pulled down a little tiny imperceptible amount of blue out of the picture, is that making my picture
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to being accurate or farther from being accurate? I don’t know. Either way, it only affects the Apple TV so it was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a moot point. So I just ignored it and left my television the way it was. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use the Apple TV calibration fixture and the before and after are radically
⏹️ ▶️ John different, one thing you could choose to do is say, oh, I’ll take what Apple TV did because that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John better, which is probably true. It probably is better than what you’re on. But the other thing you could do is take that as a very strong signal that your TV is
⏹️ ▶️ John super screwed up, calibrate your television set somehow, and then redo the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John calibration and see if the difference is smaller. Because if you have a huge difference there, it shows something is messed up
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t wanna just fix it for the Apple TV. You want to fix it for everything, right? Unless you literally only ever
⏹️ ▶️ John watch stuff through the Apple TV. But even then, please everyone, consider calibrating your TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can actually pay people to come to the house and do it. I don’t know who to recommend, except for this one guy who has a YouTube channel.
⏹️ ▶️ John He lives in the UK. So unless you live in the UK, you’re probably not gonna get him to your house. But there are options. I always
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend the THX TuneUp app, but it is super old by this point. And I’m surprised if it’s even still supported
⏹️ ▶️ John or downloadable. There are other options on the, you know, the Apple TV store
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it’s called. Most of them are terrible. That’s why I always recommend THX TuneUp.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s hard because there’s not a lot of great options to recommend. You can buy calibration
⏹️ ▶️ John DVDs and Blu-rays and use them to try to calibrate things. You can go to artings.com
⏹️ ▶️ John and look for a bunch of presets for your specific television, which might be better than nothing, but maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I guess failing all of that, try the Apple TV calibration feature. you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably better than nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A glowing recommendation. It’s probably better than nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did either of you try it on your TVs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not, but I was fighting many other problems, which we’ll get to here in a moment. Marco, you didn’t try it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t care. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also don’t care that much. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I usually, you know, when I get a new TV, which is not a common occurrence, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like do a rough calibration. Like I did it this time, I based it on like RTINGS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like a starting point, and then I did a few minor tweaks for my own taste, but then I just leave it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, at least one of you should try it because what I’m curious to know is, hey, did it actually work for you? Could you hold your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone up in front of your TV screen and then it said, oh, we see your phone, let me cycle through a bunch of colors, or did you have to sit there
⏹️ ▶️ John like I did for five minutes wondering why it’s not doing its thing? Yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I may or may not be using Dolby Vision anyway because I do not have an ancient TV, so apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s nothing I can do according to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John TV, right? Well, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that will be a result too, you’ll see. Yeah, well. Oh, speaking of Dolby Vision, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing that you will see, this is a second video from HDTVTest, is apparently the, so this is the confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, because this is not an Apple YouTube channel, it’s a television reviewer YouTube channel, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So according to the person who hosts this channel, the old Apple TV, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that means, had a problem with raised blacks in Dolby Vision, which means that you’d go on a screen that’s supposed to be black,
⏹️ ▶️ John and instead of it being black, it would be super, super dark gray. And that’s not good. And this was a problem with the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John device, not something wrong with the television. He’d calibrate the television exactly, but then you’d play a movie through the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything would be a little bit brighter than it was supposed to be, right? And he says, okay, but the new
⏹️ ▶️ John one, that’s fixed. The problem is, was that fix done in the new version of tvOS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is that a fix done in the new Apple TV 4K hardware? He didn’t differentiate. For all we know, this was a software
⏹️ ▶️ John fix and it affects all the Apple TVs and it’s fixed everywhere. Or it could be, I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be a hardware thing, but the way he presented it is like, hey, if you get a new Apple TV 4K, you won’t have raised
⏹️ ▶️ John blacks in Dolby Vision anymore. I find it hard to believe that that is a feature of the hardware and not the software. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a conclusive answer to this, but it’s good to know that one of the major visual deficits of watching
⏹️ ▶️ John anything in Dolby Vision on the Apple TV in the past, raised blacks,
⏹️ ▶️ John is now fixed somewhere in the new stack, I’m assuming in the software.
