catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

451: A Series of Terrible Magic Tricks

Facebook’s outage, A15 analysis, the latest MacBook Pro rumors, and a surprise mid-show Neutral.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
  • Hello Fresh: America’s #1 Meal Kit. Use code atp14 for up to 14 free meals.
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.

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

MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Facebook BGP outage
  2. Thanks from us and St. Jude
  3. M1 shirts available on-demand 🖼️
  4. Anandtech on A15
  5. Sponsor: Linode
  6. Raw data rates: not RGB
  7. FPS games and motion sickness
  8. Marco’s Pants Update
  9. Cases On Cars
  10. Surprise Neutral
  11. How’s Apple’s quality recently?
  12. Sponsor: HelloFresh (code atp14)
  13. Latest 14/16” rumors
  14. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  15. #askatp: Apple ergonomic accessories
  16. #askatp: Websites using too much energy
  17. #askatp: CarPlay from Apple Watch
  18. Ending theme
  19. After-show: Ordering Series 7?

Facebook BGP outage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so show of hands, who knew what BGP was before this week?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Me. Ooh, no, I don’t think I did. I didn’t either.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew John would. Of course John

⏹️ ▶️ John did. If you’ve done anything like server-side development in a big company context

⏹️ ▶️ John for enough years, you know what BGP is. Not that I know it and I’m not a networking engineer, but it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you run across.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s the kind of thing that I probably should have run across at Tumblr, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were always just in a data center host that was hosting our servers for us. When I left, there was 120

⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers, but they were all still at what was then called The Planet, which was then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco later became SoftLayer, which later became part of IBM.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was just a dedicated host, where you’d leave servers. They took care of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the networking gear, the routers and everything. I had no idea about any of that stuff. That was all kind of, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the level I was working at. So I probably should have been exposed to this at some point, but wasn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think it depends on if your company runs its own data center, which I guess is probably

⏹️ ▶️ John even more rare now because everyone just uses public cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud or Azure

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But yeah, back in the original dot com days, almost everybody ran their own data center. So even if you had

⏹️ ▶️ John some rinky dink little company with not a lot of employees, you’d still have a rack or two in

⏹️ ▶️ John some data center, and then you’d have to hire someone who knew how to set up your stuff in that rack. And if your company got a little bit big,

⏹️ ▶️ John then you’d be hiring network engineers to set up your network in that data center and on and on from there. And obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook runs its own stuff because it’s Facebook. And it’s actually kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of surprising that Facebook doesn’t have its own public cloud thing by this point, but maybe I shouldn’t encourage them.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Although maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a business where they can do less damage. But anyway, yeah, if you run your own data centers,

⏹️ ▶️ John you end up, if you end up hiring network engineers, then that’s where this comes up. But it sounds like Tumblr was

⏹️ ▶️ John born late enough to be able to take advantage of hosting by other things, and that you left before they became

⏹️ ▶️ John potentially a big enough company where they decided they want to run their own data centers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, totally. I mean, I think I’m kind of lucky in that way that I didn’t have to deal with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re at the point where you have 120 servers, I don’t think you should be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operating your own routers. That to me, that’s like jumping the gun

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the level that you’re operating at. I do think this whole, the Facebook outage thing, which I guess we’re gonna talk about now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, I’m chief derailleur in chief. It was interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, the response from average people, I think, has been really interesting. I don’t know if you’ve talked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any non-nerds in the last few days, but everyone knows about it, obviously, because everyone uses either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or multiple of those. So that’s, you know, problem number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. But also, like, the opinion seems to be split between people who thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hack based on just the whistleblower leak or something, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was specially timed for Congress and everything. It’s kind of like conspiracy theory-torial.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, a lot of people pointed out how disruptive it was. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not disruptive in the way that, oh, I couldn’t post on my Instagram, boo,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco poor me. It’s disruptive in ways like, I couldn’t book an appointment with my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hair stylist because they only book stuff over Instagram. Or I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey buy something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a friend’s business or something because they only have a Facebook page, not a website.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really revealed quite how dependent the world

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not part of a WhatsApp using community, but I know that it’s a massive messaging app and is the primary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco messaging app for many parts of the world. You know, imagine if iMessage was down for six hours for us. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty big problem. And especially if that’s like how you communicate with almost everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s a huge problem. And so when you bring in like the business side of it too, like how disruptive it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was for businesses that might operate primarily or only on Facebook-owned properties,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty big deal. And it was like the scene in Independence Day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where their computers are all broken they have to switch back to Morse code. They’re like, what kind of old technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we dust off to communicate with each other because our computers are down? That Morse code was like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those of us like dusting off our blogs or going back to Twitter or whatever, like, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how, do we have, maybe we should make a website for our business after all. But it really shows like how,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just how dependent everyone is on this stuff in ways that go beyond just the superficial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need for social likes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for, for me, I didn’t talk to most anyone about it. Like I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly talked to Aaron about it, but we just happen to have a busy day. What was it yesterday? So it, it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey affect either of us a whole lot. Like I’ll glance at Instagram maybe a few times a day, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was busy. And so maybe the one or two times I had the time to glance at it, I just, it didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, and Aaron similarly, like she, she’s heavier into Facebook than Instagram, but it looks at both.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think again, like she didn’t really think a whole lot of it. I don’t think it crossed her mind that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a hack, and it didn’t cross my mind that it was a hack. I think we both assumed it was some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of oops, and it seems as with any of these kinds of major outages, it was actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a series of oopses that caused the problem. But nevertheless, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t get any conspiracy theories, nor were our lives particularly disrupted by it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, the thing that really strikes me and kind of, I don’t know if scares is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit but scares me a little bit is from what I understand, like their entire, and I think you said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this a second ago, entire like continents, if not countries, that basically live on WhatsApp

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same way that like China lives on something. I can’t remember what it is now. WeChat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey WeChat. Yes, thank you. That’s right. For an entire continent or country or what have you to basically be crippled

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on account of somebody oopsing on a router in Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that’s, I don’t know what to say about it. about it other than that it’s undesirable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I couldn’t, I didn’t think it was a hack because honestly a hack

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually is not that big an instant of a problem. You know, like to take down Facebook’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire network for six hours, that’s not a hack,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s an oops. You can tell, like I’ve been there. And this is normally I try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to take pleasure in companies having server problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve been there. I’ve caused those server problems. I like I have,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that and it sucks. And to be like, you know, the engineers who have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like be responsible for that and be fixing all this stuff under immense pressure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that does suck. But it’s also really hard to feel sorry for Facebook. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do take a little bit of joy that it happened to an absolutely awful company. But, but certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do feel for the individual engineers who I would suggest maybe not working for that company in general.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, I feel bad for you individual engineers who happen to work on that. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that was quite a thing. The impact, it’s ridiculous how much of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an impact that had.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s going to be any lesson learned out of this, though. You’re right that it did affect huge

⏹️ ▶️ John numbers of people. But I feel like the reaction is going to be kind of the same reaction that happens when the

⏹️ ▶️ John power goes out. Like, imagine if the power to an entire country went out. Like we would all agree, oh, this has far

⏹️ ▶️ John reaching effects. Like without electricity, so much of our life depends on electricity and businesses and people and

⏹️ ▶️ John healthcare and just, boy, we really need that electricity. But the reaction is we should really make sure that electricity

⏹️ ▶️ John stays on. That’s, you know, they don’t say we should not have electricity. And I feel like Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John is, or, you know, WhatsApp or whatever, like they’re in that category where people just

⏹️ ▶️ John become adamant, like, well, we don’t want that to happen again. We’ve got to make sure Facebook stays up forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not the lesson we want people to take from this. Like, hey, maybe you shouldn’t be so dependent

⏹️ ▶️ John on what is, in fact, a private company run by one douchey guy. But

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the lesson people take from it. They just want their Facebook to work. And so I feel like nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John will come of this. And the main reason I think it didn’t have any, a thought didn’t even enter my head

⏹️ ▶️ John that this is any kind of hack is because hacks seek to either extract money or do damage or both. And this was not

⏹️ ▶️ John that. This was like accidentally turning off the light switch. Right? And then people having to drive to a building to turn

⏹️ ▶️ John it back on. It’s terrible and everything, but like, it’s like no harm done. Like they didn’t, they didn’t erase everything. They

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t like ransomware every piece of data that Facebook owns. Right. They didn’t burn the buildings

⏹️ ▶️ John down. They didn’t delete all their source code and backups from the repo. Like that’s what hacks do. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is just yeah, it’s someone who made a very bad mistake

Thanks from us and St. Jude

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that it is now October. I know that we are not really talking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about St. Jude anymore, but hey, guess what? I want to talk about St. Jude for one more minute. First of all, I wanted to thank

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, including you, the listener, assuming you donated, which you should have done. I want to thank everyone, including you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the listener, for getting Relay and the entire community over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey $700,000. This actually happened as we were recording Analog, which will be out later this week,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, that Mike got the news that we had crossed $700,000. Additionally, that means that we,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the entire lifetime of the Relay and St. Jude Partnership, have raised $1.5 million.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically half of which was this year, which is utterly bananas. But still, $1.5 million in three years, $700,000

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one year. I am extremely proud of all of us. Also, we talked last episode about the Absolutely Bananas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey donation of $26,922.05, which was one cent more than AgileBits.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The donor has reached out to me and they would like to remain anonymous, but wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey note that the donation was in honor of Shang Ling, Jennifer Lin’s parents, and so I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey honoring their wishes by announcing that to everyone. So thank you for your donation and thank

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to this wonderful lady’s parents for being awesome enough to justify a $26,000 donation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not yet had the chance to mail stickers, but all the stickers will be mailed shortly, so I wanted to put that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on record. Now, if you would like to donate to St. Jude, feel free to do so, except we don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our fancy URL anymore because the campaign is closed. But But hey, it can’t hurt.

M1 shirts available on-demand

Chapter M1 shirts available on-demand image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along in the spirit of taking your money, hi, it’s us, we’d like to take your money.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have just launched an on-demand merch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store. So this is a little different than normal. Normally the way it works is it’s kind of in the spirit of Kickstarter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we’ll do a run for a couple of weeks where we sell, where we take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey orders for a couple of weeks and then our friends at Cotton Bureau, like print or whatever the correct term is, prints the shirts and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ship them out for us. And then there’s no further sales other than pins,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we can’t seem to sell out of and maybe other stuff that’s left over. We’re gonna do things a little differently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for now. What we’ve decided is we’re gonna sell three different things in our on-demand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store. The first thing is the pin that we can’t get rid of, no matter how hard

⏹️ ▶️ John we try. And a little update on that, I think you’ll remember on a past show, we’re like, hey, pins finally sold out, but then we got told

⏹️ ▶️ John by the Cotton Mirror folks, like, actually, we still have a few more pins, So we just can’t get rid of these

⏹️ ▶️ John pins. We’re really down to scraping the bottom of the barrel. But like we always hold back some merchandise in case something gets damaged

⏹️ ▶️ John in shipping or we need to replace it or whatever. Now we’re just really scraping the bottom of the seemingly endless pin barrel.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s not a lot of pins left, but there are pins left.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So if you want to pin with the fancy locking backs, please get on that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quicker rather than or sooner rather than later. Additionally, we have some leftover pint glasses. We always order

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to like glasses and mugs. We always order a little bit too much on purpose just to make sure if there’s like damage and shipping or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. We have some amount of pint glasses left over. So if you’d like to grab one of those,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are excellent. They are my primary drinking glass now. I love them. Please check that out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t have a tremendous amount of those either. But the potential star of the show is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have brought back sort of, kind of, the M1 shirt asterisk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is the multicolor rainbow M1 shirt that we had sold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the last run. However, we are not printing anything on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. So if you were smart and beautiful and fancy enough to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your shirt already, you have the outline of the M1 on the back of your shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey These shirts that we’re selling on demand, you do not get anything on the back. It’s just blank on the back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, to make up for that, we do have additional sizes. So we have a onesie for infants.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a tank top that I don’t think John realized is available, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you can. I

⏹️ ▶️ John saw it, it’s fine, whatever. I’m not a tank top user.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey should

⏹️ ▶️ John just be t-shirts. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a tank top. We accidentally have a tank top.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the beauty of the on-demand stuff. If one person order ones, they’ll make one. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we have tees in men’s, women’s, youth, and toddler sizes as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you would like, you can go to atp.fm.com/. I don’t think we’re gonna announce this regularly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since it’s not a limited time thing, but I will make a stink out of it now and then let it go. ATP.FM slash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store, you can get an M1 shirt, you can get a pint glass, or you can get an enamel pin.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let me explain a little bit of the background to like why are we even doing this. Like there’s basically one reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is that a prominent YouTuber has been wearing our M1

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey shirt in

⏹️ ▶️ John some of his videos. And every time, this is Quinn Nelson, by the way, Snazzy Labs, I forget what his

⏹️ ▶️ John actual YouTube channel is, but just look for Snazzy on YouTube. It’s a great channel, lots of great

⏹️ ▶️ John videos. But every time he would wear the M1 shirt, like the one that we sold during the past, you know, the one with the

⏹️ ▶️ John printing on the back of it, of course you can’t see it because he doesn’t turn around, but anyway, he wears M1 shirt and his comments would fill up with,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I love your shirt, where can I get a shirt like that, right? And then what would happen is

⏹️ ▶️ John people would see those comments and they would like copy and paste our graphic onto a random t-shirt on some

⏹️ ▶️ John random website. And they would say, oh, you can buy it here. And then we would have to go

⏹️ ▶️ John to those random websites and file a copyright takedown and say, that’s not your shirt, that’s our

⏹️ ▶️ John shirt. No, you can’t sell it to people. And then the site would take down their thing. And after doing that multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John times on multiple videos, and then also not being able to say, well, I want

⏹️ ▶️ John that shirt, so where can I get it? We didn’t have an answer. So we didn’t want other people selling our shirt for obvious reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But we also felt bad for those people who saw the shirt and wanted it. And by the way, those people have no idea who we

⏹️ ▶️ John are. They have no idea what ATP is. They just see like, it’s cool. You can get the joke without knowing ATP, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So we felt like, is it possible for like, The next time we take down one of those, can we

⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, don’t buy it there, that’s a rip off, buy it from us. And so now we can say

⏹️ ▶️ John that. That’s why that’s like, we were just gonna do that one product. Like here’s just the M1 shirt, solely

⏹️ ▶️ John so we have something to give people who don’t know who we are, but just want the shirt. And so we can shut down the rip off people

⏹️ ▶️ John without feeling bad, right? But then we found out, oh, well you have a couple of pint glasses left and you have a couple of pins

⏹️ ▶️ John left, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So this is

⏹️ ▶️ John not a new way of selling things. This is just us trying to drain more merchandise. And the very special

⏹️ ▶️ John case of the M1 shirt, which seems to be very popular among people who have no idea who we are or who watch YouTube videos.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s it, that’s the purpose of this. Also, these are on-demand shirts, so the printing process is different in

