460: Desktop Laptop
09 Dec 2021Casey’s continued path toward the XDR, Marco’s continued path toward the Wrangler, and John’s continued path away from a functioning garage.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Christmas Conundrums
- Follow-up:
- Ubiquiti’s breach was from the inside
- Casey’s UltraFine 5K seems to be UltraDead
- Some wish-casting and predictions about the Mac lineup in 2022
- Apple Announces Self-Service Repair
#askatp:- How come the TouchBar failed where the iPhone succeeded? (via Todd Kaprielian)
- Why is Chromium’s dominance bad for the open web? (via Aryan Aneja)
- Why bother with a Mac Pro? (via Dave Saunders, who clearly wanted to torment Casey)
- Post-show:
- The continuing saga of John’s beeps
- Marco’s shifts to Neutral
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Chapters
- Holiday prep 🖼️
- Follow-up: Ubiquiti’s breach
- Sponsor: Slidebox
- 4K Casey Liss 🖼️
- Desktop vs. laptop today
- Sponsor: Impending Inc.
- Apple Self-Service Repair
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- #askatp: iPhone keyboard vs. Touch Bar
- #askatp: Is Chromium’s dominance bad?
- #askatp: Why continue the Mac Pro?
- Ending theme
- Follow-up: John’s beeps
- Neutral 🖼️
Holiday prep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the lead up to the holidays and there’s a lot of projects in the air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like there’s not only, you know, the typical holiday stuff of like, well, better make sure we get gifts for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also, unfortunately, I have been unable as of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet to convince my extended family that adults no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need presents at Christmas. In addition to gift giving, you have stuff like sending out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Christmas cards, which fortunately My lovely wife Tiff does the vast majority of the work for that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s good. But just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there’s so much stuff. Can we just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pause there? Yeah. I hope that you appreciate the amount of fricking labor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that takes because I am the de facto Christmas card person in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family and it is so frustrating and takes so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and money than it should all for as Aaron is off to remind me, people to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at and go, oh lovely and then throw in the trash. I really, really love the tradition. I really do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find it very enjoyable and a lot of fun to think about what I want to send.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the actual sending and like working with these god-awful websites that you use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like generate these cards. I mean, maybe Tiff actually puts everything together in like Photoshop or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not at that advanced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, no. She uses the god-awful websites and that’s part of the frustration of this time of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. Because of course, the first few days of December, everyone goes through it at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the same time and so these websites crumble under the load. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fairly mediocre web app, even in the best of days, is not the best user experience, right? But to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add to the mediocre and crappy user experience, also server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lag and delays and occasionally lost work because something timed out, it’s a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infuriating. And so last year, I put in a reminder for myself to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in mid-November, really start getting the process going Because my typical MO is that I just plain don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it until December. And then I’m like, crap, I got to get the show on the road. And so like mid-December,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m like going through pictures, trying to figure out the ones I like. But then I realized I didn’t have like a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hero picture, you know, like a good picture of all of us. First good day to do it was this past weekend. And so then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to get everyone dressed up and do the picture and blah, blah, blah. And now I’m like delayed getting everything to the printer. And then the printer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to take like a week or two to print it. And then it doesn’t arrive here until like four days before Christmas. And I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put all these undue goals, I guess, on myself. And I always fail every year. And so then I get frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And of course, because I’m a turd, I take it out on Aaron. And then Aaron’s like, why are you getting frustrated? This is stupid. We’re just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone’s going to put these in the trash in a week anyway. Why do we care? I’m like, well, yes, but, but it’s so enjoyable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And of course, he looks at me and he’s like, is it now? So, I love it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate it so much. So all of that is many, many words to say. I hope that you do indeed appreciate the work that Tiff is surely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting in for this, because it is such a pain in the tuchus.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a good time for me to announce that the Syracuse family will not be sending cards this
⏹️ ▶️ John you two in particular, when you don’t get a card from us, don’t be insulted. We’re not sending them to anybody. Why? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t get our acts together soon enough and we have too much other crap. So, it’s like we made
⏹️ ▶️ John a different call than the List family, but we’re in a similar situation and we’re just like, nope, can’t do it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if you’re listening to this
⏹️ ▶️ John and you normally get a card from me, when you don’t get one this year, don’t be insulted. We just are not sending them
⏹️ ▶️ John out this year. If you’d like to see a picture of us, let me know and I can, but we more or less look the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Sorry, Marco, like 30 minutes ago you were trying to make a point and I totally derailed you. I’m sorry. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arias I don’t remember what it was anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, I think the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the holidays are stressful. Steve McLaughlin Yes, indeed. Marco Arias And many projects are going. Steve McLaughlin
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco Arias Or
⏹️ ▶️ John not going in my case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Steve McLaughlin Yeah, I was saying to the boys before the show that we just picked up our Christmas tree and we are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a believer in the live Christmas trees here in the Liss household. This is unremarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and of itself, but this is Penny’s first Christmas with a Christmas tree because we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adopted her just before New Year’s last year. And my limited understanding is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is probably not good for her to chew on said Christmas tree, which is probably-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so everyone knows. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, Penny my dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t clear at this point. Yeah, no, it’s our third child, Penny. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to be an adventure keeping her from just eating every bit of that tree. And so we’re going to see how that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes. Ask me about this next week when the tree has been moved outside or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’ll be fine. Cats are the biggest jerks with Christmas trees. Dogs are usually good about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, cats are jerks in general. So I mean, what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I already said that we totally failed, did not finish on the
⏹️ ▶️ John holiday cards. Christmas tree, weren’t ready to give up on that one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we did wait too long. And I went to get a tree. And it was slim pickings, literally.
⏹️ ▶️ John like all the trees were super skinny. Oh, that’s fine. It’s a Charlie Brown tree then. No, they weren’t like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that they weren’t like, you know, the density of foliage and
⏹️ ▶️ John branches was fine. They were just, instead of being triangular shaped, they were more like
⏹️ ▶️ John tube shaped. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they didn’t get fatter
⏹️ ▶️ John as they went down. So it was like, it was like a pipe cleaner, like a big brushy pipe cleaner. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I asked the person, I’m like, what’s the deal? Why are all the trees skinny this year? And he said, I don’t know, these are the trees that
⏹️ ▶️ John teenagers. Yeah, and our problem is we have really low ceilings in our ancient New England house here.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even the ones that were like nine feet tall, there would no way they would fit in our house. Even those didn’t get wide
⏹️ ▶️ John at the bottom. But I had to pick one that would fit, I had to pick like a seven foot tree that would fit in our tiny little house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those just look like pipe cleaners. So I got the best one I could. And we put it in the garage as we usually do, because we’re waiting until
⏹️ ▶️ John the weekend to bring it in. And it was sitting there in the garage looking like a sad pipe cleaner.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my wife just couldn’t take it. And she said, you know what, I’m going out and getting a better tree. So she
⏹️ ▶️ John went and got a better tree. And it is better. She did find a better tree at a place that’s like close to her work, but not really close to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now we have two Christmas trees, a reject one and a better one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s kind of how the holidays are going for us. I mean, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reject one live in the house?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re both in the garage right now. The reject one is laying on the floor in the garage and the good
⏹️ ▶️ John one is in the stand in water. So it’s trying to keep it alive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re just slowly starving the bad one?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what we’re going to do with that. We’re having difficulty. I’m not going to get into all my difficulties. There
⏹️ ▶️ John will be an after show update, freezer update, for people who want to know. But there is much
⏹️ ▶️ John more going on than just that. Maybe it’ll wait for a Rec Diffs episode in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’ve got to give us that content, man. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s too much. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, gosh. So wait, so I thought, my impression was there was almost not enough room in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garage for air, much less a tree, even more so two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christmas trees. Did you move the cars outside for a while?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the cars haven’t been in the garage for like a year. You know, as soon as the weather gets warm again,
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife takes over the garage and fills it with junk. And usually each winter, it’s a battle to get rid of enough
⏹️ ▶️ John junk that the car can fit back into it. But that is not happening anytime soon for reasons that I will mention in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my, oh my. You know, a little birdie is sending me a picture of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reject tree. and it is not great, John. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not great. But it was like, and that was one of the best ones because it had healthy branches
⏹️ ▶️ John from top to bottom. It’s just shaped like a pipe cleaner. And they were all like that. It’s not just like this one. They were all like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s like nine, 10-foot trees that just did not get wider at the bottom. I’m like, what is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, this tree is sad. Oh dear God, why would you buy this at all? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this- That was
⏹️ ▶️ John the best one, and you don’t understand. The place I go to get the trees is like a nightmare. Like just, it’s a parking
⏹️ ▶️ John lot that is too small with people all fighting with each other, trying to get parking spots and stalking other parking spots to get
⏹️ ▶️ John in there and just, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I would go somewhere, if this was the best one, I would go somewhere else. And if I couldn’t find anywhere else, I would get
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, because this is not. Fake tree is not an option. This tree would have been okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I mean, again, you just want it to be healthy. Like the other big problem is usually they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t have- Well, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starving it though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually the branches lower are just like either gone are pathetic, that they can’t hold anything. This thing
⏹️ ▶️ John had sturdy branches from top to bottom. So among the skinny trees that would fit in our house,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was the best one. And the problem is we went too late. Like you need to go like basically the day after Thanksgiving and we waited
⏹️ ▶️ John too long because we did our acts together. So we had slim pickings. Literally.
Follow-up: Ubiquiti’s breach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. A few months ago, I think it was, we were talking about Ubiquiti’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breach. So to recap, Ubiquiti is like the fancy person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home networking equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco would say the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerdy and also like very often used in businesses networking equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fine, whatever. Like I said, fancy person. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say almost nobody who ever touches Ubiquiti gear would be considered a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy person by almost anybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good God, this show is going off the rails quick. All right, this conversation is quickly becoming a confrontation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Ubiquity had a breach several months ago and turns out, whoopsie-doopsies, it was from the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a post on bleepingcomputer.com, and I don’t remember where I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I apologize. I think it was in a Slack somewhere. But Nicholas Sharpe, who is posing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an anonymous company whistleblower, planted damaging news stories falsely claiming that the theft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of data, of ubiquity data, had been by a hacker enabled by a vulnerability in the company’s computer systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Among other things, this is a quote, Sharp applied one-day lifecycle retention policies to certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logs on AWS, which would have the effect of deleting certain evidence of the intruder’s activity within one day, court
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documents read. After his extortion attempts failed, Sharp shared information with the media while pretending to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a whistleblower and accusing the company of downplaying the incident. So he leaked the data and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got—pretended to be ticked off about the fact that the data was leaked. It is, while truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evil, a very ingenious plot, and it would be much funnier if it wasn’t so gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John not that ingenious, because it seems like he got caught pretty easily here. Touche. Touche.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And fairly quickly as well. I mean, this is only a few months ago, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But anyway, I admire the hustle, if nothing else. And actually, I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I admire nothing else about this plan. But nonetheless, it was—all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding aside—it was a little bit alarming because even though I genuinely do use and have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid for some but not all of Eero stuff in my house, and I genuinely do like it, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ever got to a point that I didn’t want Eero anymore, I would probably turn to Ubiquiti. And when all of this happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of was like, oh, I don’t know if I would ever go to that either. But now we know their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues were all personnel-related things from the inside. So whoopsie-doopsie.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the data was leaked, because he was inside the company. He did have access to the data and he did leak it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John believe that to be right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it also, a couple of current and former employees I’ve seen comment here and there anonymously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sounds like this wasn’t just some low-level engineer. This was a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-ranking person in the company. And apparently, people did not enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working with him on many levels. And so it sounds like Ubiquiti might,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe their security is not as bad as we all thought it might’ve been back then, but they definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some personnel issues for sure, or at least they had. And so they’re not doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything right. However, I am still very happily using all their wifi here.
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside whether there’s an actual criminal inside your organization, like the reports are like, hey, everyone complained about
⏹️ ▶️ John this person and nothing ever happened. And in general, that’s the sign of an organization that’s not healthy because no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John super important somebody is or no matter what they may have done in the past that has
⏹️ ▶️ John earned them a reputation as a good employee who was involved with successful projects or whatever, if lots and
⏹️ ▶️ John lots and lots of people complain about them, it’s worth considering maybe that employee
⏹️ ▶️ John is not as valuable to the company as you think.
