464: Monks at Drafting Tables
06 Jan 2022iPad Pro and Thunderbolt, QD-OLED TVs, a potential UWB future, dog-tracking, and leather.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Stuart Hay on chroma sub-sampling,
4:2:2,4:1:1,4:2:0 - Hyper Thunderbolt 4 Dock
- A not-too-short aside about iPad connectivity and expandability
- Xcode and setting up for Apple Watch development (via Andy Norman)
- Slideshow App Recommendations
- Canon’s flagship DSLR line will end… eventually.
- Stuart Hay on chroma sub-sampling,
- CES: QD-OLED TVs from Sony
- Interview with Gary Geaves, VP of Acoustics at Apple
- MaxTech video
- Regarding latency
- About the UWB spectrum
- An aside about Apple TV interruptions
Settings→Remotes and Devices→Bluetooth→Suggest Nearby AirPods
#askatp:- How much do we sleep? (via Nathaniel Gori)
- An aside about dog tracking collars
- Fi smart dog collar — Use the code
NEWYEARS100for $100 off. Not a sponsor. Promise. - Update: Fi actually made a discount code just for us:
ATP100. They’re still not a sponsor, though.
- Fi smart dog collar — Use the code
- An aside about dog tracking collars
- How much do we sleep? (via Nathaniel Gori)
- Post-show:
- Should Apple stop using leather?
- Thoughts on meat alternatives
- Late-episode follow-up:
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Chapters
- Follow-up: “4:2:2” naming
- Hyper Thunderbolt 4 hub
- iPad Pro and Thunderbolt
- Sponsor: Linode
- iPad Pro, cont’d.
- Trust This Computer?
- Follow-up: Photo-slideshow apps
- Sponsor: Iodyne Pro Data
- Canon ending 1DX line
- QD-OLED TVs
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- UWB for future AirPods?
- #askatp: When does John sleep?
- Dog-tracking
- Ending theme
- Should Apple stop using leather?
Follow-up: “4:2:2” naming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were all over the place. Yeah. That’s right. Even for us, we were all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Covering a lot of important ground. Involving dogs and leather and televisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow up. Stuart Hay had a lot of information on chroma subsampling. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can try to make my way through this, John, but I have a feeling you’re better suited for this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you got to do it. You can do it. This was about the name you were saying. Why is it called 422444?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the explanation in the RTINGS thing didn’t make any sense, so Stuart Hay explained it, but you can read through it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s just super.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Okay, well, here we go. I believe in you. Thanks, man. I
⏹️ ▶️ John cut it down to what I think are the essentials. I have my doubts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seriously. All right, well, anyway, here we go. So, and by the way, all the snark has nothing to do with you, Stuart. Your feedback was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent. It’s all with me dreading having to make my way through all of this terminology. So here we go, buckle up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stuart writes, I’ve enjoyed a little trip down memory lane to my training as a broadcast engineer while listening to your discussion around chroma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subsampling and felt the article you linked to, although informative, was missing the reference back to the original ITU-R
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BT.601 standard, which may answer why we ended up with the 4,4,4 terminology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to describe chroma sub-samples.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna say, you just say 444 for that one. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m just trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey establish. Please. Can you give me, play in the space,
⏹️ ▶️ John people, play in the space. Well, we did like YCBCR last time, or I think it’s like 444, 422, 411. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s the nomenclature. Do you wanna do this? And I think like for the other ones, you can just do Y and CB and CR.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry about the primes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like a married couple. Is this my story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or yours, John? Keep going. Did you watch Encanto as well? I feel like they should have used that
⏹️ ▶️ John joke twice in the song. Yes, I understand the end of the song, they’re just re-summarizing all the things they said earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I still feel like it would have been stronger just to use it once. Anyway, go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was very good, by the way. I extracted the below from the Tektronix glossary, which I have found useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throughout my career. 422, the numbers 422 denote the ratio of sampling frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the single luminance channel to the two color difference channels. For every four luminance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey samples, there are two samples of each color difference channel, hence 422.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so before you go on, like this is a piece of historic information that I think we were missing. This nomenclature
⏹️ ▶️ John comes from the pre-digital days and that based on the sentence here, the way they did things
⏹️ ▶️ John in the analog world was to have a luminance channel and then two color difference channels. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming that they split up the color signal and made two things, so when you combine them, you get the color back. I don’t know the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John details, but the point is that there was two color difference channels and one luminance channel. That’s why you end
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the three numbers despite what we’re talking about is luminance and chroma, which is just two things. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John was enlightening for me and that starts to make a lot more sense. How that relates to digital is a little bit weird, but it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for broadcast stuff, I can imagine. It’s like, for historical reasons, back in the day, we