Casey’s HOMI Journey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let me take you on a journey of my Apple TV upgrade experience and this is probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take just a few minutes So I plug in my fancy-pants new Apple TV 4k
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have an LG C9 which is a you know, a 4k OLED TV that I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in late 2019 and I my setup and you need a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of context to understand why I made the decisions I made and what’s going on here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My setup is a little bit weird, which is probably story of my life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unnecessarily convoluted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe? Yes, as always. So, Marco will make the image that I am sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat right now, the chapter art for this chapter. And so this is what’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my wall, this is what the 2Gang plate… Your handwriting is
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, you slaved over this image and you decided to handwrite the labels and no one can read them. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John come on. Speckers? What’s a specker?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, I hate you too. What’s a homie port? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. It’s it says that I just have weird A’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re using a program to make this. You didn’t draw these lines by hand. Use text. This is a text tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that circle on top? Say oatmeal?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes. My gosh, you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Oh, feel. That’s the bowl of oatmeal right below the outdoor speckers and next to the homie. ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s like an oatmeal
⏹️ ▶️ John cookie. It’s round and brown.
⏹️ ▶️ John these HDMI ports, have you ever seen an HDMI port?
⏹️ ▶️ John approximation! Does each one have a different width and a different angle of the slanted sides?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew I was going to get so much grief for this. Oh my god, I knew I was going to get so much grief. Can we please just try to move on to this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to stop recording sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco today. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have something where the HDMI ports are not all aligned to the same alignment?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like one’s 90 degrees rotated? This is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks like. Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t take a picture in part because there’s so many cables that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t want to remove them all that it would take me forever to actually take a picture. But I assure you this is what it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the wall or in the wall depending on how you want to look at it behind my like AV receiver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area. So I’ve got three HD in case you’re not looking I have three HDMI ports and optical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then optical. That’s what that says.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then you know, sped if or whatever it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would prefer oatmeal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SPDIF is only when it’s coaxial. That’s Toslink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, sorry. Toslink. Okay, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you go. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same protocol, but just different media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. That’s fair. That’s fair. So I have Toslink, I have three HDMI ports, and then four, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaker jacks for outdoor speakers. And so the reason I have this is that my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, admittedly convoluted setup. I understand it’s convoluted. I understand I’m making problems for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My setup is because my receiver is freaking ancient. It’s so ancient that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has zero HDMI ports on it because I don’t think HDMI was a thing at the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has two component inputs, which even for the time it was new, was not that many.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s not a terrible receiver, but it should probably be upgraded. So I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m well aware that I’m making problems for myself by using this old receiver, but it wasn’t broken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I didn’t I didn’t want to fix it. All right, so the way this works is I have optical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going from the TV through the wall and then coming out of this port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and into the receiver. And so whatever the TV is playing audio wise is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back out of the TV through optical. And this is actually what eARC is sort of kind of trying to do as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s coming out of the TV via this TOS link through the wall, out of the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then into the receiver. So whatever the TV is seeing, the receiver can play. Then I have three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI ports. I have one for the Apple TV, one for a cable box, and one for the Switch, because those are the only three devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ever, ever, ever use. We do have a Blu-ray player, but we used it so infrequently that I actually put it in the attic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we basically never use it. So I don’t have a Nintendo, excuse me, I don’t have a PlayStation, I don’t have an Xbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only ever really needed three HDMI ports. And so in that sense, everything was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I take my Apple TV, you know, my 1080 Apple TV, I remove it, leaving all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cabling and everything there, and I plug in the Apple TV 4K. And immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized I have a major problem because what I didn’t draw in this picture is that I also have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ll put a link in the show notes, I forget the official name for it, but it’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an HDMI audio extractor. And I started using this when I got the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, you know, the Apple TV 4, excuse me, the Apple TV 1080, because it no longer had its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own optical output. its own Toslink output. And what I do like to do on occasion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I want to have like a concert playing off of Plex, which means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m playing it on the Apple TV, but I don’t necessarily wanna have the TV on because maybe the kids are staring at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or maybe I just don’t need to look at the concert, I just wanna hear it. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed a way to get audio only out of the Apple TV and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a second Toslink input into the receiver. So what I had was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strictly speaking, Apple TV, little teeny tiny HDMI cable to this HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio extractor, and then on the other side of the audio extractor, an HDMI cable to the wall, there’s an HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable in the wall, and then an HDMI cable coming out of the wall and into the TV. So I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realized my audio extractor is too old, and it doesn’t support 4K. Fine, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s my own fault, that’s my own fault. So I pull that out, and I issue it entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I’m going from Apple TV to the wall, through the wall, then to the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I try to play stuff or I’m looking at it and it just doesn’t look right to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I start doing the like calibration and they’re not calibration, but like what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video mode am I on? And I should have taken better notes, but I was, I was in such a hurry to try to figure this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that I didn’t, that I didn’t take good notes, but I think. I think I was on 1080