Sponsor: Slidebox
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you just swipe, swipe, swipe, and you can go through and sort and organize your photo library so
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco it usually feels like with the built-in tools, if I’m honest. And Slidebox integrates and interacts
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re organizing your actual photo library on your phone, just like you see it in the Photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And your organization then, of course, syncs. So if you pick through and delete all the crappy photos and everything, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all synced to all your devices. So it’s really a fantastic way to quickly, easily,
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4K Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of things that are not as valuable as I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so my desk has been rearranged again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Would you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know why? Is there still a large monitor on it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It depends on your definition of large because it ain’t 27 inches. I could tell you that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s not 32. No, I would have been much less suave about breaking that news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you. So That’s why they call them 4K Casey lists. Yep, that’s right. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no, what did you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my LG 5K, which in the time that it worked, I loved so dearly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that sound like any white car that you’ve once heard about on this very program? When it worked, it worked great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 5K seems to have gotten worse and worse. And so it was taking more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more cajoling to get it to actually display video on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen. But what was fascinating, though, is in as much as I’m laughing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to poke fun at both myself and this monitor, it was a very puzzling predicament that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. In the sense that… Was it? No, no, just hear me out. 10 out of 10 times, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would plug in my laptop to the 5k. The laptop would get power from the 5k every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, no matter what, without fail. Eight out of, well, nine out of 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, it would get video on the, it would display video on the 5k. Then like, like seven out of ten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, then like a couple days later, four out of ten times, and now it’s to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like basically never happens. And I didn’t understand, and I still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely understand how that could be, but Aydin Warsowski
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter gave me an excellent theory, and this is through his own terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lived experience. So Aydin writes, I have an LG 5K that has this issue as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The port is wearing down, and one of the high-speed connectors isn’t making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good contact. Cool. Power delivery and power does, so it charges.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I opened it up a while back and reflowed the connector, which fixed the issue temporarily, but it started up again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it took a little bit of back and forth, because I’m a dumb-dumb and didn’t understand what he was trying to say at first. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are several, of course, thinking about this deeper, there are many different pins in the USB-C connection, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And some of them are for power, and some of them are for data. And what Aydin was saying was that the power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pins, the way that they are physically connected to the PC board on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the LG 5K, those tend to be all right. Like they don’t tend to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any sort of physical issues, but the high speed data pins like to just kind of fall off after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while or lose their physical connection. And so that means that I can get power,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t get video, which is exactly the thing I’m seeing right now. So Aydin wrote a little more. He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that, this is with a picture, that it’ll be in the show notes, that’s the Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector on the LG 5K PCB. Aydin says, I wasn’t able to get good pictures from my phone due to the angle, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far pins, if you look at this picture, that transfer Thunderbolt 3 were not making good contact and caused signal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integrity issues on my monitor due to the connector pulling off the board. And I should have mentioned, and I forgot, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the days when it went from eight out of 10 times to five to two out of 10 times, I noticed that if I jiggled the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C connector, Occasionally I would get it to work. And then all of a sudden it would just die and stop working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But power would still be working. Nothing else would. So everything that I know says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I hit the nail on the head. And this is the real issue here. So I have done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chat day before yesterday, I believe it was. Maybe it was late yesterday. I did an online chat with LG and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to get an RMA, please, because I would like to get this serviced. It took just a couple of minutes of back and forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then they said, all right, it will be $150 to have you send it to us. and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we will repair it and send it back. Now they didn’t want to take my credit card over the chat because they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t and I wouldn’t have let them anyway. And they’re supposed to call me to get my credit card number, which hasn’t happened yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’m kind of wondering where that whole phone call is sitting. But nonetheless, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will get the 5G repair, excuse me, the LG 5K repaired and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computing life will be good again. But in the meantime, I had to figure out, well, what the hell do I do? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using just a 14 inch screen every day, all day, not the most desirable thing in the world. And I literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not have any other monitors in the house. So I sent a message,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sent a text to a good friend of mine who is at my last jobby job, who happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the IT director at that jobby job. And was like, hey man, do you happen to have any of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG4, now these are not ultra fine mind you, the LG4K sitting around that maybe I could like buy one off of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause I kind of need something to hold me over for a few weeks. And he said, you know what, don’t worry about it. I’ll just loan you one for a little while cause we’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. And so, out of the goodness of his heart, and I mean that genuinely, I ran
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my old office today for the first time in three years, and I picked up a 24-inch LG 4K monitor, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what I’m currently using on my desk right now. So I am back in 2018, baby! Woo! Even 24 inches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in 2018, was small. Yes, and actually, it’s funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I wrote a blog post about how much I hate the complete dearth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of monitor options for Macs these days, or particularly Retina monitors, And somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointed out to me, and they’re right, that strictly speaking, my own metrics say that this screen isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enough. It’s a long and involved story that I’m already running way too long. But suffice to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a certain like pixels per inch number that you should really hit in order to be retina. And even though I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey view this screen that I have in front of me, which is 24 inches at 4K, I do view it as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retina in the sense that for my eyes and from the distance at which I sit, I can’t see pixels, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s only like 180 PPI. and strictly speaking, it should be like 220 to be true to form retina.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even this screen, which I do endorse, isn’t strictly speaking one of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it? Four options that are on the market right now. So, or one of the four options that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retina capable, retina friendly, whatever on the market right now. It is truly ridiculous. So Apple, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the love of God, can I have something that is in between the LG 5K, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hashtag Marco was right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is maybe not the best thing in the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world, Oh, and the utterly ridiculous Pro Display XDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I should add, by the way, the morning that the LG 5K really gave up the ghost, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think a stiff, if somebody had coughed behind me, that would have been a stiff enough breeze to get me to buy the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and I didn’t. And that is the truth. I’m not trying to spring anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on you two. Like I really haven’t bought one. I really don’t intend to. And part of that is because it occurred to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me that two of these LG 4Ks, which again, I’m borrowing one, but if I were to buy two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them, it would be $600 all in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for the price of the stand of the XDR, you could get three of them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, exactly. No, you’re exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And I know the point you’re making and I agree with you. Yes, and that’s what I came down to. Like I was seriously about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to commit to buying an XDR and then it occurred to me for $6,000, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me rephrase, I guess, for $600, I can get two 4K screens, which without question is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nowhere near as good. But is an XDR 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than two of these 4Ks? I don’t know about that. It is certainly 10 times more expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is it 10 times better? I don’t know. Five times better? Probably. 10? I don’t know about that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why I didn’t. Remind me of this in a month when I end up buying one. But sitting here now, my hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I will use this borrowed 4K to get me by, and then in a month or maybe two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will finally have the 5K and be living the dream that I was for about a week before it died.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that that’s the dream. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s- That’s the best I got, Marco. I’m a simple man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You gotta dream a little bit, dream a few inches bigger. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been doing that for a long time, brother. All right, moving right along.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, before you move on,
⏹️ ▶️ John this picture of the connector, hopefully Marco will make this the chapter art,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, it’s the printed circuit board, green in this case, and then just coming out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the printed circuit board, you know, perpendicular to it, is the USB-C connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just soldered right to it. Like, that seems like a
⏹️ ▶️ John bad arrangement to me. It seems so, doesn’t it? I mean, in general, like if we keep in mind about this
⏹️ ▶️ John in laptops for years, it’s usually a good idea to have like a separate smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John printed circuit board to just host the connectors, for anything that has connectors, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a laptop with its ports on the sides or a monitor with ports on the back, and then have like a ribbon cable or something
⏹️ ▶️ John flexible that connects to the main printed circuit board because the connectors can wear
⏹️ ▶️ John out because they’re like a mechanical part, things are going into them and out of them and people yank and things and things bend
⏹️ ▶️ John and get pulled or whatever. And so if the connector goes bad, what you want to happen is, oh, well, I’ll just replace this whole little sub-assembly
⏹️ ▶️ John with this little printed circuit board with the three connectors on it. I’ll just rip out that ribbon cable, throw this in the garbage, get a new one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those, plug it in without having to replace or re-solder anything on the board or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it also provides a form of strain relief. Like the connectors can be on a little thing that is independent and is
⏹️ ▶️ John bolted directly to the back of the display, so it’s fixed in place, rather than,
⏹️ ▶️ John in this arrangement, I’m assuming the openings on the back of the monitor support these connectors a little bit, so they can’t move around
⏹️ ▶️ John too much. But depending on how precisely engineered the plastic is and how well
⏹️ ▶️ John the printed circuit board is supported inside there, apparently it’s not constructed well
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. But this just seems like a design that was made to eventually fail, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes me worry about how the connectors in the back of my Pro Display XDR connector. They
⏹️ ▶️ John just sticking out of the circuit board like that. Like I already dread taking that connector
⏹️ ▶️ John in and out and I tried to never do it, but anyway, this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the XDR’s connectors are like, like the holes are part of the solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal casing. Like they, those things can’t budge. Like I can’t imagine that would be an issue. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John translating, but if you are to bend the connector down, could the inside of it tilt
⏹️ ▶️ John up while using the case as a fulcrum? You know what I mean? like a levering action?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think they’re so rigid from the metal that I wouldn’t worry about that too much, but certainly it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, I’m very careful with this type of thing, but this LG design seems just like a bad idea from the start
⏹️ ▶️ John that is sort of bound to fail. So if they fix it, they’re just gonna give you a new circuit board that’s like this, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John just be very, very careful
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey when you plug things in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And make sure nothing ever pulls on the cord or yanks it or does anything bad to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, truly, I don’t know what I’m going to do specifically, but like, you know, as a silly example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I moved the LG 4K down to the screened-in porch once, you know, just because it was a beautiful day and I wanted to have it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down there. And in any normal situation, I wouldn’t think a thing of it. But now, once that LG 5K arrived,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did I say 4K a minute ago? I meant 5K. But anyway, once that ultra fine 5K arrives back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my house after the repair, I will probably like super glue it to my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe even super glue a cable to the back of it, because my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I can’t say in this picture, maybe this is a smaller printed circuit board that has the connectors on it, and it’s just that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the that printed circuit board has them connected strange like normally when you have a separate printed circuit board that The connectors are like laying
⏹️ ▶️ John down flat on it like they are in a laptop or whatever But I guess maybe that’s not possible in the back of the monitor Anyway, I don’t I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pass any particular judgment from this very zoomed in picture except to say that apparently this is a chronic Problem on the LG
⏹️ ▶️ John 5k so it seems like it’s not the best way to do Connectors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chronic problems in the LG 5k is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, and that’s that’s the thing is I would love genuinely I would love to have somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, pipe up from the back of the house and say, hey, did you realize the, you know, I don’t know, ASUS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey QRSTUV6573 monitor exists and is exactly what you want. And a lot of people have said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, well, there, here’s a 4K 27-inch monitor that’s very cheap. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not what I want. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dennyson There’s a million 4K 27-inch monitors. Aaron Powell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. And so what I, if, genuinely, if somebody is out there listening and knows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a monitor that is available in the United States today that is between 22
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 24 inches and 4K or preferably about 27 inches and 5K. Please let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know people love to reach out with like these 32 plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch monstrosities that are 5K in one dimension and then like, I don’t know, 15, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like 5K vertically and like 15K horizontally. I’m not into that. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as close as I can get to an iMac screen without the computer behind it, if you please. if such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing exists, let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re behind the times though, as we discussed last show, like I know this would be fine for your purposes, like the LG 5K
⏹️ ▶️ John and this 4K, these are not HDR monitors, these are not mini LED.