⏹️ ▶️ John ways I don’t understand because I’m not a printing person, right? So it’s not gonna be the same as the ones, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John all I’m saying is if you want, like, the quote-unquote real M1 shirt, you got it on the last sale. It’s got the printing

⏹️ ▶️ John on the back, it’s probably better, slightly better printing quality all around. Like, that’s the one to get.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing to keep in mind is that we have the, if you look at the

⏹️ ▶️ John very carefully lawyered, not really, we have no lawyers, very carefully worded text on our member page that

⏹️ ▶️ John says, hey, if you become a member, you get an automatic 15% off on our time limited

⏹️ ▶️ John sales that was carefully worded from day one to specify when we do those sales where we

⏹️ ▶️ John take a bunch of orders and make a bunch of stuff. That’s where you get 15% off. So if you are a member, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get 15% off on any of these on-demand things because these are on a time limited sale. We just run this forever for

⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 shirt because every time someone orders one, they make one and then it just sits there again, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John my advice to you if you’re listening to this is, we’re gonna have a holiday sale sometime,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fall, holiday, season sale or whatever. And in that sale, there’ll be a bunch of stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John You will get your discount during that sale if you’re a member. I suggest saving your money for that

⏹️ ▶️ John sale, especially since this is an M1 shirt. Any day now, if you’re listening, Apple, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey could release

⏹️ ▶️ John a new computer that doesn’t have an M1 in it. Maybe it’ll have a better chip with more cores and

⏹️ ▶️ John more GPU and all that other stuff. And then the M1 shirt is essentially obsolete, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 shirt is the one that’s in all the YouTube videos so we wanted to have some link to provide to people. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not telling you not to buy this. If you are wearing out one of your M1 shirts or if you never did like the chip on

⏹️ ▶️ John the back and just wanted it on the front or if you want a onesie or a tank top, by all means, go for it. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John actually a little bit cheaper because it doesn’t have the printing on the back so that’s one less printing pass to do. So it’s almost like

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting a discount just for being a cheaper shirt. So anyway, that’s why we’re doing this. Once we’re out of pint

⏹️ ▶️ John glasses and pins, we’ll just be down to the M1 shirt. If some YouTuber wears another one of our shirts,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll probably find us back in the same position and you’ll see some other on-demand thing be added to the list of stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in general, we’re still gonna concentrate on the, you know, the normal sort of time-limited sales with member discounts and

⏹️ ▶️ John all that other good stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So thank you for the we would love your money portion of the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in conclusion, John, you’re a terrible salesman. So what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you basically just-

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not selling to the people who listen to the podcast. This shirt solely exists to sell to people who have no idea who we are

⏹️ ▶️ John and have never heard this podcast. That’s why this shirt exists.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just great. It’s like what you basically just told people is don’t buy this shirt and don’t become a member.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What I said

⏹️ ▶️ John is become a member and wait for the time limited sale that’s gonna happen around the holidays. That’s where

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s your time to shine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my, we’re a mess. All right, let’s just get into the stuff we’re good at. Let’s talk about some follow-up.

Anandtech on A15

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a really good post, several page long post on AnandTech about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the A15 and we’ve pulled out a series of quotes with regard to it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or that came from it. And I’m just gonna go one by one and if you gentlemen have something you would like to add, please feel free

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to jump in. Let’s start with, this is again, these are all quotes from the AnandTech article. Compared to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey competition, the A15 isn’t 50% faster as Apple claims, but rather about 62% faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not

⏹️ ▶️ John sure how they come up with that quote, consider it all boils down to what you think of as, quote unquote, the competition.

⏹️ ▶️ John But this is a theme you’ll see throughout this article is that Apple was sort of underselling the A15.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, compared to the A14, it continues, the new A15 increases the peak single

⏹️ ▶️ Casey core frequency of the two performance core cluster by 8%, now reaching up to 3.2 gigahertz

⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to the three gigahertz of the previous generation. When both performance cores are active, their operating frequency

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually goes up by 10%, both now running at an aggressive, well, also basically 3.2 gigahertz,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to the previous generation’s 2.9 gigahertz. So yeah, they’re a little faster too.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was a little bit of some rumors about these things being clocked higher, also rumors of them being clocked

⏹️ ▶️ John higher on the Pro versus the non-Pro, but this is just compared to the previous generation. Basically the A15

⏹️ ▶️ John is able to achieve higher clock speeds than the A14 was.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s frequency increases here are quite aggressive given the fact that it’s quite hard to push this performance

⏹️ ▶️ Casey aspect of a design, especially when we’re not expecting major performance gains on the part of the new process node.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The A15 should be made on an N5P node variant from TSMC, although neither company

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really discloses the exact details of the design. TSMC claims a plus 5% frequency increase over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey N5. So for Apple to have gone further beyond this would have indicated an increase

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in power consumption.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we said that like the A15 is quote unquote five nanometers just like the A14, but within

⏹️ ▶️ John the five nanometer process node, there is an improved version of the TSMC has called N5P or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s supposed to give you, oh, you get 5% more clock speed. Even though you’re still quote five nanometers, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a better process and you can clock higher. But Apple has gone above and beyond that and clocked it even higher than what they would

⏹️ ▶️ John get out of the process increase. So a reasonable portion of the things that are good about

⏹️ ▶️ John the A15 are essentially good because of that P, stuck on the, whatever it stands for, stuck on the end of the process. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John the newest version of TSMC’s five nanometer thing. And this new version has

⏹️ ▶️ John small amounts of what you would get with a node shrink, you know, like, oh, I can just clock it higher. I just get that for free out

⏹️ ▶️ John of the process. But, you know, Apple’s pushed beyond that by saying, yeah, we get that for free out of the process, but we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to go with an eight or 10% clock speed increase to push it even farther.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The A15’s efficiency cores are also massively impressive. At peak performance, efficiency is flat,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’re also 24 or 28% faster. So they’re using about the same amount of power, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 30% faster. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at what the, If you read the article, you’ll see they added execution units to the efficiency cores. The quote unquote efficiency cores, I think I

⏹️ ▶️ John made this point a couple shows back. Like, don’t think that means they’re slow. They’re not slow. They were already fast,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re getting even faster. They do some embarrassing comparisons where they compare the efficiency cores of the

⏹️ ▶️ John A15 to the non-efficiency cores of quote unquote competing ships. And it’s very embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ John for the rest of the industry. The efficiency cores are, I mean, they’re still efficiency compared to the power

⏹️ ▶️ John cores, but they’re pretty darn good cores on their own.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Apple’s A15 performance cores are extremely impressive, right, Xanon Tech?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple here instead had managed to reduce power while increasing performance, meaning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14. So you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more stuff and you’re spending less power to do it. In terms of peak performance, the new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A15 GPU is absolutely astonishing and showcasing again improvements that are well above Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketing claims. So not only the CPU is better, the GPUs are way better too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff about thermal throttling in there as well, because like for the things that are

⏹️ ▶️ John much better, like the power cores and the GPU, given the thermal

⏹️ ▶️ John constraints of the phone, they don’t achieve that peak performance for very long.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even the, what they call the sustained performance, essentially when they throttle down, because they get too hot, that

⏹️ ▶️ John performance level is still above the peak performance of other phones, right? So it shows that there’s a lot of headroom

⏹️ ▶️ John on the A15. If it was put in, if these same cores were put into a situation where they’re not in a tiny little fanless phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John or even if they’re in like, as we saw on the iPad mini, someplace where they are better able to spread the heat,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of headroom. Like if you look at the bar chart, what is the peak performance

⏹️ ▶️ John of the A15? The quote unquote sustained performance is so much lower than that. The peak performance like sticks

⏹️ ▶️ John out of the graph like by an extra 50%. Yeah, and so, and the GPU,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, if you compare it to its competitors, even when it’s thermal throttling, it’s still amazing, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John bodes well for higher-end chips that use some of the same technology in

⏹️ ▶️ John applications where there is more cooling. And Anetec has a lot of harsh things to say about how

⏹️ ▶️ John the cooling works in the iPhones, like basically which side of the board the chip is on and what it’s pressing

⏹️ ▶️ John against and how much it’s able to dissipate its heat. And the fact that the, like, the cell modem is on the other

⏹️ ▶️ John side of the SoC, So two very hot parts are right next to each other. So apparently the thermal environment

⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone is not great I mean, but what can you really do? like I think I feel like they made that trade-off to make sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John the motherboard or whatever they call it inside a phone as Small as possible to make room for more battery. And honestly, I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the correct trade because People aren’t running benchmarks on their phone all the time they just want to use it and

⏹️ ▶️ John battery life is the way to go there, but it speaks to the the potential of the

⏹️ ▶️ John the design of the A15, whether it be the individual cores or just the A15 itself, or an M something chip

⏹️ ▶️ John derived from the A15, an M2, like MacBook Air next

⏹️ ▶️ John year, that uses an A15, you know, an A15 derived M2, freed from

⏹️ ▶️ John the constraints of a tiny little phone, but just put into a fanless MacBook Air, which has considerably more cooling because of all that

⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum surface area, is going to be a fairly amazing performer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m really excited for whenever we get new computers, hopefully sometime

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this month or next.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think that because we are finally making our M1 shirt available again, that means

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tomorrow Apple will release the M1X or M2 based computers. What it took was us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to finally invest more heavily in the M1 name. That’s what they were waiting for.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the good thing is the people who watch YouTube don’t know that and maybe don’t even realize what the M1 is about. They just think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a cool looking shirt. So when the M1X or M2 or whatever the heck they’re gonna call it comes out, someone is still

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna watch a Snazzy Labs video with him wearing an M1 shirt and they’re gonna say, hey, where can I get that shirt?

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re just gonna buy it not have any idea that the M2 is out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to host all of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my servers. Visit linode.com slash ATP and see why Linode has been voted the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius. And if I knew what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that meant, I would rate at the top that whatever too because I love Linode for running my servers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have done so much server hosting in my career and my personal life over, you know, the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15-20 years. I’ve been with a lot of different web hosts of a lot of different kinds. Linode is what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be called a modern you know, VPS host. Now it’s called a cloud company, because everything’s cloud now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you need one of those hosts, if you want to run server instances, you want to run them at Linode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, you have full you know, root access to your servers, install whatever software you want, you know, your own app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backends or get repositories or whatever you want to run a server for Linode can help you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have all sorts of great add-on services as well, things like Block Storage, Kubernetes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an upcoming bare metal release. And all this comes with not only great support and great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance, but also amazing value. This is why I’ve stuck with them for so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, because I’ve run a lot of servers. The price matters. It adds up at the numbers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m running. And they just have the best value in the industry. Like I’ve never found another website

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can undercut them on even a temporary basis, let alone a sustained one. and as technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets better, they offer more for your money. So it’s just a great web host. Again, the support is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great if you ever need it. I use it sometimes, and it’s been wonderful every single time. Their control

⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel is nice. They have an API. They have all sorts of specialty plans, high memory

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plans, GPU compute plans, dedicated CPU plans. So they have your needs covered. And again, the value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the support are fantastic. So linode.com slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Create your free account there, you get $100 in credit. Once again, Linode.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP for $100 in credit. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my servers and sponsoring our show.

Raw data rates: not RGB

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brian Peterson writes, during episode 450, Marco ran through the math of 4K video data rates. This math was correct for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, but three times too high for a camera. Each pixel in a display is full RGB color.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Each pixel in a camera sensor is only red or green or blue. And they’re arranged in a Bayer filter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pattern of 50% green, 25% red, and 25% blue. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey raw conversion algorithms convert them to full color pixels. So Marco’s and a half gigabytes per second, figure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be about 500 megabytes per second.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I didn’t know. I mean, I had heard the term Bayer filter or Bayer sensor thrown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, but I never really knew what that meant. And I had no idea that, yeah, apparently, and I’ve verified

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, that yeah, this is all correct. Apparently that most camera sensors,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco each pixel only has red or green or blue. And exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they said, you know, there’s twice as many greens as the other two, because I think because our eyes are more sensitive to green,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and our eyes actually works kind of similarly to this, I think. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a raw dump off of a camera sensor is not RGB. Each pixel has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those colors. So I don’t need to have three different colors at each pixel site.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one color at every pixel site when doing my math. So that’s pretty cool. And 500 megs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per second for my quick 4K math at eight bits per, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess, pixel, is still a ton of data, but it certainly makes it a little bit easier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to process.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey At least a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was a good article that I just found the URL for. I don’t know why I couldn’t find it before. Apparently I can only do it under pressure. Back

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey last year,

⏹️ ▶️ John when ProRAW first came out, and there’s this article at Lux.camera by Ben Sandofsky

⏹️ ▶️ John called Understanding ProRAW. And it basically, it’s talking about Apple’s ProRAW feature, which was introduced last year, but it goes through

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the process of, you know, what comes off the sensor and then what happens to it next or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can see the step where they go for, they call it de-mosaicing, where they go from

⏹️ ▶️ John the actual sensor, which with its 25% red, 25% blue and 50% green sensors, and that

⏹️ ▶️ John they de-mosaic that into RGB pixels, right? And then

⏹️ ▶️ John steps all of that. So if you wanna see a graphical representation of that and a nice explanation, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John also learn about ProRaw, we’ll put that link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this looks good. I hadn’t seen this before. This is the folks that do Halide, right? Or am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I think so.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how I Googled for it. I did Halide blog demosaic. That’s what I Googled

⏹️ ▶️ John for to find that link. Apparently I couldn’t come up with that previously. Oh, and we got some other feedback about

⏹️ ▶️ John like, what is, you know, sort of raw, uncompressed or losslessly compressed

⏹️ ▶️ John video? Like how does that manifest on disk? And in many different applications of

⏹️ ▶️ John that technique, I don’t remember the particular names, but the way they actually do it is they just

⏹️ ▶️ John fill folders with a series of, of, you know, losslessly compressed

⏹️ ▶️ John frames. So it’s just a bunch of files. Like as images? Yeah, frame one, frame two, frame three, as

⏹️ ▶️ John literal images, and then like an XML file to weave it all together. Like that’s how they store it. Because, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you are trying to do sort of uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the sort of deltas

⏹️ ▶️ John that you do between frames in a lossy format, like H.264, that doesn’t exist. Like you’re not doing that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John just, they just have a bunch of images, which seems ridiculous, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one way to do it And it’ll work.