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I’m like, well, that’s weird. That doesn’t seem right at all. And somewhere in the Apple TV settings, there’s a mechanism by which you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on, redetect the TV and see what the issue is, or see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video modes you support. And eventually it comes back and it says, well, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I really got is 4K. No, no, no. Oh, yes, I’m good. Oh, here we are. It’s 4K Dolby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision, and everything seems fine. 4K 60 hertz Dolby Vision, we’re all good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I go to play some stuff. I play some stuff off Apple TV. I play one of the couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things I have in 4K on Plex. And what I’m finding is, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 1080 content, every like 30 seconds, and this is where the problem comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, every like 30 seconds, the TV loses all signal. I hear nothing, I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing, waits for two or three seconds, and then everything comes back. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is happening every 30 seconds to a minute. I’m just periodically losing everything on the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t hear anything, I can’t see anything. What’s the problem? Can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess? Yes, please. Bad HDMI cable or HDMI cable that can’t handle the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full bandwidth of the full resolution that you’re sending?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your guess is noted. Let me continue telling more of the story. So I eventually think to myself, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cable inside the wall was put there in the aughts, so like 10 plus years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. I bet you this ain’t right and it’s just not supporting the bandwidth that I need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I go into the Apple TV settings and I think, okay, let me see if I crank it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down from 4K Dolby Vision at 60 hertz, the best bang for my buck, the thing I will miss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the least is if I drop it down to 30 hertz. So I’m still 4K, I’m still Dolby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision, but 30 hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re killing me with all these things. You watch a lot of 60 frames per second content on your television, do you? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the thing, I don’t. But let me tell you what looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage. looks like garbage is the animations on the Apple TV like home screen and anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV related, like just the animations, like zooming in and out and moving around, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swear to you, they look like garbage. They look so crappy at 30 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but there is a setting that, I’m surprised this isn’t the default, but maybe imported these settings. The setting
⏹️ ▶️ John that you want is, hey, when I’m on the menus Apple TV, use 60 Hertz because I
⏹️ ▶️ John want 60 frames per second animation. But when I’m watching an actual TV show, use the frame rate that the television
⏹️ ▶️ John show movie was shot in and please do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that wasn’t, that wouldn’t solve this problem though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it wouldn’t solve the problem because even in the home screen then I would periodically, I would assume get these blackouts dropouts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now you have you have some other problem going on, but I’m saying like the solution is probably not to let’s let’s pin my TV
⏹️ ▶️ John to 60 frames per second everywhere because that’s going to make everything look really bad. Except for the except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So nonetheless, so nonetheless, I eventually come to this conclusion that I can do 4k at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30 hertz with Dolby Vision, everything’s fine. And I thought I had at least gotten a stopgap for now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have already ordered through Monoprice a supposedly 8K capable cable, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what I have to do is go back in the wall and string a new like 15 foot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable through the wall. So in other words, Marco, I think your conclusion was, or I can tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your conclusion is my conclusion, that the cable in the wall was no good. However, I’ve already solved the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. What had happened was, unrelated to all of this work, I also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the final steps on the Screened-In Port, which is now pretty much done, was installing outdoor speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for the first time in years, I’ve had a need to plug stuff in to the four speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports that are below one of the HDMI ports and the Toslink port that’s in this diagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the process of doing that, I removed the upper left HDMI cable, which just so happens to be the Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fios cable box. In placing that cable back in the wall, once I was done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the outdoor speakers, I accidentally pushed the HDMI receptacle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside the wall, further into the wall, so I can’t plug in the HDMI now, right? It’s quality
⏹️ ▶️ John craftsmanship in this box that you’ve drawn here. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really frustrating. So now I’ve got to take every, I’ve got to remove the face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plate. I’ve got to take, I think it was, I only had to remove the left-hand, you know, gang or whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called, the left-hand box, and pull it out so I can shove the HDMI receptacle back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to where it’s supposed to be, blah, blah, blah. So then when I was reconnecting, what I’ve diagrammed in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture is blue and pink or whatever, but they’re really not color-coded. When I was reconnecting the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two HDMI ports for the, or the two HDMI cables for the Switch and the Apple TV, because I was in such a rush
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to finish this, I accidentally swapped them. And I know this because all of a sudden my TV was like, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there’s something new here. And then it occurred to me, well, holy shit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if this cable happens to be better. And sure enough, I accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solved my problem because whatever 15 foot HDMI cable the switch was on seems to be good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to carry 4K Dolby Vision at 60 Hertz and now everything’s good and I don’t have to worry about anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you did swap it to a better cable. It just happened to be one that was already in your wall. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say it was kind of weird that your previous Apple TV was working but then again I remembered your previous Apple TV was not 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly right. So all of this to say, either for bootleg people or regular show people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this to say, as it turns out, if you’re having very wonky and intermittent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like problems with video dropping out or something like that, it’s worth, first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, doing the HDMI test in the Apple TV, because that was my first hint. I don’t remember if I said this in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dissertation just now, but there is an HDMI test in the Apple TV. In addition to the thing that tells you what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolutions the TV supports, there is a separate HDMI test. And when I was on the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI port cable, what have you, it was like, nope, this ain’t going to work. And so that was my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first clue that something was not good here. But then, again, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidentally swapped them and ended up accidentally solving my problem, I did the HDMI test again. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, oh, yeah, you’re good. You’re good to go. So this not too cheap, theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 8K-capable HDMI cable that’s on its way from California to me, it will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually have to go in the wall. And I will do it one day. but the good news is I don’t have to do it today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all told, I’m mostly good to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, I have a request for the listeners. Now I’m in a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I need, I think I need a second amplifier, but what I really wanna do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the following. I wanna be able to have maybe the kids, for example, watching something on TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indoors, using the receiver that does the indoor TV and all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And currently that same receiver is actually doing the outdoor speakers as well. I just choose whether or not I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to play on both sets of speakers or, you know, one or the other. But I don’t like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because A, if the kids want to go in and watch TV and I want to listen to something outside, we can’t do both of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time. And B, the way I have things set up right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I don’t have any remote volume control. If I’m playing, like, for example, if I’m playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something on Plex, like a concert or what have you, and I’m broadcasting it outside. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like what I might want is a second amplifier to drive the outdoor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure. Say that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonos amp. If you just get a new receiver, all modern receivers have multiple zones
⏹️ ▶️ John or all sort of medium to high end ones have multiple zones, and that will solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so that’s that’s the thing is I don’t know if I want a new amp. And the reason I say that is because one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the things I do like about this amp is that it’s very stupid. It just plays whatever comes in over Toslink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and doesn’t have to extract it out of HDMI. I don’t have to worry about if in 10
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re receivers, they’re not amps, Casey, first
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of all, and second of all, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all extremely dumb. And by the way, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this TechHive article that has a nice chart showing the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John between Toslink and HDMI ARC and HDMI eARC. The summary is Toslink is 384 kilobits
⏹️ ▶️ John per second and HDMI eARC is 37 megabits per second. Toslink
⏹️ ▶️ John is good for like stereo CD quality sound maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, yes, that’s what it was designed for. It’s the optical version of SPDIF, which is designed exactly for CD
⏹️ ▶️ John So, but if you’re watching movies on your television that have like Dolby Atmos 7.1
⏹️ ▶️ John tracks, don’t use Toslink. Yeah, that’s fair. So anyway, you need a new receiver.
⏹️ ▶️ John Regardless of this situation you’re describing, you need a new receiver. Now, maybe you want two receivers or a Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ John amp, like Marco’s saying or whatever, but you need a new receiver for your TV And when you get that new receiver for your TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might solve this problem for you by having multiple zones. And if it doesn’t, then you have other options.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so the thing is, I mean, maybe the Sonos Amp is the right answer, but I mean, $650, hell no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not the right answer. Holy
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get a decent receiver for that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. No, the reason why I suggested that is because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of beautifully dumb the way I use it, which is probably not the way you’d want to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the way I use it is, it is my TV receiver. I power only two speakers, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never want surround. So it’s great at powering only two speakers, plus optionally a subwoofer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will want surround someday, just wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t yet. You say that, but I’ve been in this house for 13 years, 14 years, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had a surround sound that entire time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and what I like about it is that as input, it either has regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog RCA jacks, or it has an HDMI port, which supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARC as input. And you actually can buy a little adapter to convert that into an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optical in, if you need to, for your setup, but you probably wouldn’t. I would recommend running HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly into it. And what’s nice about it, this is the part that made me think of it for you, is that you said remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume control. And what’s nice about the Sonos Amp is that there is no remote control to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You control it via digital things, via network. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AirPlay 2 native device. And so what this means is you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay something to it from your phone, so can anybody else on your wifi network. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you just control it from the AirPlay 2 interface and control center on your phone. And you never have to use the terrible Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. Like you can, I never do. You literally just control it as an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay device or as a TV input device. And it correctly switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them. Like if it receives an audio signal over the HDMI port, that takes priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over anything else. So like if you’re playing AirPlay and then somebody wants to watch TV, it’ll take over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the TV. It’s a very well implemented device for a very narrow set of requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I happen to fit. And I absolutely love the Sonos Amp for this purpose because then I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a separate amp, I don’t need a separate receiver because the other features that receivers tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to offer are all things I don’t really need or want. And the Sonos Amp is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice product for exactly like if you want a optionally TV connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two channel, you know, two channel speaker amp that is also AirPlay 2 and has no other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requirements. It’s fantastic. And I don’t know of anything else in the market that is like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so that’s actually, it’s funny you bring that up because people have been making, have been excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this thing, the Belkin SoundForm Connect, which appears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be basically an AirPlay 2 receiver, not an amp, but an AirPlay 2 receiver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, you know, digital optical out that you would still have to plug into something. So I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if what I, and this is a hundred bucks, which is kind of expensive for what it is, but it’s within reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, trust me. That’s fantastic because that product has not existed until this point. Right. Like that, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so happy this product has finally launched because it’s been, I think they announced it like a year ago and it finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has officially launched. I really could have used a couple of these over the last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, so my question is, you know, do I use this? I actually do have an airport express that I haven’t used in like 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting around somewhere, like do I use that? And the question then becomes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do I plug either an Airport Express or the Belkin SoundForm Connect? What do I plug it into? I need some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of amplifier to drive, presumably, the outdoor speakers, but here’s the kicker, and this is where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t want the $650 amp that Sonos makes, but your point is fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do I control the volume remotely? Because I really, really, really want to do that. The whole point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of half the stuff I’ve done in the Screened-In Port, we actually have an update about that for the after show, but half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stuff I did in the screen and porch, I really wanted to be able to control via my phone. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already been a bear, even though we’ve only had the outdoor speakers connected for like a week, it’s already deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frustrating me that I have to get up off my butt and go and walk inside the house to adjust the volume. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really frustrating me. So if you, the listener, know of a preferably cheap, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fidelity doesn’t matter, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, the Belkin SoundForm Connect thing, this might be your answer. If you feed that into any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap amp, that will give you what you want. And you can get an amp to drive two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, you know, I mean, what kind of power output do you really need here? I think like 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts would be fine for what you’re doing with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably, but how do I get the sound control, or the volume control?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Through AirPlay. That’s your volume control.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a good point, that’s a good point. See, this is why I have you around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The nice solution to this is the Sonos amp for $650. The cheap solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap solution to this is probably a sound form connect and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cheap 50 watt two channel speaker amp you wanna plug it into. You can get those for like 50, 60 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Amazon. The little desktop ones or whatever. Those are easy to find. Keep the amp at a fixed volume,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then just use the line input from, or the line output from the Belkin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and control it via AirPlay. It’s not an incredibly elegant solution. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s a terrible enough amp, or if the SoundForm Connect has terrible enough output, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear hiss noise at low volumes, because the amp will be fixed at a high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume. But it would have to be pretty terrible for you to hear that. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the cheap solution, and that could be like 160 bucks. Yeah, so I like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. I think that’s a very reasonable thing. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my priorities, I’m not saying you, Marco, or you, the royal you, Your priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be very, very different, but for me, I don’t need flawless audio fidelity. These are outdoor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speakers. This is the worst possible place to get good audio fidelity. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just wanna be able to hear stuff that I’m beaming from somewhere, and I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to hear it with a volume control that I can do via like a phone. And I think you’re right, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this paired with some sort of amplifier that’s not a complete and utter piece of crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would probably do the trick. Sounds like you need a big HomePod. Well, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey got the speakers. To solve
⏹️ ▶️ John your problem, it just plugs in with one cable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can control the volume from anywhere. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John independent of your television. It’s got an amplifier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I can’t mount the HomePod up at the ceiling, which is where I’ve mounted these. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to mount it anywhere. Just stick it anywhere in your screened-in porch and you’re all done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They aren’t exactly outdoor rated either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very true as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be fine. Not sure. Just put it in the middle of the porch, away from
⏹️ ▶️ John the sides. Yeah, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so listeners, all kidding aside, I like what Marco’s got going here. But if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution that, and I think I’d like to spend like no more than 200 bucks on this. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a solution that you think would work, please, you know, send me an email or tweet at me because I’d love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear. This is one of those times where I really do want to hear input. If you think that you have a different way of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handling this, I’d love to, or if you have an amplifier that you recommend or whatever the case may be, please let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be interested to I agree with you, Marco, that the Sonos is probably the right-est answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, it’s not, because I don’t want to hear you complaining about the price for the next six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Exactly right. So just, yeah, do my cheap solution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then if it sucks, you can just return the things to Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, what many people would do is just use a Bluetooth receiver instead. But I don’t like Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this purpose, not for sound quality reasons, like I couldn’t care less about that in this kind of context, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Bluetooth is annoying to pair to, and if you wanna have more than one device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can send it audio, like AirPlay is so much nicer for that. Like if you have multiple people in your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you wanna send it from multiple devices, like what if you wanna play something from your iPad once and then the next day you wanna play it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your spouse’s phone. Like Bluetooth sucks for that and AirPlay is fantastic for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I would highly suggest using AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as your protocol here and just figuring out then what the hardware has to be to do that. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and Memberful. And thank you to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who can support us directly at atp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, check
Casey’s Fan Conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a brief bit of a follow up with regard to the porch and my fans. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall, I was trying to figure out a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two ceiling fans, two Kickler ceiling fans to work with HomeKit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they use this like proprietary RF thing to go from the wall to the fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So obviously the wall is connected to the fan, but in terms of control, they use radio frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to control between the wall, the thing that you’re touching on the wall and something internal, well not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal, but like sitting right above the fan. And my theory, after a lot of talking with many different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people on the internet, I mean, it was genuinely extremely helpful. So thank you to everyone who reached out. But my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theory was, and several people suggested this, what if you just remove the RF