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the new modern specs. They’re not high refresh, I don’t think, right? Nope, they don’t. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any of the modern specs that your laptop screen has. So you’re just looking for like, oh, something that will
⏹️ ▶️ John tide me over or something that, you know, but you’re never gonna see HDR images on these things. You’re not gonna get 120 Hertz out
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, right? So, and this is why I think you should not get the XDR. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR is gonna be replaced anytime soon. I just think now it is too late to buy it. And when will
⏹️ ▶️ John it be replaced? In six years. Oh, so you’re saying it’s too late to buy it now, but it’s gonna be replaced in six years? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s exactly what I’m saying. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way of the Apple monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you ever bought an Apple monitor before? This is the experience, right? Mark when I got in just under the line, we bought it
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was the best option available and it was actually kind of good. But now that you can buy a 14 inch laptop with a screen that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better, although way, way smaller, it’s too late now. No way you spend $6,000 on this monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to wait for Apple to either put out the new big iMac with a cool screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the monitor that uses that screen, or I don’t know what you wait for. Like, so I feel for you, Casey, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad you held strong and did not buy the XDR because it is not time to buy that screen. It’s time to wait six years
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be refreshed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing is like- I
⏹️ ▶️ John disagree with, okay. That’s, I think for me and Casey and most
⏹️ ▶️ John normal people, it is not time to buy the XDR. time passed and he missed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you. And the thing of it is, is that a lot of people have been have said in so many words, sometimes kindly, sometimes not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, what is your sanity worth? And what is, you know, this would arguably help you earn more money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by helping you do your job better. Why would you not spend that money? And if it was $2,000, like I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid in retrospect, maybe should have paid full price for an LG5, like a new LG5K.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But even that seemed a little spendy. If I could get like an XDR or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along those lines for a couple grand, I probably would. But $6,000, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t, I can’t get to the point where I think that that is a reasonable expenditure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of money. Even if it could make, even if it printed, it had a money printer on the back that printed money. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don’t know if I could do it because it’s just so preposterously expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing I’ll add to those, with your vision the way way it is, Casey. A retina, like you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re aiming for like 220 points per inch or whatever, 180 or even 150, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John may be your future anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the idea that you might get a 32
⏹️ ▶️ John inch screen with like 170 points per inch, that may be what you
⏹️ ▶️ John want. Like I know a lot of, I mean, a lot of people as they get older and their eyes get worse, end up going to like 42 inch televisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John like people you were using
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like 42 inch plasma TVs or something
⏹️ ▶️ John because it makes things bigger, as in it has lower PPI, right? And it’s larger, physically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking. So, you know, it’ll, it’s easy, it’s, as you said, it’s very, not very
⏹️ ▶️ John easy, but it’s easier to find 4K 27-inch monitors with HDR and high refresh. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John are still expensive as discussed on past shows, but at least they exist. And having, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got one right here. I play my PlayStation on a 4K 27-inch monitor. And for a while, when I had like
⏹️ ▶️ John the DDK, the little Mac mini thing, I hooked it up to that. and everything’s bigger, right? It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s quote unquote, not retina. Everything looks bigger, like a funhouse type thing. And I don’t need that
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, but if my vision continues to deteriorate, that might be the type of thing that I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John So by the time Apple comes out with like, finally, they made a monitor that’s retina and it’s 5K and it’s a reasonable price.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, yeah, but now the pixels are too small for me cause I’m old. That’s probably not gonna happen to you anytime soon, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m probably getting close to that. So I’m enjoying my retina 6K while I have
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And when it’s refreshed in six years, I, my eyes won’t be able to see it anymore. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think you’re exactly right. I think there’s that, and that’s part of the reason why this, strictly speaking, incorrect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG, not ultra fine 4K that I’m looking at right now, part of the reason why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is acceptable is because my eyes are garbage. And so, so for me, it’s like, yeah, whatever. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s good enough. I don’t know. It’s just, it’s so frustrating. Like we don’t need to perseverate on this anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just so frustrating that this is seemingly a solvable problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple, especially like, they’ve gotten these MacBook Pros so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And to have no good options, either first or third party, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could excuse it if let’s suppose that we all agree that the LG 5K UltraFine was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really truly ultra fine. Like it was a great monitor, just for the sake of discussion. Then fine, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Apple branded, but okay, that’s no big deal. But the fact that there is literally nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the market I can find that is truly workable other than the XDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is now eliminated because it’s so absurdly expensive. It’s such a hole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in their lineup. And I got to assume they’re going to fill this hole at some point, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is this hole there? Let’s fix this, please. Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John had a tweet occasionally, or Tim Cook’s Twitter account
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco occasionally tweets things like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here I am at the opening of Apple Store and whatever, and we love all our customers and blah, blah, blah. And one of them was like, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at these people doing creative things with our new MacBook Pros. And it showed a bunch of people with MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in front of this big setup doing, I don’t know, audio, video, whatever they’re doing. So they’re professionals using their
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros, right? And there are a bunch of monitors attached to the MacBook Pros, and none of those monitors were Apple monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I did a snarky quote tweet going, oh, I wonder why they’re not using Apple monitors. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because I understand where Apple’s coming from and that the market is probably small, but that’s true of the Mac Pro as well. We already
⏹️ ▶️ John had this conversation. No, not a lot of people are going to buy the Mac Pro. yes, Apple, you still have to make it. Like even if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a money loser, like just to have a complete lineup, just to have some coherence, right? Otherwise, you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John take your best, most perfectly arranged like glamor shot of people using your products in real world
⏹️ ▶️ John situations, and you’d be embarrassed by things. And they’d be embarrassed by the fact that there was six monitors in front of these people and
⏹️ ▶️ John none of them were Apple monitors because they didn’t need XDRs, and there’s no other choice, ha ha. So they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John meant. And the other thing they’re embarrassed about is those brand new MacBook Pros with their amazing displays
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the ports and everything had this giant mess of dongles coming out of the back of them because they were like HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John dongles. So they could have like three HDMI monitors attached to it and everything. Cause why are the monitors HDMI monitors? Cause that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all you can buy. Cause you know, it’s just, I, you know, Tim Cook probably doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about these things. They’re like, Hey, they bought Apple products. It’s great. And we love how our products integrate with their existing
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors that they use for all those stuff. But you know, it would be nicer if we could say, look, we
⏹️ ▶️ John sell a complete solution and they can use all of our stuff and Apple might say, well, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can just buy Pro Display XDRs, but no one wants to waste money. If you don’t need a Pro Display XDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just need a 4K size monitor, Apple doesn’t sell one. So you have to get whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they were using in that picture and it’s not a good look for Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco especially in
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, you want them to work with other monitors, I’m not saying only have proprietary monitors, but in the glamor
⏹️ ▶️ John shot, you want to say, look, if you buy all Apple stuff, it works all well together and it’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. And you just can’t do that, to Casey’s point, you made these great new laptops, they have places where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John connect monitors, what am I supposed to put in there besides the XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, just to put things in perspective, this monitor, which I’m very thankful to be able to borrow, I’m running it via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DisplayPort. What is this, like 2002? I mean, I’m going USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to DisplayPort because if I use HDMI, I believe it’s only 30 Hertz. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it’s fine, everything’s fine. I’m thankful for this monitor, but it’s just frustrating. It’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a few things are true at the same time. You know, thing number one is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, the XDR is absurdly expensive. Thing number two is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, you should buy one anyway. And thing number three is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what will probably actually happen is, the monitors that you’re juggling now, whether it’s the 4Ks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have now, the 5K if it ever comes back, and if it then subsequently works after that, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are two big ifs in my mind, if all that happens, that will probably tide you over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until mid next year, at which point Apple probably will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release a monitor. Like I expect if they have a monitor project going, which was lightly rumored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a year ago, I would expect it to come out probably at WBDC this coming year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, or you know, thereabouts. So I think this hole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their lineup, which is very big and very real, I think they did finally admit to themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should fill that hole in typical Apple fashion. Even though this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant fire in the product line was there, they’re gonna take their sweet time to fill it, but when they do finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill it, it’ll probably be fine. That being said, they’re probably also, in a similar time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame, going to release the larger iMac. And when that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming that the larger iMac and the next large monitor come out in a similar time frame,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re gonna have a big decision to make about whether you go for the larger iMac for your desktop needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and relegate your current laptop to laptop only needs. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you really couldn’t go wrong with either there of those options when they come, and assuming the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor does come.
Desktop vs. laptop today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny, I might be the only person that is not excited for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new 27-inch iMac or whatever fills that gap. Because right now, monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accepting, and I know I’ve done a lot of complaining about the monitor situation, especially over the last week or two, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor accepted. I could not be happier with this MacBook Pro. It is so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a couple of software quirks here and there. Like the SD card reader seems to be a piece of garbage, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still getting some Bluetooth wonkiness. But I’m pretty sure both those are software. And so eventually those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will get fixed, I have to assume. And leaving that aside, these laptops are so good. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am so happy with this laptop. I didn’t think I could be happier with a computer than I was with the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I got a portable iMac Pro and it turns out that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John even better.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re going to be even happier with the big iMac though. Like I think it’s a no-brainer when that happens, you have a decision to make. The decision is
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the new iMac because the new iMac will be faster than these laptops. You’ll know it will have a good display.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that problem is solved. And then your laptop continues to be an awesome laptop. it’s just freed from the burden of
⏹️ ▶️ John having to also be a mediocre desktop for you, right? It will just be a great laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll also have a great desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re great desktops too. That’s the great thing about this. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thing. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac will be an even greater desktop because it will be less thermally constrained and will have a bigger screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The screen, you’re right, the iMac will probably have the bigger screen and everything. But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t feel any constraints, at least using the 16 inch as a desktop. The 14 inch, if you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sustained long testing on the 14 inch, it does thermally throttle sooner than the 16 inch does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in practice, most people aren’t doing that kind of work. And these are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like when the iMac comes out, it’s gonna be less of like a bomb going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of joy and happiness because Apple’s are making really great desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while now. You know, the desktops weren’t on fire the way the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were. Like the desktop lineup from, you know, Even the 27-inch regular iMac before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iMac Pro, the 27-inch iMac has always been a pretty great computer. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, for its entire existence, it’s been a pretty great choice. And those have been really good, especially when they went Retina,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was, like, it just was so great. The 27-inch 5K iMac, what an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing computer for its entire existence. And then the iMac Pro took that model and made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it even better. And again, amazing computer, even though they only ever made one of them. amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, amazing product line. The new Mac Pro, even though it’s ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no longer really new by any stretch of the imagination, but the soon to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outgoing John Mac Pro, that also amazing computer for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is. Like they really have been making great desktops. Hell, even, you know, we mentioned last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the Mac Mini from 2018 forward has been great. So Apple’s been making great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktops for years now. we weren’t as starving for great desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from them. They haven’t been making amazing laptops since 2016 or so. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, there’s been all these compromises, and so to finally have really freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great laptops coming out of Apple, you know, from last year’s M1-based models, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making them even better now with this new line of MacBook Pros, oh my God, they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, and frankly, as I mentioned in my kind of review episode of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My desire for a desktop is lower than ever right now because currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fastest Macs you can buy, by far, are MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m extremely happy with this and using this laptop as a desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t feel much compromise at all. The only thing I feel is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I still have to open it up to turn it on if it’s powered down, but oh well, that never happens in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have Touch ID on my keyboard, but that’s only because I don’t have Apple’s keyboard. Even that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be solved now if I wanted it to be. So this is just great. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such an awesome computer as a laptop or as a clamshell mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop. These things rock. It is nothing like previous laptops being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used in this way. Like, if you’re interested in using clamshell mode, or even, I haven’t tried side-by-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, we have the laptop open, but a lot of people do that. that I’m doing right now. There you go. The M1 series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of laptops is so much better at either one of those than the previous, than any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Intel ones, and hell, even the PowerPC ones. These are so good. I can’t overstate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good a computers these are and how happy it makes me that finally, Apple’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kick-ass amazing laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but obviously you have it connected to an XDR, so you have the monitor problem, solved, quote unquote solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey does not have one of those, nor should he buy one. So his decision will be different than yours. And honestly, your
⏹️ ▶️ John decision, especially if they come up with a 20 core version of the iMac, you’re probably gonna get that too, let’s be honest. Although you might not, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be a downgrading screen size. So you have a more, your decision, Marco, is trickier because
⏹️ ▶️ John do you wanna give up 6K for 5K, depending on what big the iMac screen is and so on. But Casey’s decision is
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward, is you get to use your laptop as a laptop and you get a desktop with a good screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s faster than your laptop. So it’ll be straightforward for Casey when the big iMac comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Will it though? Because I just spent like $5,000 on this laptop on the agreement with myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, maybe you’ll Hemingway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I just feel like I’ve always been in the opinion that let a desktop be a desktop, let
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop be a laptop. Don’t try to use one for both. If you wanna spend $6,000 on a monitor, then
⏹️ ▶️ John you can be in Marco’s land, but honestly, Marco’s only gonna be in that land until something with a ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John higher number of cores comes out, in which case he’ll jump ship to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would probably have to be a Mac Pro though. I wouldn’t, I don’t think I would jump ship for an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac because of the monitor thing, you know, but a Mac Pro would be tempting,
⏹️ ▶️ John think. Or like a mini Mac Pro, this half-size thing. We don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know what that
