447: Lunchbox on Your Face
09 Sep 2021A geographic dispute, important mouse updates, John’s favorite percentage, and predictions for next week’s Apple event.
Episode Description:
- Please donate to St. Jude. Cancer sucks, and childhood cancer sucks a lot. Please donate any amount of money, if you can.
- Pre-show:
- Casey’s very big day
- Teaching Marco geography
- Follow-up:
- Australians: Get your shot!
- More arguing about geography
- Apple delays CSAM protection features
- HomeKit camera TV PiP can be enabled/disabled per camera
- App Store lawsuit is only for iOS apps?
- John’s “bad mouse pad” update
- John’s favorite percentage: 9.6%
- Google Drive for Desktop
- Forcing Photos.app to download all your photos
Photos→Library→All Photos- ⌘A
File→Play Slideshow
- Apple Event
- MacBook Pros? :(
- Apple Watch Series 7 (renders based on rumors)
- Airstream
- Apple Pippin
- Half-Life: Alyx
- HoloLens
- Oculus Quest
- Post-show
#askatp: Will the iPhone ever drop the number? (via Doug McArthur)
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Chapters
- Long Island or not?
- Donate away your guilt! 🖼️
- 🇦🇺 Vaccinate! 🦘🕷️🍺🍤🏄💉
- Wikipedia: Map of Long Island 🖼️
- Sponsor: Things
- CSAM features delayed
- 1Password served Casey
- HomeKit cameras on your TV
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- John’s mouse follow-up
- “John’s favorite percentage: 9.6%”
- Google Drive for Desktop
- Mac photo-download trick
- Sponsor: Earnest
- Apple-event predictions
- Ending theme
- After-show: iPhone numbering
Long Island or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big day for me. Big day for Richmond. We’ve took down the last of the monuments on Monument Avenue. There’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey avenue that runs through Richmond called Monument Avenue. Guess what? There’s a bunch of monuments used to be on it. Last one, Robert E. Lee,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traitor, came down today. I’m very excited about that. So no more Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very good news. Progress. So big day, big
⏹️ ▶️ John day. We should put up new ones. It’s still called Monument Avenue. You can put monuments there. Just don’t put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument. Absolutely no argument
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. And if I say that, knowing that, they’ll probably do sports team stuff, which is great either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. What does a Hokie look like? Well, you know, as a former tour guide, as the former
⏹️ ▶️ Casey president of the Hokie Ambassadors, thank you very much. I can tell you that a Hokie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is me. I am a Hokie because I am an alumni of Virginia Tech. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hokie. Are you petitioning for a monument? Yeah, no, I’m not petitioning for a monument for me. Although I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you that the War Memorial Chapel has eight pylons above it at Virginia Tech and the eight pylons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand for the eight virtues of Virginia Tech, which are brotherhood, Ut Prosim, which is our Latin, which is our school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motto, which is that I may serve, leadership, loyalty, service, sacrifice, honor, and duty. Still got it, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. You said duty. This is a very useful skill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can walk backwards like the best of them, let me tell you. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we can’t make fun of being called hokey while Marco can’t because he lives in a place with a town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hey, I don’t live on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco island. That’s your island, sir. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John You live on Long Island. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, I don’t. It’s a very different
⏹️ ▶️ John place. No, go find a map of Long Island that does not include Fire Island. Go ahead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very different place. I know, I was there this morning. I had to drive through it. It’s a very different
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s hard to wrap your mind around the idea that there’s a place called Long Island that could itself have many sub-islands
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of which you live on, but you do indeed live on Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John Long Islands. I’m not, I’m not arguing that, but I’m telling you there are a bunch of islands and they’re all part
⏹️ ▶️ John of a place called Long Island. And if you get a map of Long Island, it will include all those other little islands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a bunch of islands in a place called New York. And I happen to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in New York.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, no. Are you on Long Island? No, I’m on Fire Island. Yeah, that’s on Long Island, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, it’s not. It’s a different island. It is. A different island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely. Strictly speaking, Marco is correct. However, however… He’s not correct in any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey form. No, no, no. I think colloquially or in any reasonable measure, John is correct. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, you live on Long Island. Of course you do. Like, yes, strictly speaking, it’s a different island, whatever. It’s like…
⏹️ ▶️ John not how geography works. Like, the name of the place, because it has the word island and it doesn’t suddenly exclude other things that are islands.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how geography works at all. It’s just a place name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shouldn’t the person who lives here be able to be the authority
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on what this is called.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tiff would agree with me because she was born there and she will agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I have an important question. Do we live on Long Island?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s a different island. It’s a different island. It has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different name. There are two different islands and they’re islands so they’re surrounded by water so they’re distinctly different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from each other. We live adjacent to Long Island. And for the record, where are you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from? I’m from Long Island. Thank you so much. I mean, Manhattan’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not Long Island. It’s an island next to Long Island. That’s what I said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry. Suck it, Syracuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’d you know it was him? How could I not know? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Donate away your guilt!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you know that Dave Matthews band is a jam band? Hey, so anyway something that we can all agree on it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey September Which means it is childhood cancer awareness month and for the month of September the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us who are all members of relay FM We try to join in with relay and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a lot of fundraising for st. Jude Children’s Research Hospital What is st. Jude?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey well if you live in a backwards ass country like we do you have to pay for health care like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and And if you have a really sick kid, that can be—well, first of all, having a sick kid is ruinous to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with—but if you have a kid that’s been stricken with cancer, you can take them to St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if St. Jude treats them, not only will they treat your kid for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free, they will help you travel and pay for it, they will give you your food for free, they will do all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these amazing things, and they will do it at no cost to you. Well, how do they do that? It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people like us, listeners and hosts of this very program, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of the generosity and donations of all of you that are listening to my voice right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that kids are getting healthy and not dying due to childhood cancer. Treatments invented at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80% since St. Jude opened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With one in five children not surviving St. Jude won’t stop until no child dies from cancer, they need our support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, let me tell you a quick story. Last episode, a week ahead of schedule, John decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do his donation, which meant the two of us needed to do our donations because we try to do this as a unit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We each donated, well, two slackers donated $7,000, and the one true host donated $7,001 to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, since then, there have been two extremely noteworthy donations I’d like to call out. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have not heard from either of these people, but if you would like to reach out, please reach out to me. The first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an anonymous donor who left the message, asterisk trolling, asterisk Casey, asterisk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for asterisk, the asterisk kids, asterisk who donated $10,001,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is genuinely as much as I’m being silly right now, that is genuinely an immense amount of money. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am extremely thankful for that. And that happened within like 24 hours, I think of, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us releasing the last show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Truly a sticker worthy amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, absolutely. five
⏹️ ▶️ John digits worth of stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, absolutely. So please, I’m really being serious. Reach out to me, caselist.com slash contact. Please reach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out to me and let me know if that is you. Send me a picture of your donation receipt
⏹️ ▶️ John Because remember Casey said, anyone who beats the top amount, whatever the top
⏹️ ▶️ John amount is at the time. So the time this was done, the top amount was $7,001. So 10,001 handily beats it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that means it is eligible for stickers. And anybody who beats the current top
⏹️ ▶️ John score, according to Casey’s rules this year, will get Stickerist if they write him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that is correct. And then not too long after this $10,001 donation, which again is amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then apparently not only can humans donate, but canines can as well, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gus the dog donated $15,000. $15,000. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like eight of John’s first Honda Civic. It’s $15,000 that Gus the Dog donated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even typed out as a message, asterisk A, asterisk T, asterisk P, asterisk space,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ampersand, ampersand. So Gus the Dog, I know you probably can’t understand me, although, hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donated 15 grand, so you must understand more than I expect. If you or Anonymous want to send me a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your receipt and reach out, I will send stickers. I don’t care where you are in the world. I will find a way to get them to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re not Gus the Dog and you’re not the anonymous person trolling Casey for the kids, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please, if you have even but a few dollars to scrape together. Stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP. Stjude.org slash ATP. Marco, this is your cue to give the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spiel since it is next week that we might be having all of this become very relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, this is, look, this is the season of Apple nerds spending absurd amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money on new gear, some of which we might need most of which we probably don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, and when we buy our new gear, we have this, you know, a purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attachment thing that happens as, you know, this is the whole idea of like extended warranties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and accessories for your new car and the fancy floor mats and all this stuff, when you buy something expensive you’re more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to throw away additional chunks of money on things for your expensive thing. Whether it’s upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the next storage size or a nice new, you know, Apple silicone or leather case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, buying the AppleCare for your new phone or watch or whatever, maybe getting the steel watch, getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cool band for it or something like that, there’s all these opportunities to not only spend a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of money on the thing, but spend even more money to make yourself feel even better about the thing, or make the thing accessorize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a certain way, or whatever. And what I ask every year of our listeners is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know not all of you, not even most of you, can do these amazing, you know, multi-thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollar donations. Like, that’s an amazing thing, and I’m glad we have any of our listeners who can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, obviously I don’t expect everyone want to be able to do that. I do know though that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all going to go out and drop like a hundred bucks for the next storage size up or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna drop a hundred fifty bucks for you know the next AppleCare or whatever or drop 70 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a new case without even thinking about it. You’re probably gonna pay a hundred bucks in tax on sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tax when you buy you know anything from Apple these days. So what I ask you is take those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that size chunk of money if you can’t do the bigger chunks of money I understand but I bet you can do one of those chunks of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Throw in a hundred bucks. Throw in 70 bucks. Whatever you can do, donate that to St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes a huge difference. Even donations of that size, even smaller, if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all you can do. If you can only throw in 30 bucks, fine. Do whatever you can do. Be generous if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can, because this is an amazing cause. And you know, it’s hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes it’s hard to know like what’s a good charity to donate money to? Like, you know, who can really make a difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, who’s actually using the money well and everything, it’s really hard to beat St. Jude for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of impact you can have and how important it is to people who are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a tough spot in their life, you know. Like having a child with cancer, both for the child
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for their family, is just a really tough thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways, so many levels, I don’t even have the words to describe it. So if you can help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that better in some way, you’re You’re helping pay for treatment. You’re helping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fund research to help more kids survive cancer. That’s a huge deal to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people. And you can just like crap out a donation from what you were going to pay on sales tax in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your iPhone case or whatever. It’s such a small deal to you and it can make such a big deal to someone else. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a really great way to donate away your guilt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your Apple purchases by also sending a chunk of money, in addition to sending a lot of chunks of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple, also send a chunk of money to St. Jude because they’re doing really important work. That money will put to very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good use and it makes a very big impact in people’s lives. And then you can guilt-free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get your new phone that you don’t really necessarily need or get the steel watch because it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer, you know. As long as you also kicked over some money to St. Jude, that will absolve you of your guilt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. So again, stjude.org. And just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a quick situation report, we are at $215,674.11. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over a million raised in three years, which is amazing. And hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the perks, which I will now announce since it’s been made public, at $300,001,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will publish, or maybe not publish, but at least stream via Twitch one time, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lost Casey on cars episode of the Tesla Model 3 versus Tesla Model S. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco get us there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are only 75 ish, excuse me, what is that? 85, I can’t do math. It’s late, 85 ish thousand dollars away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s get us there to $300,001 at stjude.org slash ATP. to stju.org.atp. Moving right along.
🇦🇺 Vaccinate! 🦘🕷️🍺🍤🏄💉
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up, as always. I’ve had a request, which I normally would absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignore, but in this case, I am allowing it. An Australian listener reached out to me and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, Australians are going through a real tough spot right now with COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vaccines seem to be getting to the point that they’re pretty readily available. So would you mind just encouraging Australians
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get your shot? Hey, I would not acquiesce to these sort of requests in any normal situation, but when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to vaccinations, yes, all of you, Americans, Australians, and anyone else who has a shot available, now’s the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe you could imagine, just imagine with me for a second. Close your eyes if you’re not driving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine with me, you’re sitting there waiting to get a vaccine, not just for yourself, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your fellow country people. And as you’re sitting there, you’re using your information phone to go to stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP to donate to St. Jude. Imagine two birds in one stone. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life get better than that? So Australians, Americans, anyone else who can, please do all the above.
Wikipedia: Map of Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco along. Apple. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some important real-time follow-up as well. Thanks to listener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N in the chat for linking to the Wikipedia article on Long Island. You’ll notice that the map
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Long Island colors Long Island geographically in red. And you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also notice if you click on that and make the map even bigger, that Fire Island, which is one of those skinny trips below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island, is not colored in red. So Fire Island is not part of Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going for a low-resolution bitmap image on Wikipedia as
⏹️ ▶️ John a deciding factor here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s clearly not colored in. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could see some of the white.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh-huh, sure. I mean, there’s also other things that aren’t colored in that are also part of Long Island, as you see those
⏹️ ▶️ John little white blobs there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, it’s like those are different islands. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John To think of the absurdity of it says, hey, what’s your favorite Long Island beach? And you say, I really love Robert Moses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say, sorry, that’s not a Long Island beach. It’s not. That’s the absurdity of where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, just hold on. Since we’re appealing to Wikipedia as the authority and arbiter, arbiter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John arbiter, whatever. Well, we kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think we are, but. No, just hold on. Since we are appealing to them as the adjudicator, that’s what I was looking for of all these things. Let me read to you the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beginning of the second paragraph of the entry for Long Island. Broadly speaking, Long Island may refer both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the main island and the surrounding outer barrier islands, which includes, ladies and gentlemen, Fire
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, like, I understand getting hung up on the word island. This is like an episode a robot or not, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get hung up on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the island that is long and anything that is not that island is not Long Island. It’s the name of an entire place.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, just look at anything having to do with Long Island. When they put a map of Long Island, they don’t remove all the little other
⏹️ ▶️ John things around. Those are all parts of the umbrella term Long Island. I’m sorry, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s just the way place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is like, they include that because these are the best parts of the area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real estate listings, when you have a good neighborhood and then the the neighborhood next to it, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it like, you know, West Park Slope or whatever. Like, they’ll give like a, like, they’ll try to use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name of the nicer one for the less nice one, because it increases the value of the houses there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, since we’re going down this rabbit hole and we’re just going to keep digging, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the city? What portion of New York City do you qualify as the city?