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receiver from the equation? So instead of the wiring being from the fuse box to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wall unit to the RF receiver to the fan just take out the receiver.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it goes from fuse box to the wall to the fan and that’s it. And then put my beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lutron Caseta fan controls as the switches. And this I think was this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past weekend we finally got around to remounting the fans. My dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I did. We removed the little RF controller boxes and sure enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no problem because they’re AC fans, it works no sweat. So my beloved Lutron Caseta switches can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control fan speed. I can do that from my butt when I’m sitting on the porch and it all works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ligety split. And I didn’t have to do anything like the bond RF repeater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, which we had talked about, where it will receive something from HomeKit and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repeat that as an RF signal. I didn’t have to bother with any of that and I’m really, really excited about it. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the situation where you have a fan that you want to make HomeKit capable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t guarantee this will work, your mileage will vary, I’m not a lawyer, etc. But what we did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pulling the RF receiver from the fan, and it was an external thing, it’s not like I’m removing the internals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the fan, it was this box on the outside. We pulled it from the fan, and now I can control the fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via the Lutron Caseta switches, and I’m super happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. Are your fans still in danger of giving you a haircut?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, actually. So if you recall, the fans were way, way, way too low. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember how much of this I actually talked about on the show, but we were talking and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had, we had a heck of an experience with an electrician for all this work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our builder to do the physical construction was amazing. I love this guy. He was so great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The electrician was kind of awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Can I give a quick aside here? Yes, please. Just a very quick aside. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, if you or someone you know is looking for a career change,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become an electrician or a plumber. You will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never be out of work again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re good. If you’re good and if you charge. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certified and available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many, like in both places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve lived recently, there’s been a massive over-demand and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short supply of electricians and especially plumbers, but both trades really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those jobs, you can charge pretty much whatever you want because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people need you so badly and there’s not enough of them. And really, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re looking for a job that can never be easily outsourced to other places or that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always gonna be in demand, that’s always gonna be needed in the economy, become an electrician or a plumber. I’m telling you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are so short on those in so many areas. And so that’s like job security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for life right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And in fact, I think part of the reason my experience with this electrician, who by the way, came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely highly recommended from the same individual that recommended the builder that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did the job. And again, I loved the builder. The electrician, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his company was just spread way too thin. And so what I think ended up happening we got the JV squad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for doing most of the build. And it was like two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five steps back, two steps forward, three steps back. And it was just awful. And eventually we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, look, whoever, this JV squad ain’t working for us anymore. And I hate, God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate being this guy so much, but we can’t have the JV squad anymore. Can you send somebody who like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually knows what they’re doing? And that’s what ended up happening. And this other guy was amazing. He was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He got everything squared away. look at the split. But when he was here at one point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he looks at these fans and says, wow, those are low. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know. They’re really low. I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the measurement was, but they were probably six and a half, seven feet off the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know, oh, those are really low. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re not sure. No, it’s not great. I don’t know what we’re going to do about it. But for right now, like, we’re just going to live with it. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don’t understand. Those are too low. Like, yes, I do understand. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking right at it. Yes, I get it. No, you don’t understand. Those won’t pass inspection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh. So, as it turns out, I think in the county in which we live, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan blades need to be something like seven foot six inches off the floor of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, of the room. And when we measured these things, like I said, like six six or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven foot off the floor or something like that. So they were easily six inches to a foot lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than they could be to pass inspection. And so Aaron and I being the goody two-shoes we are, we’re like, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do we do? Can we raise them up? Oh my God, what do we do? Uh, and, and I was like, all right, look, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be here all day. So first of all, let me just kind of think about what to do about this in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me see if I can find any sort of solution to bring these up. Because these fans were not flush mount. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually emailed Kickler, the company that makes them, was like, hey, can I flush mount these? Is there anything I can buy to do that? And they were like, ha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha, no. Uh, and so I went looking for like a smaller down rod, which is the thing that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan is hanging on. And we got one that was marginally smaller, but it really didn’t make a noticeable difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we were like, I don’t know what to do. Long story, already long story,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slightly shortened. What the guy ended up doing, the electrician ended up doing was he had like some piping, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey metal piping that I think was supposed to be used for plumbing or something like that. I don’t even know why it was in his truck. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had this tubing that was really, really, really short and he could fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as basically a downrod. And so he put one of those in each of the fans and that brought it way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. So it’s still lower than I would like in the grand scheme of things, but it’s not like you step into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey porch and go, Oh, what the hell’s going on there? You know? So now it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, those are low. Aren’t they? Rather than, Oh my God, am I going to lose my hair? All in all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all good. We have speakers, we have fans. I can control the fans. via my phone, which of course I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never do because the only speed that’s worthwhile in Richmond, Virginia in the summer is high. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, I can turn them on and off and I could adjust the speed if I so cared. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really happy about that.