FPS games and motion sickness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we’re breaking a personal rule of mine and we’re going to talk about destiny on the show. I’m sorry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone John tell me about destiny and motion sickness, please. What

⏹️ ▶️ John was the motion sickness thing? It was I think with regard to 120 Hertz and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John We talk about 120 Hertz and tracking animations with your eyes and turning your eyes off when things go

⏹️ ▶️ John on and a lot of people Ask me. All right So you have this motion sickness thing and you had to use reduced

⏹️ ▶️ John motion and so on and so forth But how do you handle gaming? Like doesn’t playing first person

⏹️ ▶️ John shooters and everything make you sick? Like how do you do any video gaming? And I answered a bunch of them on Twitter, but I figured

⏹️ ▶️ John it was worth talking about here, if only so I can relink the same Destiny article from 2015.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, first person shooters, some of them do make me sick. In particular, the Half-Life series has always

⏹️ ▶️ John made me a little queasy. One thing that helps with, I still play it, but like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that really helps with queasiness for me is increasing the field of view.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s like how wide, if you think of like the in-game viewport as a camera,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if it was very narrow, it’d be like looking through like a, you know, a cardboard, you know, paper towel tube,

⏹️ ▶️ John and very wide would be like a bullhorn, right? So how wide a view it displays

⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen, like the most extreme would be like a 360 degree view where on your monitor, you could see both in front

⏹️ ▶️ John of you and behind you, or a 180 degree view where you could see all the way to your left and all the way to your right, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And also dead in front of you. Anyway, if you have a very narrow field of view, I find I get motion sick

⏹️ ▶️ John much easier. Thankfully, the Half-Life games do have an adjustable field of view, and I just crank it up to the maximum, which I think is like 90

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. I forget what it is. So that helps. Not having the screen entirely fill

⏹️ ▶️ John your field of vision helps, like you’re basically doing your own field of view thing. So if you’re sitting on a couch and watching ATV,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is better than sitting two inches from a huge monitor that extends past your peripheral vision in terms of motion sickness.

⏹️ ▶️ John But finally, motion sickness in first-person games is a thing that game developers know about.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because again, everybody gets motion sickness just a matter of degree, and no game developer wants to make a game that

⏹️ ▶️ John makes some substantial portion of their potential customer base feel nauseated, because that’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ John They won’t buy your games, they won’t play your games. Especially if you have a game where you want people to either pay a monthly

⏹️ ▶️ John subscription or constantly play. And so there’s an article back from 2015, about a year after Destiny

⏹️ ▶️ John was launched, I think, that explains, it’s a Polygon article, explains the work that

⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny’s developers did to try to prevent people from getting motion sick while playing their game. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it is fascinating if you’ve never thought that this is something that game developers consider and do. It totally is.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the upshot is, after many thousands of hours playing Destiny, I don’t get motion sick playing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hooray!

Marco’s Pants Update

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m even more remiss to talk about this than I am the one we just finished,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but here we are everyone. Somebody put in the show notes, Marco’s pants update.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me Marco about your pants.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so first of all I did get the Apple silicone case. I’ve been using it for the last couple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of days. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I wanted to address this is in regards to my my plea to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the listeners and you last week of where am I supposed to put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iPhone in my pants? because it doesn’t really fit very well anywhere. Now that I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the regular pro size, the middle size of phone again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am missing the pantsability of the iPhone mini. I don’t want to go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the mini because I’m telling you, I’m getting some amazing pictures out of this camera system.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I, and I really am enjoying the 3X lens and the macro and ProMotion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are all really nice. So I don’t want to go back I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to lose these features, but I’m still trying to figure out how to carry this phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a comfortable and non-ridiculous looking way and I’m still haven’t found

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that yet. So a lot of people did write in to recommend lines of pants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have like special pockets that kind of go like along the leg a little bit lower. The most commonly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommended brand for this was KUHL and they have I think like almost all of their pants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or all of them and they have a huge line of different pants. They have this little extra pocket

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is made specifically for smartphones so that it drapes it a little bit lower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and totally on the side of your leg as opposed to the standard five pocket jean pocket

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design. The phone is always going to be a little bit in the front side of your leg

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s what I was trying to get away from. It will look better if it’s on the side and a little bit more in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the line of the pants you know, as opposed to this big block that keeps shifting over towards the front of my leg.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, there are these pants like Kool and other ones that have these extra pockets. The problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that is that, I mentioned this before and I mentioned it really fast last week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I am right-handed, I keep my phone in my left pocket. And that’s just a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fluke of my history that I grew up in a time when I was carrying a wallet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keys long before I had a phone. And so once I had a phone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wallet and keys were already occupying my right pocket. And so I put the phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the pocket that was free, which was the left pocket, and I’ve kept it there ever since. And I pick up and use my phone mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my left hand. Any kind of one-handed phone operation for me is my left hand. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I were to switch to one of these special kinds of pants that has a phone pocket on the right, which as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I could tell, all of them are on the right. I couldn’t find any where it was on the left. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I switch to one of those on the right, I would have to totally change not only all of my pants,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a non-trivial ordeal, I have many pants, and some which I like a lot, which I don’t wanna get rid of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also I would have to change what hand I hold my phone in. That’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big life change, and I feel like I don’t necessarily want to change my life quite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much just to accommodate a bigger phone. So if that’s my only option for carrying this phone comfortably,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably should go back to the Mini, but I think what I’m gonna do instead is just learn to tolerate this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, if anybody has any pants recommendations where that extra pocket is on the left side, please let

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me know. So regarding the case situation now, I did get my Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco silicone case in the intervening days since last episode. And Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you liked yours a lot, right? You still like it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t have it on my phone, it’s Aaron’s case, but in the brief time that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spent with it, I did think it was vastly improved, but I have not spent meaningful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time with it because it’s on Aaron’s phone, not mine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. So I would say I mostly agree with what you said. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement to the outside coating is not as significant as you said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it did feel that way on day one. So I think it might’ve just been like when it was new, it felt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, this isn’t sticking to my pocket as much, but now that I’m a few days in, oh, it sticks just as much. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, I don’t think that’s like, meaningfully better or at least not enough to matter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Nudiant case, I think I might switch back to because it is both thinner and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less tacky than the Apple silicone case. I don’t like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons on either one. Neither one of these has great feeling buttons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what I want is the Apple leather case buttons, like those nice, like steel, like those are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. Yeah, neither case offers buttons that nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the Nudiant doesn’t have buttons. However, the cutouts,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am getting used to them, but I don’t love them. I feel like the cutouts feel as though they’re 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet tall, even though the space is actually quite thin. Like I don’t understand how it ended up this way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, maybe they need a little more like dead space around the actual physical button,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one way or another, I feel like the buttons, they’re exposing the iPhone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey own buttons, which is what I’m trying to say, but I don’t love the way it’s been handled plus the branding on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back. Like it’s not obvious, but I feel like it’s embossed or whatever, letter pressed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I feel it all the time, which is very frustrating. Like I still think the Nudian case

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is certainly sufficient, but I don’t love it, that’s for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s how I feel about it as well. It is, I think I’m gonna switch back to it out of the two that I have,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also think my search is not over yet. And it’s very possible I might end up just going back to the Apple leather case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though, again, I live a very wet lifestyle out here, and so that’s not going to be great in certain ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, I’ll tell you what though, I have also considered just going back to caseless, or trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other options, like the Peel cases have strong recommendations, but they don’t have their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own magnets?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, they do. I thought that, I think, check me on this, and I’m not gonna bother checking as we’re talking,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I could swear I had seen that Peel has just added their own MagSafe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnets to their cases. but again, I might be lying to you by accident.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll look into it, thanks. But yeah, so I’ll try that, but ultimately, I will say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do like having a case again, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like being able to toss the phone onto a countertop and know it’s not gonna slide

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. Or like a surface, just throughout the day. I put it on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the counter a lot when I’m doing stuff, like around the sink or washing dishes or whatever, or cooking or chopping or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like, you know, when I take a shower, I bring the phone into the shower and like stand it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up on a ledge. It’s not like in the water stream, but like the ledge is on, might have a few drops of water

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it if anyone else took a shower recently because that’s how water works. And so like, I like being able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like kind of toss it onto a surface and have it grip the surface itself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without me having to worry about am I scratching up the back of it like hell or is it going to slide off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and break? And that’s one thing that, you know, I have felt that the last year using my mini case list. That was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing I always had to be aware of. And so going back to the case lifestyle,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do really like the way it interacts with surfaces better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I do think I want a case. I just don’t think I have found that case yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So real-time follow-up, it appears that there exist Peel MagSafe cases. However, they are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all for the iPhone 12 line. I do not think they’ve been updated for the 13 line as yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll keep an eye on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ve heard the peel ones are good, but I would like to try them as well. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with you, I want to have a case that has little magnets internal to it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I

⏹️ ▶️ John hear you. Yeah, I just looked at my brand and they apparently still don’t have a 13 case, but it sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ John just what’s up Marco’s alley. Like I can highly recommend not having a bottom lip and otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a very thin leather case that has pretty close to Apple style buttons, little metal things

⏹️ ▶️ John that transfer through. In particular, the reason I like this case so much is it does what the Apple leather cases do, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John the place where the buttons are, like the volume buttons, there’s like an indentation in the leather case.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in that indentation are the secondary metal buttons that push on the actual primary

⏹️ ▶️ John metal buttons. And so what that means is that the metal buttons don’t stick out that far from the case. They stick out a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit, but they don’t stick out as far as they would if they started from just the edge of the case, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And same thing with the power button or whatever. No branding on the back of it, you know, and like I said, it’s held

⏹️ ▶️ John up. It’s just they don’t make a 13 or 13 Pro case at this time. And also there’s no mag safe, which I consider

⏹️ ▶️ John a feature, but it sounds like you want the magnet transfer thing, but I’ll keep an eye out.

Cases On Cars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely want the magnet because so one thing I I mean maybe maybe I could be wrong about this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anything that would reduce the effectiveness of it sticking on my car mount would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a fatal flaw for any case for me because even though I don’t use my car incredibly frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I live right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can just use CarPlay so why do you even need a mount?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh I have some car follow up if we ever get to that. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a different story, different night probably. But you know, ever since I switched to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MagSafe car mount from ProClip USA, it’s such a quality of life improvement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not have to like dock it into something to be able to just stick it there. That’s so nice that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to give that up either. So I don’t know that maybe, you know, if I use something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a peel case that doesn’t have its own magnets in it, I don’t know if maybe it would be too weak then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that extra millimeter or two of case, maybe that would make the magnet weak enough that it might not stick on the car mount reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s the main reason why I insist on having its own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco magnets in the case. Otherwise, if it’s just for charging on my bed stand, I don’t care. It’s not going to get bumped or moved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere, so that would be fine. But it’s the car mount that I’m worried about there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Makes sense. Man, if only you had CarPlay, wouldn’t that be amazing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to just do your car follow-up now? We are right at the end of follow-up. Now’s the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I want to deal with this now.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not a safe enough driver to get full self-driving.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I haven’t even tried that. I would never do that. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, um…

Surprise Neutral

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might’ve gotten myself in the pre-order list of a different vehicle.

⏹️ ▶️ John LUCID AIR! 520 mile range. Really? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have so many questions.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it’s not the Lucid Air.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we really just gonna drop this bomb and then walk away?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do we feel about Apple stuff? You like Apple stuff? How about phones?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell us the car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Come on, man.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s so there is a not a large chance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there is a small chance I might get a driving permit on the sand this this coming winter.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so you went for that ridiculous pickup then? Ford Bronco. No, no, no. What is it? The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rivian?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John He

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like gas powered things, I know. It’s that stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Rivian. Yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not the truck, the SUV one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John realize they were doing an SUV. It’s the same as the truck, but it doesn’t have a bed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I saw Quinn Nelson’s video on the truck and I’m like, that actually sounds kind of like exactly what I would need and want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco best out here.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t need that to drive on the sand, but yes, I can see you

⏹️ ▶️ John will no

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco need. Yeah, but

⏹️ ▶️ John like because it’s not like like that’s you’re going up like mountain trails or whatever. You’re going a very short distance

⏹️ ▶️ John on the sand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s you know, it’s a like, you know, five mile drive across very uneven, rough,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wet terrain that is oftentimes being torn up by other drivers who don’t air down their tires.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s like you got it. There’s there’s some rough areas like that’s why ground clearance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like the number one thing You need for a vehicle to do this So anyway, I I just I place the deposit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get an in line because they’re their deliveries allegedly are starting in January

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I get a permit this year, it would be sometime near January

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so chances are I’m not even gonna get a permit and chances are if I did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my I review and wouldn’t even be delivered on time anyway, so I’d have to get something else. So this is not a likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco outcome. But you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to get something else. Like, would you just wait for the truck to arrive if you got the permit or would you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John have a gap filler car?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have to have a gap filler car. They don’t give you a permit unless you have a car to apply it to.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just go out there and make car noises, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco look at me, I’m driving with my permit. Vroom, vroom.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like if this permit ever comes in, this is not the kind of thing you say no to or give them any reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to give it to you. So, again, it’s probably not going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. And even if it is, it probably wouldn’t be in time to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Rivian monster, but it is kind of like everything I would want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What would most likely happen is some kind of quick purchase of a used Jeep or something. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know. Yes! One of us!

⏹️ ▶️ John You should get a Ford Bronco, I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Are those really widely available yet? I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John know. I’m seeing them pretty much every day now. I don’t know. available than a Rivian electric truck.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah. And there’s the other question, too, of whether for this kind of use, whether I should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get something cheap and used and just beat it to hell on the sand, because the sand will destroy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is. So that’s what I really should do is, again, just buy an old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jeep of some kind.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re being a pioneer and an early adopter, because we don’t know how good Rivian is at building cars.

⏹️ ▶️ John As Tesla has shown, building cars is actually kind of difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Who knew?

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, and how you’re correct to point out that setting aside

⏹️ ▶️ John how well Rivian builds its cars, most cars don’t stand up well to a saltwater environment.