⏹️ ▶️ John All of New York City, all five boroughs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so it’s not just Manhattan, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all five boroughs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even just going by the boroughs, of people are upset by the idea that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of New York City is on Long Island. And I’m sorry, that’s just the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. So when, so people in Brooklyn, should they say that they live on Long Island?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where they live. I mean, they live in Brooklyn too, and they also live in New York City.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so people from Brooklyn are, so somebody from Brooklyn, they could say they’re a Long Islander? Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’d be okay with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’m surprised. I mean, but I bet they would probably say they were from Brooklyn because there’s a primacy
⏹️ ▶️ John of, uh, pride of place that, the sort of a hierarchy of where you want to say you’re from, but it’d be technically
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, they could say they’re from New York too,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that would be true. They’re also from New York, but they probably wouldn’t lead with that unless they’re – we’ve gone to this before. Like when you say you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John from New York versus the United States versus Brooklyn versus Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So somebody in Brooklyn shouldn’t say they’re from Long Island because Brooklyn is like a nicer place name, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would be legitimately on the geographic feature of Long Island. So there the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco geographic feature boundary matters, but when defining Fire Island, the geographic feature boundary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I’m saying that the geography of Long Island as the thing that Casey just read is the entire the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole conglomeration of crap like I know it says island in the name and you’re just dying to make it one island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It says in quotes the phrase Long Island may refer to that whole area it doesn’t say it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And it does refer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously you are referring to it so it may but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that doesn’t make it correct. At
⏹️ ▶️ John least we can all just agree to like dump on Staten Island which is not part of Long Island and
⏹️ ▶️ John really people wish it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really should be part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s if you look at the map, it’s kind of ridiculous. Staten Island is part of New York.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. I don’t I think Staten Island gets a lot of crap
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of garbage from New York City, literally. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of the the outlier in many ways.
Sponsor: Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Things, the award-winning to-do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I love Things. I use Things. And I can’t say that about a lot of apps. There’s a lot of apps, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I try, I kind of bounce off of them after, you know, an hour or a day or a week. Things has stuck with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. It’s so good. It is my favorite task management app. Now, they’ve also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added a fantastic new set of features. Things now supports markdown inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your notes. Actual markdown. This is not just some small subset, it’s the real deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Headings, bold, italics, highlights, code, code blocks, you name it, all the Markdown syntax is detected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rendered in a beautiful style inside your to-dos and project notes. I mean, Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an app is already an amazing looking app. It’s beautifully designed, and this just makes it even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, you might be surprised to think of Markdown as a feature inside of a to-do item, but that’s because in most to-do apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the notes field is kind of a second-class citizen, whether it’s a tiny little super small font below the to-do or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tucked away inside of a detailer inspector pane. Not so in Things. In Things, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes take center stage. When you open a to-do, you have plenty of room to write. You can add whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details you need, detailed plans, reference material, brainstorms. This is how I actually use Things myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put tons of notes on each to-do. If it’s a link I want to refer to, or notes or little sub-bullets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do all of that in Things. And you can keep it simple if you want to, and just have nice, simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Thanks to Markdown, even your longest notes look and feel fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you haven’t tried Things, check it out, especially now with this new version. Just search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Things on the App Store or go to thingsapp.com. You can download a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your Mac and try the new Markdown feature for yourself. And there’s many other great features to love as well. So whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is you want to accomplish in life, Things can help you get there. Go to thingsapp.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try the app today. Thank you so much to Things, my favorite to-do app, for sponsoring our show.
CSAM features delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s move on. Apple delayed controversial child protection features after privacy outcry. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an article from The Verge. Apple has a quote, Last month, we announced plans for features intended to help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of child sexual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abuse material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s good. I don’t have extremely strong feelings about this, other than to say, hey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, do you know what? Sometimes doing things in public out loud is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helpful. Who knew? Maybe you should consider it sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of thankful that this has been delayed just so we can finally stop talking about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, one question, do you think this is ever gonna actually ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is this just gonna be one of those air power delays where eventually it’ll just stop being talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will never, and this is actually more of a cancellation, but they don’t wanna really quite say that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re gonna do something, right? Just because all their competitors and everyone else does something,
⏹️ ▶️ John does a lot more than Apple does, as evidenced by how much of this stuff they catch. So Apple has to eventually do something. Do they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do any of the specific things that they described here? No, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re just gonna say, eh, nevermind, we’re fine the way we are, we don’t need to do anything. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is that they do eventually will be interesting. Like I hope one of the things they took away from this
⏹️ ▶️ John as we discussed on many past episodes is that their notion of
⏹️ ▶️ John the most privacy preserving approach to solving this problem does not match with
⏹️ ▶️ John the opinion of their customers notion of what is the most privacy preserving. Like I don’t think, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John within the technical communities, there’s any debate about what they’re doing or the specifics of it, but Apple seems to
⏹️ ▶️ John think, like everyone agrees about the facts, but Apple says, and this way preserves your privacy the best. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the customers are saying, doesn’t feel that way to us, but at least everyone agrees on what
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is doing. So I think this is more of a sort of customer fit type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, okay, well, we have our opinion and you have your opinion, but we don’t want to do something that you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t preserve your privacy because that’s what our goal is. And so they kind of have to figure out something that
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody can agree is privacy preserving, or they could, the version of punting on this is like, yeah, we’ll just scan everything
⏹️ ▶️ John server-side. Right, and not really make a big deal out of it, because hey, did we have
⏹️ ▶️ John any stories about this when all the other companies started scanning server-side? We don’t even know when that was. They just do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not a big deal, and you know, that’s that. But Apple wants to do it better in a
⏹️ ▶️ John quote-unquote more privacy-preserving way, and that’s kind of how they got themselves into trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I mean, ultimately, I think the scanning on your device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore, like, kind of having your device be like a police force or surveillance force,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it’s like your hardware that you own. I think that is one of the biggest parts that offended a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if they switch to a server-side model, that would obviously preclude end-to-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encryption. But I think a lot of people would be okay with that trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t make it, like I think from a technical perspective, that doesn’t make any sense, but I think that’s what Apple is learning
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it might not actually make any sense, but really you are, and when it comes to things like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are in some ways beholden to what customers think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, no customers are flipping out by the fact that their phones are
⏹️ ▶️ John scanning and categorizing all their photos to identify dogs, airplanes, dinner plates,
⏹️ ▶️ John potatoes. There’s this open-ended, machine-learning-powered thing that is
⏹️ ▶️ John literally scanning and categorizing every single one of their photos. And everyone’s fine with that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s missing that one little part of, oh, we’ll report back when we find a picture of a dog. Like, you know, the whole thing of like, if we find pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of a particular politician we’ll report you. They could totally be finding those pictures of the politician right now. The only little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have haven’t added is, oh, and by the way, if you find pictures of that politician, send a ping to the
⏹️ ▶️ John server or something like that. All right, so all the people who are upset about, I don’t want them to build this capability.
⏹️ ▶️ John They already did and nobody cared, right? It’s just, it’s, anyway, I don’t want to rehash it all, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think they need to do something and I would actually prefer that they do enable and encryption
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere and do something like this, tweak such that there is
⏹️ ▶️ John like more broad agreement, as I said, with like advocacy groups, researchers, and
⏹️ ▶️ John customers, I suppose, and whoever the others are, that before they come out with an announcement, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with something that has more features that make people feel
⏹️ ▶️ John more comfortable because Apple thought they had all the features they needed to make everybody feel comfortable and they were wrong, right? People didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel comfortable. So they, I think engaging in more dialogue with everybody who complained
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, now that they know who all those people are to come up with something where they can say, okay, if we announce
⏹️ ▶️ John this now, all these other people who we didn’t talk to at all or enough before our first announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ John do we all agree that this is going to be better? And I think, for example, you’d have to pair it with end to end encryption, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the point again, what’s the point of doing this thing if you have access to everything server side anyway, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of pitch, which is like from this point on, Apple literally can’t look at any of your your pictures, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to catch these things. So we’re going to use this system and it has these safeguards that are much better than our previous safeguards.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, there’ll be no automatic reporting or like, I don’t know, like something to make people feel comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is the best possible outcome of this. I think one of the worst outcomes is for them to just get frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ John and do server-side scanning, even though people would mostly be okay with that. I would prefer to live in a world
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple can’t see my photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with that. I would be willing to make the trade of them scanning server side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, I guess, I’m sorry, them scanning device side, is what I meant to say, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have end-to-end encryption. I think that’s a trade I’m willing to make, although not everyone necessarily would.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but you need, like, people need more features, more stopgaps, more hedges
⏹️ ▶️ John against the false positives and stuff like that. Because what they rolled out
⏹️ ▶️ John before, like I said, if you look at it in light of their performance of the app It is not reassuring to you in any way that humans
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to review it. That makes you feel like I still might get swept up in this. So there obviously needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ John something sturdier than that to avoid false positives.
1Password served Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The 1Password 8 beta is still a thing. I’m still running it. I’m still not in love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s not actively making me angry for the most part. But I am happy to report this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is a tweet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A glowing review. This is a tweet from Dave. Is it Tierre? I hope I pronounced that right. I’m sorry, Dave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He tweeted earlier today, or maybe it was yesterday, by popular demand, today’s update includes a cute little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey animation when entering an incorrect password. I think you’ll enjoy it, Casey Liss. And so this is me, catching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how the, in 1Password 7, the entire window would shake, you know, side to side a little bit when you entered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an incorrect password. And I use that as a silly example of what not going native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does. And so, the good news is the shake is back. The bad news is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not the whole window. It’s just the little password entry field. But nevertheless, small victories, my friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, somebody, I think it was Christian Selig of Apollo Reddit client fame,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey challenged Dave on the fact that it wasn’t the whole window. And there was a reasonable justification for that was not technical. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in short, they thought it was less, uh, um, I guess less loud for better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lack of a better word, uh, to do just the input field. But anyway, progress is being made, which is good. I haven’t done any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey testing with some of my other complaints yet, but I can tell you, I did see the little shake earlier, which made me happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does this count as you being served?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think so. Well served in the sense that I have requested something and it has been served to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking more of like the, like, you know, dance contest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey meaning. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you certainly got better responsiveness than you get from filing feedbacks with Apple. That’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on. Slow down. No, no, no. I think that’s an incorrect statement. I got a response.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Yeah. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that alone. Like in and of itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is table stakes for most people. And I did get that much. A timely response? And yeah. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first, if like it’s the communication pyramid we talked about on analog, right? So first level is I got a response.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The second level was it was timely. level was it was actually slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey f***ing relevant to what I was trying to say and what am I, fourth level now? Fourth level was it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did what I wanted it to do. So this is like a pure freaking victory for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would like to point out that I have filed two feedbacks this summer, both of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in early June and neither of them have gotten a response.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So business as usual, same as it ever was.
HomeKit cameras on your TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay yi yi. All right, moving right along. HomeKit camera TV picture in picture can be enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or disabled per camera. Which one of you, was this Marco complaining about this? Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I was asking whether it was a thing. I was saying it would be annoying if it happened to me. And is that a thing that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John turn off? And this is the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John was saying it was an anti-feature to have your HomeKit camera alert you on your TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you couldn’t turn it off. Because John is very protective of his TV watching time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And nobody wants that. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John watching a show and all of a sudden another picture bloops on top of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I absolutely would like to know that if somebody’s at my front door. Are you kidding?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would too because I don’t… So through too-flusive construction, we don’t have a doorbell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we haven’t had a doorbell for like 10 years. We do have a dog. And so we always joke that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hopps’s job is to be our doorbell. The problem… And he’s very good at it. The problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he’s only working for a certain part of the day and then he’s off for the night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s… Usually his shift ends around like 8 or 9 o’clock at night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if somebody comes to the door and knocks, we don’t necessarily know if we can’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the knock. Like if we’re in another room far away from the door and hops us off for the night, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. So something like this would actually be useful. I can’t think of a time when I’m watching TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I wouldn’t want to know if somebody was at the door.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I was thinking more of like, because you were tied to security cameras, like if someone walks by your house and trips on one of your motion lights, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want a little square popping up on the show that I’m watching.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our camera philosophy here, and I said this last week, just to reiterate a very important part of my camera philosophy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re walking past my house like on the public sidewalk, I don’t want you to be able to see a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera. I don’t want there to be any sign that I have cameras. You shouldn’t even know that I have cameras until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are somewhere that you really shouldn’t be. Then I want my cameras to make themselves known in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing is looking like at the public sidewalk or at the public street, so that wouldn’t be an issue unless somebody was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like under my house doing weird things, in which case I do want to know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that’s fair. So anyway, Pankaj Rupani writes, activity notifications are turned off by default on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV. What they showed in the keynote was doorbell notification, which is turned on by default, and is actually coming in handy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you have a movie night and you get delivery, for example. Additionally, Jonathan Rogers writes, the doorbell actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rings my home pods and can identify faces using people have ID in the photos app. That’s very cool. I dig
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder if it like announces that it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so and so is at the door based on facial recognition. That’s a good Apple integration of tech and, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, announcing it through the home pods as opposed to like, I don’t know, the little dingy thing on your wall. That’s kind of neat.
Sponsor: ExpressVPN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a VPN is a really, really useful tool. One of the reasons I use VPNs is if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveling and I have to use some untrusted Wi-Fi network, like at a hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an airport or something, I won’t do that without a VPN. Because to me, even though I know a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my stuff is encrypted, like at the client level like, you know, HTTPS, I know it’s not 100% and there’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, creepy stuff that network providers can do like at the local or ISP level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I just don’t trust other people’s connections. So if I have to use someone else’s Wi-Fi, I’m using a VPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Another good use of VPNs is if you want to use, say, your streaming service that you’re paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for when you are traveling outside of your country. I’ve actually done this and I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ExpressVPN to do it. We wanted to watch a show on Netflix while we were traveling in Mexico a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years back. It was amazing to be able to just click and say, I’m now in the US officially, according
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John’s mouse follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me about your crappy mouse pad, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, remember, remember this whole thing about like one side of my mouse pad wasn’t working right? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yeah. And I like
⏹️ ▶️ John rotated the mouse pad and people so maybe it’s the cord. Maybe it’s the desk surface. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s this, maybe it’s that. Maybe your mouse has gone bad. And I did all these experiments. And I was like, it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to be that part of the mouse pad. And that part of the mouse pad was more worn than the other ones and had like a slightly different sheen
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. and like, wow, it’s really weird that this isn’t tracking. And for a while now I’ve been like, I really need to, because my mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John pad is like cut from a larger mouse pad. You know, he carved it himself from a larger spoon. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if either one of you get that reference. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was from the Simpsons. Is that the chili cook off? That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hey. Good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t even gotten to that episode yet in our rewatch.