Casey’s TV Altitude
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t wait to hear the conclusion of the story of when this quote-unquote 8k HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John cable arrives. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Painted gold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, probably right. I should see what it is and get a link for it
⏹️ ▶️ John keep buying HDMI cables to be fair is not particularly easy
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t they don’t make it easy for like they don’t let you you know
⏹️ ▶️ John say that an HDMI cables an HDMI 2.1 cable You have to use their read code words. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John have these apps. Various manufacturers make apps that let you scan the barcode of an HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John cable and try to tell you what it’s actually rated for. Because it’s really complicated now, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, a newer cable is probably better than 10-year-old’s cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s more than 10, I think. I don’t remember exactly when all this was done. But it was shortly after we moved in, if I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, that we had put all this stuff in the walls. And then my dad and I had rejiggered it slightly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think a couple of years later. So I would guess this was literally 2010 or thereabouts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that these cables came from. So it’s a miracle that any of them worked. I put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat room and it’s in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John 8K certified, uh-huh. Agree,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey agree. HDMI 2.1, oh, is that what it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that this is. Oh, look, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got the little QR codes. You should get the app and scan the little QR code and it will tell you something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, too late now because it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John at 20. I’m sure it’s fine. You don’t have an 8K television. Like you just need literally any reasonably modern
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI cable. Your problem is that the cables are long though. He says like 15 feet or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t remember exactly how long I need, but my TV is obnoxiously high to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that John would burn down my house. If he,
⏹️ ▶️ John know we’ve all seen it. Everyone knows your TV is too high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s basically on the ceiling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s it’s, you know, it is. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to lay on the floor. He has
⏹️ ▶️ John to lay down on a bed to watch TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much, how much space is there between the top of the TV and the ceiling?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess six to 12 inches, something like that. And it’s, but now it’s a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low, it’s like a, I have a normal person house. I don’t have like a 30 foot ceiling like you do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I think I’ve, I think we have eight foot ceilings, I think. So it’s probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a 55 inch TV and I think it’s six to, somewhere between six to 12 inches off the ceiling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time you watch TV, you can see up all the actors noses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I concede and concur that it is not the perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey placement for a television, but given that my room is situated the way it is, and I don’t know if Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remembers, but he’s been there. No, I remember. I couldn’t do really anything else without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just completely turning the room into a television room rather than a, like, living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room. You know what I mean? But it is a television room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Are you kidding? That’s what living
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome to modern society. living room is a television room.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, he doesn’t want to block that fireplace that he uses so often.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of times in Virginia, he needs to start a fire
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and keep his house warm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re fired and I quit. All right, it’s been great everyone. Thanks a bunch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t worry about canceling your memberships. You never know when it’ll come back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bootleg people are gonna get scared.