⏹️ ▶️ John The very first electric car from a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey brand new

⏹️ ▶️ John company, splashing around in the salt and sand,

⏹️ ▶️ John how well is that gonna hold up? I don’t know, I mean, especially if you lease it, who cares? If it rots out in two years, your lease is up and

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever, but you are entering, you know, that’s some, what do you

⏹️ ▶️ John call it? uncharted territory for sure. So I would love to see the result of this

⏹️ ▶️ John experiment.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, especially since I don’t even know if they’re offering leases. But this is why, like, the only reason I put this deposit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down is that it’s completely refundable. So I’m like, all right, I’ll put myself in line, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect it to pan out. Speaking of leases, oh my god, getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla to give me my car.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re not good at building cars, and they’re also not very good at selling them or collecting money for them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on Tesla’s BS here, but let me just say that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ending the lease was almost as hard as beginning it was.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my gosh. I still don’t have my title. I gave them a big lump of money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a month ago. Oh my God, I would be

⏹️ ▶️ John furious. Every time you call up, they say, who are you? It took

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, okay, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this is not gonna make sense. I am here for this, I am ready.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What just the quick version when you want to end a lease in a way that is not you returning the vehicles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I wanted to buy it. Okay, so you go in the leasing portal and you can say alright, but send me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a buyout quote and you hit submit. Okay, and then about a month later

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get an email saying your buyout quote option has expired. Try again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so go fill out the form again like okay. Well, it’s you know, I still had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few more months left in the lease fine. just give me a bio quote, fine. And you hit submit, and then it says, all right, a team member

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will contact you. And then another month goes by, and it says your buyer request has been canceled.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this happened for four months in a row, at which point I eventually just called them. And look,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll do a lot of things to avoid a phone call, but eventually I just called them, all right, please,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to buy my car from you. Somehow can you please make this happen?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the person, the impression I got from that call was that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was submitting those requests, it was basically just like creating a ticket in some system and after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month they just expire and nobody apparently checks those tickets unless you call

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bug

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey them. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gosh! And then the person was like, oh yeah, I’ll put that on my list for today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh and then sure enough,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know, a day later I had everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what does this person do with their day if people don’t call? Do they just not look at the

⏹️ ▶️ John ticketing queue and whatever software they’re using and say, I’ll wait for a phone call. I forgot to, so they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent me, eventually. Or first I send back these forms, you gotta sign it, sign a few places,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then one of the forms is like, where should we send the title? It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one of those DocuSign web interface things where you just click to sign, but you can’t freeform edit anywhere in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the document. You can only edit the places they’ve marked as fields. but the place where it says, where should we send the title

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not editable. They just hadn’t put fields there. Like there was like lines from the PDF they had scanned, but they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t, so. Oh my gosh. I downloaded the PDF and I emailed it back to the person and I said, these fields

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t editable, but I went ahead and did it like on the PDF. Here’s the signed version of the PDF

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these fields that I did like in preview. So again, I hear nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Three weeks later, I get an email back saying, sorry, the version of the form

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had you fill out was not complete, please fill out this new version. Oh my gosh. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point, they already have the money. I still don’t have my title. They’re like, we need this to release your title. Whoops.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So everything I’ve done with Tesla leasing, it makes it feel like I’m the first person to have ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco done that. That no one here has ever done their job before. No one here is trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard or thinking about how does this actually work? And I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you how perfect it was to have even this be so difficult with Tesla. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I still love their car. I’m gonna do a lot of driving in a few days because I have some errands to run.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still love their car, but dealing with the company is such a train wreck at every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco single turn. I just, I hope nothing breaks on this car because now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really mine and dealing with that is so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you’re really selling it well. Just that this is what John sounded like, except for you it’s Tesla and for John it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was us. but that’s okay. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. It is. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? Oh, goodness. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’m just happy to know that the entire internet will tell you that Tesla’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna show those old car companies how to do it right, because those old car companies definitely don’t understand how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a lease quickly and easily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing. The old car companies do so much stuff terribly that Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does really well. No, that is true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I put up with all this crap, Because yeah, Tesla’s a mess. You know what? Apple.

How’s Apple’s quality recently?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s a mess and we put up with all their stuff because we like their products, right? Apple’s a train wreck

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many areas and yet, you know, we’re able to look past those even though we complain,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like we it’s not like we’re going, you know, all switching back to PCs or anything. Like, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we still choose to use the products even though the company has a bunch of areas in which they’re terrible. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just what happens. You know, nobody’s perfect all the way across. You weigh the pros and cons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you go with what, you know, what what has more stuff that’s important to you. And with cars, most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time that you own a car, you don’t have to deal with the company that made it. Most of the time you own a car, you’re driving the car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and that’s what I prioritized here. It’s a fantastic car to drive. I absolutely love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. As long as I don’t have to deal with the company that made it.

⏹️ ▶️ John To be fair, Apple is way better at the important things that Apple needs to be good at than Tesla is, because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is really good at building its products, like physically, like they’re good at that. That’s one of their core skills. they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John also, I think, pretty good at selling them and collecting your money. In fact, we just saw a thing recently. So

⏹️ ▶️ John when we were all ordering iPhones, there was that glitch where like, within a minute of the time where you could

⏹️ ▶️ John order, all of a sudden everyone who was trying to use their Apple card was getting rejected. And so lots of people were impatient. They said,

⏹️ ▶️ John all right, well, whatever the hell the problem is with Apple card, I’ll just buy it on my Visa card or something, right? I don’t know at

⏹️ ▶️ John least one person who got an email from Apple after ordering their phone on a non-Apple card and

⏹️ ▶️ John says, hey, we noticed that you tried to order your phone with the Apple card so you could get 3% back, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that failed due to a problem on our end and you completed your purchase with a different credit card, here’s the 3% cash back

⏹️ ▶️ John onto your Apple card that you would have gotten. Yeah, that’s great. That is super cool. So not only is Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good at collecting your money, pretty good at, we’ve talked about taking returns and customer

⏹️ ▶️ John service in their stores and not being sleazy when they sell you things and doing warranty

⏹️ ▶️ John repairs, but in general, the things that a computer company has to be good at, they’re pretty good at.

⏹️ ▶️ John Software is another thing, but I feel like on the software

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey side of things, Tesla doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John really have any high ground there either. But, and software is weird and difficult and we’re all programmers, we understand that that’s a special

⏹️ ▶️ John case, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say on the Apple’s side of things, I think design recently, UI design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think has, I mean, I know this is a big thing with Safari tabs. I think UI design is now one of those areas of Apple where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually the software quality in the last like two years or so has been significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Like iOS 14 and 15 have been pretty good releases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality wise. Same thing with watchOS 7 and 8 on the Mac. Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality wise, I think is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s good. A

⏹️ ▶️ John step up from its predecessor, still gaps, but it’s going in the right direction.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, was Catalina the one right before this or was there one between? Because Catalina was a disaster. Like that, Catalina is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. iOS 13 was terrible. But like the ones that have come after that, quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise have been great. I have many design nitpicks with Big Sur. I haven’t tried Mono Ray yet,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, but it seems like actually that Apple mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has fixed their software quality issues of yesteryear.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they fixed them, but they’re going in the right direction.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, that’s fair. But yeah, I agree that like things are significantly better now in the quality area

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they were two or three years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think mostly like, how did they do that? Mostly by choosing those ship things, which, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John as we predicted when we used to complain about this even more, like the world doesn’t end. Oh, a feature’s not ready? Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John disappointing that SharePlay isn’t ready to go, but please, by all means, hold it back until it’s ready. Don’t just

⏹️ ▶️ John ship it because it’s 15.9. Every major release of everything has basically had features that end up

⏹️ ▶️ John MIA, like either because Apple pre-announces that they’re not gonna be included, or because in between the time

⏹️ ▶️ John they did some kind of keynote presentation and the time the thing ships, they’re like, oh yeah, that’s not ready yet. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John just hold it back. Or like doing mid-year releases, like the Catalina point five release that had or

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the iOS point five releases that have a whole bunch of features in it that were announced when the major OS was released.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously, we would like to have them sooner. But this is the right choice. If it’s not ready, don’t ship it. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ John like, pretty much all of the improvement is attributable to that new policy, and I endorse it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like that. Really, it’s I think it has worked like we are seeing the results of that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when you make a policy shift or a strategy shift like that, or process shift, you know, you don’t see the results

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly, you see them over time. And I think we actually have seen that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last couple of years, Apple software quality is better than it was before. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, we’re not out of the woods totally and in certain areas yet especially, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think on the Mac, I think it’s worse than any of the platforms, but the direction we’re heading is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a positive one there. Now, most of my concerns are about design. Like most, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still can’t believe that the Big Sur notifications are the same in my opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That to me is amazing. And of course you can do Safari and everything. Like, you know, we’re definitely to the point now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where if Apple says, we’ve redesigned, you know, insert thing that you rely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, there’s no more excitement there. Now you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like, oh crap. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, how did they ruin it? Like that’s where your mind goes instantly because you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably the bigger concern then, ooh, what’s new? And that’s a bad place

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be. I think they’ve certainly, you know, they have some problems with their design high ground these days, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software design is really, like hardware design seems fine. Software design is still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mess in certain areas. And it seems like the process that should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weed out, like directions or decisions that don’t work, things that like, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? This thing that we tried in the labs or that we had the design idea for, We built it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it turns out it’s not usable, and so let’s not ship that. That process is clearly broken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really big way. So design-wise, they are way off in the woods

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have problems, big problems that need to work out. But quality-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s substantially better and I’m very happy to see that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh. With HelloFresh, you get fresh, pre-measured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingredients and mouth-watering seasonal recipes delivered right to your door. Skip trips to the grocery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco store and count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun, and affordable, and that’s why it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco America’s number one meal kit. Fall is very busy for a lot of us, but HelloFresh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recipes save you time that you’d otherwise spend meal planning, shopping, and chopping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can get back to what matters. And they offer 50 menu and market items to choose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from every week, from vegetarian meals or calorie-smart choices to extra-special gourmet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. So there’s something for everyone to enjoy, with recipes designed and tested by professional

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chefs and nutritional experts to ensure deliciousness and simplicity. And you can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great value. HelloFresh is over 30% cheaper than shopping at grocery stores, with pre-portioned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingredients that ensure you won’t spend money on excess food that ends up just going in the trash because it goes bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HelloFresh is super flexible. You don’t have to worry about like, if you’re gonna be out of town for a week, or you temporarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need more or less food one week. You can just go to their app and customize your order easily within minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Change your delivery day, food preferences, plan size, skip a week whenever you need to, no big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. I’ve used HelloFresh and it’s great. It’s incredibly convenient. Their instructions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really nice. And it’s exactly what they promise it is. It’s great food, delivered easily. You know, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have to shop for it or really choose much. It’s wonderful when you just want that, no pun intended,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your plate, and you just wanna have good food that you can make at home. So go to hellofresh.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP14 and use code ATP14 for up to 14 free meals, including free

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping. So hellofresh.com slash ATP14, promo code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP14. Thank you so much for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsoring our show to HelloFresh, America’s number one meal kit.

Latest 14/16” rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We heard rumors a few weeks ago, and we haven’t had time to talk about it, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the upcoming potential, 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro display resolutions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey may have been revealed in the latest at that time, macOS Monterey Beta. So somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had found that there are two new display resolutions found in the Monterey Beta 7.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re listed at 3456x2234 Retina and 3024x1864 Retina.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as per MacRumors, they do not correspond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to resolutions of the built-in displays of any current or previous Apple products. So based on the resolutions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves and their relationships to each other, it seems likely that these new resolutions are for the upcoming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. The current 16-inch MacBook Pro has a native display resolution of 3072x1920, while the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey current 13-inch MacBook Pro’s native resolution is 2560x1600, giving both machines a pixel density of about 226 or 227

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pixels per inch. If

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these new resolutions are indeed for the upcoming MacBook Pro models, they would represent an increase in pixel density

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to around 250 pixels per inch, which notably would allow for native 2x retina as the default

⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting for these new machines. So with the apparent increased pixel density of these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey upcoming MacBook Pro models, a true 2x retina setting would fall right in the sweet spot for most users, with the 16-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey model yielding a looks-like resolution of 1728x1117 and the 14-inch at 1512x962.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I just said the 14 is 1512x962. On my current…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John 982. 982. God, I can’t believe it. Well, actually, I am down one contact

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right

⏹️ ▶️ John now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for uninteresting reasons. So that would be why.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my 13 inch MacBook Pro that I have right now, it defaults to 1440 by 900,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I run it at the quote unquote more space resolution, which is 1680 by 1050.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, they’re saying the native, the 2X native for the 14 inch would be 1512 by 982.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is continuing the trend and the rumors of the upcoming MacBook Pros of basically

⏹️ ▶️ John being complete wish fulfillment for all of our complaints about Apple’s laptops for the past like

⏹️ ▶️ John five years. It’s gonna have an HDMI port, it’s gonna have an SD card slot, it’s gonna have MagSafe,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be smaller, lighter, and faster and better battery life. It’s gonna have 2X Retina.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’ve missed like practically anything in the rumors of what this thing is going to be. And by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way, we didn’t mention this before. I kept mentioning the A15 cores and the M2 and the MacBook Air or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure all the current rumors and all our past discussion and my current thinking continue to think that

⏹️ ▶️ John when these things come out, they’re not gonna have A15 cores inside of them. It’s not gonna be an M2, it’s gonna be an M1X,

⏹️ ▶️ John meaning it’s the A14 derived cores that are in the M1, just more of them with a much

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger GPU. Like that’s been the rumors for all these machines, and if we get that, that’ll be an awesome thing. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John so, you know, I don’t think there’s been any rumors that say, oh yeah, fully expect these new MacBook Pros

⏹️ ▶️ John to have A15 derived things. They’re not going to, it’s just gonna be the big M1s. That’s why the rumor

⏹️ ▶️ John name is M1X. So, but that’s great. Like that’s still great. The M1 is an amazing chip. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ John made it with more cores and more GPUs, even better and put it in a big battery and put it in a 16 inch thing. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think maybe the only thing they’re missing is there, we never, I mean, this is getting not just into like, here’s what’s wrong with your laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s sort of like what we would like to have. No face ID rumors. And I don’t think there’s any OLED rumors, just

⏹️ ▶️ John mini LED rumors for the screens maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe that’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but other than that, like this is, you know, And those are sort of like things we didn’t dare to even hope. We just wanted them to

⏹️ ▶️ John have a keyboard that worked. And then we had other complaints about it. And this, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John if rumors are to be believed, in theory, sometime, you know, in the fall,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could have an event that rolls out the official release of Monterey and these two new

⏹️ ▶️ John laptops with their amazing chips in them. And they’ll be awesome. And we’ll love them if all the rumors come true.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if they don’t, if we get like 50 percent of what’s rumored, there still be great again, assuming they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t re-break the keyboard. but I think they learned that lesson. One would hope.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I like about all the rumors about this computer so far, these computers so far, is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all seem like they’re pretty plausible, and they all seem to be pretty well-supported

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by certain sources in the industry that tend to be reliable, or certain analysts that tend to be reliable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it does kind of seem like these computers are out there to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco settle all debts, like just settle all old business, or whatever the phrase is that I’m trying to reference.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You should

⏹️ ▶️ John watch those movies and you’ll be able to get the quotes better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway. Like, I love that these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really by all accounts seem to be laptops designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after Apple has heard everyone’s complaints with the previous generation. Like, they fixed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard a couple years back because that was like really on fire. But that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fix that otherwise didn’t really change anything else about those computers. Now, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be the first total design update for the entire computer all around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since 2016, really, for most of these models. This, to throw in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibility that they might also make the Retina screens in the laptops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco true to X for the first time, that, oh, that would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be so great. I would love that so much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me why. Why is that so important to you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple spends a lot of time and money and resources

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making really great displays in all of their products. They invest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so heavily in it, not because their customers necessarily always care, because they care.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the kind of thing like Steve Jobs is always super obsessed with display quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and would push for features like this, where even though your customers aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking you to make the screen super high res or to make the thing certain, having certain color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accuracies, or investing heavily in HDR stuff, or things like True