⏹️ ▶️ John whole lineup is gonna be like, but yeah. You’re just waiting to see something that is appreciably faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than what you’ve got and you don’t have any issues right now because the laptop works great in clamshell and you already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and even like, the things I would want to be faster mainly are Xcode builds. But I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even just from going from four performance cores to eight, I’m nearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that point where like, things start to level off with Xcode builds of my scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I might not even need the Mac Pro when it comes out. And I know everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna make fun of me for even thinking that I would possibly not buy it, but I didn’t buy the last one.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. Yeah, but you had a 10 core iMac Pro at that point. Yeah, fair enough. So, you know, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see what the compile times are like. Again, you are using more Swift, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t even get them started. No, I think the more interesting question to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I guess maybe a Mac Pro for Marco, but even potentially more interesting is what happens if we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get some sort of screaming Mac Mini that has, you know, basically the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro guts, but in a Mac Mini? Because I think if I were Marco, that would be pretty appealing. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re here, so you tell me I’m wrong, but I gotta imagine, okay, tell me why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if I didn’t already own my desktop laptop, maybe. Okay, fair. But now that I’ve joined the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of desktop laptop for the time being, it’s great that if I’m going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a trip where I wanna actually bring all of my stuff with me, all of my work, all of my files, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have the biggest screen I can have, I can bring the giant laptop and I have my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really, if there’s not significant compromises for using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop as a desktop, then there’s no reason to get a desktop. The only reason we get desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because usually there are huge trade-offs involved. When if you try to use a laptop as a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of just using a desktop. You know, actual desktops are better in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But those ways are smaller than ever right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John In fact, right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the way. Right now the laptops are better than the desktops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re in this weird situation where the powerful desktops have not yet been, have not gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John the ARM system on a chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treatment. Right, and they will. Like, you know, next summer or next fall, whenever it is that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get faster desktops, you know, that’ll put things kind of back in order a little bit, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops are so good and so, like, low compromise. I mean, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instance, like, typical things that have always been problems in the past whenever I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use a laptop as a desktop. number one thing usually was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermals and fan noise. And with these current, like with the 16 inch, that is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a thing. I haven’t tried using the 14, I can’t speak to it like as a desktop configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the 16 inch, this thing is quieter under load,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full load, like full sustained 100% CPU load for hours. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quieter than my iMac Pro was. And that was a very quiet machine. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was remarkable. It’s quieter than the Mac Pro at idle and load.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the Mac Pro has like real fans. This thing is so quiet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and runs so cool. And I mentioned how I keep it in a vertical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like little wood clampy stand with the vent, the screen hinge and vent on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can reach over, I can put my hand on top of the vent, I can feel the temperature of the air and the velocity of the air coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the machine. I almost never feel anything, or I’ll feel a very slight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air current, and it’s barely warm at all. Or it’s just cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This thing, the thermals and the noise are so good on this. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major compromise number one with desktop, laptop situations, out the window. This thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is silent the vast majority of the time, and even again, when I was able to crank it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is like the only time I’ve ever heard the fans was when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maxed out all of the CPU cores for multiple hours. Then I heard the fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely and again it was warm you know the air coming out was warm but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing like any Intel machine of any class I’ve ever seen. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s thing number one. Thing number two usually using a desktop as a laptop is a bit unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially regarding sleep-wake and the connection or disconnecting of screens. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem to be a thing with any of the M1 based computers. The MacBook Air and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these new MacBook Pros. Like, so far the Apple Silicon, you know, use in clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or out of clamshell, plugging in external displays, disconnecting external displays, all that stuff seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more reliable with the M1 based stuff than previous machines. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromise is also gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree with that with a small asterisk. I would, when the 5k was still working, rest in peace,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would sometimes have my computer in clamshell and sometimes not. And one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy thing about the M1 Macs is that they will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come back to like, you know, not when they’re suspended, but when they’re just, you know, the screen is off, there’s kind of, what is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the name of that? When it’s not fully asleep, but the screen is off, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, point being when the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is off and you hit a button in order to wake the screen up, the screen wakes instantly. and any other monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any other monitor, well maybe not the XDR actually, but any other monitor I’ve ever seen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re feeling like you’re waiting a year for that darn thing to turn on. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remarkable how quick these M1 Macs wake up and also switching resolutions, like just for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grins, I was doing that just a moment ago on this very, very old LG 4K monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s astonishing how quickly that even this old monitor can switch resolutions. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Intel days where you sit there with a stopwatch and wait 15 seconds for flicker, flicker, flicker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey black screen, flicker, flicker, black screen. It’s instant when you switch resolutions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which sounds like such a silly thing, but it’s so delightful. So yes, I absolutely agree with everything you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying. It is unbelievable how few compromises
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these machines have. And for that reason, I don’t know, again, leaving the displays aside, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, John, that I would get an iMac because I would feel guilty about spending another $5,000 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it would be on another computer. And because I really don’t have compromises on this machine. I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really don’t. It’s remarkable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there’s so many other ones too. Like other compromises that you would typically get with laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually like the performance ceiling would not be as high because they don’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermals. Well, we’ll see what chips they put in the iMac and the Mac Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are, like following the current rumors and their current apparent strategy so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’ve had with the M1 series of chips and the products they’ve built from them, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re mostly just putting the same chips in the desktops and the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and running them at the same or very close or close enough clock speeds. And, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t actually expect significantly higher CPU performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the families. Now, what they do on the GPU side, that’s gonna depend. I would suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna beef that up in various ways, as rumored. But if it ends up that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Pro is gonna have two of these chips, or one of these chips, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro has two of them, or four of them, for my purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be mostly the same performance between the MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just gonna add more parallelism for very large parallel tasks. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the MacBook Pro is already reaching the point of diminishing returns for Xcode builds of my size and scale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I’m not gonna really need anything faster for a lot of cases until I start using SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the real compromise for a desktop laptop, as far as I’m personally concerned, and I think this is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John even people who are not as obsessed with this as I obviously am, is you get all your windows arranged
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you unplug the monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John where does your 6K worth of windows go on your tiny little 14 inch screen? well, they go somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and the OS tries to do something sensible with them and I think it’s been better about restoring them, but it’s still just like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve disrupted your working environment because now you need to go use your laptop and having them separate means
⏹️ ▶️ John that your desktop is arranged the way it is and no one’s ever going to pick up your desktop and smush
⏹️ ▶️ John it screen to be smaller or remove a screen and suddenly it used to think it had two screens and now it just has one and that one screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is only 14 inches instead of 6k. That’s a disruption as far as I’m concerned. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did it at work for when I was still going to the office for many, many years. And as we said in this program, my solution to
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem was to run my, the monitor attached to my
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop at the exact same resolution as the monitor on my desk. And I could do that because
⏹️ ▶️ John I had these pre-retina things and I ran the laptop at the highest, like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, the most scaled resolution, right? And I just manned my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor at its native resolution, was it 1920 by 1200 or whatever? So it was 1920 by 1200 both and I mirrored displays. So even when I yanked it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John knew nothing moved. That had its own compromises. 1920 by 1200 on a 15 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop was not great and it was kind of blurry. And 1920 by 1200 on a non-written display
⏹️ ▶️ John was also not the best, but that was the compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John I chose there. And I don’t think you could do that in the modern world nor would I want to. So if I had an XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John and a laptop attached or even a 16 inch laptop and I disconnected the laptop, what happens to my Windows? It’s madness.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s gonna keep me on desktops forever. And I also don’t like laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s a fair point. Like that is like the disruption of taking, of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unplugging a laptop from his desktop configuration and taking it with you. Yeah, there was a lot of disruption that happens. You know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’ll disconnect. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John got external disks attached to the monitor. Like desktops, you’re able to sort of build a
⏹️ ▶️ John setup with a bunch of junk. And the laptop, yeah, it’s great that you can take it away and take it with you, but not everything comes with the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some stuff stays on the desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are utilities, like there’s one called Stay that purports to fix that window or even problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John actually have it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my list to try it out. I haven’t tried it out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please don’t send us the million apps that do this. We all know about them. But the thing is like the OS, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS could do this better. Third party apps do it better. But in the end, if you used to have a 6K display and a 16 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you just have a 16 inch, like something’s got to give. Like there’s no solution to this with
⏹️ ▶️ John software. You now have less space for your stuff, especially if you had stuff arranged carefully on both screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go? Well, I mean, I think that can be solved with apps, but I think the bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco counterpoint here is like, even if, like, this is why I think my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two laptop situation is actually kind of great, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the thing. If a MacBook Pro is actually a better desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than most desktops for most people, then even if you literally never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move it, you might be better off getting it as your desktop, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in case you might need to move it sometime. If you’re a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John user, it’s like you said, it’s the best desktop you can get. Just think of it as like a car up on blocks in your front lawn, it never goes anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the highest performance
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop that Apple sells right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, I think if you’re gonna be like super mobile back and forth all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, then yeah, get a laptop. if you’re gonna be only occasionally mobile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still think this makes sense. Because again, if there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant compromises to it not being a desktop, then it being a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always going to be better. Because even if you hardly, it’s like people who buy SUVs, like well I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go off-road sometime. It’s like, well even if you almost never do, you still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that capability if you need it. And if there were no other compromises, you know, it’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are, SUVs have higher rollover
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco risk. I know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know. They use more fuel and they’re more subject to crosswinds. And like, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I know. But imagine if there were no compromises. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but there still are some. Like, it’s way better than it used to be for sure. And Apple’s line is in a weird place
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. But there is less space inside those things. And all the components are sort of wedged
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. And batteries can expand and do weird stuff. And there’s not as much, there’s room for dust to get
⏹️ ▶️ John caught. And like, don’t get me wrong, they’re way better than they used to be. and right now they are the best desktop that Apple sells, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I expect this to be a temporary condition. It just depends on how much value you put on the other stuff and how
⏹️ ▶️ John lucky you get in avoiding the laptop whammies because like I would, you know, if given
⏹️ ▶️ John the choice, I would rather have a purpose-built desktop like an iMac than the laptop, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were exactly the same speed and I never disconnected them, just because like, why do I wanna pay for a monitor that I’m gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ John folded up all the time if I don’t wanna use it that way? Why do I want to pay to have everything miniaturized and put in
⏹️ ▶️ John the skinniest possible case when that has no value for me, although-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktops are gonna be any different?
⏹️ ▶️ John Given the way the iMacs are, we don’t know yet, but you know, the 24-inch iMac, that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a different distinction, but maybe the big one it will be. But yeah, just like the laptops are, you know, they’re made to be small
⏹️ ▶️ John and portable, and they expect you to carry them around. And it’s not that there are compromises, but there are different
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs for achieving that portability. If that portability literally isn’t important
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, then the only reason to buy them right now is because it’s the best desktop that Apple sells, but that won’t be true for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, man, I keep coming back to, I think Marco’s right, that with so few trade-offs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, and you’re hanging your hat on things that just really aren’t true anymore, like, oh, there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space. Well, it’s all, like, look at the iMac 24-inch, you just said it yourself, it’s all crammed into this.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’m saying right now, that’s the right thing to do, but I assume, I mean, certainly the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro will be less compromised in terms of how much space,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at least I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be, but we don’t know. The big iMac might be as thin as the 24-inch, but it might not be. So we have to wait and see what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does with these other desktops. Already I would say the M1 Mac mini, incredibly spacious. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this empty, literal empty space is not there, right? Obviously it’s not the M1 Pro and the M1 Max inside
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but the Mac mini is suddenly a cavernous, you know, it’s got this massively
⏹️ ▶️ John overbuilt power supply, right? From the old Intel Mac mini, this tiny little logic
⏹️ ▶️ John board with a system on a chip on it. And I feel, I think I would feel more confident
⏹️ ▶️ John about the longevity of an M1 Mac Mini than a new 14 inch M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Max. And just because the new 14 inch M1 Max, it’s got a bunch of batteries inside there and it’s much tighter and there’s more room
⏹️ ▶️ John for stuff to get caught in the M1 Mac Mini is just an empty cavern, an
⏹️ ▶️ John overbuilt empty cavern. You know, it’s probably gonna be fine. Like it’s not that big of a difference. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the compromises that used to be there are just not there anymore. But it doesn’t mean there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John zero of them. It just means that they’re falling below the threshold of people, most people caring, but
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely not falling below the threshold of me caring. And in the end, it is a waste to buy a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and a keyboard and a trackpad if you’re not gonna use them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I think ultimately the biggest reason to get the new iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it comes out, again, we don’t know anything about it, but the biggest reason to get the new iMac when it comes out is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be the screen problem. Like it’s gonna be that, oh, well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Apple still is not gonna have- Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t have a monitor with it, then that is the biggest selling, but you’re basically buying a monitor I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John that has a computer attached.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the screen problem is gonna be a big driver. And then secondarily to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, desktops do have more ports. It’ll have things like built-in ethernet that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops don’t have and
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, well, probably. I mean, at least on the PowerBrick, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Will it be like 10 gig ethernet on the Mac Pro? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I mean, so I think, yeah, there are still reasons, but I think what Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has said, it was important. It’s like, there are still reasons, but they’re mattering less and less over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they matter less now than ever with that one exception of the monitor question, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we keep coming back to this, you’re gonna bring it back around. That’s why it’s such a glaring hole in the lineup. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re either willing to set $6,000 on fire or have some other solution to your monitor needs on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your desktop besides relying on a built-in one for like an iMac, if you have the monitor question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answered, the MacBook Pro is the best desktop Apple makes. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new iMacs, whenever they come out, will be that much better than the MacBook Pro is already.
⏹️ ▶️ John Agreed. Well, see, I mean, it’s easy to predict. If you wanna make bets on Marco changing
⏹️ ▶️ John his setup, that’s usually a safe bet. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have gone back and
⏹️ ▶️ John forth from laptop, desktop, laptop, desktop. I’m assuming this cycle will continue to repeat. And that means
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually you’ll be in a desktop again for a little while. So we’ll see. I mean, you were just very recently, you were
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac mini, but just because that was the best one you could get. but now the laptops are better. So now you’re on that, and there’ll probably be desktops
⏹️ ▶️ John that come out that are better and you’ll be on that. Who knows, round and around you go.