⏹️ ▶️ John transmitted the information over analog wires in this way, and that’s why it’s three numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 411, 411 indicates that Y has been sampled at 13.5 MHz while CB and CR were each sampled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 3.375 MHz. Thus for every 4 samples of Y,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is one sample each of CB and CR. 4.2.0, a sampling system used to digitize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the luminance and color difference components Y, RY, and BY of a video signal. The 4 represents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 13.5 MHz sampling frequency of Y, while the RY and BY are sampled at 6.75
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MHz, effectively between every other line only.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what we learned is that analog ruins everything by making it weird and complicated. And when we went to digital, we got saddled
⏹️ ▶️ John with a lot of the same terminology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. That’s a pretty fair summary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco actually. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? thing. Bye.
Hyper Thunderbolt 4 hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Thank you, by the way, to Stuart Hay for that feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Hyper has released a new Thunderbolt 4 hub,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey additionally a turntable dock, which I thought was quite funny, but that’s actually not what we’re trying to talk about. The turntable dock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is designed so you can put a new iMac on it, and you can then spin the iMac left and right in order to show a co-worker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. But anyway, what we’re interested in is their Thunderbolt dock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reading from Mac Rumors, it’s CES, hyper-announced what it claims is the first Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hub with an integrated 100 watt, how do you pronounce this? Is it GAN? What is
⏹️ ▶️ John go with GAN, that’s how I read it in my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how the Anker CEO pronounced it on a podcast interview.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco gallium? Gallium
⏹️ ▶️ John nitride or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Power supply, the hub features one Thunderbolt 4 upstream port and three Thunderbolt 4 downstream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports. So this is very similar to the dock that I have that I’m using that I’ve already forgotten the name of, which I like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I am really into, no sarcasm, the 100 watt power supply thing, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the 14 inch take? It takes like 60, 70 watts, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 65, something like that. And then, yeah, then the 16 takes, I think 95 or 100. I think that’s right. Somewhere in that neck of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this would be able to power, you know, one of these new MacBook Pros much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more effectively, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John super neat. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the big selling point. The big selling point is no giant power brick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. That’s why it’s a giant dock. But yeah, this is, so yeah, Because as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is basically the same guts, like the same, the same functionality, the same ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how they are split up as many of these other docs that we’ve mentioned recently that many companies are making for around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same price point. But this is nice because it is first of all providing a hundred Watts of power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which many of them don’t. I’d like, I believe the CalDigit one, I think is 60 Watts. The OWC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I think is 85 or 90, something like that. So, you know, this might, this might be the highest power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s being provided by this whole category of products. So if you happen to be plugging in like a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a 16 inch MacBook pro and you actually run it hard enough to need that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of power all the time, um, which I actually, like I run mine with the XDR power and I believe the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR only powers up to something like 85 Watts. Um, and I’ve never, it’s never been an issue cause I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not like encoding videos 24 seven. But, um, if you need that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you prefer the internal power supply and not having some giant power brick like I did, like I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely prefer. This looks pretty good. So good for them. I’m glad that somebody got the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memo that, you know, hey, not everything has to be a tiny little box for product marketing shots and this giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black power brick somewhere on the cable, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outsource the problem so that they don’t show up in your your marketing shots.
iPad Pro and Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at this thing I just put in the chat. I was looking at the, at Hyper’s website and they have this other product, which it looks a lot like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, kind of like the things we got for our laptops at work. It’s got an HDMI on the side of it and then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John USB stuff or whatever, but look what it’s got on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s media keys. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play, sync back and sync forward. That’s, and this is only for iPads?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, this is like for, like, well, yeah, I guess it is. For
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iPad, it says.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it not work on laptops?