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tone. That’s the kind of thing that customers don’t ask for. And oftentimes the market doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reward you for it as much as you put into it. But you do it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just want your things to be really great. You wanna have really great screens that have really great image

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality, even if 90% of the customers won’t even notice. You do it because it’s right and because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. The era of Retina to date has only had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top quality on the desktop Retina screens, which there haven’t been very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many. So most people using Macs are using laptops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and those laptops mostly these days, ever since 2016 I believe, or 2015 at least, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere around there, have shipped by default. The default resolution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not true 2X of the pixels. It is a scaled resolution.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The pixels are a little bit less than that. It’s like if you drop it down one notch, then that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the true 2X resolution, but the default has been a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than that, and it renders it into a buffer, and it scales it to the physical pixels, and it makes everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit blurry. And it’s not a huge difference. Most people don’t notice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I notice. And I can’t be the only one. Because my eyes aren’t even that great anymore. Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know other people notice. And like, it’s the kind of thing that when you compare

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the visual quality of the screen, the sharpness of the pixels, when you compare that between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the true 2x mode and the default scaling mode of 1 notch up, you can see the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can decide whether you care or not, that’s up to you. But if you look for that difference,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will see it. And there’s a reason why on Apple’s other products,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost all of them, except for the Retina laptops, with occasional like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-end phones here and there, but for the most part, most of Apple’s other products have true

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2X or 3X multiplied pixels at their default resolutions. Like they don’t usually pull this trick on anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. They’ve been pulling on the laptops. I don’t really know why, except I assume

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, economy or battery life or whatever, but now that they have a chance to fix it, and the rumor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they might be, in addition to fixing all these other shortcomings of the laptops for the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years, oh, that would just be so wonderful. I really, really hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they finally are going to give us the screens in the laptops that are as good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they say they are. Because they talk all, the big talk about how great their screens are,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but as long as they’re shipping them in default scaling modes that make everything a little bit blurry, they’re not living up to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their potential. And a lot of that effort I think is oversold or wasted. So to have truly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp, awesome quality screens in our laptops that live up to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their promises and their ideals would be great. And so I really hope this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumor is true.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I remember initially part of the sort of excuse from people making

⏹️ ▶️ John excuses for Apple because Apple didn’t really say this too much themselves, at least not in public, was that if we native, native,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, native res by default, would use more battery, right? Because it’s more pixels and it, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it costs more power to do that. So, hey, this is our very first Retina MacBook Air, and no,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t, although, you said they’d never done native 2X, the original Retina MacBook Pro wasn’t, also wasn’t native 2X?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was native in the setting that it shipped in, but it was that 1440 across. But it

⏹️ ▶️ John was lower effective resolution than its predecessor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the predecessor before were 1680 across at its highest level. So yeah, it’s 1440 across point-wise on the 15-inch retina

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and where it stayed, and the 16-inch is a little bit more because they made the screen a little bit bigger,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s that same scale, or the same density, rather. Yeah, but that was the excuse.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, well, there’s so many more pixels, give us a break. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John yes, there is a downgrade in apparent resolution, but it’s very interesting. But as the years wore on, that

⏹️ ▶️ John excuse became less and less convincing as tons of competitors had high-res screens. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point, you could say, like, okay, even if it costs more battery, like on the big one, you know, 16 inch, just

⏹️ ▶️ John do it or offer it as an option and let people decide to make that trade off. But with the advent

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s ARM chips, we know that battery life is phenomenal now

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s power to spare and yes, please spend some of that. You know, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John based on the assumption that this screen actually does use more power than the previous one, who knows? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if it’s mini LED, there may be some variance with like the super bright HDR backlight with the mini LED

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or whatever. I don’t actually know how it comes down in terms of comparing to its predecessor in total power draw.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if we’ve got battery power to spare, please spend it on the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John When someone buys the 16 inch top of the line laptop, now there’s no more 17 inch thing, at

⏹️ ▶️ John the very least give them the option for this. And if they can make it standard across the board, that’s great too. And if you look at the apparent resolution,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I mean, as Casey pointed out, it would be for him a downgrade from his more space

⏹️ ▶️ John setting that he has it on to go into native 2X, but at least he can still make that trade

⏹️ ▶️ John off. And it also means that if he does go to the sort of scaled up factor, perhaps there would be

⏹️ ▶️ John less apparent blurring because the DPI of the screen is just higher. Although again, in Casey’s case, especially when he’s rocking

⏹️ ▶️ John one contact, it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey probably doesn’t matter to him.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is true. This is true. So more generally, how do you guys

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the laptops coming? Because John, you mentioned this a minute ago, Like this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, if you believe some of the rumors, they’re supposed to have SD card slots, they’re supposed to have HDMI,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re supposed to have MagSafe, they’re supposed to be getting rid of the touch bar. Like all of these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that we’ve all, to some degree been begging for, I think some of us more than others

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in different orders than others. But, you know, if you were to believe the hype, all of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these ills are getting fixed. So do we think gentlemen, that this is really happening?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, I would be slightly surprised if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got MagSafe again. Honestly, I’d be more than a little surprised if the touch bar went away.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be moderately surprised if HDMI ended up on there, like without some sort of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey adapter. I think the only thing that wouldn’t surprise me is if the SD card slot came back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like that’s thin and it’s not, I don’t think it takes up a whole lot of room. That makes sense to me, but everything else

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find mildly surprising. I guess for me, the next least surprising thing would be some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey flavor of MagSafe. And then maybe HDMI would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty surprising, but not totally surprising. But I think getting rid of the Touch Bar, I would be very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised if it happened. And I don’t have strong feelings about the Touch Bar one way or the other. Like I don’t actively

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dislike it, but I definitely don’t actively like it either. So whatever. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, how do you feel, let’s take those four SD, HDMI, MagSafe, and TouchBar.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think that any or all of these are realistic? And what would you be most or least surprised about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they actually showed up?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD, I think I would be very surprised. I want it. I’m one of the people who actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would use it and I want it. And when I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey have it…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would you use it? You just told me that you never use your big camera last week.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do use audio recorders. I also…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but do you actually pull things off the SD card when you do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that? I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally use a drone. I occasionally do use the big camera.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When was the last time you flew your drone? Come on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I crashed it off the roof of my neighbor’s house earlier in the summer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s still a couple of months.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I said occasionally. Yeah, I occasionally have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put some ROMs on a flash cart for something. It’s a weird thing. When you’re a nerd,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use SD cards in unexpected ways at unexpected times. I occasionally have to use an SD card.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope they bring that back, but I think the SD card would actually be the most surprising thing for me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they did, because it seems like that is the thing that is, even though I would find a lot of value,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many other people would find a lot of value, including almost everyone who they pitched the Pro Laptops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to in their marketing materials, all the video producers. But, and all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audio, but it’s like, if you look at the people who use Apple’s products in Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own marketing materials, all of them would use the SD card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also, that seems like it is like the most like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old thing in this list that I think Apple would try to find a way not to have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also, it would take a decent amount of, you know, width on the side of the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they would be willing to spare the space for it. So that, I hope they add the SD card,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would be surprised to see it. HDMI is something I would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use myself, but I recognize is a very, very common use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially for people in businesses who plug into projectors and stuff like that. That’s a very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco common use. And so I think if they can fit an HDMI port on a laptop, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely should have one. Because I’ve always been, I’ve been saying, for five years now, ever since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dongle generation, most people should not need a dongle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If most people need a dongle for their laptop, then the laptop should probably have had that port in the first place.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So most people who buy these computers should not need any dongles. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be for occasional or specialized use, not everyday use. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most people use dongles for is USB-A, HDMI, and SD cards.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you remove the need for most or all of those things some way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think time has mostly solved the USB-A need for most people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Time and cables. You can always just buy a cable that ends in USB-C and then has whatever you need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other end. So USB-A, the need for that is very low I think in a modern laptop design these days.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certainly the need for HDMI and SD cards really hasn’t gone away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they can do that, that’s great. MagSafe, I hope they bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back just because I think it would be cool, but I also hope these laptops can still charge over USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you plug them in to one because I love having ubiquitous charging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on either side of the computer. Like that’s one thing I miss with my air is that I only have the ports on one side. I’m eyeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 14 inch hard here for myself and probably the 16 for tiff actually because she’s using my 16 and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s starting to get a little weird. But so MagSafe, I think it would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool, but I don’t know how realistic that is. USB-C charging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been great for me in most ways. The charger is not as nice, but that’s Apple’s fault, not USB-C’s fault.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So MagSafe I think would be nice to have, but it’s not super important, and I would give it a medium

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likelihood because of the weirdness it would introduce. Like, okay, now we have two different ways to charge this computer, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is this new kind of port, and do we have space for it and everything? And then the Touch Bar,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously you know I hate the Touch Bar, and I’m so happy on my MacBook Air that it doesn’t have the Touch Bar, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does have Touch ID. It’s such a great combination. And, you know, Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was mentioning earlier, their design process has often seemed broken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the feedback loop and how and if they correct things. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware design team, for all of their fault with the butterfly keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did eventually correct it. I think Apple, if you look at Apple in general,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, they do tend to correct bad product decisions, whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s design or hardware, they do tend to correct their mistakes. Sometimes it just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes way too long, and the Butterfly keyboard was certainly one of those cases. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did correct it, probably three years longer than it probably should have taken them to correct it, but they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did correct it. I think the Touch Bar is going to have that similar kind of outcome, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s clear that they were very stubbornly adamant that it was pretty great from the beginning,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at some point, and a very soon point after they released it, they stopped,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no pun intended, touching it. Nothing changed about the Touch Bar pretty much since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was introduced. If you look at what they unveiled in 2016, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what it can do today, there’s basically no difference. They have done almost nothing to it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except continue to ship it in all of their Pro laptops. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they knew back then, you know what, maybe this isn’t going well. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their timeline for making hardware change, hardware direction changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac in particular is a very slow, long timeline. Again, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know why, and I don’t think this is right. But in the case of the Butterfly keyboard, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they accelerated their plans. Not fast enough, but they did. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they decided the Touch Bar wasn’t a bad enough problem to have to like change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their five year plan for this laptop design or whatever. So I’m guessing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Touch Bar being gone is true. They won’t even talk about it. It’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be like, hey, here’s a new laptop. Look at all these cool things. Touch Bar will just not be mentioned at all. It will be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone and they will have corrected their mistake just after a very, very long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so if these rumors that have been building up over time have any truth to them

⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever, which is always, you know, a question, but if they do have any, it makes me think, like Marco said, that

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a, that this is a rethinking of the hardware with more

⏹️ ▶️ John respect for things that the users want to do. That the proposition put forward by the laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John where they said it’s just going to have a bunch of USB-C shaped holes on the side and that’s it. design

⏹️ ▶️ John that they gave they gave that the old college try again way too long than they should have and they’ve reconsidered

⏹️ ▶️ John and if they’ve reconsidered I see almost no reason that we shouldn’t get all this on the 16 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s just so much room like the the arm chips that are going to be in this are a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of the reason why I feel like there’s no excuse to not get all this stuff because you just have so

⏹️ ▶️ John much more headroom like you’ve got you could you have have

⏹️ ▶️ John room to cut into your battery space because the battery life is going to be phenomenal. We know that, we’ve seen the M1 things that

⏹️ ▶️ John are out there and the 16 inch is so much bigger. You can put really big batteries in there, shaving off

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of room for even something as big as an SD card slot, an HDMI on the 16 inch, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got that room. On the 14 inch it’s questionable, like we know what things will come. But I see no reason

⏹️ ▶️ John not to get all of this stuff with the possible exception of MagSafe, just because the rumors that I’ve seen about

⏹️ ▶️ John it have been like, it’s really hard to tell something is mag safe from a blurry drawing,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that could like, it’s, it’s hard to tell what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John seeing on the side of the computer in terms of like, is that, is that a mag safe thing? Or is that some

⏹️ ▶️ John other, I don’t know. That’s the only one I have that it’s questionable in terms of, is the rumor even

⏹️ ▶️ John remotely accurate about what you’re getting, right. But every other one of those things you could have.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so again, if these rumors have any credibility, I see no reason that why we shouldn’t just get all of them because

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has shipped them all before in laptops in a much more difficult environment

⏹️ ▶️ John where their battery life was terrible. Granted, the laptops were a little bit thicker then too, but the battery life was terrible. You had Intel chips on them, you had fans,

⏹️ ▶️ John everything was hot, and they still came with HDMI and SD card slot and MagSafe and all that other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the touch bar is the easiest thing in the world. You just, like Marco said, you just don’t mention that again. You know, oh, touch

⏹️ ▶️ John bar,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you won’t see him no more.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like just, it goes

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey away. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s real easy. And by the way, that also saves you power and space and complexity and all sorts of other stuff, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still on board with saying, look, if these rumors are true, why do we have to be like, oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John like what you’re asking is like, which one of these things seems like outside

⏹️ ▶️ John the ethos of Apple? That like, okay, well, they’ll do this, but they won’t do that because that’s a bridge too far. But I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like the entire, the premise of these computers, the premise of the rumors is they’ve changed

⏹️ ▶️ John the ethos. And once you change the ethos to, I’m not trying to make a machine with just one kind of uniform

⏹️ ▶️ John shaped hole on the outside. And the new ethos is, like Margo said, let’s find out what people actually want and

⏹️ ▶️ John try to make it so most people don’t have to use a dongle. That’s this set of stuff. And so I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John someone would come into the room and said, yeah, but what about the ethos of where we just want everything to be smooth now? It’s like, no, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that anymore, right? So we don’t have to look at this and start bargaining away one of

⏹️ ▶️ John these things. Again, depending, you know, I’m not saying this is the set of ports, but whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John the set they decided is, that basically this is the set where most people don’t have to use a dongle, this is the set that we think will

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of hit the fat part of the bell curve, right? That that set should just ship as is and there shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be any sort of whittling down and bargaining down because again, to what end like say they come up with a set of

⏹️ ▶️ John features and said, This is the this is the sweet spot, right? Are they going to have a knockdown drag out fight

⏹️ ▶️ John to remove just one more? It’s like, No, we already decided this is the sweet spot based on probably

⏹️ ▶️ John actual metrics in terms of port use surveys, stuff like that, like they’re rather than just saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John people want what they want, but I’m going to tell them what they want. And what they want is a laptop with just one port on the side where it’s like, no,

⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t want that. Right. And same thing with a touch bar. We really think people are going to like this just to get used

⏹️ ▶️ John to it. And I think the answer is, I mean, it’s not some people like it. Some people

⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s OK, but in the grand scheme of things, is it war? Is it worth the design cost? Is it worth the parts cost, the design

⏹️ ▶️ John cost, maintaining it, doing the weird, you know, the way it interacts with the rest of the US and all that stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not. So I, I not. I think that mindset of,