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Apple Self-Service Repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should probably talk about Apple announcing self-service repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This dropped like a month ago now, but we just haven’t had a chance to get to it. And so this is Apple announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey self-service repair, which will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuine parts and tools. It starts with the iPhone 12 and 13 and M1 Macs will be coming soon. It starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPhone with the display, battery and camera. This all began in the US in early 2022.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Following the repair, customers who return their used part for recycling will receive credit toward their purchase. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past three years, it is noted, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuine parts, tools, and training, including more than 2,800 independent repair providers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The rapidly expanding independent repair provider program, originally launched in the US in 2019, has since grown to more than 200
⏹️ ▶️ Casey countries, enabling independent repair shops to access the same training parts and tools as other Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorized service providers. I should, it’s probably obvious by now, but I should note this is an Apple PR release.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is interesting. I don’t think that I would be the kind of person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would want to open up my own phone and replace the display, but it’s cool that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can next year, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the context for this announcement, if you’re not going to keep up with things in this world, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, I guess, whatever. This seems weird or I’m not interesting or whatever, but there is a context
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple making this announcement. And that context is the challenge
⏹️ ▶️ John of people with broken Apple products getting them fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John and not wanting to pay a lot for that to happen. There are a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John challenges involved with that. There’s one YouTuber, Lewis Rossman, we’ll put a link to his video
⏹️ ▶️ John responding to this, but he does the type of repairs, you know, what is it, Sega does
⏹️ ▶️ John what Nintendo don’t, Rossman does what Apple don’t. If
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac is broken, you can of course, or your phone or whatever, you can of course take it
⏹️ ▶️ John to an Apple store and they will fix it for you for a price, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you might not like that price. That price might be really high. Let’s say you have one of those stupid laptops where everything was
⏹️ ▶️ John all attached to the top case and your stupid keyboard went bad and they had to replace the whole top case and let’s say it was out of warranty and you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna pay that much. Can’t you just fix the keyboard? No, we have to replace everything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That same thing plays out a lot of different ways. Oh, I cracked my screen on my laptop. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ John just replace the screen? No, we have to replace the entire assembly involved in the screen. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ John just the LCD panel is bad, we have to replace the aluminum top of the case and the backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the old days and the LCD thing. That even though they are independent parts, they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be replaced together. Oh, one chip on my logic board is bad. Can’t you just replace that chip? Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, new logic board, $900. Chip is 30 bucks, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the problem here. And you would
⏹️ ▶️ John think, okay, well, that’s what Apple wants to do. They wanna give you the best repair possible. They don’t wanna replace individual chips because when you replace
⏹️ ▶️ John individual chips, it’s unreliable and they just go bad again and there’s problems with corrosion and blah, blah, blah. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just wanna give you the best repair possible and that costs a lot of money. So fine, you don’t like it, Apple’s thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John go someplace else and get it repaired. That’s where the tricky part gets in. Where else are you going to go? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s Apple bragging about their independent repair providers and how they’ve doubled the number of those and
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re getting more and more places that have genuine Apple parts, which is another problem because lots of places will repair
⏹️ ▶️ John your stuff but put in sort of like equivalent parts, counterfeit parts, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John parts that are not genuine Apple parts, let’s say, that might cost less money or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that customers may be okay with, but Apple isn’t because what if, you know, their liability problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John or especially if it’s involving the battery or something or whatever. Um, so Apple wants there to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, a better network of independent repair shops that use
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple parts and the do things the Apple way. Uh, and for that to happen, those parts
⏹️ ▶️ John need to enter an agreement with Apple that says we will do the repairs the way we’re supposed to. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange, you will allow us to get Apple genuine parts and Apple genuine. you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, repair manuals that tell us how to fix them or whatever. But still like
⏹️ ▶️ John those places are under constraints due to that agreement with Apple. They’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John not allowed to do repairs that Apple thinks quote unquote shouldn’t be done. And that’s where this big tension
⏹️ ▶️ John is between people who want, I keep wanting to say, I don’t want to pay a lot for this
⏹️ ▶️ John muffler, but it’s an ad that only old people even know about it. And remember when I asked her on TV and people watch them, when it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago. They don’t wanna pay that much for things to get repaired. They’re okay having
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-genuine Apple thing if it means the screen on their phone works again. They don’t care. They just want to
⏹️ ▶️ John get their phone fixed for less money than Apple charges. And if they go to an independent Apple retailer
⏹️ ▶️ John and that retailer gets genuine Apple parts at the genuine Apple price and has to do it the genuine Apple way,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s probably not gonna be that much cheaper or to the degree that it will be cheaper, it’s just cutting into the margins
⏹️ ▶️ John of the independent shop. Like they’re not empowered to solve the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John problem here. That’s what I have in my mind. It’s like, what problem is being solved? The problem from consumer’s perspective is
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a broken thing. I want to pay the least amount possible to get it fixed. And I’m willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John compromise on like maybe long-term viability won’t be that good. It would be better
⏹️ ▶️ John if you replaced the whole logic board. Like I acknowledge that, but I don’t want to pay $900. I want to pay 200. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big difference in money, right? Or I just want my screen to be fixed. It doesn’t need to be genuine
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple screen. I don’t care if the screen is worse. I just want to be able to use my phone again so it’ll hold me over to next year and
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to pay half price, right? And that option
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, that problem is not being solved by this program. This program of allowing people to do things
⏹️ ▶️ John the genuine Apple way with genuine Apple parts is not helping. And so people like Lewis Rossman, his problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John at his shop, he can’t get the parts anymore because no one will sell them to him. Apple won’t sell them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who make the parts, like the actual vendors that Apple buys them from, also won’t sell him the parts. So
⏹️ ▶️ John he literally can’t get this one little, you know, $2 chip on a logic board that needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be replaced. He knows how to replace it. He can replace it. He’s got videos on YouTube of him replacing it and it costs way
⏹️ ▶️ John less than buying a whole new logic board. And yes, maybe it is less reliable over time, but this is a trade-off that consumers are willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to make. But Apple says consumers shouldn’t be able to have that choice. Consumers should only be allowed to repair
⏹️ ▶️ John their things in the way that Apple wants them to be repaired, which is usually the better, safer
⏹️ ▶️ John way, but also the more expensive way. And so this is the whole right to repair thing. How much say should
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple have as a vendor in how I can decide to get my thing repaired?
⏹️ ▶️ John And this program, it sounds like, oh, well fine, just do it yourself. But no, if you wanna do this yourself, you also
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay the genuine Apple price to get the genuine Apple parts and repair things the genuine Apple way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re starting with display, battery, and camera, which are things that break a lot on phones and same thing with Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to sell you the little chips that you need to fix a little thing on a logic board. They’re not going to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John you just this part of the screen instead of the whole screen assembly. Apple’s not going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So still Apple is exerting control by saying, here’s what we’ll sell you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we will tell all our vendors, you’re not allowed to sell any of the parts that you sell to
⏹️ ▶️ John us to other people. So Apple’s essentially boxing out independent repair shops from doing things
⏹️ ▶️ John not the genuine Apple way, which is kind of crappy. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John repair program doesn’t really do much to change that except in that
⏹️ ▶️ John it allows, I mean as far as I can tell, it allows people to undercut Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John by cutting into their own profit margins. By saying, okay, Apple wants X amount of profit margins because they have to maintain a fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John store in a mall, right? I don’t have to maintain that, I have lower rent. I’m in a smaller place
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t have like Italian marble tiles on the wall or whatever the hell Apple has in their Apple stores. And I’ll pass
⏹️ ▶️ John that savings on to you by taking less of a profit on this screen repair. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I will do the screen repair the Apple way with Apple parts and it will cost almost the same price
⏹️ ▶️ John minus 10% or something. And that 10% is 10% I’m eating because I have to pay the same price for the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple does, right? So I guess that helps. I’m not saying this announcement is bad. I’m just saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem that is, that the context, the surrounding context of like, hey, what is the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with people getting stuff repaired? That’s not being fundamentally changed by this program. It’s helping, it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John than not doing this. It’s better to have independent repair shops than to not have them. But still, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is essentially controlling from top to bottom exactly the kind of repairs that can be done to its products by anybody, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, John covered it really well. I think this is going to change things in small ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I mean, and it’s good if you’re one of the independent repair shops. Oh, I want more access to more stuff and to be able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John more repairs. Good, great. But the bigger problem, like the big question is, should Apple be able to decide how
⏹️ ▶️ John I can get my thing repaired? And the answer is right now they can, sort of like de facto, like
⏹️ ▶️ John through all their arrangements and dealings. It doesn’t look like they’re stopping you from doing anything, but they really
⏹️ ▶️ John are. And it’s kind of crappy. In some ways it’s also kind of better because you can these
⏹️ ▶️ John things have lithium ion, this is the scare tactic that Apple always uses. It’s the computer repair equivalent of think of the children.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, battery’s gonna explode because you use a cheap battery and they poke the battery when they were changing your screen and now everything’s setting
⏹️ ▶️ John on fire and everyone’s gonna die in flames, right? Like that’s, Apple will always tell you that you’re all gonna die in flames.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is some truth to that. Someone’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gonna die in flames.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, think of it this way. When you get your car repaired, you don’t have to go to the dealership.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can go other places and anybody can buy a part from Honda to repair your car. And Honda does
⏹️ ▶️ John not force you to rebuy the whole engine if you just need a new head gasket. They will sell you the head gasket.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will sell you every part in that car. It’s a good business. Parts are very profitable, right? But they won’t just, oh, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t just sell a head gasket, you need to buy the entire head. That’s not how Honda works. Imagine if they
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Imagine if first you could only take it to the Honda dealership and they said, no, we’ll allow third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John to do stuff, but also you can only buy the entire top of the engine. You can’t just buy a head gasket. Because we feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you just replace the head gasket, that’s not a good repair. You just need to replace the whole top of the engine. That’s the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re in with computers. And cars are way more dangerous than computers at this point, right? in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of potential for instant death, right? Yes, battery’s gonna go bad and burst into flames, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re hurtling along in this multi-thousand pound machine that could veer off into an immovable
⏹️ ▶️ John object in any second, but somehow we’re okay with doing it with cars, but computers, it’s, you know, when Apple makes the safety
⏹️ ▶️ John argument. It’s true, there’ll probably be more incidents of bad repairs and things going
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but is it gonna be worse than vehicles? And somehow the world goes on, we think it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can take your car to someplace other than the dealer. And I don’t think anybody, if you introduced the law, it said, hey, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John decided that you’re no longer going to be allowed to get your car repaired at any place other than the dealer. Well, that’s kind of true with Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. Sorry, Marco. But Tesla tries very hard to be like Apple in this regard of not allowing third
⏹️ ▶️ John party repairs. This whole YouTube video is not if you want to look at it. But I don’t think we’d want to go back with cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anyone would agree to a new law that says your car can only be repaired at the dealer because we
⏹️ ▶️ John know what would happen there. Well, that’s the situation we’re in with Apple. We were in with Apple, and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to expand it out in the other direction. But we’re nowhere near where we should be, which is I can get my car repaired
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere and I can be confident, unless I have a Tesla, I guess, that you can buy any part
⏹️ ▶️ John of this car, any one of these thousands and thousands of parts that make up this car, you can buy a genuine part or
⏹️ ▶️ John a replacement part that is not an OEM part and pay someone else to put it in there and it will be
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#askatp: iPhone keyboard vs. Touch Bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Todd Kaprilian writes, the iPhone was a big risk for Apple, in part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it didn’t have a hard keyboard. Instead, they opted for the flexibility of a virtual one. In this usage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a virtual interface was a smashing success. Following this lesson, I can see the merits of replacing the top row
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of regular function keys with virtual ones on the Mac laptops, like they did in the Touch Bar. This appears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have been a failure, however. do you think the use of a virtual interface works so well in one context but not the other?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a couple of theories. First of all, when I’m using the virtual keyboard on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phone, nine times out of ten, I am looking at the phone, whereas I am a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch typist. And so, it is very rare that I am looking down at my keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It happens, but it’s very, very rare, and it’s very unusual. And secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every iPhone had the same keyboard. Not every Mac had the same keyboard. And a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of times people who wrote code to create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey programs in applications for these Macs were doing it on iMacs, which didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a touch bar. So those are two potentially silly reasons, but those are two reasons I see why it never really took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. And then there were people like Marco who just never gave it a chance. Excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I gave it lots of chances. I’m kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kidding. No, I think, you know, number one, you’re right. That the fact is that when you are touching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen that you are looking at. That’s a very different thing than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a keyboard where traditionally, like typically, most people typing on physical laptop keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time are not looking at the keyboards when they’re typing on them. So that’s, you know, problem number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the touch bar required you to move your eyes every single time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to the keyboard to be able to reliably use it. Whereas with the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are looking at the screen the entire time you are actively using it, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a lot more direct interaction there. And I think the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the software keyboard on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not 100% better in every way than a physical keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it enabled such additional features like the screen opening up when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard wasn’t there into much more screen area and other kinds of customization or anything else. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it allowed other benefits that let us forgive the downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the virtual keyboard over a physical one. The TouchBar didn’t do that. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TouchBar didn’t enable enough additional value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the hardware keys to justify the loss of the hardware keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the biggest problem is that, you know, in certain ways it was significantly worse. you know, the lack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of feel, accidental input, you know, not having to like activate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to do certain things, you know, having to wake it up, you know, so it was worse in all these ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it wasn’t better enough. It didn’t provide enough benefit in, you know, to offset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ways in which it was worse, whereas the iPhone, it’s the opposite. The iPhone keyboard, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s worse than a hardware keyboard in some ways, but all these benefits came from doing that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we put up with those downsides. And it was overall a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-off. Yeah, and the Touch Bar just didn’t have that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I agree. That’s the big difference there. What do I get in exchange for this? In exchange for this weird thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you get on the phone is like, well, you get like double the screen size without making the device bigger. How does that feel? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s such a massive win. And the other thing I had going for it is, those tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards, like on BlackBerrys or whatever, they weren’t great. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops can have full-size keyboards on them that are just, you know, they’re fine. Full-size keys,