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, obviously on laptops, you have these keys on your keyboard. Now they’re actual real physical keys too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? The side of it that the USB-C connector is on is molded to fit a modern iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you look at the one, two, three, fourth image down, it says extension cable for universal compatibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in case you don’t want to plug it in directly to an iPad, then you can use this little like two or three inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little jumper cable, if you will, in order to plug it into a regular computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I guess it probably just like simulates keyboard commands for the media controls?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. Yeah, I imagine. But like when you have it on the side of an iPad, the play button points upwards
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they left the back and previous are up and down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, almost any iPad accessory makes it or itself look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sideways at some point. Like it’s, there’s just no getting around that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I thought it was interesting. That is neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say it is quite an ugly setup. When you scroll down and you see the one where the iPad has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable sticking out, what is now the top port on this thing, this is phenomenal 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video. You see like, can you, oh man. This is like, part of the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any kind of like, you know, bolt-on accessory or dongle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing for any of, you know, you get these great computing devices like an iPad or an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and okay, well now I want to add this functionality to it, and then you have to have this giant, like, clunky thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s wires everywhere all of a sudden, and yeah, you start to, again, it’s just like the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply thing, you start to lose the appeal of the marketing photos very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And spoilers for for six colors like Apple yearly report thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ John just filled out and sent to Jason today But one of my comments about the iPad was
⏹️ ▶️ John like net basically now the MacBook Pros got their ports back Maybe it’s time to reconsider whether the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro Should have more than one port on it because hey it is Pro and they’re pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one port they have is like A Thunderbolt II USB C type thing, but really just one on the Pro product this
⏹️ ▶️ John room for more and that could save you from at least some of this mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, although, I mean, honestly, like having Thunderbolt on there on the most recent ones is great because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you can just use one of these hubs if you need to. But yeah, I definitely obviously, you know, it’s much better to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, built in ports as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argued, because first of all, they’re free. You know, it’s, you know, a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will excuse the lack of some kind of port by saying, Oh, it’s fine, just buy it on the but like, you don’t consider like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost of dongles, like these, these Thunderbolt expansion dongles are $200. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, that’s a significant investment for something that they think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should probably be built in to the product. But then you also have to carry it. You gotta plug it in somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, you gotta power them. It’s a big thing to have them built in, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously they’re not free when they’re on the iPad and then it costs more to manufacture them and so on and so forth. But we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying like, hey, you should have HDMI and SD card slot and five USB-A or whatever. We’re just saying maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John how about two Thunderbolt ports?
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe three, you know, on all three sides. Like, just rethinking whether one is the
⏹️ ▶️ John right number for, especially for the really gigantic, you know, 13 inch or whatever it is, iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. Maybe one or two, all, you know, one or two also very small
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt ports would be appropriate for a device
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at that price and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think, though, I mean, I don’t wanna start a thing with the iPad people, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you think anybody’s using the port for more?