⏹️ ▶️ John He carved it himself from a larger spoon. That’s, I think Lenny says that. I don’t remember. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to cut myself a new mouse pad. And that’s because I have another sheet of mouse pad
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff up in the attic. And I kept meaning to do it. And every time I sat down on my computer and my mouse skipped around,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I really need to do this. So finally I got a chance to do it. I go, I cut my new, I brought my old mouse pad and put
⏹️ ▶️ John it down on top of the new one, cut myself a new mouse pad, brought it in, set it up, put it down underneath my mouse, woke
⏹️ ▶️ John up my computer, plugged everything back in. My mouse wouldn’t move at all on the new mouse pad. Cursor would
⏹️ ▶️ John not move at all. I’m like, all right, well, what’s going on here? Like no motion, zero, zero motion.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, how is this the mouse broken? It’s not the mouse pad. Like it’s just a black,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, felt fabric. It’s mouse pad material. There’s nothing wrong with it. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John went through this whole debugging procedure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What, what, what is the debugging procedure for this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, not moving at all is like, okay, this isn’t a tracking problem, right? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it on different surfaces, put it on the, you know, the other parts of the keyboard I put it on the desk, put it on my leg,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was just not moving at all. And so I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s start limiting these things here. So first thing I did was I unplugged the mouse from the cord
⏹️ ▶️ John and connected it through Bluetooth and that worked. I mean, my Bluetooth signal is crappy, but anyway, the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John over Bluetooth works. But I don’t want that. I want it to be plugged in because the Bluetooth, again, my Bluetooth signal from my distant tower
⏹️ ▶️ John is crappy. So I’m like, well, the mouse isn’t entirely broken, but maybe just the wire connection is broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I unplugged it from this cord and I got a shorter cord and plugged it into the same USB hub that this
⏹️ ▶️ John cord is in. And the mouse worked perfectly. I’m like, well, maybe the cord is dead. Maybe it kinked, maybe got
⏹️ ▶️ John cut, maybe, you know, a mouse chewed through it. Like maybe the cord is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried a shorter cord and it worked. I mean, I’m kind of giving away by saying shorter, but I tried another cord, which happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to be shorter and it worked fine. So before I realized the length was potentially an issue, I was like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John got another one of these mice in the attic I will go and get the long cord because it comes with this really
⏹️ ▶️ John long really thin USB cord that’s more like a mouse cord and not like a cord that you’d use to like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know charge your you know camera or whatever like big thick USB
⏹️ ▶️ John cord so I got that cord down I plugged into the USB hub plugged it into my mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John same problem like it would it would well actually not the same problem it would move a little bit but it it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very sporadic, like I’d move the mouse and maybe the mouse would twitch on the screen or whatever. I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a brand new cord, fresh out of the box, never been used. So it’s got to be the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John hub, right? So then I took it and plugged that the cord,
⏹️ ▶️ John the long cord directly into the back of my computer and that worked. So I’m like, this cord is good, the hub
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad. And that’s where I ended up after this process of elimination of trying all
⏹️ ▶️ John different combinations that my USB hub, which granted I’ve had since I had my cheese grater Mac Pro, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how old it is, but it’s pretty old. Apparently it can’t supply
⏹️ ▶️ John enough signal strength for a very long USB cord anymore. It can supply enough
⏹️ ▶️ John signal strength for like a three foot cord, but not for like the six foot cord that I have. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. Yeah. Now the question is why did I think it was part of my mouse pad?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because all the experiments I’d done before is like if I do it on the right side and I was padded, it jumps, and I do the left side, it’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the best thing I can come up with is, every time I did this test, I don’t even know which order I did, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John probably always tested the bad area first and the good area second. And there was probably some kind of like voltage
⏹️ ▶️ John ramp up or some kind of like, like the first thing that you try it on, it’s jumpy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then when I moved to the second area, it’s fine because like, I don’t know, it’s like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing needed to get, whatever thing is dying inside my USB hub. And it’s super weird that the thing that was dying
⏹️ ▶️ John like went totally dead, you know, the time I cut out the mouse pad and put the new one down
⏹️ ▶️ John because it wasn’t moving at all, right? So a new USB hub, it’s on its way
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. I just wanted to finish up that story to say, it turns out it was not the mouse pad, although now I have a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John new mouse pad. I saved the old one too, because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John rotate it back down. Now I have a nice new mouse pad. I’m currently using
⏹️ ▶️ John my Logitech mouse with the little RF dongle, which I have sticking up out of the top of my Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John with a USB-C to A dongle, like a little antenna, because if you stick that little
⏹️ ▶️ John dongle, we went over this before, if you stick that little dongle to the back of my computer, it’s too far away and too close to the other USB ports, it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible signal, but now I have my little antenna that works. I’m using the Logitech one while I wait. Logitech one works great
⏹️ ▶️ John on the new mouse pad. And when my new USB hub gets here, which by the way, I had to end up buying, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to, but I did end up buying literally the exact same USB hub, because since the time I bought that many years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John There has been no advance
⏹️ ▶️ John technology or availability. So I hope the new one solves all my
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. I’ll keep you updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t hold your breath.
“John’s favorite percentage: 9.6%”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So oftentimes one of my beloved co-hosts will put just a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very curious line item in the show notes. And I feel like it’s happening more and more as we all get older, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next line item is as follows. John’s favorite percentage, colon 9.6%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are you talking about? If you listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to the episodes like I do, you’d know. Marco, do you know what that’s about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so. I was trying to, I saw that earlier too, and I was trying to think, what could that be? And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John entering the photos section of the follow-up here. These are grouped items. I was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John how to organize your photos in an ASCII TP a couple weeks ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John fave everything, and you can’t fave all your photos, but don’t fave one in a million. And I was trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I wonder what my percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco measured, and in my photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently I faved 9.6% of my photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you thought we would know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is a very good turn of phrase. I thought you just meant that you really liked the percentage 9.6%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John very well done. But I see now
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of favorites, which is probably a little high. Like I have like 13,000 faves and 140,000 library thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John still 13,000 photos over like a lifetime is way more manageable than 140,000. It really
⏹️ ▶️ John cuts down the the size of the library of photos you’re dealing with. So I would
⏹️ ▶️ John I would aim maybe a little bit lower than that, but you know, it is what it is.
Google Drive for Desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then tell me about Google Drive for desktop, which is something that I really don’t think I’m interested in, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I am. Well, so
⏹️ ▶️ John remember last time I talked about my photos backup strategy, I was saying how Google’s backup and sync thing had just like
⏹️ ▶️ John become unable to upload my photos anymore. Uh, recall that I had I had it pointed at my photo library and I
⏹️ ▶️ John had it uploading to Google photos as like a fifth level backup photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I’m already paying for that space in Google and you know, like might as well do it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it had gotten to the point where you’d run it and it would like say, okay, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at all these files and I’m trying to figure out which ones I’ve got and which ones I need to upload. And it would just
⏹️ ▶️ John spend forever with like some huge number and saying, looking at, you know, 700,000 files, looking at 500,000, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John never complete. It would never get to the point where it would
⏹️ ▶️ John upload new photos. And so I was months and months behind in Google photos. If you went onto the web and looked at my Google photos library,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see the latest photo was from ages ago, because it couldn’t figure out what it had uploaded
⏹️ ▶️ John or not from my thing. I’m like, I don’t know what to do with that. I basically just stopped running
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Backup and Sync. And I think the story I told last time is that I’d forgotten that I had stopped running it. And I’m like, oh, why haven’t I been running
⏹️ ▶️ John this? And I launched it and I was like, oh yeah, this is why.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because it never actually uploads anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why, but I ended up looking at something on the web and it was like, hey, try Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive for desktop. And some piece of copy somewhere said, this is the replacement for
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s backup and sync. Like, hmm. Well, I get, you know, I was wondering why Google backup and sync
⏹️ ▶️ John basically didn’t work and, you know, would make the fan spin off my wife’s computer and never actually do any useful work and it was terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently it’s been replaced. So I’m like, all right, I’ll try the replacement. So I tried the replacement, it’s called Google Drive for Desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll put a link in the show notes. I didn’t, maybe I went ahead avoiding it because I don’t want Google Drive. Like Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it mounts a little, it makes a little volume that is your Google Drive. I don’t want that. All I wanted to do is look at my photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library and take the photos and upload them to Google Photos. Like that’s all I want it for. But this thing does both. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it will import your settings from Google Backup and Sync. So I launched the thing and it said, hey, I see you’ve run Backup and Sync, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John me to import your settings? I said, sure, go for it. And it imported the settings and it’s like, now I’m just trying to figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to backup. And it ran for about 36 hours. And then it said,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, I’ve figured out what I wanna backup. I’m gonna start backing up stuff. And it showed
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of progress and a number and that number counted down to zero. And it said, okay, I’ve uploaded everything. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want me to uninstall Google backup and sync? And I said, yes, please do that. And so it uninstalled backup and sync.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I have Google Drive running on my wife’s computer. Yes, it has a little Google Drive icon mounted
⏹️ ▶️ John as volume that I never look at. It’s just like a network share volume. It doesn’t actually copy anything to
⏹️ ▶️ John computer, although that is an option. But yeah, it takes like zero CPU. It sits
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And when new photos appear, it uploads them and says I am uploading, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I have 500 photos to upload and that number counts down to zero. And then it says I’m done. And it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John miracle. I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have such low standards for Google’s client software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, but I’m struggling to understand. You’re saying you have feedback, reliable feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as to the progress of
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, everything’s relative. So it does occasionally say some errors have occurred. You’re like, would you like to view
⏹️ ▶️ John them? And you’re like, sure, I’ll view them. Then the other, Backup and Sync had this feature as well. And what it would show me is
⏹️ ▶️ John usually a list of like five or seven files and it says, these files fall below the minimum size. What I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to do and what any good Mac app would do is I should be able to right click on those and say reveal in finder to show me where this file is. But I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure when it says they’re below the minimum size, it means there’s zero size because they don’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it insists on showing me those lists of a handful of photos that it said it couldn’t upload because they’re too small. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird because I think it’s always skips over like the thumbnails, you know, the thumbnail letters that are just too darn small that are in
⏹️ ▶️ John the photo library. Anyway, it seems to understand that it is uploading and Apple Photo
⏹️ ▶️ John System Library, because in the settings it says, you would like me to upload everything from your system photos library. I’m like, yes, nice
⏹️ ▶️ John that you figured that out. Because I pointed it at the, you know, the photos library bundle folder
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but it knows that that’s the system library. And when new pictures appear, it finds them, grabs
⏹️ ▶️ John them, and uploads them. So I’m, despite the weird errors of it occasionally telling me that these
⏹️ ▶️ John files were below the minimum size, and the fact that there’s no way to clear that error, it just constantly has this little notification
⏹️ ▶️ John that says these five files were under the minimum size. I’m like, okay, I don’t care. As long as you’re making progress and
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you are, when there’s nothing happening, you are idle and you’re like 0.01% CPU when I
⏹️ ▶️ John go look for it in an activity monitor, thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just, I’m so jealous of any system wherein you have a easily findable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually useful progress meter. Amazing. Who’d have thought that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that would be useful? Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a progress bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s just a number. And like, if you watch the little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like occasionally it will do a thing, it just shows the file name. It’s not a great app. Like one of the file names it shows is
⏹️ ▶️ John called fullsizerender.jpg, which I think is just like the file name that Apple Photos makes when it
⏹️ ▶️ John like renders out like a thing that you’ve done in external editor. And for the longest time, it just had fullsizerender.jpg
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would never seem to complete, but I think it was just replacing the, like essentially the table row
⏹️ ▶️ John with another fullsizerender.jpg table row that had the same progress indicator on it. And I was afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t terminate, but it did. It did eventually terminate. The number, it said uploading this number, the number did eventually count
⏹️ ▶️ John down to zero and then it was idle. This is all I could ask for. So I guess I get a few years out of this before Google abandons
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Drive or Desktop and replaces it with something else.
Mac photo-download trick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of progress meters, Chris Steckler writes, the obscure method to force your photos library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to download everything to your Mac is to create a slideshow that includes all of your photos. So in photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey library, all photos, hit command A to select all and then choose file,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play slideshow. I kid you not, writes Chris, I kid you not that you will get an actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey progress bar and it actually moves and provides you with an actual status update. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple couldn’t hide a sync or refresh button button in a menu somewhere, like they include in the Mac App Store is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beyond me. And me too, Chris, me too. I don’t get it. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And remember that this is the alternative to going into preferences and saying, please put the originals on this Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John In theory, that’s the way Apple wants you to do this. If you want all your photos to be on the hard drive of
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac, that’s what that setting is for. Download all originals. But the problem is if you click that radio button in preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no indication whether it’s doing anything about it or when it might complete. Whereas this method,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is with that thing not checked, with just saying like, oh, you know, optimize storage or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanna force it to download them, try to make a slideshow with all the photos in it and play,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it will pull down all the, apparently all the files in that thing and give you a progress bar. And I assume as soon as it completes
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you should rush into preferences and click originals on this Mac. And then I guess you have to hope that it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John purging all that stuff before it downloads them. It’s stupid. Like, I know Apple just wants it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, you just check this box and you’re done, but people wanna know, like, so, A, are you doing anything?
⏹️ ▶️ John And B, how long is it actually gonna take? Photos is bad at answering those questions.