⏹️ ▶️ John canceled. If anyone cancels because of Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m kidding for the love of God. I’m kidding. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put the children in the middle of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hard to say unless there’s the children. Are we the children? Yeah, I need I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. Nobody cancel. I need nobody to cancel because I need to afford this being so
⏹️ ▶️ John paper that I get gold HDMI cable. You just bought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then and then down the road pay for the renovation to pull the fireplace out and just mount the TV on a regular spot
⏹️ ▶️ John The head injury from the fan
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m going to jump up
⏹️ ▶️ John from your chair one day and surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I kid you not, I guarantee there will come a time before we move out of this house that we’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing cards or something outside. And I’m going to have a really good hand of like, and I’m not talking like poker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. I’m talking like something old man, like, you know, like Aaron and I used to play 500 rummy a lot about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, when we were just the two of us and I’ll get like a really good hand and 500 rummy or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that next thing you know I’ll jump up yes and oh god I don’t have hands anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think as long as the blade doesn’t hit your eye you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s not gonna be comfortable but like I don’t think it’s gonna like cut your hand off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I dislike fans strongly. Wait what’s wrong with fans John? I don’t like fans period and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my wife grew up in a house with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco every single
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey room. What is wrong with you? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want someone constantly blowing on me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah but like how do you like what I like about ceiling a fan fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they extend much further upwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the comfortable temperature rings that you can sleep in a room without using the air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. People are just addicted to fans. They just need to have, they need to have the noise. They need to have the wind constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John blowing on them, especially probably people also who are often hot, right? People who really run hot or run cold. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John run hot, you probably want air constantly blowing path to you to take all your body heat away so you don’t get overheated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Same. I do not. I do not want fans. I don’t want the noise. I don’t want the breeze, I don’t want any of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s because you’re always cold. Like, it really, what I love about fans is that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re in a place that doesn’t have a lot of wind, which like my other.
⏹️ ▶️ John You are not in a place that doesn’t have a lot of wind,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Margot. No, but I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last 10 years. And it’s so nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a constant slight breeze if it’s artificially created, if you can’t get a natural one. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, if it’s like 74 degrees, It’s so hard to sleep, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s stupid. Like, and I hate having to use air conditioning if I don’t have to. Like, I would so much rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefer not using air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so you’re saying you only need it in the bedroom? Is that, is the only place you want a fan is in the bedroom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like a ceiling fan in the bedroom and in the office. Because those are the two places where I have to like, sit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long, like stay for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you get a fanless Mac and you install a gigantic fan in the room with your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s quieter. No, like in the summertime, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like using the air conditioning in my office more than I have to like I would rather like I can be in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office comfortably up to about 80 degrees with the ceiling fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before before I want to switch over to air conditioning, because it they’re effective, they’re very good and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saves a lot of energy. I think it’s nicer. I’d rather be in a room with with a fan that’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warmer rather than having to switch over to air conditioning and then have like the weird cold hot transitions as I come in out of the room or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out of the house. Like I hate all that. If I don’t have to do that, I’d rather not. So I greatly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefer like if a fan can keep me cool enough and I don’t need to use the air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather not use the air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I have nothing. I love air conditioning more than almost anything. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just really feel like for my comfort, I need two things and this may make me very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird and I’m okay with that. I need moving air almost always. It’s very rare that I’m okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in still air. Wow, that was way too much rhyming, oh my gosh. Secondly, I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get uncomfortable if there isn’t some sort of audio somewhere nearby and I think this is where John and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would never be able to be roommates. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this is terrible. You’re just combining all the things that I don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have an easy solution, Casey. Get a Mac Pro and put it on your desk. And live inside it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just turn it around, like face the back towards you.
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the television on? Casey’s gonna have the television on constantly, maximum volume with
⏹️ ▶️ John seven ceiling fans in each room, full blast all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But all the TVs are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be up on the ceiling. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Up on the ceiling, that’s exactly right. No, generally speaking, like when I’m around the house, whatever room I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in will have the fan running, usually but not always. And pretty much always there will either be ambient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music playing or I will be privately listening to a podcast. One of those two things is almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do the other members of your family want this or is it just you mostly?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has learned to live with it. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. That’s not entirely true. Like Aaron, her family grew up with, they were big into white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noise when sleeping, typically fans. So this definitely qualifies John as the people who need the noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like Aaron cannot do silence and I used to be able to do silence just fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of sleeping that is. I used to be able to do silent sleeping just fine. But now after years and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years of very faintly hearing the white noise machine in the kids’ rooms because it’s being piped through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the monitor. Now, when there’s silence, like, it was right after New Year’s, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my parents took the kids for the first time in months and months and months and months and months. And we had a night, just the two of us here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home, and we didn’t have the monitor on because there were no kids. And there was no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white noise machine on because no kids. And it was actually somewhat hard for me to sleep because I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to now this stupid white noise. noise and I’ve had arguments with Erin where I’ve said, I don’t want them addicted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this white noise like you freaking are because she cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sleep without some sort of fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now I’ve done it to myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean it sounds like Casey should move to the beach because that’s got white noise and wind all