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets into your story from the previous week about like how terrible iPad OS is
⏹️ ▶️ John at taking advantage of the stuff that’s in there. So like it’s got the same M1 chip as the Max, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Max are just so much more capable and it’s not because the hardware is less capable. The hardware on the iPad is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because the OS is cranky about just doing what you would expect a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John to do when you plug in a storage peripheral. And again, it’s not like Apple doesn’t have an OS that understands how to deal with external
⏹️ ▶️ John storage. Like it’s the hardware is limiting it a little bit and then you only got the one port, acting like it’s an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John from, you know, what year did the iPad come out?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not 2010 anymore. The iPad is so much more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John and capable. It’s an amazing machine, still just got the one little dinky little port on it. And then on top of that, the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s making moves in the right direction, is so slow to just sort of let us do what we know the hardware can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I still, I mean, again, I don’t want to get into a thing, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple really still hasn’t found like where the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is supposed to be, what it’s supposed to really be able to do software wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hardware wise, it’s very capable. And we’ve been saying this for years. Everyone’s saying this for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the iPad hardware seems to be way over provisioned for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software’s actual needs and actual usage and limitations. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad power users for years have said, this hardware is great, please make the software, you know, allow us to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more things, or make it more pro-friendly in some way. And it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like, it seems like that whole dream really kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fizzled out a lot over the last couple years with the massive improvement happening in the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line with the switch to the M1. And I know a lot of iPad people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently switched back to MacBook Airs or something and are very happy there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if the whole iPad Pro project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, or initiative maybe is not panning out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it’s working fine. They’re just going slowly. But I think the match in hardware now that it’s M1, just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, just really highlights, like iPadOS doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need all that baggage it used to have, that it used to have because iPads were obviously less than Max. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff about like, oh, we can’t have too many background processes and we’re gonna kill your thing as soon as you’re out of memory and don’t use too
⏹️ ▶️ John much CPU and don’t do this. It’s like, you could, I know they’re not exact matches now, but you could
⏹️ ▶️ John introduce an iPad Pro that has the same amount of RAM and the same system on a chip
⏹️ ▶️ John as a MacBook Air or even a low-end MacBook Pro in the case of the big thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then what’s your excuse? Why are all those limitations there in iOS? And some of the limitations there for safety, sandboxing
⏹️ ▶️ John and having APIs that can’t do weird things and security, like I understand all that. keep all the good stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all the rest of the things about we don’t want you to see too many apps on the screen at once, because it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be too confusing and you know, that we have really limited multitasking and we don’t want you to be able to arbitrarily
⏹️ ▶️ John place thing and not don’t have too many floating things and don’t have many programs running at once and only
⏹️ ▶️ John give yourself limited time in the background and the OS will kill your app. Like those type of limitations make less
⏹️ ▶️ John and less sense when you have like, when you could have essentially identical hardware in a low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John to mid-range Mac and the high-end iPad. And that’s before we get to the stuff of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is the Files app so cranky, right? Like why did it not read Marco’s card, but the Mac did? There’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John about that, that reading external storage in a sane way,
⏹️ ▶️ John no feature that we like about the iPad, the simplicity, the security, the sandboxing or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of that precludes doing a better job at what Marco was trying to do with external storage on these pro products.