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Apple-event predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yesterday, today, sometime in the last 24 hours, the time is a flat circle, y’all. Sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last 24 hours, we have learned that the next Apple event, which presumably will be the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey event, is this upcoming Tuesday, the 14th of September at 1 p.m. Eastern.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as always, we need to spend some time talking about what’s going to happen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, man, I’m not really, I’m not that jazzed about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, maybe it hasn’t sank in for me yet. I’m sure I’m gonna love whatever’s presented.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I’m gonna get whatever silly phone they tell me to buy. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing other than MacBook Pros, which I don’t think we’re gonna get, that I’m like super duper, oh, and actually, now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m talking, maybe there are things I’m excited for. So what do I really wanna see? I wanna see MacBook Pros and new AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just watch, next week Casey has ordered a phone, a watch, AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want Apple to take all my money, but I don’t know if they’re going to. So yeah, I would love to see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously a phone, but more importantly to me anyway, I would love to see new AirPod Pros, because I’m in the market and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been for like a year, and I want to wait until there’s a new set. And I’d love a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new MacBook Pro. I’d love for one of my machines to be on Apple Silicon, and at this rate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s never going to happen. But I digress, how do you want to handle this, John? How do you, do you want to walk through
⏹️ ▶️ John I put the very first item I put up there. I think we can like dispense with this
⏹️ ▶️ John early is MacBook Pros question mark, sad face emoji.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I really want them to be- That’s not an emoji, that’s an emoticon. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right. The, remember at
⏹️ ▶️ John we were like, hey, maybe there can be, maybe there’ll be MacBook Pros at WWDC. Oh, I guess they’re not ready yet. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John we just forget about them and the next event comes along and nobody’s talking about MacBook Pros. I mean, again, that’s the rumor mill seems to
⏹️ ▶️ John say Like this is, I mean, it’s the iPhone event. We all know it’s the iPhone event, right? Fine. But there’s no reason you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John also put out MacBook Pros. Like I really, I’m dying for M1X stuff. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple announcement that I am most anticipating and it just doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards for this event. So I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of sad about that. But that’s, I mean, set that aside because I think there’s lots of stuff that is rumored
⏹️ ▶️ John for this event that is good and interesting. And this is the iPhone event and I get it. You don’t want to distract or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope though that there’s like maybe an October event for, you know, Monterey
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new MacBook Pros. I’m ready for that thing to happen. I just wanted to get that out there. I know we’re weird on
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, tend to like the Mac announcements. I’m more excited about the Mac tech. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs going to Apple Silicon has been a big story. And so far the Apple Silicon Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John they put out have been amazing. They just haven’t been the high-end ones. So I’m really hungry for the high-end stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like I’m gonna have to wait a little longer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree. It seems, based on all the rumors and stuff, it does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not the MacBook Pro event. This is not the M1X Mac event, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t seem like we’re going to actually be getting any Mac news at this event, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunate from those of us, like the three of us, who tend to care more about that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also not that unexpected. You know, yes, we were expecting M1Xs in June, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumors even then kind of suggested later in the year. And the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event almost never contains any Mac news. It’s almost always the iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the Apple Watch as well. And that’s usually like the big headlining features. And then they’ll shove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like whatever they want to promote with those, but it’s usually not the Mac event. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not that surprised that the rumors seem to be indicating this is probably not going to be any Mac stuff here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I am as excited as you and as impatient as you for whenever the Mac event actually happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I love my M1 Mac mini that I’m using as my desktop right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but I really want more RAM and I really want more cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as soon as I can get more RAM and more cores, I will get it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I have to buy three small Macs this year, if it’s like, if you know, I got the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini in like January, February, If I have to buy the M1X Mac Mini because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Mini Pro isn’t out yet, and then a few months later, buy the Mac Mini Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that comes out, I’ll do it because I need more cores so badly, but I’m so happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing right now, and it was so inexpensive, like relative to other high-end Mac desktops, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna feel bad replacing it soon. But I really want more cores and I really want more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You really don’t need to convince any listener to this program that you will be buying more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macs as soon as possible. There’s been a large, large amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of past circumstance and evidence that that is exactly what’s going to happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t doubt it. But yeah, I’m gonna sum up both of my computers. So I have a, what is a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old MacBook Pro, 13 inch MacBook Pro, four port with touch bar, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an iMac Pro. And because I don’t have any Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Silicon computers that I use ever, neither of my existing computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels bad. But I know from the reports of every human who’s ever touched an Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac that both of them are actually dog slow and I just don’t realize it. So my thought process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and assumption is that— Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say the Intel Macs are slow compared to the M1 Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, like, as I just said, I am desperate for more cores and more RAM because every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I do a build, now that I’m using Swift and SwiftUI, oh my god,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it murders my computer to do a build of my app. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. It’s a never-ending cycle. It’ll chew up whatever you give to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, sure. But because I run iStatMenus, I can see in the menu bar, I can see like- Isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convenient? Here, it’s maximizing all my performance scores for this pretty big chunk of this build process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I know what it’s doing. But what I would say, the main difference, like here we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are almost a year in, the main difference between the feeling of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Max and the feeling of Intel Max is that the M1 Max raised the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way up. Like stuff, like common stuff that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing everything to the max is faster and feels faster and is way more responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when you want to push everything to the max, when you want to like do a massive video encode or a massive build,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel still wins on that front just because it has so many cores in many workloads, not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workloads, but many. So it’s like we’ve raised the floor, we’ve made the low end of performance really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really high and fast and responsive, but we haven’t yet lifted the ceiling very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the high end much higher. So that’s what I’m waiting for, for the new, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upcoming higher end Apple Silicon Max. That’s what I’m looking forward to. What can we do now? We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were doing some crazy stuff now with four performance cores, what can we do with 12 or 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, you know, whatever we can get? Like, that’s what I want to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s the line? You know, what’s cooler than a million bucks? A billion bucks. You know, what’s cooler than four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cores? A hundred cores. I hear you. And so my thought, like I said, was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or like I was starting to say, my thought was I would replace the laptop first, even though it is newer, but I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have an Apple Silicon equivalent of the iMac Pro anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I figured I’d replace the laptop and then we’ll see what I think after that. Maybe I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get an external monitor for it if it really is that great. I don’t know. But I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a two-port MacBook Pro. I really want to replace what I’ve got, which is a four-port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. I can take away the touch bar. That doesn’t bother me one way or the other. But I really want four ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think that that exists right now. And I want to wait for this Phantom one that’s coming eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we We probably spent too much time on this already, but I’m right there with you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was going to say, I think it’s funny that we spent this much time talking about Macs in our predictions for the event that we said is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to contain Macs. But at least, listeners, this will mean that we won’t have to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this Mac stuff next week when this stuff has been announced. And we can actually talk about the iPhones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were presumably announced instead of talking about all the Mac stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless they announce Mac stuff. Who knows? But looking at the list of things that are probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a good bet for our announcement, I mean, we’ll go through them in order, but it’s iPhone, new Apple watch, new
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods and the new iPad mini and the cheap iPad. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is plenty for an event, especially as we go through them. We’ll see that, you know, the watch is all new
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory this year. The AirPods are all new. The mini is making its triumphant return with an all new design.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a full event there. There’s not really, you know, if they announce all that stuff that I just listed,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a pretty good Apple event, right? I guess we can start with the iPhone, which presumably will be called iPhone 13, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not but I feel like the big story here based on the rumors I put it as the first
⏹️ ▶️ John bullet item here is that supposedly Apple ordered 100 million
⏹️ ▶️ John A15 chips from TSMC which apparently is a bigger than normal initial order
⏹️ ▶️ John for like the launch of a phone. And I mean I guess you can read into that and say
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thinks they’re going to sell a lot of these there are also other explanations and that maybe the A15 is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John used in things other than just the iPhone 13. Maybe it’s gonna be used in the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John mini. Maybe there’s confusion about what things the A15 might go in. Maybe they’re announcing
⏹️ ▶️ John AR goggles that these will go in. Like, we don’t know. We don’t know what that 100 million means. Maybe TSMC just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to make a big order to lock in a low price. It’s very difficult to know. But either way, it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is A, tying up a lot of chip manufacturing capacity, and B, they
⏹️ ▶️ John seem fairly confident that they’re gonna sell a lot of things with A15s in them. And one of those will presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John be the iPhone 13, which otherwise seems like a, not a boring
⏹️ ▶️ John year, but like, you know, the outward design looks about the same. It’s got the flat sides, just like the 12. The
⏹️ ▶️ John notch is supposedly gonna be smaller this year because they combined a bunch of sensors,
⏹️ ▶️ John larger wireless charging coils for better heat dissipation, stronger MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John magnets, a bigger battery, faster wired charging going from 20 watts to 25 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we just, can we pause real quick right here? I would love to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better battery life for both my watch and my phone. I, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about this last episode, maybe this is a self-created problem because I very rarely charge from any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism other than Qi charging, but I don’t know, I feel like my phone’s battery, and I have a 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, a regular size 12 Pro, I feel like my battery is not great, which means Marco’s must be abysmal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, given that you have a much smaller battery. But I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to see an increase in battery life in both my watch and my phone. I tend to charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my watch for about half an hour to an hour in the middle of the day, not because I have to, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just have an opportunity to. And if I don’t do that, the watch typically dies not too long after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dinner time. Now again, I have the smaller of the watches. It is cellular, although it rarely has the occasion to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a cellular or to have the cellular radio on. But I don’t know, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would really love, we’re back in that position after a couple of years off where I really would love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more battery life. And we’re gonna talk about it in a minute, but if we’re getting some new display technology, I’m really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really concerned that that’s gonna be even worse for battery life. And I am not on board
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think you’re gonna get, so the reasons you’re gonna get better battery life on the iPhone are physically bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John battery, according to rumors, right? So there’s more, you know, more capacity in there. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John last year was the first set of 5G phones and the 5G modems were not particularly good with power.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the rumors this year is that it will have an improved 5G cellular modem still from Qualcomm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s isn’t ready yet. And so those two things combined is that it’s not the first generation
⏹️ ▶️ John 5G product with the big power hungry 5G radio in it and the battery is bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I guess you could throw in there at a 15 is five nanometer. The A14 with seven nanometer, I think. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, all those combined to make me think that the 13 is gonna have better battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life than the 12. Because, I mean, that was one of the knocks against the 12 when it came out. It’s like, do you really want the first
⏹️ ▶️ John 5G phone? Everyone knows it’s a little bit battery hungry. It’s why we talked about it on the past shows, if you would disable 5G,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get more battery life out of it, just because you don’t have it do the 5G stuff in it, you know, in its cell modem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think you’ll be happy there. And the display, that’s one of the rumors, is the display is finally gonna be 120 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the key part about the display, assuming it is still just the same OLED tech that we have now, is not the 120
⏹️ ▶️ John Hertz thing, which is kind of a battery sucker, but it’s the variable refresh rate, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, does the current OLED screen have that? I don’t remember if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current one. No, the watch has it, the phone does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but anyway, variable refresh is that it can change the refresh rate of the display, and if nothing is happening
⏹️ ▶️ John on the display, it can go down to one Hertz, like one update per second, which is super slow. And this is also
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the rumor of potentially having an always-on display on the phone, or it will just show like a time or something. That’s what the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John does. The SIP battery is, it goes into, you know, how can you afford to keep the display on all the time? Well, OLED, you
⏹️ ▶️ John only pay for the pixels you’re lighting up. And if the pixels you’re lighting up, like rarely change, like if it’s basically a
⏹️ ▶️ John static image, like the time with the minutes, and you can crank down the refresh rate to one Hertz, that saves
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. It also saves battery when you’re staring at your phone and nothing is moving on the screen. Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not scrolling. The variable refresh can crank down the refresh rate to not be 120 Hertz, but to
⏹️ ▶️ John be less than the 60 Hertz that your phone is doing right now when you’re staring at the screen, right? So I know
⏹️ ▶️ John it might look scary that 120 Hertz is gonna eat your battery, but I think net and net, unless you’re constantly playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a game, it won’t actually be updating at 120 Hertz. In fact, it should be updating it much less than your
⏹️ ▶️ John current phone’s 60 Hertz. So I think the phone screen is probably gonna be a wash, especially if there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John option to just do 60 Hertz. Like lots of Android phones have that. Like, do you want 120
⏹️ ▶️ John Hertz on or do you want it to just be 60? I wonder if that setting will be in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I bet there will be such an option because when the 10.5 iPad came out with its 120 Hertz screen, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added an accessibility option to limit it to 60 Hertz. ProMotion, sorry, we should use Apple’s marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms. Yes, well, I’m sure we’ll hear all about it next week. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the iPad got 120 Hertz, they had an accessibility option added to limit it to 60. And so I would expect to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same option show up on any phone that has that capability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this year is crop of camera stuff. One of them is what has been described as portrait mode in video, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John like the real time effects that you can do for like blurring the background and finding objects and stuff. Apparently that
⏹️ ▶️ John that day 15 is fast enough to do that in video. The rumor name for it is cinematic video, possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John using LIDAR to better do object detection. That’ll be interesting. The astrophotography mode rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John that we talked about for a while taking pictures of the night sky. Um, portrait mode using LIDAR
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently currently portrait mode doesn’t use the LIDAR, but the new one will object detection photo filters where it can
⏹️ ▶️ John like find objects in the, in the photo and apply filters just to them, like just to the person or just to an object
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. At least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have those pictures that have the red fruit inside of the black and white picture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are all just rumors. Maybe this is all founded on the same underlying technology of hey, now it’s gonna use LIDAR
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick out objects in the scene and you can do stuff with it. A better wide angle camera with autofocus.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the current wide angles don’t have, they’re just a fixed focal distance or something. I don’t know what this
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor is about. But anyway, better wide angle camera. The rumored new color is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been described as sunset gold. I don’t know if that’s what they’ll call it, but it’s like the pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t look like rose gold, but it looks more like a bronzy type thing. Anyway, that’s that’s a rumor of a potential
⏹️ ▶️ John new color. There’s there’s the fun rumors about satellite connectivity for emergencies. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is one that is very confused. On the one hand, you have the people saying, oh, that’s, you know, the the
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhones have like FCC registration or whatever for these radio bands that
⏹️ ▶️ John are used for satellites, but it’ll only be used for emergencies. Like if you’re out of cell range and you want to do an SOS, you can connect to
⏹️ ▶️ John a satellite to do an SOS so someone can find you or whatever. But then other people are saying, no, no, no, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand. There’s just a bunch of radio bands that were previously licensed to satellite makers that are now being repurposed
⏹️ ▶️ John for cell phones. And this radio has the capacity to use those. So there’s no satellite thing
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. And it’s really just, you know, 5G with more bands or something. We’ll find out which one of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John true, if any. Maybe they just won’t mention it all. And then we’ll know this is a nonissue. But that crop
⏹️ ▶️ John of features right there, it makes for, you know, what we used to call an S generation. It’s the same case on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this case, it’s a little bit different because the notch will be smaller. So for all the people who did the clever jokes where they hid something
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the notch in their apps, right? You got to make sure you make you detect you’re on the iPhone 13
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it narrow to fit inside there. Oh, yeah. One more thing about the narrow notch. The rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John and the little parts leaks and everything show the notch being like not as wide on the phone. But to do that, they had to take