⏹️ ▶️ John but can we get closer to that ideal is not a mind, that old ideal is not a relevant mindset.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing that’s relevant is, what set of features has Apple decided,

⏹️ ▶️ John serves the most customers, right? And I don’t, and maybe this is too much. Maybe one of these is

⏹️ ▶️ John like too much, is outside the realm of what people want. I can see them saying, especially on the 14

⏹️ ▶️ John inch, like I can see the 16 inch having more slots than the 14 inch just because it’s bigger and you got more

⏹️ ▶️ John room for everything in there. But I’m not ready to

⏹️ ▶️ John start bargaining away any of these things. At this point, I want everything on this list and I think it’s reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ John to get everything on this list.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you were still working at an office, were you plugging into projectors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything frequently? I know we’ve talked about it, but I can’t recall. Yeah, all the time. Okay, so HDMI would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be useful for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John I lived through Dongle Geddon already when our whole company had to switch And it became, I

⏹️ ▶️ John can tell you, what it came to is when you came into a meeting, whoever still had

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the quote unquote old laptops, they were the highest

⏹️ ▶️ John and mightiest in the room. It was like, oh, you’re so lucky you still have one of the old laptops. You can just plug right into the projector. And

⏹️ ▶️ John all of us were, they did the thing where like, they tried to give everyone dongles, but then people would lose them and then they’d write their names

⏹️ ▶️ John on them. So if they left it in the room, someone would steal it. And then they started like essentially chaining the dongles with

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those little like metal wire thingies, kind of like the skinniest version of like a bike lock,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they would just chain it to the cord that it attaches to. And so every conference room

⏹️ ▶️ John had sort of like a, not a cinder block chain, but like a chain to dongle to the thing. But then if that

⏹️ ▶️ John dongle broke, then people were like broken on it and have to bring their own. It was

⏹️ ▶️ John something for like, you know, more than half of my time at my current company was just like, oh, you come into the room and you

⏹️ ▶️ John plug into the projector, which I thought was barbaric and we should all just attach Apple TVs and do all AirPlay. But unfortunately it was

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of PC laptop users in the company who didn’t agree with that. But either way, at least you could just plug right into the projector.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it would happen of like, this is what we would do in the days before like sophisticated software for changing

⏹️ ▶️ John who was projecting. If one person was projecting, the other person might project, you just go yank, throw the cord over to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them, they plug it in and now they’re up, right? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how, that’s the sort of the hardware way of like handing off what we do in Zoom now. Like, oh, I’m gonna share my screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m gonna share my, like, this is all in-person stuff. And as soon as the dongle books came out, it was just

⏹️ ▶️ John such a mess. And it was like the first five minutes of every meeting was just complaining about dongles. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it made them

⏹️ ▶️ Casey look better, I guess?

⏹️ ▶️ John And again, that’s the question. The non-computer people in the company, it would just be like, why did they change

⏹️ ▶️ John them like this? Everyone hates it. And people would nod and say, yeah, I don’t understand it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, see also New Safari. You talk to any non-nerds about New Safari?

⏹️ ▶️ John Not popular. The worst part is I hear, I mean, obviously we hear this because there’s way more iOS users than Mac users. but

⏹️ ▶️ John so many people, more people, I’ve heard complain about the iOS on the iOS when you can fix to be back to normal.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t know that, like I don’t blame them for not knowing because the default is weird. And people without

⏹️ ▶️ John direction, most people will just simply complain and never find that you can switch iOS Safari back to normal.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, because there’s so many more iOS users, that’s what they’re complaining about. And I feel like, be glad you’re not looking at the Mac version.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, we said this before, the Mac version hasn’t shipped yet. I know

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s shipped on Big Sur. Yes, the Monterey version. Monterey is a beta. Technically hasn’t shipped.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Yeah, whatever. But the Monterey version technically hasn’t shipped yet. It counts,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it counts.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they’re doing in Big Sur, which by the way, I still refuse to run that software update, right? What they’ve done in Big Sur by inflicting

⏹️ ▶️ John it upon people is terrible, but Big Sur is in theory going away. And when

⏹️ ▶️ John Monterey comes out, they do still have one remaining chance to repent like they did in iOS and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know what? This was a mistake. And even though we shipped that weird thing on Big Sur, Forget

⏹️ ▶️ John about that bygones. We’re gonna fix it in Monterey. So Apple, you still have a chance

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. Monterey has not yet shipped. Please change something because it’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, go back to the laptops for a second. Like I think, you know, to kind of sum up, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m most looking forward to with all these rumors for these new laptops is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, and I apologize, I’ve said this before over the last five years, but the 2016

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward generation of laptops was a product that forced the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users to adopt to it rather than adopting to what users needed. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, it was telling people, this is better, you fix your life so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works with this. Whereas the rumored changes to this laptop are,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, we’re making a product that is actually what you wanted and will actually fit into your actual needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and require you to adopt less to it and it will adopt to what you want. And that I think is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, it’s a shift from an arrogant attitude to a humble one. And that’s very important

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for good product design. You know, people always glorify the arrogance of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, we’re gonna make this firm decision and we’re gonna take away all the old ports on the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re gonna make amazing stuff. And like, that works sometimes. It’s sometimes occasionally right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can’t lose sight of all the times that it’s not. And you very quickly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start loving the smell of your own farts too much to recognize when your decisions are actually not as good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when you actually should listen to your users.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the move to ARM, like this is one of the benefits. Not to say that they couldn’t have fixed their laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John without it, but in any kind of internal debate about this change of philosophy that you just described,

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, let’s, you know, we thought we had an idea what the future of laptops were gonna be like, and we were wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s be humble about that and let’s revisit, right? And then when you say, OK, what should they look like now?

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s let’s look on this and see what do people actually use their laptops for? Which

⏹️ ▶️ John things we thought were going away haven’t gone away and all that stuff. When all that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John comes up and they say, OK, you end up with this list on the whiteboard of like, are we really going to add all this stuff back?

⏹️ ▶️ John And someone starts pushing back and saying, yeah, but like that’s going to take up so much space and it uses power and complexity. And it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John you have this giant windfall of increased performance and decreased

⏹️ ▶️ John power consumption to say, this is like a fraction of the windfall we’ve gotten from Apple Silicon.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s use it, let’s spend it to make our products better. It’ll still have way better battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll still be way faster. It’ll still be quieter and cooler. And we get all this stuff. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John this, let’s not just, you know, in some respects when they did the M1 MacBook Air and all those other

⏹️ ▶️ John things, they just took their existing things, ripped out the insides and just made them like magically super powered. Oh, now

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s silent and cool. And the battery lasts twice as long. and it’s twice as fast, like it was just phenomenal. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the philosophy represented by the outside that stayed the same. I really want to see them spend those

⏹️ ▶️ John gains to make their products better. And I hope that’s why these rumors have a higher chance of success

⏹️ ▶️ John is because any pushback based on technical constraints is saying like, I see where you’re coming

⏹️ ▶️ John from, but do you realize what a surplus we have now? Please let’s use that to make,

⏹️ ▶️ John to fully embody this philosophy in the same way that the previous ones tried their very best to fully embody the philosophy

⏹️ ▶️ John of, there’s only one size hole in the outside of this thing, minus headphone, but ignore that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s our philosophy. And we’re gonna really adhere to that as best we can. I hope they

⏹️ ▶️ John are just as strongly adhering to the new philosophy, which is let’s consider what people actually do with their laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John and give them the tools to do that, especially on our biggest, most expensive, supposedly pro laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in some ways also, if this, again, this is all big asterisk, if most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these or all of these rumors are true, it would represent a profound shift in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude from ultra minimalism and in the way of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s the least we can give you? Like, if you look at so much of this generation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of laptops that is hopefully now outgoing, so much of that is defined by like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is the least we can get away with giving you in terms of like number of ports,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of ports, number, different hardware capabilities, you know, how nice the power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brick can be. We’re gonna remove the light up logo and the battery indicators. There was so much removed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there was this like ridiculous, like over the top obsession with minimalism.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many ways, this is actually the problem of the current software design.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, ideology of Apple is over obsession with minimalism to a fault,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to sell the idea of less is more way to the extreme.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re trying to basically tell us, hey, we’re going to take stuff away and you’re going to be thankful and actually pay more for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a problem now in the software side. But if the laptops go in this new direction,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that will represent a profound change in the hardware side. Part of whenever we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco criticize things that Apple does or says, we hear from a lot of of Apple fans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who strike back at us, some of whom are also Apple employees. A common attitude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically people who jump to defend Apple product decisions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by basically yelling at me or other critics saying, like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t actually need that thing, or why should Apple cater to your needs? You’re just XYZ,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that is, just a developer, just a product, whatever, ignoring for the fact that developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are their biggest pro audience, and podcasters are certainly not small in number. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been this attitude among Apple defenders for so long of obsessing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over removing things and glorifying Apple when they remove things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if that is itself inherently a good thing. If there’s a feature on a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that these people don’t use, they consider it a problem. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that attitude, what that worldview results in is this attitude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I don’t need, you know, whatever it is, an SD card slot or whatever, I don’t need an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD card slot, so they should just remove it. Okay, well, A,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you aren’t everyone, and B, what harm is it doing being there?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like that attitude permeated Apple’s design and hardware choices for so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long that they were just looking to see what else can we get rid of, what else can we, like for its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own sake. But, I remember like when I bought my G4 PowerBook, you know, forever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, my first Mac, there were tons of hardware capabilities of that machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I never used. But I wasn’t upset they were there. Like it had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PCMCIA slot of some kind. I never put a single thing in that slot. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should have had that slot, because lots of people did use it. And when I buy a laptop or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a computer, like I want the things I buy to be versatile. I want them to be able to do lots of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, even if I don’t do those things. I just said 20 minutes ago, I want them to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco add an HDMI port to the laptops again, even though I personally will probably never use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Because I want that capability there for everyone, because enough people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do use it, that it’s worth having it in the product. And again, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the Apple defenders going to yell at me like they always do. Yeah, you know, go ahead, do your worst. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just glad to see that Apple seems to be going in this direction, that they have finally realized, like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’ve realized that minimalism for its own sake is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, bullsh**. Taking stuff away is not its own inherent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gain. It might result in other gains. You know, maybe taking taking stuff away can make something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less expensive or more reliable or thinner and lighter. But if you’re not actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco achieving all those goals, then taking something away is just taking something away. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you just have less, congratulations. Now your computer can just do less. Or there’s now more cases where you’re gonna need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of external hardware or dongle or adapter or whatever. And so to put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a line of laptops that goes in the direction that like adds back things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not everyone is going to need, but some people will sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great direction to go, and that, I think, would represent maturity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and humbleness, certainly, but also just like, that will represent their design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco team getting better and moving past the just like, minimalism

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its own sake fallacy and into something that actually makes better products for their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems to me, and I don’t know the right words to verbalize this, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is unfortunate on a podcast, but here we go. It seems to me that pro machines for the last several years,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially, have meant to some degree more depth rather than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more breadth. So like a pro machine means you’re doubling down on USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports or you’re getting more RAM or more SSD, but you’re not getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a variety of anything. And I think what we’re all asking in various ways with various words

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, yeah, we do want more depth, but we would also like more breadth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to have an SD card slot. I mean, personally, I mean that both in a figurative

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and literal sense. Like me, personally, I would like to have an SD card slot. And although I don’t use them all the time, I use them

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably a couple of times a month. I wouldn’t use an HDMI port more than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe when I travel at most, but I agree with what you’re saying, Marco. Like, even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey though it’s not necessarily something that would dramatically change my life, it would dramatically change a lot of people’s lives

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, and when we ever go back to the office. So I’m all in on an HDMI port. Like I want more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey breadth, not necessarily more depth, though. Or I don’t want any additional depth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the depth we’ve got is pretty good for the most part. I’d like more Ram, you know, hypothetically says the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guy with an Intel MacBook pro, but nevertheless. But in principle, I think the amount of depth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mostly good, but I want a lot more breadth. And we haven’t really had that in a long time since we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really went all in, or since Apple really went all in on USBC. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of that back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Squarespace. Start building your website

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today at squarespace.com slash ATP. Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace makes it very easy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make websites. Now this is a huge deal. So first of all, if you are not a nerd, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re making a website for somebody who’s not a nerd, or if you’re trying to recommend something to them, Squarespace is awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s There’s no coding, there’s no design skill required, nothing like that because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they take care of all of that for you. You don’t have to worry about server maintenance or security upgrades

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or uptime or keeping up with traffic. None of that is on your plate. They take care of all of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. And if you’re non-technical, they can also help you out with anything you need help with, but honestly, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super easy to use. They have great support if you need it, but you probably won’t even need it. And if you are super technical,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like many of our listeners, you can make your own website in other ways, but you don’t have to. And there’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many times when it’s not worth dealing with some like manually installable CMS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or writing your own thing when you’re going to make a site and Squarespace can do all sorts of sites, blogs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco portfolios, storefronts, podcasts, all sorts of stuff all on Squarespace. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so easy. And it takes very little of your time not only to set up but then ongoing maintenance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s basically nothing required besides like adding your content or operating your store we know whatever you need, whatever you’re making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco website for. So it’s wonderful. yourself by starting a free trial at squarespace.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. You can build the entire site in trial mode and see all of it without ever even giving them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a credit card. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, go back there squarespace.com slash ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase. That’s squarespace.com slash ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer code ATP for 10% off your first purchase. Make your next move with an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing low maintenance and easy to make website from Squarespace.

#askatp: Apple ergonomic accessories

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Johnny Oliver writes, do you think Apple should do better in the ergonomic computer accessory

⏹️ ▶️ Casey space? Personally, I find the Magic Mouse to really strain my wrist, and the Magic Keyboard is very flat with no adjustments

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available. I think Apple could lead in designing and producing ergonomic accessories which could introduce more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey users to alternatives which may help them avoid RSI and other injuries later in life. Also, the iMac screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be height adjustable. You know, I agree with all of this. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the Apple that we know today doing much of this, but if we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do get a more humble Apple, I forget which one of you just said that a minute ago, but if we really do get a more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey humble Apple, then yeah, absolutely. I’d love to see this. I really enjoyed the magic mouse, but comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was not. And that’s part of the reason why I now use a track pad, even though I swore I would never do that in a million

⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, but I haven’t used a magic mouse for more than a few minutes in probably a couple of years now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would love to see more ergonomic stuff. I’d love to see Marco buy an Apple produced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey split keyboard. And you know what? Maybe I would buy one too. But I just, I don’t see that happening in today’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, but maybe in tomorrow’s. What do you think, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is another example where the minimalism that Marco was just talking about has infected their design.

⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of their hardware design focus heavily on sort of minimalism of form. The mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John is very small and slight. The minimalism manifests in the iMac not having a height adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ John stand because a non height adjustable one is more simple and minimal. Look, it’s just a bent piece of metal. Look how simple and straightforward

⏹️ ▶️ John it is. You don’t have to have any kind of mechanical mechanism to raise and lower that is more

⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and less sort of straightforward, right? And so they try to just sort of say,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is what we wanna make and we don’t want it to look awkward or lumpy

⏹️ ▶️ John or have lots of weird moving parts or be complicated. We want it to be simple and elemental and so on

⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth. is very, very often exactly the wrong thing to do for hardware. And the worst part about

⏹️ ▶️ John this is two really bad parts. One, Apple didn’t used to be like this. Apple did make an ergonomic split keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John way before anyone else was making it. Granted, it was back when everything Apple made was even more expensive than it is now, and it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John a very good split keyboard, but it was a split keyboard. And so like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as if Apple has never been on this page. And then the second terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is that within modern Apple, making computer ergonomics

⏹️ ▶️ John better for users is exactly right up the middle of Apple’s stated values in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of

⏹️ ▶️ John health, safety, accessibility, like everything about doing things well ergonomically

⏹️ ▶️ John fits with every aspect of Apple’s ethos. And the only thing that is countering it is

⏹️ ▶️ John people in the design group who want the mouse to be as minimal as possible and maybe the cost cutting of like

⏹️ ▶️ John an adjustable stand would be more expensive and less durable and you know, all that other stuff, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John I do wish this is an area where Apple would revisit older philosophies because it is so in keeping with what

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does. And I’m not saying Apple has to start making quote unquote weird accessories that look strange to

⏹️ ▶️ John normal people and confuse people. Why is the mouse look like that? I’m scared and confused. Like I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John saying they should do the most radical thing but you know, I’ve always talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John OXO good grips or whatever, you can make products that

⏹️ ▶️ John concentrate heavily on ergonomics while still being

⏹️ ▶️ John good products for literally everybody. Oxo’s products ostensibly concentrate heavily on

⏹️ ▶️ John being more accessible to people with more motor difficulties or whatever, but you don’t have to know that. If I

⏹️ ▶️ John just throw you the Oxo can opener and you use it, you’re like, oh, this is a good can opener. You have no idea it was designed that

⏹️ ▶️ John way so that people with arthritis can open cans. You don’t know that, you don’t care about that. You just see it as a good can opener,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it doesn’t look super weird. You’re not confused, I can’t figure out how to use this can opener. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a can opener, just every aspect of it is slightly better than your average can opener. It is more comfortable,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s easier to use. You feel like you have more leverage, you have to apply less force, like it’s easier

⏹️ ▶️ John to grip, it doesn’t slip out of your hand, there are no sharp parts, right? Apple should be doing with literally every piece of hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John they have. On the laptops and stuff like that, you’re constrained, because like you do want it to be thin and light,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have much leeway for other aspects, and in general, I think that the ergonomics of their laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John are reasonable. They’re kind of slippery, they’re kind of sharp edged, but limitations of the form. But for

⏹️ ▶️ John things like, let’s try to sell computers so that when people sit at a desk, the monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John is at the right height and the keyboard is the right way for them and the mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John supports their hand in a way that we think is ergonomic. There are just a few minor things you could do to Apple’s current

⏹️ ▶️ John line to make it better. If not making the iMacs height adjustable, then perhaps saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John have we chosen the right stand height for this? Because I think they haven’t. I think they’re all a little bit too

⏹️ ▶️ John low. If you look at the average height of a desk that someone sits at, and then you add to that the height of the stand and the

⏹️ ▶️ John average height of a person or whatever, I think the iMac’s non-adjustable stand is a little bit too low.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not saying you have to suddenly, the iMacs have to have this amazing ergonomic height adjustable stand that can accommodate

⏹️ ▶️ John very small and very tall people, but maybe they just have missed the mark on what the

⏹️ ▶️ John non-adjustable height is, right? And the mouse, I’m not saying there’s anything particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with the ergonomics of the mouse, but it only does fit one style of mousing in terms of how you

⏹️ ▶️ John put your hand on it. And if you don’t use that style and try to use the Apple mouse, those are the people who don’t like it. They say,

⏹️ ▶️ John I try to hold it the way I wanna hold the mouse, the way that’s comfortable for me to do it. And this little tiny slippery piece

⏹️ ▶️ John of sushi just doesn’t cut it for that, right? And then the keyboards, this person’s complaint, is

⏹️ ▶️ John saying that the keyboard is flat with no adjustments available. Unfortunately, decades

⏹️ ▶️ John of computer use has mostly trained people to the idea that the way a keyboard should adjust is by getting higher

⏹️ ▶️ John in the back. Like the Apple extended two keyboard did that. It was slanted up to begin with

⏹️ ▶️ John and it had an adjustable foot that would come down to make it even higher in the back. That is exactly the opposite

⏹️ ▶️ John direction. You want your keyboard to slant. You do not want it to be higher in the back and lower in the front. If anything, you want

⏹️ ▶️ John it to either be totally flat or lower in the back from an ergonomic standpoint.

⏹️ ▶️ John But this does get into the area of weird things, right? Of like, well, you don’t wanna make the keyboard too weird because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not used to a split keyboard, it can be off-putting. but you know, Apple can offer more than one

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they already do offer more than one

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard. Oh my God. Right? Like there’s enough room in a trillion dollar company to have more than one keyboard. So

⏹️ ▶️ John offer a split one. And in your regular one, I like the idea that these are mostly flat, even though they are technically

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit higher on the back than the front. That’s just kind of an education opportunity to maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John convince people that keyboards that go up in the back are not good. I don’t know how to get on this,

⏹️ ▶️ John but just to start by saying, let’s offer some keyboards of, you know, that are now not, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not weird to see a split keyboard. Like it’s a thing that lots of manufacturers sell. Some people like them, Apple should

⏹️ ▶️ John make one and sell it, and they should make and sell a good one. And if Apple really wants to spend some of the trillions and trillions

⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars or whatever they have, like you can do research into what makes a good, comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, mouse, and display setup. Just like I really hope, and I’m pretty sure, that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is currently doing research on how do we make a comfortable ergonomic AR

⏹️ ▶️ John VR goggle thing that people can wear with different size and shape heads and be comfortable and

⏹️ ▶️ John not get sweaty and not mess their hair too much and not hurt their head. Like that’s ergonomics,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they’re doing that because like, oh, AR, VR, it’s all so new. But there are known things in the world

⏹️ ▶️ John of ergonomics that Apple could be doing with its personal computer hardware that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just simply not doing because the design group has said it’s more important for our mouse to look like a beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ John piece of sculpture than for it to be comfortable for the most number of people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you see the amazing patent filing from about a month ago? This must have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made people’s heads explode who don’t like the Magic Mouse. It was like a laptop where the mouse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco popped out the side. Like you could either stash it in the laptop and you’d pop it out and it was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, a mouse that would look like it was about the size of a USB thumb drive kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Oh my goodness. Have you seen the Microsoft Bendy mouse? My wife uses it. She’s got it with her

⏹️ ▶️ John Surface thingy from work. Have you seen that one?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the one that’s like an arc? It’s like a parabola?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it flattens. It goes flat for like storage. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so that it is basically the thickness of like a MacBook, right? Imagine just a flat thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John basically the length of a mouse, but the thickness of a MacBook. But then when you use it, you take it out of your bag or whatever, you

⏹️ ▶️ John bend it so it becomes like a V shape. And it’s like, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John see, it’s a travel mouse. It’s like, can we make it so small for travel? But the problem with

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of travel mice is like, who wants to use a tiny thing that’s easy to travel because it just feels too low and whatever just makes me

⏹️ ▶️ John think of the Apple mouse But when you bend that thing up the reason it bends up is because it’s more comfortable to use that way Than a thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John is like, you know a centimeter tall and totally flat all the way across Not that I’m saying this is the world’s greatest mouse. It’s just at least someone

⏹️ ▶️ John thought about We want to make a travel mouse. It’s small It’s light is easy to stow in any kind of bag

⏹️ ▶️ John and when you use it It doesn’t feel like you’re trying to push around like this, you know half a deck of cards

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks. Bye.

#askatp: Websites using too much energy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Michael Hagen writes, when using Safari with sites like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Squarespace, YouTube, Facebook, and other not unpopular sites, I often get this alert saying, quote, this website

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is using energy and may be reloaded, quote. Any way to get rid of this? Thoughts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this? Not only is it annoying, but doing literally the same thing in other browsers like Brave, Chrome,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Firefox does not affect my total system performance at all. As far as I can tell, Apple has set the bar really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey low with what triggers this alert. I want to use Safari for Touch ID passwords, but it only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey takes one editing session in Squarespace to get reloaded without saving to keep me from using it long-term.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see this very often in any of the browsing that I do, but I’ve certainly seen it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done on the user side to really stop it from showing, is there?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if there’s a PLIST hack for this, but for people who don’t know, this is like

⏹️ ▶️ John when this person says, oh, I do the same thing in other browsers and it doesn’t affect my total system performance. We

⏹️ ▶️ John know for a fact that those other browsers are not as energy efficient as Safari. And part of Safari’s energy efficiency

⏹️ ▶️ John story is that Safari is trying to essentially blame the website

⏹️ ▶️ John and not, you know, so that the user knows what’s going on here is because you went to facebook.com and they’re running

⏹️ ▶️ John some JavaScript that’s grinding away in the background. That’s killing your battery. And I know you wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John go to this website, but we want you to blame the right thing. So don’t blame Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John or don’t blame your Mac. It’s this specific website that’s currently eating your battery. And so it puts up that banner.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now I understand the philosophy there, but any time a feature like this, where it’s trying to like

⏹️ ▶️ John catch bad behavior, the key is in the thresholds. How do we decide at what point

⏹️ ▶️ John we throw up that banner? Obviously you wanted to throw up that banner. If like some, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John some JavaScript got injected into a site and now it’s doing Bitcoin mining in the background or something and killing your battery. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an easy one. Right. But it seems like what has happened with this feature over time is a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote non malicious websites like regular websites that are not trying to do anything wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John and generally aren’t really badly behaved just through the typical march of quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John progress and you know the increase in features let’s say of those websites

⏹️ ▶️ John more JavaScript being used on websites richer JavaScript more client side applications more single page

⏹️ ▶️ John applications more and more legitimate things are running afoul of this limit and And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s mostly the fault of Apple not sort of keeping up with the times and saying when we set

⏹️ ▶️ John these limits, this all seemed reasonable and no real legitimate website website trip them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But now, many years later, it seems like we haven’t adjusted the limits and lots of websites

⏹️ ▶️ John people use every day throughout this banner and I’ve experienced it as well. And it’s like there’s no recourse as a user, you can either just

⏹️ ▶️ John not go to that website or constantly hit the little x to dismiss that message. So

⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, Michael, I’m not aware of any way to disable that. There may be some hidden plist

⏹️ ▶️ John key. I don’t think there is an exposed GUI thing to get it, not to complain about that. And yeah, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you don’t like feeling good about like I’m using this website and I get this banner and it has a warning or sometimes it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John even just like, you know, as the, as the warning as worded in this, uh, as KDP says,

⏹️ ▶️ John threatened to like reload the page or reload the site to say it’s just gotten out of hand. It’s using too much memory,

⏹️ ▶️ John too much CPU and I’m just going to reload it. And if that was like the normal expected functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John of the site, it makes you want to use another browser. So it’s Safari in its effort to encourage

⏹️ ▶️ John good behavior and apportion blame where it is more rightful to go is has resulted

⏹️ ▶️ John with this feature being neglected over many years, essentially with people saying, well, I’m just going to abandon Safari and I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John go to a browser that doesn’t complain because in the end, it’s the job of the computer to do what the user wants. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if the user wants to use YouTube or Facebook, and they keep getting that banner in Safari, Now it’s a Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Like what’s more likely, that people are going to stop using YouTube or stop using Safari? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty easy. People are gonna pick YouTube every time. So Apple needs to get on

⏹️ ▶️ John it and either add a GUI preference to disable that feature for people who don’t care, or at the very least

⏹️ ▶️ John readjust the thresholds for the modern world.

#askatp: CarPlay from Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, Yoni writes, when if ever will the S-series chips get powerful and efficient

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to enable CarPlay on watchOS? I don’t ever see that being a thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest, but it is an interesting idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I think it’s interesting to consider, well, what is CarPlay? What exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would this mean? As far as I can tell, what CarPlay actually is today is mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone beaming a video stream to the car head units. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay is like the car head unit is basically giving Apple a window to play arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video content into and then providing some kind of interaction hooks, whether it’s touch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen or the dial and button kind of controls. But for the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is rendering that screen and is sending it over to the car as a video stream. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth thinking about, okay, well, if the watch is doing this, I assume what What this means is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car play in the car would be able to control watch apps, basically. You wouldn’t need your phone to be involved or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even to have a phone, necessarily. Okay, interesting question. What this would mean, first of all, is that the watch would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be constantly streaming video over, presumably,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco local Wi-Fi to the car. Number one, that’s going to be a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant power draw for the watch, to basically be streaming video constantly, wirelessly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s problem number one. Also, I think that transmitting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco data over Wi-Fi, I think uses more energy by a noticeable amount than receiving it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, the watch already takes a lot of power to use Wi-Fi at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, even when it’s mostly receiving data, like in a download. If it’s in a mostly transmitting mode,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would probably be a pretty power hungry operation. So that alone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the transmitting, not to mention, you know, the rendering of the video stream on the little tiny GPU on the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re talking non-trivial amounts of power there. But then, when you consider, well, what exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you controlling with CarPlay? What CarPlay is on the phone is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote interface to control iPhone apps that are constantly running, whether it’s a navigation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, or an audio app like Overcast, or maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco messages coming in from messaging apps, that kind of stuff. Most of those apps are things that are constantly running, whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an audio app playing audio, or navigation doing like turn by turn. So you’d have to then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, all right, well, how good is the watch at running, constantly running

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, some of which are high power users like streaming audio or navigation directions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just don’t see it being a thing that Apple ever enables, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the actual question that Yanni is asking here of like, when will the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S series chips get powerful and efficient enough? I think they’re probably powerful enough today,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think they have the power budget, like the battery life budget, to actually provide a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful CarPlay experience without probably draining your watch battery. Because also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep in mind that when your phone is in CarPlay mode, it’s either plugged in with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cable to the car directly to do that at all, in which case it is being charged continuously,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if in one of the more modern wireless CarPlay setups, you’re very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco often putting the phone on like a Qi charger in the car or something while you’re doing that, just because it’s convenient and you don’t want to drain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone battery. And the watch is not going to be doing that. You’re not going to take your watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your wrist in your car to like plug it onto a dock to, to charge it continuously while it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this. So I don’t think this is ever going to be a thing, even if it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, even if the chip is ostensibly powerful enough to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think constantly streaming a video stream off the watch plus audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over Bluetooth, plus running the apps continuously in the background for potentially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours if you’re doing a long drive, you know, I don’t think that’s ever gonna be a thing that the watch power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco envelope is really good at or that Apple would ever enable.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a good infinite timeline example because it gets to a nuance of a lot of these arguments. But first,

⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned like the current S series probably powerful enough to do it today if it

⏹️ ▶️ John had a giant battery attached to it instead of the dinky little watch battery. I think the limit of the current ones is they don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John enough RAM. They can’t run iPhone calibraps

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because they just have

⏹️ ▶️ John enough RAM. So even if the battery was a giant car battery on the floor hooked up to your watch, it still can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do it because you can’t literally run. You can’t run ways in the amount of RAM that probably in the amount of RAM that the watch

⏹️ ▶️ John has. CPU wise and capability wise, yes, you could totally do it because the watch is as powerful

⏹️ ▶️ John as an iPhone from several years ago probably at this point, especially if it had a giant battery hooked up to it and didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to, you know, sit battery and you could set aside all the other limits of the watch thing. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John the infinite timeline thing, um, eventually, if you look at what you can do with

⏹️ ▶️ John a, with a phone in CarPlay today, yeah, the watch will eventually probably

⏹️ ▶️ John in our lifetime be able to do that with, within the constraints of the watch

⏹️ ▶️ John power envelope, right? The problem is by that time, doing what you can do today

⏹️ ▶️ John will be seen as primitive because it’ll be 20 years from now. I’ll be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, but I don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ John run Waze from 2021. I want to run Waze from 2040. And Waze from 2040 is AR, VR, 3D, like who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John But like the bar for what you want out of CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t stay still. So you can look at what you can do with CarPlay today. And I think the watch will eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John conquer all of that. It will have enough RAM, it will be fast enough, and it will even have enough battery power

⏹️ ▶️ John for a reasonable length car ride to run today’s iPhone caliber app and

⏹️ ▶️ John display it on the screen. But it’ll be 20 or 40 years from now and nobody will wanna do that because it

⏹️ ▶️ John would be like playing in an NES game. You can do it in an emulator and it’s cute and everything, but when they

⏹️ ▶️ John say, when will we be able to play games, they don’t mean in play an NES game from 40 years

⏹️ ▶️ John ago, 30, I don’t know how time works. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so that’s the problem with infinite timeline things

⏹️ ▶️ John is that hardware keeps getting more powerful, but we also, our expectations of what we get from it keeps raising.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the only time we ever really catch up with that is the thing I talked about in several past shows is when we reach limits of human

⏹️ ▶️ John perception, right? Streaming audio, if all you want to do is stream audio from your watch

⏹️ ▶️ John to your car, the current technology we have has more or less

⏹️ ▶️ John good enough audio quality, especially in a noisy environment like a car that

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re basically there. And you know, 40 years from now, it’s not like the audio quality is going to be you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have 40 times more information or something. like it’s fine like we can you can do that and you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John still be able to do it and there will be no further expectation because human ear human hearing is not

⏹️ ▶️ John changing particularly rapidly so once we sort of saturate the needs of human hearing we’re there

⏹️ ▶️ John but for applications as in you know software that you can do arbitrary things

⏹️ ▶️ John on a screen we are nowhere near the limits of what we might possibly want to do and so for

⏹️ ▶️ John our for the rest of our lifetimes for sure though the watch will eventually be as powerful and capable as the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John today No one will care because the phones alongside it will be so much more powerful and capable and will still be using

⏹️ ▶️ John Wireless carplay or in Marco’s case not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, it’s funny. The Rivian does not have carplay either.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my god. Are you serious? That’s the worst. That’s the worst part of the in the reviews. They did

⏹️ ▶️ John their own software stack. Yep. It is really Like I applaud

⏹️ ▶️ John them for bravely going their own way on that and trying to be like Tesla but boy, it looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like an Android tablet from like the debut of the iPad. It looks so janky and slow.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, like how could you, like it’s such an expensive car. Could you just like double the budget

⏹️ ▶️ John for like CPU and GPU power just to make your UI? Because the UI itself, if you use a screenshot,

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks fine, but in motion, it’s like three frames per second. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John tough. I like they have, you know, kudos to them for trying to do the thing, but yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John It fits right into Marco’s car

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco philosophy,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is janky first party UIs that you can’t change.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. No, but I think, you know, going back to the question for a second too, like I think the whole idea,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the Apple Watch first came out, there was this assumption

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a lot of tech fans, like, oh, maybe the watch someday will get powerful enough to replace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones and we won’t even be carrying phones anymore. And I think that’s just never gonna happen. You know, A, what I always say, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet against a smartphone. but people love their phones for so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other reasons and use them for so many other reasons and just the form factor difference is so big.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The power difference is so big. Even if watches get better and better as technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco progresses, phones are gonna get better at the same rate. So, you know, when your watch is able to do certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, while the phone has a screen that’s like eight times bigger and a battery that’s 10 times bigger,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone’s gonna always be able to do way more than the watch can, just because it is not a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit bigger, it’s a lot bigger. And that enables an order

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of magnitude of complexity and abilities and everything like that. So people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are always gonna have their phones and they’re always gonna be way more powerful than their watches. A lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people are not going to have a watch, but everyone is going to have a phone. The world where the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to become their primary device, I don’t think that world’s ever gonna come. I think phones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the primary device. Like we’re going to have something that is, you know, roughly hand shaped that we keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our pocket as our computing device that we bring with us everywhere, probably for the rest of our lifetimes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The details will change, but that general form factor I think is with us to stay because it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compelling. Something that lives on our wrist, that’s strapped to our wrist is always going to be so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and therefore more resource constrained and more interaction constrained. This difference

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will always exist. we are never going to stop carrying phone-like objects,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore the watch doesn’t need to become the primary device and doesn’t need to take over primary roles like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. I don’t think there’s a big market of people who want to go driving without their phone. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, this is never really going to happen, for many reasons, including the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that nobody really wants it. But many other good technical reasons as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John They get a few too many absolutes in there because, like, the… You can’t say never because

⏹️ ▶️ John there is the possibility that a thing replaces the phone, but the thing that replaces the phone will

⏹️ ▶️ John also not be in the same constraints as the watch. Like say we get

⏹️ ▶️ John really good ways to display images onto our retinas in a hundred years or something or whatever, then

⏹️ ▶️ John you would just need a phone size and shape thing that is on your person somewhere, but you wouldn’t need to hold

⏹️ ▶️ John it anymore because the display would be basically into your eyeballs, through your magic glasses or contact

⏹️ ▶️ John lenses or whatever. and the interface to it could be waving your hand around in front of you. And, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, like there are ways to sort of get rid of the idea that you have to hold a rectangle

⏹️ ▶️ John in your hand. But what wouldn’t change is whatever that thing is, the

⏹️ ▶️ John power envelope of it would still continue to be better than the power envelope of the thing on your wrist. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you don’t need to hold it in your hand, you can make an equal volume of stuff, of computing stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and put it literally anywhere on your body. Put it on a belt clip, because we know you love those. Put it in your pocket,

⏹️ ▶️ John sew it into your clothing. But if you just have to take this volume of computing stuff, it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John a way bigger volume than you have on your wrist, right? And so there’ll still always be that delta. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the only way you ever get past those things is if you reach some kind of limit of human

⏹️ ▶️ John perception or ability. And for the foreseeable future, things

⏹️ ▶️ John that we can do with software, projecting bit-mapped images into our eyeballs and interacting

⏹️ ▶️ John with them, There is no limit out in the distance for what we might want to do with that, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John You can think of things today that will absorb all the computing power that anyone can ever imagine in the next 100 years,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then some, because literally everything we do, even something as simple as like, I want to render something

⏹️ ▶️ John in 3D, right? Like, oh, we’ve already done that. We have so much computing power, it’s fine. We’ve reached the limits. You remember, we said, no, we haven’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John We can’t even do trivial, straightforward ray tracing because it’s too computational expensive. If you know how actual 3D

⏹️ ▶️ John graphics work, it’s a series of terrible magic tricks that

⏹️ ▶️ John compromise everything about how we do it. And if we just do it in the straightforward way, if we had like

⏹️ ▶️ John a billion times more computing power, whole new types of software that are not possible today

⏹️ ▶️ John would open up because we wouldn’t have to do these terrible tricks and have these terrible limitations. That’s just one example, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So there is no foreseeable future where, because software is just so arbitrary. It’s like, if you can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John it, you can do it. It’s not like audio or like moving pictures where it’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John our ears work as well as they do. And once you can give them sound that is at the limits of their perception, there is no

⏹️ ▶️ John more you can go with that. You can make different sounds. I’m not saying we’re at the end of music, but in terms of the job

⏹️ ▶️ John of getting audio into our ear holes, we can do what we need to do right now. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of putting pixels in front of you that you can interact with to do an arbitrary thing, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not going to run out for a really, really long time. So the delta between watch

⏹️ ▶️ John and phone volume thing will continue to exist. even if we’re not, quote unquote, holding

⏹️ ▶️ John a phone in our hand and it’s some VR thing or, you know, neural implant, whatever it is,

⏹️ ▶️ John if there has to be some amount of volume of computing stuff, having a phone volume

⏹️ ▶️ John of computing stuff is always going to stomp all over having a watch volume of computing stuff, and that will be true

⏹️ ▶️ John until and unless we reach the limits of like, we can’t think of anything else to do with projecting

⏹️ ▶️ John images and interacting with them, but don’t hold your breath for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but then once we reach that point, we’ll all switch over to web technologies and everything will just become 10 times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more bloated and use all the resources.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ideally, we will be in a future in which everyone does all their computing on a platform

⏹️ ▶️ John that is not owned by any one company. But that is definitely an ideal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, HelloFresh, and Linode. And thanks to our members who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco support us directly. You can join, despite John’s sales pitch earlier, at atp.fm slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. We will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, tech podcast, so long.

After-show: Ordering Series 7?

⏹️ ▶️ John You guys ordering watches this Friday? Yeah, I am. I have to use my DTK discount.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re going to get yourself a watch that you’re never going to wear?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not my watch. It’s my wife’s getting watch. She was planning on getting a watch anyway, but this is what we’re going to use it for. It’s because, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t want to deal with the phone hassle stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair enough. Yeah, and I’m not planning on getting one, which means I’m going to get one probably 10 minutes after pre-order is open.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling myself the same thing. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. Actually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really and truly, I’m very, very close. very close as we’re recording Wednesday night. I’m very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey close to pre-order time and I still have zero intention of getting a watch. But as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am saying these words, the embargoes have not dropped. Nobody’s told me that it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the second coming and so on and so forth. So sitting here now, I am not planning on it by next

⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. It’s anyone’s guess what I say on the next episode of this show, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve never been less excited about a watch update than the Series 7

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it really does seem like the screen changed in a decent way, but in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that I don’t think is going to affect my life very much as a user of the watch, although as a developer it will, I’ll get to that in a second.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, um, but I also like, you know, nothing else changed, you know, except for the faster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging, which is mostly for sleep tracking, which I don’t do. So it’s like, I don’t really need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that’s not really solving anything for me, and that’s about it. Like, there’s no really new abilities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. If you look at Apple’s marketing page for the Series 7, you can tell they’re really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco grasping at straws. Like, most of the benefits they tout for the Series 7 are not exclusive to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Series 7. There are benefits that apply to everything, or that were also true in the Series 6,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that are part of watchOS 8 more than the actual Series 7 hardware. There’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of reason to this, for me as a Series 6 owner, as a user.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, the screen trick, so what’s interesting is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we discussed when they announced the Series 7, the screen, as it gets towards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the edges, the screen goes far enough under the crystal that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can display things on the screen that are actually going to be like near the curving edges

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the crystal. So they actually addressed this in the human interface guidelines for the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have like new layout guides. So not only do you have a safe area inset to put stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from the corners if you need it to not be cut off by the rounding of the corners, but now there’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different inset if you want something to be aligned so it’s not gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco under a potentially curved area of the screen. And they’re saying don’t put text under

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the curved areas, but do let buttons extend into them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that. And any kind of like you know screen side like big elements can extend into the curvy screen areas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but text shouldn’t. So now I’m thinking well crap I should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one of these to physically see and test on so I can make sure my designs look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good on this unique new screen attribute but at the same time as a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user I could not be less excited about this update I was gonna skip it entirely so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t decided what to do. I was thinking like maybe I could use that as an excuse to like like switch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco materials or colors. Maybe I should get the black steel or the titanium or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. And I, even that, I’m like, you know what? No, I just want the steel. Like I always get,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the steel. It’s great. I don’t have any excitement about this update, but I feel like as a developer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to be able to design my screens of my app with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new screen curvature in mind.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think with the watch, because it has such a tiny battery, like my wife has a Series 5 now, So

⏹️ ▶️ John she’s going two generations and not that she has particular complaints about her watch batteries, but after two years,

⏹️ ▶️ John your watch battery, especially if you really heavily use your watch, it’s probably a little bit tired. And so, and

⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, maybe it’s not that big of an upgrade over the six, but it’s a little bit of a benefit if you just have a five.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, the screen thing aside, even if it was just like slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the five and had a fresh battery, it would probably be worthwhile for my wife because she wears her Apple Watch every

⏹️ ▶️ John day. She’s a hundred percent on board with the Apple Watch lifestyle. we were buying her new Apple watches every single year,

⏹️ ▶️ John but she skipped the sixth year because it just didn’t seem like that big of an upgrade. But now, I mean, I feel like this is the most normal

⏹️ ▶️ John piece of this relationship with Apple hardware. It’s like, oh, I just got one this year. I don’t need to get one next year. But eventually it’s two years,

⏹️ ▶️ John your watch, your battery’s getting a little tired. The new one comes out, it’s got a bigger screen, it’s brighter,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s got maybe a couple of new features and, you know, then you end up getting one. So that’s, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John why she’s getting one. Like she, you know, I’d happily get her a new watch every single year if she wanted it because

⏹️ ▶️ John she uses it a lot. It’s like, this is an important device in your life. It’s practically more important than your phone. Although

⏹️ ▶️ John now half the time when I see my wife, she doesn’t. She has her phone, but if you see

⏹️ ▶️ John her in real life, she’s often wielding two to three iPhones, kind of like Marco, but on purpose,

⏹️ ▶️ John because she Pokemon Go’s on multiple iPhones. Like recent iPhones that we got, instead of being handed down to

⏹️ ▶️ John the kids, they get handed down to her. She’s using my old phone, she’s using my XS. And I think she’s, I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ John other phone she’s using, she’s got some pretty good, I mean, you don’t want a slow phone for Pokemon Go because it’s a demanding

⏹️ ▶️ John game. So it’s not like she has crappy phones. So instead we just get the kids new phones, like not the top of the line ones, but they

⏹️ ▶️ John get, you know, newly purchased mid-pack iPhones so that the top

⏹️ ▶️ John of the line iPhones that I’m handing down Just go to her and become Pokemon devices.