⏹️ ▶️ John And none of it precludes having one or two more ports either. Like, you can do all of that, it’s just the OS has not,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like it’s caught up. It’s like when you’re, like when a teenager grows real fast and their sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John brain doesn’t keep up with the new size of their body and they become awkward
⏹️ ▶️ John and bump into things. That’s like what the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Yeah, and it’s wonderfully capable. Hardware, like, again, the hardware is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the software can be amazing for certain use profiles, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just seems like they have had a lot of trouble expanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what those use profiles are, like expanding the number of people who can and are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to easily get their work done on iPads. It seems like that, like, if you’re one of the people who fits into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great, but that number of people seems to have a lot of trouble expanding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like think about the use case that we always hear about because we’re podcasters and then we know a bunch of podcasters, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast recording on an iPad. You can do it, but it’s way more difficult than it
⏹️ ▶️ John should be. And there’s nothing about podcast recording that should
⏹️ ▶️ John be a challenge to iPad Pro hardware in the slightest. It is all software limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could address that use case. That should be one of their test cases. Can you do
⏹️ ▶️ John audio production, both the editing of it, which is getting much better with the new apps that are out now, but also the recording of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The limitations of the iPad are, it doesn’t have great ports for that. There’s no way at the OS level to
⏹️ ▶️ John have the kind of control over streams of audio from different apps that the Mac has. And there’s no way for third parties to introduce
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So basically people are stuck. It’s like, why do you have to use a Mac to record your podcast? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just so much more of a pain on the iPad. It’s so much more limiting on the iPad and it doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. But so far Apple has not addressed that use case at the OS level or the hardware level. And it’s a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John because the hardware, in terms of how strenuous would it be to stream
⏹️ ▶️ John something over Zoom at the same time as you’re recording it into two different files formats that you care about at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time as you have a soundboard hooked in or whatever, the iPad hardware can do that no problem. It’s like it’s going to choke on the audio streams,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would barely break a sweat. But software support just isn’t there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Powell I think your analogy of a teenager growing too quickly is really apt because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like, and this is all of us have said this many times, I’m trying not to repeat myself too much here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like the foundations of iPadOS, while not bad by any stretch of the imagination,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they’re getting a little the foundations getting a little creaky because so many things have been bolted onto the side of it. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot tell you the amount of times that I’m browsing in Safari and I go to do a right to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left swipe. So what is that going forward again? I was going to be going forward on Safari. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next thing I know, I have a slide over app coming in from the right-hand side of the screen, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguably the gesture that the iPad thinks I want, but it is certainly not the the gesture I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually want. And because there’s no real equivalent for a mouse, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, the, the, the trackpad on the magic, what is it? Magic keyboard, notwithstanding, you know, you can’t assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s always a mouse connected. And so all these things have to be done with gestures, but there’s only so many ways to gesture on a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rectangular screen. And I just feel like I hear what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying. And I agree with you about doing audio production on an iPad, but thinking about how to manage, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, microphones and connectivity and the thought of doing something like with loopback,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which presumably wouldn’t be possible where you’re creating virtual microphones and things like that. The thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of managing all that in iPadOS makes me wanna cry, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John managing that in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mostly okay. And it makes me wanna cry both as a user and a developer. Thinking, putting myself in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s shoes, like how do you manage that? What is a not crummy user interface for that, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since an iPad is supposed to go from a completely casual user to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a comp, like from my grandmother to Federico Vatici. You know, like it’s supposed to span
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that whole range. And it’s actually in some ways the same problem that Swift is running into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that Swift fancies itself being able to be a learning language and being able to be like a firmware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low-level language. But that is such a wide swath of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to solve. And there’s so many trade-offs involved that someone’s getting screwed no matter how you slice There’s a really good tweet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you retweeted from not underscore David Smith, the Apple employee David Smith that talks about this. If I can find it, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put it in the show notes. But anyway, it’s just so much to ask the iPad to do. And I agree, like hardware-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not a problem. But software-wise, it is so much that I don’t—I just—I can’t fathom—this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why I don’t work at Apple—I can’t fathom how to make that livable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think it covers the simpler end of the spectrum of needs. Like you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our—the always example of like, oh, I have this non-technical friend and they have an iPad and they love it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s their only computer and it’s freeing them to do whatever. That’s real and that’s big. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say that’s probably the majority of the iPad users that I see in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote real world. Anecdotally, when I see who’s using iPads around me or out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside of my immediate tech bubble, and it’s not nerds, it’s usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people for whom that is their primary computing device, maybe secondary to their phone. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s people who don’t use a laptop or desktop computer routinely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is their laptop or desktop computer. And for that role, it does very, very well, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has for a decade. Like, that’s great. It’s how you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the higher end of usage. Most iPad Pros that I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were bought because at the time they were sold, they were the biggest iPad, or, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, they still are. But you know, so it was bought more like for size or for one of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware capabilities like the pencil support or something like that. Rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need this to be really fast and to have a Thunderbolt port and plug in my mixer or whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that way less. And maybe that’s just the people I’m hanging out with or the people that I hear from or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it seems like, I mean the iPad, even from its entire existence, the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always covered the simpler end of needs very, very well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways better than desktop and laptop computers do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, how do you broaden that to cover more productivity needs, high-end needs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve tried a bunch of different things, I think, with mixed success. Some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas that they have gone in the pro direction, they’ve done very well in, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like there’s, like, if I can characterize it, it always kind of feels like in my mind, kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco city of very tall skyscrapers. And it’s like, you have all these like, you know, a skyscraper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically like a very tall walled garden. If you’re in one of these use cases, you can go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sky’s the limit, you can go, great. But as soon as you try to like step out of it a little bit, or if your needs are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not quite in, you know, in the square peg hole or whatever, like, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m mixing a lot of metaphors here, forgive me, I’m tired. But if you, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if your needs fall a little bit out of the norm or out of what Apple considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or designed for, you hit a wall. You just can’t do that on the iPad. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumping over that wall is a ridiculous amount of effort that you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would take a Federico or somebody on that level to actually overcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s that characteristic of the kinds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of barriers you run into on iPadOS and how hard you hit them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how few options you often have to go around them. That I think is where people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run into so much trouble and frustration trying to get it to do, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly out of bounds things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I was close though. Like they’re creeping up on it. They haven’t found it yet, mostly because they’re resisting the urge to
⏹️ ▶️ John just put windows on it, not like Microsoft Windows, but like the actual interface element of Windows. But just
⏹️ ▶️ John to give people an example of like what we’re all doing on our Macs as we speak here now, Like whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John we record a podcast, we’ve got our show notes open, it’s a Google Doc,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s in a web browser and it’s in a tab. We’ve got something recording our audio, for me it’s Audio Hijack,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is recording my audio, and it’s sometimes into multiple files, depending on how we care. It
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you either record a single file or multiple files with different tracks or all sorts of stuff like that. Of course we’re running Zoom, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re using for the live, not live stream, but like that’s what goes on in the live stream is our Zoom conversation, because it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a higher quality than Skype. we’re also in the chat room
⏹️ ▶️ John that we refer to. It’s an IRC channel and we have an IRC client that we’re running on our screens. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John if we ever go to a link or something, we say, hey, check out this link and we’ll open another browser tab or another browser window to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the link we’re discussing. Or if I say I put something in the Slack, then we hop over to Slack and see that. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen at the same time, we’re able to see our audio recording, our show notes, maybe a webpage and IRC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Already, we’ve pushed past the limits of what you can reasonably do on even the biggest iPad, not because of the hardware limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John the 13 inch screen, the power of the system on a chip is entirely there. All of those capabilities are there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But just because the iPad is like, no, you can’t, I’m sorry, you can’t do that many things at once. And honestly, it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John many things, right? It’s a webpage, a tiny window with an IRC channel, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can look at our levels in the little recorder. I don’t even really need to look at the Zoom window, although I do like to have it there, because I can hit the little mute