⏹️ ▶️ John the like the speaker that you would would hold up to your ear when you talk on the phone if anyone ever talks on the phone like that anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John and doesn’t, you know, talking to the end of their phone like I see everybody doing. Anyway, that little speaker thing, it used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be, it’s like a hard, you look on your phone now if you have one of the newer phones, it’s like a horizontal slit kind of in the middle of the
⏹️ ▶️ John notch, right? The middle vertically speaking, right? They, the rumors are that they shoved that speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John towards the top of the phone to make room for like all the sensors and stuff that they kind of crammed together.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason I’m a little bit concerned about that is I bet a lot of cases have like a lip
⏹️ ▶️ John right that goes over that overlaps the front of the phone a little bit and it doesn’t take much to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of blunt the volume of that little speaker if you have like say an iPhone 12
⏹️ ▶️ John case that had a lip that didn’t anticipate that the speaker would be like right up against the edge of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s the thing to watch for obviously Apple’s new cases won’t have that problem and they won’t block the speaker but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an existing iPhone 12 case assuming they’re compatible or you’re buying one, be aware
⏹️ ▶️ John that the lip might block the speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the rumors were already that the camera bump block was going to get bigger this generation. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are existing cases won’t fit anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like taller or like width and height wise bigger?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought the rumor was width and height, but I honestly haven’t been paying that much attention to the rumors, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looked a similar size. I think most of what I saw was that it was going to be like taller, like, you know, skyscrapers coming out of the back of your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John that they would all be taller. The plateau would be taller and the lenses would be taller, but we’ll see. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks more or less like the 12, which I think, you know, I’ve had the 12 for a year. I like it, it’s a good design. I’m not getting this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, but for an S generation, if this was called the 12S, or if it ends up being
⏹️ ▶️ John called the 13, for a revision of the previous design, if it has all
⏹️ ▶️ John these features, as in better cameras, better software features, faster CPU, better battery life, better display,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good S generation. So I think thumbs up on this phone. Like we talk about this every year, it gets kind of boring,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like Apple makes good iPhones. Like, and setting aside the pro ones, like everything we talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about here, a lot of these are gonna be pro only features, like the Plane 13. If the Plane 13 is to the 13 Pro the way the 12 was to
⏹️ ▶️ John the 12 Pro, also a great phone. The 12 is a great phone, right? The, I mean, the 12 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s honestly hard to justify the 12 Pro, except if you just want the best of the best or you
⏹️ ▶️ John like the colors or finishes better, just because the 12 was so great. Same CPU, same great features.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, Apple continues to make really good iPhones. Not a big story,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a dog bites man story, but you know, there’s something to be said for
⏹️ ▶️ John consistency. Like it’s not easy every year to come out with a really good phone and Apple keeps doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this list of features or, you know, of rumored features, I mean, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, these all sound fairly plausible. Like I don’t think anything here is a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach. Like I think this all sounds like in the realm of plausible. Maybe the satellite stuff is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, exactly. So I have a friend who does a lot of work on telecommunication stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he had and probably still has a satellite phone that he uses in very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rare circumstances. And again, I haven’t handled one of these phones in probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five years, but the antennas on those things were massive. They were enormous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And obviously with the march of progress, the march of time, everything gets smaller and smaller. But I’d be very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if true honest to goodness satellite connectivity in the in the way that people are saying about it being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for emergencies when you’re out of cell coverage, I’d be stunned if that really landed. I would absolutely buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a it’s a bandwidth thing or not bandwidth, what’s the frequency thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it’s like you said, John, the frequencies are retired. Now we’re using new frequencies. But this satellite thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m super skeptical about everything else. I agree with you, Marco. Yeah, it’s definitely plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And if all of this or I mean, heck, even if half of this stuff happens and the other half is BS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still a good, that’s still a solid update. You know, as John was saying, like this is like a, you know, kind of like an S year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, but I don’t know some of these things. I mean, every year you want better battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want better cameras, you want it to be a little bit faster and you know, whatever else that’s, that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, every year gets those things for the most part. Um, but this sounds like a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big upgrade to the display. Like If there is 120Hz and variable refresh rate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially if there’s the always on option to put like a clock or the now playing controls,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big deal. That significantly changes how the phone looks and feels. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s actually, I’m looking forward to this. I think this could be a bigger year than we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think. If the other stuff is true, if we actually get stronger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco magsafe, faster charging, That’s all just little quality of life stuff that just makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything a little bit nicer. So this sounds like a pretty good upgrade and we’ll see what happens. You know, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what they actually release. But even if the satellite thing is BS or misinterpreted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or wrong in some way, the rest of this is a solid update. If the satellite thing is real,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I can see that being a pretty nice, you know, pretty big deal because even if people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never end up needing satellite connectivity, Like if you’re never in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of nowhere and you need to be rescued, great. But a lot of people might buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just in case. They might say, you know, occasionally we go somewhere with no cell coverage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what if we get stuck on the side of a mountain and need to be rescued? Like I can see that being an amazing thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for not only for the obvious humanitarian reason of maybe this could save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a life, but also that could be good for sales because I think a lot of people would buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on that just-in-case notion of like, hey, I might need this for my doomsday prep or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my weird hikes I do once every decade or whatever. Like, I think people would actually buy it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large numbers for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I absolutely agree with you there because, you know, for the longest time I was buying cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watches, which I don’t plan to do anymore and we’ll probably talk about that later, but I was doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because when I would go for a run on the off chance that I like slipped and broke a leg or something, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to be able to call for help. And I was paying $15 a month, as I whined and complained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about many years ago on this very program. I was paying $15 a month for that privilege
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just in case. And so, yeah, not only does it fit with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what people might want to pay for and spend their money on, but in a place like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey California, where weather doesn’t exist, particularly in LA, but to a smaller degree in the Bay Area,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all those annoying people are constantly out and taking pictures of the beautiful landscape there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple, a very California-centric company decides, Oh, we should do something about this when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re off the beaten path. So yeah, I think it is. If you look at the technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not being plausible, which I do look at the technologies not being plausible. Uh, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I think the desire is absolutely there. Anything else on the phones? I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m almost certainly going to get one because I’m a sucker and I do whatever Apple tells me to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m looking forward to it tentatively. I would love better battery life and I would love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I would love better glass. As I’ve said to you, I’m never going caseless, caseless again, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to have more robust glass. This 12 Pro I have, the front has been scratched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to absolute smithereens, and I somehow dropped the back on like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wood floor in my kitchen and lightly shattered the back of mine. Aaron’s looks like it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through a trash compactor. I would love to have stronger glass,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even despite the fact that both of us are definitely in rock cases this year. So better Gorilla Glass,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please. Maybe a Rangintang Glass? Is that an improvement? I don’t even know. Moving on, Apple Watch 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This sounds very interesting to me. Flat sides and flat display closer to the cover glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in. That sounds excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of that is also a larger display. So the flat sides, it’s obvious to say like, okay, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a family resemblance. The phones have flat sides, the iPad’s got them a while ago. If you put them on the watch now, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John devices kind of look, you know, hey, it’s a flat sided rounded rectangle, must be an Apple device.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I see that angle, but I think probably the more important factor is the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John watch design, the way it curves, you know, the Airstream trailer look, leaves less
⏹️ ▶️ John area, less flat area for the display. Like you’re wasting a lot on the, essentially the bezels,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the curved part. And I know there are phones that have displays in the curved parts. I forget which manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John was making that, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was Samsung.
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung. Yeah. But that’s, I’ve never really liked that because that part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John display, like it curving away from you just doesn’t quite look right, right? So, and your other choice
⏹️ ▶️ John is to extend the display like out underneath that by moving it farther away from the surface
⏹️ ▶️ John class. And that doesn’t feel good either. So this is the solution. The solution is you make the top flat and the sides flat,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have a larger display in the same width and height because the display goes closer to the edge
⏹️ ▶️ John and the top is very flat. And then you can also get the display closer to the glass that it’s on. So it feels like it less like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sunken down in there. And that I think is the real benefit. The family resemblance
⏹️ ▶️ John is nice and makes sense, but the real benefit is you get to have a bigger display with the same size watch. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sizes are supposed to be 41 millimeters and 45 millimeters. I don’t know how watch sizes work, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the current ones are 40 and 44. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what they’re measuring there. does that mean the watch will be physically larger by a couple of millimeters? Or are they talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the display? It’s confusing to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Based on the rumors, the rumors are that the body will be roughly the same size, but that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens will be getting larger because they’re shrinking the bezel effectively. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, we’ll find out what happens. Frankly, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what I’m most curious about, is like, what is the new Apple Watch design?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How does it look? what kind of materials are they offering? What kind of finishes and colors? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little basic renders that we saw from the rumor mill did not look good to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? I thought they looked great. Well, that’s the other thing. As a fashion accessory, the Airstream Terlar
⏹️ ▶️ John look, take it or leave it, it is the iconic Apple Watch look because the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch has always looked like a rounded curve. I mean, it’s physically changed many times, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the overall design has been a pillowy round thing of various thicknesses. And this is the first
⏹️ ▶️ John time it’s changed. I think the pillowy round thing doesn’t look great as
⏹️ ▶️ John a watch, but it’s like, oh, it’s an Apple watch. The square sided one, I think similar things. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any particular tastes in watches, but either one of those I look at and say, yeah, they look like smartwatches, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they are. They don’t, neither one of them looks any better or worse as a quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John watch to me, just because I see it entirely as a little computer on your wrist. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John having a bigger screen is a feature of a little computer on your wrist, but aesthetically speaking, yeah. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see what it looks like on people’s, when you’re wearing it. Obviously it is flat sided, it will be more
⏹️ ▶️ John prominent, like the curves are minimizing in some ways, but on the other hand, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on how thin it is, it could be like more formal looking and less dorky maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s very, I agree that the renders look a little bit like you have an iPad strapped to your wrist, which is kind of what you
⏹️ ▶️ John do, but I think I’d have to see these in person to see how they actually come off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Having straight sides does not make a watch look like a bad watch. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches have straight sides. Like, that is by far the most common case shape. You have the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band around the outside, and it’s straight, and then you have some kind of, you know, bevel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to the crystal, which is like the cover of glass or sapphire on top. That’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common for watch design. It’s like the most common shape. Obviously, you know, it looks better when it’s thinner. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look good if it’s too thick, but like, overall, that’s common. The reason why the Apple Watch has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rounded like this, I think was twofold. I think number one, that was the shape of iPhones at the time it was launched. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like their design language. And number two, a straight-sided watch of the thickness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most Apple Watches are is, it looks really chunky, it looks bad. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want a straight-sided watch to be thicker than maybe about 12 millimeters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on the design. Like, that’s about as thick as you want. And the Apple Watches, I think, are all thicker than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least are in the ballpark. So if they can make it noticeably thinner and give it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight sides, it might look good, but there’s also some challenges about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like how will the materials wear, especially on the corner?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really tough. On the current, like, you know, slopey-sided ones, because the whole surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is curved, it hides scratches a little bit better. If the surface is flat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see every single scratch. And if anything happens to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beveled edge, I mean, remember back with like the iPhone 5S and 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those beveled edges got nicked up really easily. That’s where you’re gonna see all the wear. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really curious to see how this plays out in practice, both with wear and with, maybe this might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alter the materials choices. Like maybe we might not get certain materials or colors that we had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the outgoing design because it doesn’t work or doesn’t look as good with this new design, who knows. but that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very, very curious to see, like materials, visual design, whether they’re gonna like polish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bezel, or the bevel or not, and then what the heck they’re doing with the screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all sounds probably good, but I think they’re also gonna have a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the low-end models not look cheap. The flat-sided cases are easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manufacture, and that’s why almost every other smartwatch maker uses flat-sided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases, And as a result, a flat-sided, round-rect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch from our current brains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of consumers looks like an Android watch or something. It looks like something else. It doesn’t look like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple watch. So with Apple moving into this, they’re kind of redefining what an Apple watch looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they can do it in a way that makes it look good. And I think they probably can. Their history with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the Apple watch look good is pretty strong. they’ve had a pretty good track record there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially with the use of good materials and everything. So I hope they continue that. But I am really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m kind of nervous for them on this because it looks like they’re tackling a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant challenge in making a new design language for the Apple Watch that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both looks good and wears well and looks like Apple as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposed to some other cheap thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re probably leaning on the watch bands a lot because like, I mean, the majority of the surface area of the watch is the band
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple has done a good job sort of branding the bands. And you know, when you see someone with an Apple watch band even
⏹️ ▶️ John a rip off Apple watch band it’s not actually made by Apple. That’s as much an identity as like white
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods are like the white headphones on an iPod were back in the day. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this design almost says like, just ignore the watch body. Like it’s all screen when viewed
⏹️ ▶️ John from the front. When viewed from the side, it’s just a flat surface that we can put a color on. But really it’s all about the
⏹️ ▶️ John bands and that’s gonna be your fashion statement the watch sort of disappears into, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one way this might pull off. I’m mostly nervous about the thickness because, like you said, with the
⏹️ ▶️ John slab sides, with flat sides, if it’s too thick, it can start to look like, you know, just a giant wall on your wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like the curves are slimming. But if you get it down thin enough, maybe this generation won’t be quite thin
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, but if you get it down thin enough, the watch really does start to disappear and let the band do most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the talking. Again, especially when viewed, like, the way you look at the watch when you’re looking at the time, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see anything except for the screen, which will go almost edge to edge. You won’t be able to see the sides at all. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see the little rim around it, the little, the chamfered edge that was polished on the original five
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Maybe that’s the part that might nick, to your point. Like they have to do something with
⏹️ ▶️ John that edge to make it durable and attractive. And in that respect, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that even though my iPhone 12 Pro is in a case, I tried to use it without a case for I
⏹️ ▶️ John think like two days or however long it lasted. The stainless steel
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded over edge of the edge of the iPhone 12 Pro, I think looks very
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive and would look great as that same edge on a watch, right? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how durable it was. Maybe Casey can tell me if he’s nicked up that part of it, but like it seemed pretty sturdy with
⏹️ ▶️ John the surgical stainless steel and the rounded edge. Like unlike the chamfered edge, which was flat with
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp transitions to the other part. And it was two-tone material, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to nick up. The stainless steel seems like it’s rounded, so there’s no sort of corner to nick,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was sort of uniformly colored throughout. So I’m hoping they can also do something good with that
⏹️ ▶️ John edge. But yeah, these renders, they get the gist of it, the gist of the rumors or the parts leaks
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but you gotta wait to see, you know, well, it’s two things. One, you have to wait to see Apple’s glamor