⏹️ ▶️ John full-size, right? To replace part of that with the screen and with all these compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like it’s easier to replace the crappy tiny keyboard with a slightly crappier on-screen keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange for getting double the screen space and enabling a whole world of new applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, when you don’t need the keyboard, you know, it’s like such a huge win. And the touch bar is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to compromise your full size keyboard that you like, setting aside the butterfly business
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And in exchange, you don’t get much, maybe you get some benefit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also you get some downsides of having to move your eyes. So that’s why, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like any design thing, it’s all about the trade-offs. You have to look at what are the pros and what are the cons and
⏹️ ▶️ John the balance for getting the software keyboard on the phone was just, you know, witnessed the entire world of phones now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Such a huge win that it more than makes up of the compromises and the touch bar, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple’s laptop lineup, look at the laptops around the entire industry. That trade off obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John had a much worse ratio, otherwise all laptops would have touch bars now, but they don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think another thing we learned is that, you know, the touch bars promise, you know, if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was gonna have some positive value, the promise was, look, we can change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these function keys to be anything you want, depending on applications and needs and preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can have all the dynamic, you know, changing stuff. But I think what we ultimately learned from that is what most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need from laptops in that area is things like, well, yeah, I need to be able to control the brightness. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to be able to control the sound volume. I might want media playback controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. All things that the keyboard already offered in the function keys. And you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want those to, like most people want those to be available most of the time on laptops. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you throw in Touch ID on one side, Escape on the other, like, well, to make that area functional, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way most people need it for laptops, you could actually just use function keys and just put,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them be permanently, you know, fixed in place, and that’s gonna solve most people’s needs most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. So even the upside of the Touch Bar, of like the dynamism of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, was something that proved to be not as good and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as necessary as I think people would’ve thought if they would’ve first come up with this idea in 2015 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like there’s, you know, unlike the phones where the half the device was dominated by the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John because the phones had to be so small, right? That you were doubling the screen size. There’s already a large amount of screen
⏹️ ▶️ John space on laptops. That was part of Steve Jobs’ original pitch was, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, why would we take half of the surface of the device and put it on a thing that can never change, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If we make the whole thing screen, we can change everything that appears there. We can have a keyboard that just accepts numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ John we can have a keyboard with a dot com button and you’re entering the email address and like look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John benefits of a screen. You can put anything you want on a screen. Laptops have a big screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can put lots of stuff that you want there. And it’s almost as like if Apple wanted to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something like the touch bar in terms of a user interface element, you could just dedicate the bottom of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you call it the control strip? Bring a blast from the past from classic Mac OS. You can put the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John on the actual screen and then make the screen a touchscreen Apple and just dedicate a region of the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen to that if you think it’s a useful thing to have. You know, oh, a
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the interface that can change any time we want. It’s the screen, you’ve got a whole screen for that. But do it
⏹️ ▶️ John like, there’s lots of interface elements that are like that in the Mac UI. Put them there, moving
⏹️ ▶️ John it down to the keyboard, and more importantly, taking away the physical function keys that you can always reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John find the volume up and down and mute button, because it never moves and it works like a button and you can feel for it and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. Taking that away, which by the way, was stupid. You could have put the touch bar on top of the function keys It’s not like you didn’t have room on the surface
⏹️ ▶️ John of these giant laptops. Anyway, taking that away, you needed something to balance it, and they didn’t give enough benefit
#askatp: Is Chromium’s dominance bad?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ariane Aneha writes, why is Chromium’s dominance considered bad for the open web? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand that Chromium browsers have poor support for Apple devices, but isn’t that because Apple uses WebKit? What would we lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what would Google gain if all competing browsers were based on Chromium? The pros of greater website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compatibility and interoperability of extensions seems like a massive upside of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone using Chromium. After all, it is open source, isn’t it? John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so setting aside the obvious disadvantages of like a monoculture, both biologically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking and the various biological analogs in the software world. Like it’s not a good idea to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, an important part of our computing platform be like one piece of software,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, based on Chromium or whatever. The open source thing is a bit of a sort of get out of jail
⏹️ ▶️ John free card that people like to play. But as I wrote in a very old blog post, that, what, 2013,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I used to write slightly more on my blog, having something being open source is
⏹️ ▶️ John great and all, but for projects like Chromium, big complicated projects, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like a single developer can do anything, you need large companies funded by billions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John in advertising revenue to be able to make any headway on that project.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s basically whoever has the most employees working on it, whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John pays people to work on it, whoever writes the most lines of code, by default controls that project.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s open source, don’t we all share this together? good luck competing with hundreds of Google engineers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t, they’re going to make all the changes. They’re going to drive the change. You can’t compete with that because they just put
⏹️ ▶️ John more money in more people on the project and therefore they control it. So even if it’s like, Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like Google controls it. Chromium is an open source project. It’s controlled by all of us. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s controlled by Google because the Google puts the money in and everyone else is volunteering in their spare time or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. They can’t compete with people being paid with, you know, the millions of dollars that we funnel into them through
⏹️ ▶️ John Google searches and search ads and stuff, right? So having an important part of our
⏹️ ▶️ John computing experience being de facto controlled by one company,
⏹️ ▶️ John a company that makes us money off advertising,
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, Apple uses a web kit not too long ago, web kit and Chromium were based on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John browser engine called web kit. Now it’s based on blink or whatever, but I understand Chromium is bigger than just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the browser engine. It’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I get it, but yeah, it would be bad for all of us if Google and advertising company
⏹️ ▶️ John was the one and only vendor of the major component used to power our web
⏹️ ▶️ John browsers. and the fact that it’s open source doesn’t change that.
#askatp: Why continue the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Saunders writes, and we kind of hinted at this earlier, we now have a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air with an M1 and a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro and M1 Max. We have an iMac with an M1, so it is a strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibility that when we next get an iMac or perhaps an iMac Pro, it’ll have the M1 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or M1 Max chips. When the iMac hasn’t been refreshed for ages, the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a clear statement of intent. But in the current context, Dave writes, I’d be interested in your thoughts on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the incentive for Apple to keep producing the Mac Pro to serve the small and shrinking number of users who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not served by other Macs? I feel like this is one of those ones that we get asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like annually, and apparently it’s that time of year again. So, John, take it away.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to put my same article from 2013, the
⏹️ ▶️ John for a true Mac Pro successor. It’s still the same case that it’s ever been. Like luckily we don’t have to remake this case. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John agrees with us. Apple has, is not, you know, they haven’t said
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re producing an iMac Pro, but they’re producing an iMac Pro. Like, Apple needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to continue to push at the top edge of computing hardware. Not because they make
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of money off of them or, you know, sell to lots of people, or just because, for the same reason that, the analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John I made in this old blog post, it’s the same reason the car makers make what we call Halo cars, right? It’s a car that
⏹️ ▶️ John burnishes your brand, it’s really cool, you probably lose money on the whole project, but it’s an important place.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s important, it serves so many different purposes. It’s a place where new technologies are tried out for the first time. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John place where you push the envelope, things like the XDR, which is a ridiculous product. It was their first mini LED display.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was their first HDR display. Like it was pushing the envelope in what was possible. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John taught people inside Apple about this new technology. It also, a
⏹️ ▶️ John role that I don’t think I talked about in this blog post, people don’t really consider, but like it
⏹️ ▶️ John is being on a halo car project at a car company, that’s a good gig.
⏹️ ▶️ John It helps you retain employees. If you have like your very best employees, maybe they wanna make the
⏹️ ▶️ John cool, you know, supercar, even though that’s not an important, you’d rather have them be making
⏹️ ▶️ John the next Toyota Camry, right? But if you wanna retain that engineer, this great, you know, this great automotive designer
⏹️ ▶️ John and they wanna be on the LFA project, put them on the LFA project. You will retain that employee.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will make them happier. They will improve their skills, burning through all your money, making this ridiculous supercar
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s never gonna, it’s not gonna turn a profit, right? They’ll be happy, happy
⏹️ ▶️ John employees with even better skills. That’s what you want, right? So having, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were on the Mac Pro team and this sort of like turns your propeller, you love making big,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast, beefy computers. You want that job in Apple, right? You want, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t get it Apple, you go elsewhere. You work on Threadripper at AMD or something, who knows? You’ll go, you’re on Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and work on whatever. Right? Having projects like this is important for the morale of the company, it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John for employee retention, it’s important for R&D, it’s important for satisfying your customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you wanna keep video editors as one of your markets? Do you wanna keep selling Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? You need to sell a machine that they can use to do their real job. No, there’s not a lot of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re not gonna make you a lot of money, but if you want in that market, this is the price of entry. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Apple eventually was convinced of that argument. They had a Mac round table. They said they’re gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ John a modular Mac Pro. They made one. It’s pretty cool. I think they’re gonna make another one. I don’t think we have
⏹️ ▶️ John to re-litigate this, or at least I hope we don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, agreed. I think, you know, even though what they’re making so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Apple Silicon Macs, like if you just look at the current lineup, even though everything I was saying earlier about how you don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need desktops for many people anymore, there are still those higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs or more specialized needs that the current products won’t cover well. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get a nice iMac that’s very similar in hardware to the current MacBook Pros, that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be great. But if you’re a professional video producer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna want more GPU grunt. You’re gonna want more bandwidth. You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want more storage options and even higher RAM capacity possibly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always gonna be some customer that is not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be served by laptop grade or mid-range desktop grade hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though that hardware is fantastic. Because as time goes on, as that hardware continues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get more fantastic, the needs of high-end customers also continue to increase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, video gets higher bit rate, people do more advanced processing of things, there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scientific research or ML training or you know, stuff like that. the bar is always getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raised, and there’s always going to be, whatever most people are able to get away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, there’s gonna be high-end users, and they’re gonna want more, and they’re gonna be able to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, and they’re gonna be willing to pay for more. And so the Mac Pro is going to address those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco markets similarly to how the current one addresses them, I think. It’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a high-volume machine, but it is going to be very important to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain markets and certain users, and therefore they should keep making it, and including for all the reasons John just said as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus, it gives us more Mac Pro stuff to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, what would we talk about if they didn’t make Mac Pros? Thanks to our sponsors this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, Slidebox, Impending, and Trade Coffee, and thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at atb.fm.com. Maybe if enough of you join,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can get Casey to waffle more about our next DR. And we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental Tech Podcasts, it’s so long.
Follow-up: John’s beeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, what’s new with your freezer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess that’s a spoiler, but honestly, you should really listen to the episodes in order. And so you already know the source of
⏹️ ▶️ John my beeping turned out to be my freezer. I said I’m solving the problem by buying a new freezer. Just a brief update on
⏹️ ▶️ John this, unfortunately, ongoing saga. Oh, no. I did buy a new freezer.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a whole rigamarole about preparing the way that maybe I’ll talk about on Rektips, but whatever. Please. Freezer gets delivered,
⏹️ ▶️ John gets installed. I killed myself trying to level it. again, more Rektifs content probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John Set it all up, put food into it, painfully carried the old one
⏹️ ▶️ John up and out and put it in the garage while waiting for someone to give it away to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turns out the new freezer has some problems. It’s kind of like the LG 5K. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it seemed like it was okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then like it was confusing about whether the door was open or closed. I’m like, well, the door just did get, you know, it comes in without the
⏹️ ▶️ John door and you connect the door. So they sorted that out. but like, and the little high temperature light was on and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, but it is high temperature now, we gotta wait for it to cool down. But by the time the first day was over, we
⏹️ ▶️ John realized that, you know, after many hours, it would eventually just start
⏹️ ▶️ John beeping constantly. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. That’s the high temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? At least you know what it is now.
⏹️ ▶️ John no doubt, like it is constant. It is, it’s the high temperature alarm. It’s constant beeping, like about that fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I was saying like, at least you know it’s the freezer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know it’s the freezer and it’s not a song, it’s just constant beeping.
⏹️ ▶️ John We did get like a freezer thermometer to see is it really high temperature? And it’s not, it’s negative 20 degrees inside there. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is broken. It thinks that it is, it’s temperature sensor doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you Google for this online, you will find lots of people with this exact problem with this exact model, which unfortunate,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Anyway, and the other thing is like frost is forming inside the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I made the pretty quick call to say, I’m not going to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with this. I’m just sending it back. Yeah, smart. So yeah, so it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sending everything with the whole covid and shipping and blah, blah, blah. The earliest they could
⏹️ ▶️ John come and pick it up is the 20th. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, geez. Like three weeks from now. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s a good thing we didn’t get rid of the old freezer because the old freezer is up in the garage right now. And we have transferred
⏹️ ▶️ John the food out of the downstairs freezer and put it into the garage freezer and unplug the downstairs one. You know why?
⏹️ ▶️ John because the high temp alarm would go off every six hours. So that meant every morning
⏹️ ▶️ John when we woke up, we woke up to be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be,
⏹️ ▶️ John every morning because it would, it was going off at 12 and six or 12, six, 12, six, 12, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to go down there and press the alarm reset button. So we lasted a few days in that and we’re like, no F that. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so now the food is in the upstairs, uh, freezer that’s in the garage. And guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t sing a song anymore. Oh, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s in the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, did we knock a bunch of dust loose carrying it up? Was
⏹️ ▶️ John angry in the basement? So anyway, the replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John is going back on the 20th. Right now all the food is in the garage room, which is no longer singing
⏹️ ▶️ John a song and we’re not quite sure what to do. We could replace. Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s, you know, given the, like what’s actually in stock, your choices
⏹️ ▶️ John are various rebranded versions of the one that’s in the garage. It comes under, it’s under
⏹️ ▶️ John Maytag brand, Whirlpool brand. You can look at them. You just, if you’re familiar with them, you can say that’s the same freezer with different brandings, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can get that one, or you can get various rebranded versions of the one that’s in the basement, which is a GE,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also Insignia. It’s the same. Those are the two standing,
⏹️ ▶️ John frost-free vertical freezers freezers that you can get in stock.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are lots of others made, but like you’d have to wait months for them to come over on a boat from somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Only those two are in stock anywhere. So we are either going to
⏹️ ▶️ John pretend that the one in the garage is cured, and then I guess carry it back down to the
⏹️ ▶️ John basement, which I’m not looking forward to.
⏹️ ▶️ John now that it’s considered it’s filled with frozen food, which we’d have to remove, and it would be like a time pressure thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to leave it in the garage where it’s cold.
⏹️ ▶️ John or buy a new one, probably just buy a new, slightly larger,
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, of course, slightly larger, the version of the one that’s in the garage and sort of reset the clock
⏹️ ▶️ John on the beeping song or whatever. So that’s where we are. I will give more updates as
⏹️ ▶️ John things change, but anyway, the saga continues. We have not solved the problem. We had a
⏹️ ▶️ John different amount of beeping and the old one’s not playing its song anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just leave it, just return the bad one, leave the now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garage freezer in the garage, and that’s just where you get your frozen food now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s getting to where I do want to be able to fit the car in there again eventually, so the car will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eh, that’s a lost cause.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The car will not
⏹️ ▶️ John fit with the freezer in there. No way, no how, so that’s gotta come out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It barely fit before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, but it did fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jon, I think you’ve lost this battle once
⏹️ ▶️ John for all. I’ll bring it back down. I mean, we don’t want it in the garage. It’s a pain to go outside into the cold
⏹️ ▶️ John garage when you want something. It’s better to stay inside the conditioned house and go in the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see. And you know, there are other things in progress again. You know, listen to RecDiffs
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to hear more of this saga.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I do. All right, Marco, what’s going on with you these days?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m gonna take it to neutral.
Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not have a driving permit for the sand yet. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have driven on the sand and I have purchased a vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, did you get that, what was it, a Toyota
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco something or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other? I put the link in, I put the picture in our Slack so you guys can see. So the neighbor’s FJ?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is the FJ Cruiser. Not the neighbor, but somebody else in town. So I have purchased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an FJ Cruiser. It is… What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey color is the roof?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the roof happens to be white, but the car. This is a homely car. I’d forgotten how
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly these things are. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car is gray. It is nothing that I would have picked out in terms of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I was going to choose my own FJ Cruiser, by the way, which hasn’t been made since 2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, you’re already and it was never made in large volume. So they’re kind of hard. It was never attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re kind of, no, I was never tried. They’re kind of hard to find, but, you know, they’re out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I were to pick my own, I would probably get a yellow or
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? To lean into the ugly factor. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, gosh. And I would almost certainly get it with a stick, which it was available in. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gray and automatic. So this is not what I normally would have picked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as I mentioned, I don’t have a driving permit yet. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have purchased this vehicle, I think I’m pretty high on the list to get a permit. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’m going to get one probably either this winter or next winter. In the winter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes the bay freezes over and the ferries have to suspend service for
⏹️ ▶️ John to drive right over that bay on this vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so when the bay freezes, which happens usually every winter for at least a few days And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be a week, sometimes it can be a few weeks, sometimes it can be a month. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the bay freezes, you no longer have access to the land for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like grocery shopping and that’s kind of annoying and problematic. So when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bay freezes, if there’s no ferry service, anyone who’s on the sand driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting list can get weekly sand driving permits.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a hell of a system here. This is so ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, if the bay freezes and I get a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freeze-over permit, I can’t necessarily drive my Tesla on the sand. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not advisable. You need a vehicle that can do it to make use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that. And so normally, I was not planning on buying anything until and unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the full permit. But somebody in town who had a permit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was moving. She decided to sell her car and she was offering it at a price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was well below not only its official value, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, but also well below anything that is online for sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. First of all, try to buy any car right now. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good time to need to buy a car if you’re buying in most contexts. This is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really not a good time to want to buy an FJ Cruiser or a Wrangler or any vehicle that would be suitable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this purpose. So this was an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I just didn’t want to pass up because so you know, a I have I have like, you know, the bay freezing over contingency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now covered. I have a sand capable vehicle and it was very inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it was it more or less expensive than my Mac more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not by a lot. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not by much at all. Actually, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John at it. I has very poor performance on the sand. I advise it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t You didn’t even have wheels. You didn’t even get the wheels. A lot of place for a sand ingress in my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I didn’t get the wheels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, this opportunity came up to get this vehicle and it was too good of a price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pass up. And it’s actually, it’s only 80,000 miles and it’s a 2014 model year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was the last year they were made. Like if you’re gonna get an FJ,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides, you know, that it’s not really the color or transmission I would have necessarily picked for myself. If you’re gonna get an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FJ, you want a 2014 model year with relatively low mileage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a Toyota, so it’s fine. It’s not like you bought a Land Rover or something. Like, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as part of the deal, the previous owner was super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice and super generous with her time and everything. And she taught me how to drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the sand, because she’d been doing it for like 30 years. And so she took me out, we did a whole run. I did it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with her through the gate and everything, because she’s allowed to have other people drive the car if she’s in it. So we went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the gate. I went the two different routes you can go, and I learned where everything was. And let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me tell you, driving on the sand was way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder than I expected. So a few things I’ve learned. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was, you know, the conditions we’re talking about here, this is driving across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a beach for a few miles, and it’s in the winter, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hadn’t rained in a while. And so the beach consisted almost entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of multiple very deep tracks through the sand, just tire tracks, like deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tire tracks, just running straight, kind of zigzag here and there, but mostly like straight tire tracks on the sand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forming like a bunch of, I guess, like kind of virtual lanes across the beach, maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight or 10 virtual sand lanes wide, but super deep tracks, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least six to 10 inches deep, just the tracks in the sand. and going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them, the sand, because it hadn’t rained in a while, the sand is not hard packed down. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very loose packed sand, you’re riding in these basically deep ruts. So, getting in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and out of the tracks is not easy necessarily, because you have these big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruts you’re going in and out of, and the sand is loose and it’s very tall, and so, this was a challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to drive through the sand. You know, I don’t want to toot my own horn here, I’m pretty good at car control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in loose traction situations. It was like, Casey, you recall at BMW, like the driving fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing we did with Underscore, I was pretty good on the skid pad. Like I wasn’t good at going around it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly, but I was really good at not spinning out and not losing control. Like I’m generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty decent at that kind of thing with cars. This was hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, way harder than I expected. You know, there were lots of times where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going down this track and the woman who was selling me the car, always telling me, like she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had given me a ride off, like on the sand a few days earlier, I would describe her driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style as like pretty gentle. Like, you know, she was a slow, careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driver. Like one of the reasons why I bought the car actually, cause I could tell that she wasn’t like a hard driver of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there were so many times where she would tell me, you should go faster here, go faster. Otherwise you’re gonna get stuck. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta go faster. You gotta go faster. Like I had to keep the car moving at certain points, you know, otherwise I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at risk of getting stuck. And this is an FJ Cruiser, which, you know, off-roaders respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this vehicle. It’s a pretty well-regarded vehicle for off-road driving. It has off-road tires. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aired way down to like 20 PSI, and it was still really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard. It was in four-wheel drive mode. The diffs were locked. Like, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as off-road mode as it could be. And there were still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times when like, I would try to steer out of the current like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rut I was driving in, and I would turn the wheel and I’d just keep going straight. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if you’re driving on ice. Like, you know, you just, you turn the wheel and you just, well, you’re just, I guess I’m going straight for a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer until I can get it to kick up, you know, get up there on the ridge. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very, very hard. And one thing she told me, you know, she said like, you know, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has a driving permit gets stuck sometime. And I’m like, really? Because here I am thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna get a really capable vehicle and I’m a pretty good driver, I’m never gonna get stuck. And she’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, everybody gets stuck. And what do you do when you get stuck? You call 911 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they dispatch a local police something to come pull you out. I’m like, really? I’m like, first of all, I’d be mortified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I ever had to do that. I really don’t wanna have to do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of this is to say, this vehicle, I really appreciated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how capable it was. At the same time, it was just barely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I would want in capability. And so recognizing that there aren’t many vehicles that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are more off-road capable than this that aren’t like really giant things. Like, cause I don’t want a huge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like lifted pickup truck. I don’t even want a full length SUV because once you get onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big streets, boy, do you want a very small vehicle at that point. Yes, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a Wrangler. The Rivian is more capable than this though. Higher ground clearance, more power, bigger knobbier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yes, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in the Rivian. It is, however, a bigger vehicle, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t exist yet. That’s the bigger problem. But certainly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think if I get a permit and the Rivian comes out during the time I have a permit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would most likely then sell or trade this in and switch to that. Until then, and Casey, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Wrangler is the other choice. However, I don’t think a Wrangler is that much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable in this condition. I think it would be fairly similar overall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would probably agree with that, but it is a, the two-door anyway, is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very small car. It’s been a while since I’ve been physically next to a FJ or whatever the heck this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is called. So I don’t recall how big they are, but a two-door Wrangler is very small. The four doors are not. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four doors are pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I wouldn’t get the two, the two-door Wranglers don’t have enough space for me. Like, I, like we have a kid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re a family of wee little people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you seen a two-door Wrangler? Yes! If you have a car seat in the back, there’s no trunk. Ehhh… That’s a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s not an abundance of trunk. And you only have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car seat. If you have… Forget car seat. If you just have a passenger in the back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have the back seats operating as seats, you have basically no trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say that. You have a frunk. It’s just in the back. So, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not at all… and then no trunk in the front. Anyway, all right, so. No, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went Wrangler, I would go with the four-door one. And dimensionally, the Wrangler and the FJ are very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a couple inches here or there, but it’s not. They’re very close in size overall. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was first thinking about, like, you know, what kind, if I got a sand vehicle, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would I go for? Would I go for something like a Wrangler or some giant SUV thing? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking, like, could I get away with something that’s maybe just like a really good all-wheel drive system with some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good ground clearance. You know, like there’s certain options like the Subaru Outback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has this off-road package in the modern ones that gives it like pretty good ground clearance and like, you know, it has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good, it’s a pretty good system, but like, so people recommended that. There’s like other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jeep models that are like a little, you know, larger, more comfortable on the highway, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t like, you know, as off-road focused as the Wrangler. And now I know from this experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just driving, driving there and back, you know, basically two trips on the sand. I already know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would absolutely not want any vehicle that is less off-road capable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this. If anything, I’d welcome more. You know, like if I can get the Rivian, cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wrangler and FJ are my new baseline. Nothing that is less capable than these off-road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would work for me here. I’ve also, of course, I went and got the super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive Max Trax skid plate things that you can like, you can stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under your wheels to get stuck and help pull yourself out, or help drive out, I guess. So I ordered those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I do not want to get stuck ever, and have to like call the police.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds terrible. So hopefully I never have to use those, but I did order those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, you know, like little mini shovels. So we’ll see if this ever even happens, if I ever get the permit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, the great thing about this deal too, is like, it was such a good price, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if I never get the permit, and I end up selling this in a few years, I’ll probably make up all of what I paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it, or most of it at least. So, it was kind of a no risk, and again, this is another reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s kind of a no brainer deal. But other notes about driving it, this was, the FJ Cruiser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was an old vehicle, like it came out in, I think like 2008 or 2007 at first, and the 2014 was not changed that much from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, and so it still works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way cars from the early 2000s worked. So it doesn’t have the stupid engine auto start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop, which I hate on all vehicles that have it. It doesn’t have proximity key.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m out. No proximity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco key, I’m out. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically has, it’s like, it’s the way all cars used to be. That’s how this car
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the way all my cars still are, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s an ignition. You put the key in it and turn it, and just to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the car. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still a thing? I will trade that for no stop start any day of the week.