⏹️ ▶️ John shots, which only sometimes have any resemblance to reality. And the second thing is you have to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John see the product that they ship in a store somewhere and see how it is on your wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, one other thing before we leave the design of this, one thing I’m actually also concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about is I like the thick curved edge sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crystal. It looks good. And in the watch world, thick, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called box crystals usually, that shape where like it kind of comes up on the edges, like it rounds up before it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat top. That’s in fashion in watch design and has been for some time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like many decades, for many types of watches because it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good and it’s also highly functional. You know, if with the crystal being very thick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crystal will therefore take a lot of the impact that would otherwise scratch the sides because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of those impacts will hit the crystal instead. And, you know, the glass is pretty strong on the glass models, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sapphire is super strong on the steel models. And so it’s actually a pretty, not only,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, attractive, you know, kind of a retro look in some ways, but like, it’s also a very pragmatic design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a thick, curved-edge crystal. So if, you know, like, the rumor renders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the new watch design show it with basically a flat crystal that has very little to no thickness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they’re extending the screen outwards and reducing the margins of the, you know, of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bevel here, bezel, I guess now it’s a bezel. I was talking about the bezel before. It’s hard to keep these things straight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John. But anyway, I worry that they’re going to thin out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and flatten the crystal, and that will be another thing that might make it end up looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap. So I really, this is a very tricky design line they’re walking here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have faith that they tend to pull off these things well, but I’m really nervous for them on this one because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking on a pretty big challenge on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so fascinating listening to you talk about all these things because I basically disagree with everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just said, but I come from a position of not really understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is correct amongst watch people because I am not a traditional watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person. But like, I’m looking at renders of this new Series 7 watch and it looks freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great to me. I love the way it looks. I love the flat sides. Now I agree, like if it’s a skyscraper on my my wrist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s different. But assuming it doesn’t look absolutely absurd in terms of how tall the watch is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love the way this looks. I would prefer to have a much flatter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glass on top because I’m too cheap to get the fancy sapphire ones. I think this looks excellent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m super pumped for it, even though I got a watch last year. But again, it’s kind of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job, and I’m definitely a sucker. So I’m not saying you’re wrong. Again, I’m not trying to argue with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the fancy watch people believe and think is best, but To my eyes, to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silly, dumb consumer eyes, it looks great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, one of the reasons why I’m concerned about, by having the potential thinner crystal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and straight ties and everything, to me, if it looks like a tiny iPhone on my wrist, that’s a downside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not good for fashion or elegance or looking nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It shouldn’t look like a tiny iPhone. It should look like a nice smartwatch. It’s never gonna look like a nice watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period, because it can’t, but it should look like a nice smartwatch. And the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not every model of Apple Watch has always looked like that, but every generation of Apple Watch has offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configurations that look nice. So I hope with this new design language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they continue to offer that. Like I’ve been very happy, yes, you make fun of me for buying the expensive thing, I’ve always gotten the steel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. I love the steel watch. I love the high polished edges, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets scratched to hell. My current one from just last fall is indeed scratched to hell because I’ve worn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a lot this year. But I love the polished steel, the black top,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a white support band. I love that look. With the Sapphire, it’s a really, really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart watch. And it’s actually a pretty decent watch if you configure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and don’t mind it being a digital watch because the analog faces are all terrible. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the digital faces can be decent. So anyway, once you’re accustomed to that and now that we have the Always-On
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, it can be a decent looking watch. I am fine wearing this watch most of the time now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s decent looking. I hope with the new design language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I hope they’re able to still have configurations that look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both nice and not like you have a phone strapped to your wrist. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be the biggest challenge I think. Like seeing the rumor renders, that to me just looks like iPhones. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope that the actual final design it differs enough from that in practice. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it doesn’t just look like I have a phone strapped to my wrist because that’s not a look that I want. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find that elegant at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I always liked the shiny stainless steel too. And that one Apple watch that I got, I paid more for the stainless steel because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a look that I like. And that’s why I would call it an Airstream trailer because they’re kind of shiny, while they’re more of a matte
⏹️ ▶️ John finish stainless steel. But anyway, if you made this new design of that thing, I guess it would be a sardine can,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a round rectangle with shiny sides. We’ll see. of like the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone with the same finish that my iPhone has around it. In terms of battery life for a Casey, if he gets one
⏹️ ▶️ John of these, improved battery life is part of the rumors. Part of what makes that possible is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John it has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 possibly. There’s also vague rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of the possibility of 5G which would hurt battery life which makes me think it’s not going to be in this watch. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John of course the system on a chip, the S7, is going to be at 5 nanometers which will help it sip
⏹️ ▶️ John battery power as compared to its seven nanometer. I’m assuming the current system on a chip is seven nanometer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s also rumors that it might have two gigs of RAM, which I suppose would help developers be, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John would help them be less constrained depending on how Apple changes the rules. And the final thing that helps battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John is straight sides make for easier packaging. Like there’s more volume and
⏹️ ▶️ John it is easier to put components inside something that doesn’t have curves all over it, right? It’s just easy, you know, so they can
⏹️ ▶️ John fit a bigger battery. You know the the the s7 system on a chip is supposedly the double layer design
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’ll take up less Area width and height wise in exchange for being a little bit thicker and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s room for a bigger battery So I have high hopes for that Apple watch 7 will have improved battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life over the 6 just because of all those things combined You know smaller system on a chip easier packaging
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger bigger watches period 41 millimeters Or is 45 when you’re talking about the watch battery every millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John helps So I think this will be for people who aren’t people who like the aesthetic
⏹️ ▶️ John or Don’t care about it or just mostly about the watch bands I think the Apple watch 7 will be a really good watch for
⏹️ ▶️ John people who like the Apple watch for it being an Apple watch Having a bigger display with less area
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know some fun new watch spaces That’s another rumor like watch faces that can let you have more complications now.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s more screen space I think for people who love the Apple watch the Apple watch 7 sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John like a hit all around longer battery life bigger screen you know, faster, not
⏹️ ▶️ John that anyone cares about that. I think it will be extremely popular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, probably. Then apparently AirPods 3 are rumored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The rumors being that they would be stubby, kind of like the pros, but no in-ear soft tips, no noise canceling, and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wide case. I currently have the AirPods that have the Qi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case. You know, it didn’t have an add-on Qi charger. It has the Qi case that came with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And my left AirPod is really hurting in terms of battery life. My right one, even though I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it more, seems to be fine. I am ready to try for the very first time AirPod Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanna do it, but like I said earlier, I don’t wanna do it until there’s new ones, and it sounds like maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new ones this event. But man, can you imagine new watch, new phone, new AirPods? This could be very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new MacBook Pro. This could be real ugly for me. So with that in mind, hp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Better give to St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, I gave to St. Jude, so everyone else, after you give to St. Jude, atp.fm.com, please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John these AirPods, I’ve been talking about this before, of like how I might have to panic by the previous ones when the new ones
⏹️ ▶️ John come out. It seems like the rumors are pretty clear that these won’t be, I didn’t want to call them in-ear, but you know, the ones with the little,
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Pro, the little soft, squishy thing that goes into your ear canal, I don’t like how that feels. My wife has them, I don’t prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which is kind of a shame, because I think I would enjoy the noise canceling, but I just don’t like that sensation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the current regular AirPods fit me great. I’ve used them since they were introduced. I’ve bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple pairs as the batteries have gone bad or they’ve been passed down to kids or whatever. I love
⏹️ ▶️ John them, they’re great. My only problem is they do have a limited lifetime. Like my current ones, they’re doing this weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where when I pick up my iPhone, it shows the little rounded rectangle white thing from the top that comes down
⏹️ ▶️ John and says, AirPods connected, you know, that little thing, ba-doom, you know, it shows that. And then I hit play and overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and it starts coming out of my speaker. Nice. And why? And then I have to go to like the little, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, control center, little circle thingy, and tap on AirPods again, and now it goes through them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is just a recent thing that’s been happening. Like they’re taking longer to connect to my phone. And this is like my AirPods telling me we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John old. And the batteries aren’t that great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, like almost every release of iOS, including point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases, messes with the way like AirPods connect in some way. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they mess with it so often, but they do. Also, I would recommend to anybody out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with AirPods, turn off the auto switching. It is such a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality of life improvement to have that turned off. And it’s frustrating, because you have to turn it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off on every device that your AirPods pair with, and for every pair of AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, it is, trust me, manually switch, it’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ John I use the auto switching, though. When I’m in bed, watching my iPad, and then I switch to my phone, I love
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that whichever device I’m using gets the AirPods and it happens transparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the few features that actually works. Like, oh, this will just automatically switch. It really does work when
⏹️ ▶️ John I do that. And I kind of like it. I’ll think about it though, if it’s still.
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-switching unicorn. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I don’t think I am because half the time when my things aren’t connecting, I think they’re connecting like to the upstairs iPad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not really a unicorn. I think it is messing me up a little bit, like you said. Like if I just did it manually, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have these problems. But when it does work, I appreciate it. And when it doesn’t work, not that bad to
⏹️ ▶️ John manually fix it. But anyway, my issue with these is, they aren’t shaped like the classic
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPod shape has been. And I don’t know if this new shape will feel comfortable in my ear, will fall out of my ear, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I just don’t know, right? It’s not shaped exactly the same as the AirPods Pro, and it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the soft tip. And so what would an AirPods Pro feel like without the soft tip? But it’s not quite that shape either. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John yank the tips off the AirPods Pro, and you look at it, that’s not quite the same shape as the Rumors 2. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think these have the stubby tails you have to squeeze instead of the tapping. I’ve been tapping my ears for years now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how I’m gonna feel about the squeezy stubs. So these are a mystery
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. Like I’m probably almost certainly going to buy them to find out, but it’s almost like I should order
⏹️ ▶️ John these and quickly also order one more pair of the old ones just in case I hate them, but that’s a waste of money. So I’m probably just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John order these and I really, really hope I like them. Because if I don’t, then I’m gonna be trolling eBay
⏹️ ▶️ John old AirPods or whatever. or whatever, so I’m a little bit nervous about these. Like I don’t begrudge Apple, like this, the
⏹️ ▶️ John shape of the current AirPods, how many years has that been out? Like they’re due for a redesign, like I’m fine with that. Oh, and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is the case, the wide case. I don’t like the wide case. My case is slimmer and smaller and fits
⏹️ ▶️ John in my pockets better and the fat case just looks huge to me. I understand why it has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger because you know, it’s a different shape or all that other stuff, and I think it also has a bigger battery than my case, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna miss the original AirPods design. It’s one of the, it’s lasted so long because it truly is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of Apple’s great, we’ve talked about this many times, one of Apple’s great products. Like it totally changed the way we all
⏹️ ▶️ John relate to headphones with these turdy little things and their little magnetic case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Poor Marco, that didn’t fit in his ears, that’s a bummer. But, and maybe I’m gonna be in that camp with these new ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like this- It’ll be a bummer. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s the case, I’ll just have to buy the other ones, like the used ones. It’ll be like my cheese grate. I’ll just have
⏹️ ▶️ John a stock of old design AirPods in my attic and just go through them as the batteries get exhausted.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I really think these are great products and I hope the AirPods 3 can live up to the legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John of their predecessor. Because again, I feel like the Pros, I know they have Pro in the name, but they’re really a different kind of product.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, they have features that these can’t have because they seal in your ear canal. And if you don’t like a little thing shoved
⏹️ ▶️ John into your ear canal, that’s not the product for you. So I’m glad Apple continues to make the other one instead of saying, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just decided everybody needs to shove these things in their ear canals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New cheap iPad 9 with laminated display, thinner and an A13. Cool. Good.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of a shame that it hasn’t had the laminated display for so long because that’s just kind of, you know, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just seems like cheaping out or whatever, but yeah. I think it’s important for them to continue to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a cheap one. It’s still kind of disappointing that this is still gonna be like the Touch ID thing with the whole, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, big bezel and all that other stuff. Like, when, I guess maybe next year, the
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap iPad 10 will finally get updated. It’ll be the ugly duckling because we’re gonna see in a second, like basically all
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPads will be on the new design except for this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at the same time, like they update this iPad pretty much on schedule every year now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they sell an absolute ton of them and we never have to know about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We never talk about them like-
⏹️ ▶️ John good iPad, right? You can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the things on it. I would say they’re fine products. They’re not great, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need an iPad and your needs aren’t that high and price is very important. Yeah, just get it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’ll run all the things. Like an A13, you’ll be able, it’s not like, oh, I can’t play games in this because it’s only A13. A13
⏹️ ▶️ John is fine, you’ll be able to play the games, right? And the screen is fine. And like, you know, Touch ID versus
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID is not a big deal for an iPad. Like it, you know, with the exception of having to use the crappy old Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Pencil, but at least it does support that. And, you know, again, if you want the Pencil, maybe this isn’t the product for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I think it’s a good product and I think it’s important for them to keep having this cheap one. It’ll just be nicer maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John next year when there’s uniformity across the line.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, iPad mini 6 with the iPad Air design, a flat sides, touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID power button, magnetic Apple pencil, et cetera, A14 or A15. You know, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a former Apple iPad mini apologist, this makes me happy that they’re still making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them from time to time. And I hope they continue to, but I don’t know, it’s not something that I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care about anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s something that my kid cares very much about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s nice that it’s getting the update. Like the iPad Air design is so weird. Like remember when they came out, it’s like, well, it’s gonna have touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, but it’s in the new design. They put touch ID in the power button. And it’s like, yeah, I guess, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it’s working out. And you get the new pencil with it. And you know, especially if this comes with an A15,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again is the new chip that’s going to be in the iPhones, that would be amazing. It’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like getting the iPhone mini with the same system on a chip as the, you know, the iPhone 12
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, right? Like it’s a little one, but it’s, you know, you don’t compromise on the computing power. You get
⏹️ ▶️ John the same A15. That’s just one of the rumors. It’s probably gonna be an A14 since it’s the mini, but yeah, it’s nice to see
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini getting updated because I think they need to have, just like they need to have the cheap one, they
⏹️ ▶️ John also kind of need to have a slightly smaller one because sometimes that’s what people want. So obviously it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get updated that frequently and it’s long overdue, but yeah, update it. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna update it, having basically the iPad Air design is a great compromise in terms of family resemblance features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love for it to be USB-C, which the iPad Air is. And so, you know, if the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini adopts the iPad Air design in every other way, I would expect it would probably be USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. And that would just be nice from like a family charging perspective, just to have more things on USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s always a welcome change for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that leaves the poor iPad 9, the cheap iPad, as the last iPad with lightning on it. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just to be clear, new iPhone still lightning?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to have it go USPC, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon, if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the type of thing they’re going to do in an S generation of like it’s the same case, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, and then AR goggles, right? Okay, good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think so either.