⏹️ ▶️ John so many car, Like the thing, every time I look at a modern car review, and they go over like, and here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where you disable the start stop button. All I wanna know is the one piece of information that would tell me is, do I have to disable
⏹️ ▶️ John stop start every time I get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco into the car? Does it remember? Like that’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important feature of this car. And let’s just like Casey, if they say, oh, you got to disable it every time you get in, I’m out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, nope. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey worst part of the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the positive reviews that the Wrangler 4xe are getting, the plug-in hybrid Wrangler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of those positive reviews are positive because the 4xe, you don’t really feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the engine start-stop, because it’s a hybrid system. Whereas all other Wranglers, you feel it and everyone hates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John So- It’s the principle of the matter. Stop-start, I reject on principle. Even if I never feel it, I just know that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s happening. I say, no, you need to be burning gas constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so again, like it has, it’s just, it’s an old, it’s like a basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functioning car. So, you know, the key fob does have little remote control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons to like lock and unlock the doors by remote. So that’s, it has that, yeah, it has that like capability, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Everything else- Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. It does, however, have a standard double DIN radio socket
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it have Bluetooth?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s the thing. So first of all, I don’t know much about these cars, but I did know that everyone said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if you’re gonna have a vehicle on the beach for this purpose, get the FJ, because it’s, you know, it’s better than the Wrangler for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the needs of most residents here. So great, okay. Other than that, I really didn’t know much about the vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first time that I get into it and I look around the controls, I notice, right, there’s no navigation system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like the stock head unit that just has the regular LCD display that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows the seven segments of the numbers, whatever. Like it’s not, it doesn’t have a full bitmap screen. So there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigation system. But I did see there’s a USB port and a line in on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom. I’m like, okay, so I can rig something up there. I ordered myself ProClip USA mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my phone. I’m just gonna mount it up there with a MagSafe puck and that’s fine. I thought too, like, you know, one of the flaws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the FJ is that the visibility’s not great. And especially like, you know, with the rear visibility,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re trying to like, you know, do some parking maneuvers, it does actually have those beeping parking sensors, like the proximity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensors for parking on the rear bumper. So that’s nice. But I was thinking like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first thing I think I’m gonna get here is some kind of aftermarket backup camera because I’m spoiled now, I love backup cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t wanna go without them. And especially a vehicle that I’m not that familiar with, I have to navigate around very tight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streets and navigating it on the island is terrifying, actually on the streets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the streets here are so narrow and there’s houses built right up to the edge, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John So. We’re getting lured over our children, say, yeah, in my day, we had to back up all these big vehicles with no
⏹️ ▶️ John rear visibility and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no backup cameras. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first thing I think like, all right, I gotta get an aftermarket backup camera. And then the other thing, I’m like, well, maybe I’ll also get like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’ll replace the head unit with a CarPlay head unit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, now we’re talking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because you can do that. It’s just, you unscrew a few screws and you have the head unit out. It’s a standard double DIN. So, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already own one actually from my CarPlay testing rig that I’ve actually since replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something better. So I already own an extra double DIN CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head unit that’s just sitting around not being used. Like, this is great, I can just pop it in. And those usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have video inputs for backup cameras as well. So I think, oh great, I can rig that up. It should be no problem. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have some local shop do it because I don’t know how to do any of that stuff. I could have some local shop do it, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you actually want though, I’m wondering, I don’t know what the interior looks like, but like in a car this old,
⏹️ ▶️ John is CarPlay actually better than your phone mounted on a vent? Because like if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John positioned really low in the dash, you’re not gonna wanna look at that. You’d rather look at your phone to be closer to your island. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John made to be like modern CarPlay things where the screen is within your eye line where you can just glance down
⏹️ ▶️ John at it? Is it down on the floor?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s low. It’s not super low, but it’s not certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideal. We transferred the car over, putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the new license plates. And I notice, as I’m putting the license plates on, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was looking, kind of eyeing the bumper to see where, I’d read some forum posts, like, oh, you can put a backup camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right in the middle of the rear bumper and it kind of looks nice with the parking sensors and everything, I’m looking at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I look up and I notice there is what appears to be a backup camera in the spare tire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosure thing on the back of the car. There’s no screen in the car though. So, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I then did some research and learned that they added a backup camera to the FJ like in later model years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, oh, great, okay, I have the last year of it so I have the newest thing, that’s great. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no screen so I thought maybe the backup camera was only used if you optioned the navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. And so I’m like, all right, well, I guess, let me figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hook up the stock camera to a CarPlay head unit and I’ll put that in. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at the manual, Casey, because I had some questions about some of the off-road controls that I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything about. I’m stunned. So I was reading the manual and I noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a section about the backup camera and it didn’t have the asterisk that said, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the optional equipment, has the asterisk and that says, if equipped. And the backup camera did not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the asterisk. So it’s standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is where Doug DeMurra needs to come in and show you all the quirks and features of your car. You don’t know where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it turns, so in all of my test driving of this car, I had never put it in reverse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I learned from the manual that when you put the car in reverse, it shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tiny, greeny little backup camera image in the rear view mirror.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which apparently is a common thing on lots of cars that I’ve just never seen before. Yep, sure is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure is. So that, I’m like, okay, I’m being, I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be too smart about this. This is fine. It also already has Bluetooth on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio. So I already have Bluetooth and a backup camera and a car mount for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. So that’s it. I’m not gonna bother with CarPlay. I’m not gonna bother with changing the head
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey unit. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna keep the car stock as it is and just clip my phone to the dashboard like I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my Tesla. Because that’s fine. Like that gives me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything I want, really. So it’s, yeah, overall it’s even better than I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other notes before we end here. I was very pleased, we used to be, growing up we were always a Toyota
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family, but I haven’t owned a Toyota or driven one since 2002 maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was very pleased when I got into this car that I already knew how to use the cruise control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it still works exactly the same way. That old cruise control stock that’s on Toyotas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the res and set and everything, it works exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean it’s not just tap on the navigation item on the touch screen, then go to cruise control, then go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey slider and move your finger down. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John physical controls for the cruise control? How barbaric that you can do that in one operation without looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so everything worked. It’s a fully manual car, except for the transmission,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course. Although, honestly, again, for a moment, going back to the transmission, first of all, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually mind the automatic transmission that much because I’m not driving this car in a sporty way.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got enough to worry about not getting stuck in the sand to worry about shifting too. I feel like automatic
⏹️ ▶️ John gives you one more thing that you don’t have to worry about. You can concentrate on steering and throttle input.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It gives you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one more thunderbolt lane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and that’s the thing. I think for off-road use, automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be better, for me at least, at being a relative amateur at off-road driving, because what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often need is to start from a stop in a very slow way, like to creep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s really hard with a stick, especially with my relatively sloppy stick technique.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they have creeper gears on off-road. But it’s the thing, when people say off-road,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re picturing going up a mountain with rocks or whatever, sand is an entirely different beast to deal with, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to, there just to be clear people in Long Island be just like he’s not going over boulders. No, no boulders
⏹️ ▶️ John here. It is sand. It is just sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, lots of sand often very loosely packed and I have to go around. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to pass a school bus, which that was terrifying because it was it passed
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of that, what are the rules about like how much of the beach is available for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It varies depending on like how much how much have storm was washed away recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, can you go all the way down into the water and just like splash through the waves if you wanted to, or is that illegal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not illegal. You will get stuck if you do. Like, No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just, I’m like, you know, if you think of like a car, I’d go down there and sunset and speed
⏹️ ▶️ John through the hard packed sand with the spray coming behind you and then just try not to get stuck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, like you don’t want it to be wet, but you absolutely, like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed, if you have this permit, you are allowed to drive on any part of the beach, except for the dunes, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to really accelerate the corrosion of your vehicle, you could splash through the salt.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so it was. Oh, and there was also there was one scary moment to where I was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was turning in one of like the like one of the inland but still sand roadways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a truck was coming in the direction and I saw it had to pass me in a relatively small space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I tried to pull over a little bit like off to the right to give them more space. The non-existent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoulder. Yeah, and my rear end fishtailed left very much towards them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice. So yeah, this again, terrifying and way harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a drive than I expected. So yeah, I’m I still obviously if this permit happens, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot to learn about how to drive and I think a lot of that will just come with experience. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was so much harder than I thought so much harder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you eventually get onto the you know, you know what they have they just recently expanded it’s the place where you can take
⏹️ ▶️ John your RVs and stuff. I guess that’s maybe not like Robert Moses somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess maybe they don’t have that like it’s that’s not just fiction
⏹️ ▶️ John for father ID’s they have so there’s the beach and then there’s the dunes and then if you go farther
⏹️ ▶️ John out east on the South Shore they have beach dunes and then another sand road
⏹️ ▶️ John and then RVs that are like that have views of the bay essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John right but that sand road it’s a road but it is not a road but it is just sand. And that reminds me of what you
⏹️ ▶️ John were talking about. It’s so skinny where you see like these, it’s always pickup trucks, pickup trucks are RVs. There are RVs
⏹️ ▶️ John being pulled by pickup trucks. And the two pickup trucks will be coming toward each other on that road. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way two cars are gonna be able to pass each other because there’s no room and it’s just sand. And it’s like feet deep, you know, like you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ruts. And you see them creep past each other and try to like squeeze by with the, you know, the big,
⏹️ ▶️ John those, whatever they are, whatever those plants are in the dunes, like scraping the sides of their fancy $80,000
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up trucks against the dunes as the deer chew on things and laugh. Uh, anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess you don’t have those roads. I’ll have to go look at some satellite things, see if they’re around there, but, but anyway, you’re on the beach the whole time. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John part where you sort of go to the other side of the dunes, but you’re still on sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, no, there, there’s both like, so there’s, there is an interior route that drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through more towns. Um, but it’s just, it’s slower and tighter and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still, there are still sandy sections on that, but there’s fewer sandy sections or you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you there’s a couple of points where you’re where there’s like little ramps you can cross the dunes like sand ramps like but there’s there’s a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cuts through the dunes that you’re allowed to drive through that you know get you in and out of that area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you can drive on the beach the whole time as well if you want to so so but sometimes in the winter especially like sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not enough beach to drive on and so everyone has to then use the interior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco route so it’s a whole thing and and you know keep in mind that the context of this, like the interior route,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the interior roads, such as they are, are one lane wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even just barely that. And so, if there’s someone coming the other way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of you just has to turn somewhere, and let the other person pass, or back up, back up to the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco street behind you, and turn into that. And this is one of the reasons why backup visibility is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important for this kind of driving, because you often are having to back out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the street you’re on to let some other vehicle go the other direction or something like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not easy driving by any means, but yeah, it was very
⏹️ ▶️ John You should consider a duck boat though, because when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the Atlantic
⏹️ ▶️ John Ocean punches through into the bay, as it has done multiple times in Long Island’s history, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just go out east, there are various places where the ocean has punched through. Oh yeah. Your road will
⏹️ ▶️ John end and you will need more than a sand permit to get out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. At that point, I think I’d get back on the ferry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really feel like Fire Island is the geographic equivalent of an LG UltraFine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K. It’s great, except that you occasionally can’t get to the mainland and can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey food. It’s great, but only certain people are allowed to drive. And by the way, you have to drive on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sand. It’s great, but it’s going to sink into the ocean sometime in maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam’s lifetime. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not sinking into the ocean. The ocean is going over it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I’m sorry. My mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Asterisk, dagger, double asterisk, double dagger, cross, double cross.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s just great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, one more thing that I loved about the FJ here. I’m going to send you a picture too. The controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like the ventilation system. They’re a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of giant knobs and buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Imagine having a physical control for something. Isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just astonishing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that just astonishing? Easy it is to use those things without thinking about it. They never move,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really easy to find. It was great, like, because for one of the drives, it was cold, and so I was wearing gloves for most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive. And it was no problem to operate these giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey knobs Imagine that. With
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gloves on. It was great, like, it was just, it was so refreshing. It was almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, after having driven more modern cars for a while, it was like retro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appeal, you know, to have this like. Accessibility is not retro, it’s just good usability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that too. But yeah, like, oh man, it was so satisfying. Oh, I’m just gonna turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this temperature knob slightly. Or I need to turn the heat on. Oh, I just go over here and turn this a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notches with my giant gloved hands and it’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that. I can’t wait until you end up buying another ice, another internal combustion car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you realize that yes, it is nice to have an electric powered car, but everything else about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Tesla is a pain in the ass. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plenty of electric cars with physical controls. Like not everyone is on the same page as Tesla in terms of how much should be physical and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can look at the car manufacturers that are getting a clue faster than others, but a few of them have already sort of gone
⏹️ ▶️ John back on their previous iterations and have said, nope, we’re bringing back physical controls for climate, we’re bringing back physical controls
⏹️ ▶️ John for cruise control and all that other stuff. So I have faith that people will figure it out eventually, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where’s the AC outlet in the car? Like the vents? No, no, no, no, no, no. the alternating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current outlet, because I’m looking at a button in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this picture you sent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. There’s an AC outlet in the trunk. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and as well as a giant subwoofer for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get the other benefit of physical controls. You get to have blanks for the features that your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco car doesn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Three blanks. But anyway, it’s surprisingly nice. It’s the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve bought a gas car in forever. It’s the first time I bought an automatic car in forever. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not at all what I thought I would want to buy ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s pretty nice. Like for what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a round steering wheel too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, imagine that. A complete
⏹️ ▶️ John Real easy when you make those turns.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it turns out this car is very easy to drive as a human. Which you still have to do