⏹️ ▶️ John People were getting hung up. We didn’t talk about the invitation, but it was California Streaming, which is a play on California Dreaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John the song from the 60s. It’s a reference, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John in some respects, it is like the most generic title because it’s like, hey, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not inviting you in person. We’re going to stream it just like we did all those past times, right? And so great, you’re not saying anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John the title. But then, of course, people always want to read into it. So there was the little AR thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John shows the little Apple logo. And if you go inside the Apple logo, it plays a little song or whatever. But Apple has done little
⏹️ ▶️ John AR gimmicks for its events for a long time now. Doesn’t necessarily mean this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the air goggles. But still, people want to hang on to this. Yeah, but this AR gimmick for their event
⏹️ ▶️ John is cooler than the past one, which I agree it is cooler. But I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything we just read out. That’s a full event. There’s no reason you need anything more than that in an event. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone event. The iPhone is Apple’s biggest product, and there’s a bunch of other cool stuff in this as well. The Apple Watch getting
⏹️ ▶️ John its first complete redesign and a totally new form factor, new AirPods that haven’t been, you know, regular AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John that haven’t been updated in forever and some iPad stuff. You don’t need anything else in this event.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think that Apple would want to distract from
⏹️ ▶️ John the new iPhone by talking about AR goggles, like assuming the product was even ready. And to be
⏹️ ▶️ John clear, what we’re talking about here is a big ugly thing that you strap to the front of your face. We’re not talking about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Superman style glasses that just magically show you, like, no. We’re talking about actual goggles that
⏹️ ▶️ John like a gamer would wear, right? It’s not, it’s the type of product that really needs
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated explanation to explain to somebody why they would want to strap this plastic thing to the
⏹️ ▶️ John front of their face. I don’t know what Apple’s pitch is going to be for that product, but the rumor is
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have, you know, they have multiple things in flight and one of them is in fact, a thing that looks kind of like an Oculus Quest
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these things, but like a big plastic thing that you strap to your face. It does
⏹️ ▶️ John not look like a pair of glasses. It does not even look like a pair of ski goggles. It looks like an existing VR
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but apparently it’s, you know, AR work and has cameras where you can see what’s in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the rumor. And the other rumor is, oh, an actual thing that looks like glasses that is farther off into the distance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either one of those things seems like it would need a new event, or at the very least, it would need an event that
⏹️ ▶️ John does not include a bunch of iPad crap, AirPods and all the other stuff. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not the event for AR goggles, or if it is going to be like a three hour
⏹️ ▶️ John event and the messaging is going to be very muddled. Based on unlike Apple’s recent history,
⏹️ ▶️ John see the Casey’s topic from a show or two ago, maybe our assumptions
⏹️ ▶️ John about how good Apple is at forming a coherent message about its products, maybe we should
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey modify our assumption that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would never do something so muddled, but I’m just gonna still say that this is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the stuff that we listed as possibly coming actually does come, this is not the event to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to jam in the AR goggles. And yeah, I think of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John by this point, with less than a week to go, if the AR goggles were coming out, there would be much more rumors. Cause it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is an unknown. We’ve seen, you know, renders based on descriptions of the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve seen leaks of pieces of software, of the starboard thing that they use for internal testing and all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, code snippets and frameworks and libraries. And of course we all know about ARKit and all the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been doing over the years and RealityKit. Like, so the AR stuff is an open secret, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t know if and when any product will appear. and it just doesn’t seem like it’s imminent for this event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it would be, you know, first of all again, you’re right that I think the rumor mill would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much stronger, you know, pinpointing it to this time, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the the current rumors which you went over of like that, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just come out out of the gate with like glasses the way we think of glasses that that it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like the the most recent rumors were like it’s gonna be this multi-stage approach where the first they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna to roll out basically a developer device that’s going to be like the Quest, you know, like this big virtual reality looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headset thing. And then later down the road, maybe the next year or two years later, then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they release, you know, smaller things that are more like glasses. If that’s what they end up doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t expect them to want to put it out at a very high profile event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect them to actually like slow play it as much as possible because what you don’t want to happen from a PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perspective is you don’t want this massive, you know, big project that’s been going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years that they’ve been slowly building to for years, you don’t want to put it out there in a really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fanfare way if it’s not ready for that yet. If it’s if it’s gonna be something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be like kind of not really for public consumption yet or much more like specialized and early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rough and and like kind of big and clunky and then later on you’re gonna have something better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to put that out there in in the quietest way possible, basically. Like, put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to developers, like, don’t even hold a massive, you know, big fanfare event for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to put it in the biggest, most massive, highest fanfare event every year, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone event, would be literally the last place you wanna put something like that. So, again, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John said, that’s not to say they won’t do it, but they probably won’t do it, and they at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t do it. Unless they’re at a point where this is, where this would like totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blow you away. And we’re and we’re totally wrong about where they are in this. But that seems very unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, WWDC seems like the natural place if you’re going to pitch it as developers who want you to start figuring out how to make us
⏹️ ▶️ John in AR. And this product like that’s the whole difficulty of this product. Like they could pitch it as like, you know, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John do for dev dev kits for game consoles, where it’s like, the console is not done yet, but game developers
⏹️ ▶️ John who want you to start working on games for it. So here is the some monstrosity, loud,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, multi-fanned giant monstrosity that has specs similar to what we’re planning
⏹️ ▶️ John for the console, but we’re not entirely sure yet. But maybe this one has more RAM and is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John clocked a little bit lower, but gets hotter because it’s using an earlier version of the chip. And it’s just for you to get
⏹️ ▶️ John started on your game development. And then you have to develop against that based on what you think
⏹️ ▶️ John the eventual product will be, right. And, you know, as time goes on and you develop in the years
⏹️ ▶️ John leading up to the console, you adjust for, okay, we think the console is going to have less RAM than the dev kit or more
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. Are we thinking the console is going to, you know, have a higher clock speed or lower, have more graphics scores. And you just sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of work around that. Right. So that’s one way they could go with the AR things. The problem is you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to know when you’re going to ship the quote unquote real consumer product with game consoles. They pretty much know, like we have a dev kit,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be X number of years. Then we’re going to release the real console and we’ve done it year after year or generation after generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s somewhat predictable. But nobody knows how to make a pair of attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John looking glasses that double as a high resolution screen for AR Like that doesn’t exist. Like you see things like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Magic Leap thing or whatever Those don’t look like it’s a pair of glasses like they look like computer
⏹️ ▶️ John things in your face or Google Glass or whatever No one has cracked this problem yet. So it’s not like, you know when you’re gonna be done with this,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? years in advance, you know, you don’t know until you’ve actually done it and and
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you strap to your face that look like Oculus type things or whatever, those exist as products right now
⏹️ ▶️ John and people buy them mostly for playing games. So the question is, does Apple try to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual product, a narrow interest product, but an actual product to consumers that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look like a pair of glasses, an actual product that is used like the Oculus Quest? I mean, they could pitch it as a
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming thing and Apple’s not great on gaming, but like if they don’t pitch it a gaming, it’s like, so why would
⏹️ ▶️ John a consumer buy this ugly thing that they strap on their face? They’re not gonna wear it in public. Why would they wear it
⏹️ ▶️ John in their house? Like what is the pitch to consumers for this device? Because that I feel like is
⏹️ ▶️ John easier than trying to give something to developers and say, develop something against this
⏹️ ▶️ John and someday we’ll have something that’s not this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That you can ship yourself. When will that day be? Well, A, we can’t tell you because we’re Apple, but B, we actually don’t know because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John really hard problem. Like, so maybe that’s the reason nothing has come to this. But I feel like the most
⏹️ ▶️ John likely scenario is that Apple is going to ship an actual product that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big ugly thing that you strap to your face. And it will be narrow interest. It’s not like they’re gonna say, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the new iPhone and everyone’s gonna own one. It’ll be narrow interest in the watch. It’ll be narrower interest than any of their
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs because all those products are things that in theory, anyone can buy and find useful. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John product, I don’t think you can pitch that to the broader public and say, everybody should buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John lunchbox that you put on your forehead. No. And so the question is, if it’s not for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John who is it for? The answer so far has been, it’s for gamers and here are some games on it. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is perhaps uniquely ill-equipped to
⏹️ ▶️ John product that gets, see the Apple Pippin and many other past attempts to make gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because like, if you look at like, you know, what is an Oculus Quest? You know, the hardware, it’s basically smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware with some specialized displays in like, you know, a nice plastic enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some batteries. Like, Apple can do all of that. Like, hardware-wise, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no doubt that Apple could make a really good competitor to the Oculus Quest. It would kick its butt in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, graphics performance, and CPU performance, and everything, because it’s all, it’s phone hardware. This is what they specialize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. So, that, the hardware side would be fine. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know what Apple’s relationship is to gaming. And while they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have a lot of game playing going on on their platforms. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of happens to them, happens despite them, not because of them. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John think of the casino games for children that could be in it. You’d be like, you’re in the casino for children. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you can see the gems flying out of your pocket to do everything in the game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine that they would be good at shipping something that is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their first, second game console. We saw what happened with the Apple TV’s attempt at gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I don’t think they have it in them and we’ve talked about this before. So, that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back just a little bit higher level here, I wouldn’t actually assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that anything will ever ship from the AR project. Like, we’re all kind of assuming, like in the rumor mill and in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press, that it’s inevitable, like oh yeah, when the goggles come out or whenever this thing comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s stated as a when instead of an if, but the AR project, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, has a significant chance of never actually shipping. I think the same thing about the car project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the car has an even higher chance of never shipping. I think a much higher chance. I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be shocked if the car project ever produces anything to the market.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason the AR thing has a higher chance is like ARKit exists, RealityKit exists. They’ve iterated
⏹️ ▶️ John on these frameworks, these necessary frameworks for AR for years and years. And they have us
⏹️ ▶️ John all holding our iPads in front of tables and stuff. And it’s like, see, isn’t this stuff great? It’s like, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we all know. Like, it’s great that they’re working on it, but like they’re shipping it, right? So it would seem really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird to work for literal years on AR, VR, tech, framework, software
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and never ship hardware that does it justice. And the rumors are that they
⏹️ ▶️ John do have a product-ish looking Oculus Quest kind of thing. You’re right, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John still choose not to ship it, but like, unlike the car where they’ve shipped nothing, right, I mean, CarPlay doesn’t count. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing related to the car that has shipped. Like it’s not like, hey, self-driving for your iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ John point it out the window of your car and it will say where it would steer if it was controlling the car. Now that doesn’t exist, but we have that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like the car project only exists to just churn through a whole bunch of people and money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I mean, obviously someone somewhere thinks that they’re on some track to
⏹️ ▶️ John something. I think we saw recently a suggestion that the, there’s a lot of things like, oh, don’t you realize
⏹️ ▶️ John AR and the car project are combined because there’s obvious synergies with like in terms of heads up displays and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car, but as far as I know, the AR project and the car project are
⏹️ ▶️ John not working together on anything. Which, it would make sense if they were,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have not heard any confirmation of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, when Steve famously came back to the company and he cut all the advanced research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects that were just burning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that happened today, AR and the car would be the first things to get cut. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, AR might, one of those would probably end up being the iMac where he comes back to the company and realizes
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s this industrial design group that everyone’s ignoring that’s actually doing some cool stuff. I’m just not sure which
⏹️ ▶️ John one of it whether it would be he would come back to the company and say, Oh, actually, I’m going to cut a bunch of stuff. But these people working on the car
⏹️ ▶️ John doing great work, or these people working on ar doing great work. And that’s the future. But yeah, the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John them both continuing to exist and not ship anything for many years under a belt tightening
⏹️ ▶️ John regime is it but that’s that’s a different Apple like that was an Apple that was that was going bankrupt in 90 days and needed to cut to save money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Current Apple does not need to cut programs to save money to say the least. I mean, hell, the car thing has probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gone through like three lifetimes worth of company money,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even keep track of what iteration they’re on. The head of the project just got poached by Ford. And apparently he was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody liked him and he was doing a good job. So that’s not good. So are we on the fifth iteration now?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Anyway, no car at this event. Bold, bold prediction. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, bolder prediction. No car ever. maybe no AR goggles ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty close to your opinion on that, Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, I feel like they have to eventually ship what they’ve got for the AR thing. It’s just a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John how to position it. And, you know, the reason we keep talking about like, oh, why are you worried about Apple and gaming? The phones
⏹️ ▶️ John are great with games, again, despite Apple, you know, if not because of it. The problem is that
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, the way you make a game for those platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that different. the way you make a game for AR VR is totally
⏹️ ▶️ John different and mostly doesn’t make sense on the other platforms. That’s right. You
⏹️ ▶️ John could say, oh, well, I don’t touch my TV. Doesn’t that not make sense? There’s whole classes of games where
⏹️ ▶️ John you play them on the phone and yeah, you’re using your fingers to touch a screen, but actually it would be better with a controller. But
⏹️ ▶️ John AR VR, like the rules are entirely different. Like the controls, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re looking around with your head in a virtual space And you can’t map that onto a controller
⏹️ ▶️ John very easily unless you really narrow the genre. Like you could play maybe Half-Life Alyx
⏹️ ▶️ John with a regular controller, but lots of other VR experiences, like even things like Beat Saber or whatever, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John narrowed that to not be a VR type game, it would still work, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like a really boring version of Guitar Hero versus what it really is when you actually play Beat Saber
⏹️ ▶️ John is it feels very different than Guitar Hero because things are actually coming at you and you’re moving your arms, right? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I could play Beat Saber with the Sega Activator. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fishing rod, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the octagon you put on the floor and you punch through it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the game becomes boring at that point. Because in terms of a rhythm game,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have the complexity of even Guitar Hero with different frets and strings or whatever. The complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John comes from the fact that you’re there in 3D space and you’re moving your actual arms to hit the thingies.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is what makes that game. Take that away and it’s the world’s most boring rhythm game. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, developing for AR would have to be, you know, the same things for the quest or whatever. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to cultivate the development of games that take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of your hardware. It is not a success to say, look, it’s cut the rope in VR. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cares. Like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you cannot keep selling threes to people. Like it’s just, you have to, you have to actually make games.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like saying, oh, Nintendo 64, and here’s Super Mario Brothers on it in 2D. No, you need Mario 64.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need something that demonstrates why do I care about this new hardware? And even just in the realm of gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is desperately needed. And I’m hard pressed to think of an application other than gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to pitch a product like the Quest, unless you pitch it to businesses or something, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t care about that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they wouldn’t be good at it. You know, that’s a Microsoft thing. You know, let them do their HoloLens.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think, yeah, I don’t think HoloLens has been too successful in that realm either. Maybe like in the creative fields, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like gaming is the only possible application of that because you’re not gonna wear that out of the house. It’s not like, oh, I’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to see directions when I walk through the city with a lunchbox in my face. Nope, not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and even gaming, I think what we’ve seen from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VR so far is that it’s kind of like the Wii. You get some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun novelty time with it, but I don’t think we’re seeing a lot of lasting, like must-have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games yet. And it’s not like VR is super new. we’ve had decent widespread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VR hardware now for a number of years, and we still are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a ton of must-have VR games. And it’s possible maybe the appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it is just not that, not as wide of an appeal as we originally thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think we haven’t gotten over the threshold of minimum viability though? Because like, I mean-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think the Quest and the Quest 2 are that, because those are the first ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t require a cable running out of your head to some PC somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a PlayStation or something. That is what, the Quest series made VR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy and palatable to consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re underestimating the motion sickness factor, right? The fact that if there’s even the smallest amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of lag, which there still is, especially on the Quest, which is not powerful hardware, that a whole section of the population,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a torture device. Nothing is ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be fine. Well, yeah, but you’re over indexing on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but like if you if you if you get motion sick at all after like 30 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a product you’re going to want to buy or spend time with. Like nobody wants to feel that ever. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John let alone in something you spent money on. Right. It’s not a fun experience. You have to actually solve that problem. And it just
⏹️ ▶️ John flat out hasn’t been solved because we just don’t have hardware that’s fast enough and responsive enough not to induce
⏹️ ▶️ John motion sickness. Granted, not in all people, but you’re further narrowing the group. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has been, it’s reached minimum viability for gamers, for a subset of gamers, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ John not reached minimum viability for everyone who might enjoy an AR VR experience. It feels kind of like touchscreens
⏹️ ▶️ John were Yeah, touchscreens existed for years, and, and touchscreens didn’t cause people to vomit. Right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John literally didn’t make them sick to their stomach, but they just weren’t pleasing to use. And the threshold we didn’t know it. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John threshold was essentially the iPhone. And before the iPhone, if you said, are touchscreens so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad that they make people sick to their stomach? No. Are they you know, do you not like using touchscreen ATMs?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine, like whatever. But we didn’t until we saw the Okay, now we pass the threshold. Like I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’ll only be obvious when we get there. And I feel like VR, if you have to make excuses, or
⏹️ ▶️ John caveats, or some people just plain can’t do it because they get sick to their stomach, which I think is an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John debilitating again, you know, an unpleasing touchscreen is much less
⏹️ ▶️ John offensive for someone to use, then use this thing and you’re going to feel like you want to puke in 30 minutes. Right. That
⏹️ ▶️ John that is that is a barrier that has to be overcome. And we more or less know what’s needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to overcome it. It’s just that it’s too expensive and hasn’t really been solved for the general case.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the quest to solve the problem of like, oh, I don’t want to set up all this crap in my house and it’s too annoying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but at the cost of low resolution and lag, which causes motion sickness in a fairly large subset
⏹️ ▶️ John of the population. And also you have a lunchbox on your face. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking forward to the day when the only excuses for not using VR are lunchbox
⏹️ ▶️ John on your face and too expensive. Right. But there are many more
⏹️ ▶️ John excuses that it’s lunchbox on your face, too expensive wires if it doesn’t have lag and makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, going back to a for a moment, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has to ship something to pay off all the investment they’ve they’ve put into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think all the investment they put into it necessarily suggests they will ever ship something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of the effort they put into it and the hardware and the software and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they have found ways to make that improve their other products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, in the case of AR, you have sensors, things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, cameras need to be very good. You have things like LiDAR being involved, potentially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance measuring, stuff like that. Well, they put all that in the iPhone and the iPad, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has improved those products. And those products have AR features. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adoption of those features justifies their inclusion in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those products, but it does not justify an entire separate product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focused entirely on AR. Because what we’ve seen from those features so far, and yeah, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem in the sense that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, I know the AR features would be more compelling on glasses than they are on a phone or an iPad, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve seen from these features so far, as they’ve been on the iPhone and iPad for quite some time now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they enable some pretty cool use cases, or some additional side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features like assisting the camera in autofocus or something like that. But they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking over the world. We’re not seeing massive must-have things that, wow, this thing I can do in AR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my phone is amazing. If only I could have the glasses strapped to my face to do this full-time in the world. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not seeing that kind of thing come out of it. So if the AR project,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all of its different forms, only ever results in things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make iPhones and iPads better, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t consider that a failure at all. I consider that just, well, we did all the R&D, we developed all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff, this is where it was most useful, in our other products, not as a standalone thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that makes it hurt less, but I think everyone agrees that if you could
⏹️ ▶️ John get something that looked like a pair of regular reading glasses, that could put a name over everyone’s head so you didn’t forget their names,
⏹️ ▶️ John that product sells a billion copies, right? So I know that’s distant future, but like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s an infinite timeline argument here. Like, yeah, the lunchbox may never ship because they can just never find a use case for
⏹️ ▶️ John it other than gaming, but all this AR tech that, yes, it is helping in their existing products or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, and it makes it hurt less that you’re not shipping the AR thing. And I think actually, I’ve said on the past shows, it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John important that they’re actually shipping AR kit and all this VR stuff and refining it and making it better,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is progress that’s going to help when you do finally get the glass. But eventually, technology
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime, probably in our lifetime, technology comes where you can get a pair of glasses that has a screen in them and
⏹️ ▶️ John just the name over people’s heads feature alone, plus walking directions in a city that thing sells
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as the Apple Watch. Easy, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because that because
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’ve cracked it. We just don’t know when that time is. And that time definitely doesn’t seem like September 14th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think your point, Marco, about all of this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offshooting of the technology is valid and important,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like getting LIDAR, which is ostensibly or presumably from an AR thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but having it actually show up in iPads and iPhones. But I still think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having the driving force be—and we’re all three of us making huge assumptions here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having the driving force being an AR headset, I still think that’s important. It’s not that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at existing technology or even inventing new technology and saying, oh, you know what? We could try that on an AR thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really feels to me, knowing Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way I do, that this is trickled down from AR to their current stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really feels like they are still trying to make AR stick, and they’re still throwing things against the wall, and they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sleep on the stuff that they’ve come up with. They’re not going to sleep on LIDAR and they’re not going to sleep on any of these other technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, they’re still pushing toward that ultimate goal. You snarked earlier, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey semi-agree with you that they’re never going to release an AR headset. And I don’t think I would say never, and I don’t think I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infinite timeline, but I think it’s going to be years, and I think it’s going to be very unimpressive at first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think the car will never, ever ship, and I will be stupefied if anything that even vaguely resembles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car does. But I do think there will be an AR headset or glasses or what have you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point. And I think it’s easy for all three of us to kind of poo poo it and say, Oh, it’s not that interesting or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that exciting. Cause it’s one of those things inventing the future. Like I remember thinking, why would you want an all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen phone? That seems dumb, but you know, fast forward to after the iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s clearly the way of the future. So I, maybe I’m just not as, as good at envisioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the future as others, but I could totally see where, even though I agree with a lot of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said that, Oh, this isn’t that impressive, it isn’t that exciting. I mean, who cares if you have an arrow on the street instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or an arrow in front of your face, I should say, instead of like watching your phone as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving or walking or what have you. But I can imagine experiencing it would lead me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very different conclusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Mercedes with the heads up display that has little AR arrows that’s shipping now, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes me think that like the AR team should actually talk to the car team because
⏹️ ▶️ John they can never ship any goggles. Like Apple has better tech than Mercedes for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing AR, I would assume based on all their experience with ARKit and everything, and certainly better Silicon experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they actually do make a car of any kind, it better have a heads up display that does ARKit crap all
⏹️ ▶️ John over the city. Like that’s it better have that because the Apple’s got that technology, same company guys like work together.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they never do ship a car, then maybe they should just license that out to Mercedes or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That will also never happen. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Ernest, Things, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ExpressVPN. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. We’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John 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, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, tech podcasts so long
After-show: iPhone numbering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we never got the chance to do Ask ATP during the main show, and we thought we’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull a relevant one into the after show. So Doug MacArthur writes, do you think the iPhone will ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop the number from its naming convention? What would cause Apple to do it? And what would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your ideal new naming scheme? Maybe the crack marketing team at Apple will take notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s going to have to happen. We’re not going to have an iPhone 37, but I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t think of a better scheme. I mean, we could just have iPhone per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2021 per in which is fine. Like it works for the laptops, but I don’t know, it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What would cause Apple to do it? Maybe iPhone 13? Maybe? Actually, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, what are the unlucky numbers in in Chinese or in China? It did where or do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we already passed it? Okay, nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t care about superstition. So they’re not afraid of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, yes, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they care a lot about China.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then they launched the iPhone was the iPhone four in China.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, certainly China wouldn’t have been as important of a market back then as it is
⏹️ ▶️ John also true, yeah. Yeah. So here’s the thing with the numbering. We talked about this before with video cards, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone thinks like, oh, well, it’s not going to be like iPhone 765. Like, that’s silly. It’s not a good product
⏹️ ▶️ John name. Video cards have the same problem, because they name their cards with numbers, and they keep making the numbers higher for better
⏹️ ▶️ John cards. And eventually, the numbers get too big, and they do what they call in the MMO world, they do a stat crunch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they say, OK, well, the numbers are too big, so let’s just make all the numbers lower. and they basically start over.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remember, I think AMD did that, AMD slash ATI did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were up to like the 9,000s and then they started over at like the 1,000s. Now they’re up to like 6,900 again.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just go back down and you say like, oh, they’re gonna have another iPhone 4. Well, you just put a number
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of it. You call the N4 or the iPhone A4 or the 4A. Like there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of ways where it could technically not be exactly the same product name. But the point is by the time you get numbers big enough, No
⏹️ ▶️ John one remembers the iPhone 4 or its ancient history. So you can literally just do iPhone 4 again. As for dropping
⏹️ ▶️ John the number, I know they did that with the iPad, but I feel like with the iPhone, don’t mess up a good thing. They finally got off
⏹️ ▶️ John of the stupid S thing. The number just goes up every year. It’s really easy for people to say, what kind of iPhone do you have? I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a 12, I have 11, 11 Pro, 11 is a little bit precious, but either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. Every year, like last year was the 12 year. There was 12 Pros, there was 12 Minis, and there was plain old 12s.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t screw that up. Just keep going. You can go easily into the 20s or even the 30s and you’re fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like you only get into a problem when you get to 99 because you don’t want to go 100 101. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John too much of a mouthful. By that point, start over again with iPhone one or
⏹️ ▶️ John two or I don’t know, like there’s so many options you have because it’s so many years in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope they don’t drop it because if they do, it’s going to be so hard to talk about. Like we have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same problem, like I have an iPad Pro, which iPad Pro? Oh, the flat sided one. Oh no, the original iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? I don’t know, the 10.5 inch iPad Pro, it’s exhausting and annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people do upgrade their phones on a more regular schedule than they update their iPhones. So I think the numbering
⏹️ ▶️ John is a feature. I think Apple will keep it. I think Apple should keep it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I agree. I mean, they had a chance to reset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it when the 10 came out because instead of, you know, it’s obviously written iPhone X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they could have pronounced it X like everyone else does. And they could have had, Okay, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the iPhone X this year, and the next year we have the iPhone X2, and then iPhone X3, and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could have done that, they didn’t. I think the time of the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being clumsy is gonna start, I think, before 99. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we really want, like, oh, I got the iPhone 41. Like, that just seems a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John clumsy. It seems weird, but it’s distinguishable from iPhone 40. It’s one more than the 40.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, so they could always go with years if they really wanted to. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corporate, thanks to Microsoft, so I don’t know if they would actually end up doing that. But there are other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options, or they could just drop the number completely, as Doug asks. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would drop it completely because people know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old their phones are based on the numbers. Most people don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize that the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 10 are the same age because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t realize that was a wonderful bit of marketing they did there. But people who have iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 8s think they’re really old, where people with iPhone 10s don’t quite yet. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they have a little while longer before they have to change anything. I think they can go through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the teens, but I think maybe past 17, 18, I think they’re gonna wanna switch by then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, 20 will be cool. The
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 20 will be like a celebration. Same thing with 25, like it’ll be exciting number, like the Super Bowl when it’s like a nice round
⏹️ ▶️ John number, everyone gets excited about it. I think we’ve got many more years where
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers will be just fine. Doesn’t mean they’ll keep them, but they should keep them, I think. Because it’s just some people know
⏹️ ▶️ John and understand. And in some respects, because they have a new iPhone every year, a yearly thing would make a lot of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John In that case, they should sync it up with the last two digits. And so this year would be iPhone 21, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve suddenly jumped a bunch of digits. But-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the problem with the yearly approach though is that they tend to keep around the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models for a few years to sell them for cheaper. So I think that might discourage, I mean, maybe they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but like- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why they don’t do 2021, they just call it 21.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I see what you
⏹️ ▶️ John mean. Yeah, maybe. But then they’d be skipping from 13 to 21 and that’s burning a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of numbers they want. Yeah, I think they’ll just do a stat crunch. Like you said, you can put a letter or a number in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John it or just go back, because by the time they’re up into the mid-20s and they go back to four, no one’s gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone 4, I already owned an iPhone 4. What year, grandpa? Like it’s so long ago, no one cares,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah. The real question as people putting in the chat is did they change the little comma separated
⏹️ ▶️ John number like iPhone 20 comma one, 21 comma one or whatever, right? That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John developer nerd question. Same thing we have with like 10.15 versus 10.16 versus 11, all that crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is actually a kind of annoying problem of like internally what representation
⏹️ ▶️ John do we have for device names and numbers? It’s worse with version numbers because people do version comparisons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I think Apple has good macros for most of that now. But yeah, that’s not a concern for consumers. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is mostly a consumer question. But it will be interesting if they ever do a stat crunch if the numbers internally just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I’m doing a survey for the Accidental Tech Podcast. I was wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where do you live?
⏹️ ▶️ John I live in Ocean Beach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would you say that’s on Long Island? That is not on Long Island. it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fire Island. And for the record, where’d you grow up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great, thank you. Where do you live?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would you say that you live on Long Island? I do live on Long Island, yeah. Part of Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much. Okay. What were you asking? So is Fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island part of Long Island? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. Municipality, yes, but it’s not connected to. It’s an island of another island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So would you say we are on Long Island right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. No, we’re on Fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s completely different. Where are you guys from? I’m from Bayport, New York. Or Bayport,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island. East Sysop, Long Island. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so what I’m trying to find out is, first of all, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you say we are right now? The Albatross and Ocean Beach. Would you say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are on Long Island? No. No. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Fire Island. In Fire Island. No, I wouldn’t call this Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And where are you from? From
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island. Long Island, Fayetteville. And would you say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are on Long Island right now? No, I guess I wouldn’t say Long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island. No, I would say Fire Island. And then if someone who didn’t know the area was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, where is Fire Island? I’d be like, it’s off of Long Island. Like, I think that’s how I would word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So it’s not on Long Island? No, it’s not on Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would you consider it part of Long Island?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I like to think that I’m better than everybody on Long Island, so no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I try to remove myself as much as I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course. Are we gonna be on the internet? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it was a debate about podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, let’s go. We’re gonna be on the podcast. What’s your podcast?