⏹️ ▶️ John button that’s on the Zoom thing when I call for whatever, right? This is not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I need system hacks and extensions, and like loopback is not involved. Now granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John Audio Hijack that we’re using to record does have a system extension thing that lets it do that, but this is why Apple should build
⏹️ ▶️ John this into the OS. What does Apple need to do this on the iPad? They need a system level service where it says, hey, do you want raw
⏹️ ▶️ John access to the audio streams flying through iOS? Here is a public API for you to use. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe Rogue Amiibo wouldn’t jump on it because they really hate Apple’s usual limitations, but if they just
⏹️ ▶️ John made the thing for that, third parties will fill that gap. We have a choice of IRC client. We have a choice
⏹️ ▶️ John of what we wanna use for our communication. We use Skype, now we’re using Zoom. choice of web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Docs, other type of document. Those choices exist on iPadOS and on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing that doesn’t exist is, hey, hardware that’s totally capable of doing this. Can I sort of do all those things
⏹️ ▶️ John at once? It’s like, yeah, I hope you like swiping. Right? It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, they’re so close, right? And again, we’re not asking for, I need command line access
⏹️ ▶️ John and no sandboxing and total free for all, no. You didn’t, like, to do what we’re doing now,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad is very close to allowing that, but it’s far enough away that it’s really annoying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, so much so that when any of our podcaster friends need to record a podcast, they usually turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure we’re as close as you think we are, because on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just mentioned, many of us use Audio Hijack. Audio Hijack relies on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system extension, as you said, and you just can’t do that on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s lots of security and policy, App Store policy reasons why you just can’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that on iOS. And that’s the kind of thing like I can’t see Apple ever adding that on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you think about, you know, not only would you would you need some kind of, you know, again, Apple approved method
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of of, you know, controlling and intercepting the audio of other apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I know they have audio bus. That’s a very different thing. This is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that have not opted into the system can have their audio captured or rerouted by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this program. There’s no way Apple would ever allow that on iOS. If Apple made any new system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any new platform Apple makes from now and in the future, we’ll never allow something like that to be done by apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know that they would never do it because I feel like if it’s a sort of opt-in, dual handshake,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the two applications have to mutually agree that they allow it to happen. Like the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do this right is at the OS level because you’re never gonna allow it a system extension like they do on the Mac. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do it and Apple can do it in a way that’s secure. Oh, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could, yeah. I mean, it could be very similar to the Mac permission dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that say, do you want to allow this app to control your screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Please, make it better than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, yeah. You can do better than that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true. You can do so much better. But I’m saying, make it have dual handshake. Not only does one app have to request it, but then the other app to receive
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Just make a better UI to that. By all means, it can be as sort of, it can be technically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be as cumbersome as you want. I’m just arguing for less cumbersome. but the number of steps required can be the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, two way handshake, double confirmation, explicit connection between
⏹️ ▶️ John two apps because for our situation, it’s not like we need arbitrary apps every week. We know the apps that are gonna be involved
⏹️ ▶️ John and if we change our mind and use a different thing, we’ll just re handshake those. Like this is all
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. Like, and the main thing I was trying to get at is it’s nice to be able to see all these things at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even on a 13 inch screen, even if you have to make the windows small, just talking to Jason in Slack cause he’s listening to this thing live.
⏹️ ▶️ John My IRC window for looking at the chatroom is tiny, even on my XDR. I could make it a lot bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t. Like, I don’t need to see thousands of lines of everything. Same thing with the show notes. I don’t need to see the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John document. It’s way too long for that. I just need to see a little bit. And for the audio hijack, I make
⏹️ ▶️ John the window as small as I can. I wish I could make it smaller. I think I complained to Paul about that one, but I wish I could
⏹️ ▶️ John make my audio hijack window smaller because I just want to see the levels meter and see that it’s recording and maybe see the time, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This fits on a 13-inch screen, provided you can use the amazing technology that we
⏹️ ▶️ John call lowercase w Windows. iPadOS isn’t there yet. I’m not saying it necessarily needs to go
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but the current system of slidey things plus maybe a floater
⏹️ ▶️ John here and there is not adequate for being able to do this. And then, like I said, then there’s the thing of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I wanna look at a webpage. Now do I lose everything? How do I get back to it? I don’t know how close we
⏹️ ▶️ John are, because like Casey said, you know, what is the solution? It’s not super obvious. I’m like, you should do exactly this thing. You’ll make everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John happy. That’s not clear, unless your answer is just make it like a Mac, and in which case, why even have the iPad exist?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t say just make it like a Mac. We’ve got Macs for that. But I think there is a way to get from
⏹️ ▶️ John where we are now to something closer to the capabilities of a low-end small Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t know. I mean, maybe the way it is now with all these limitations is the best balance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know? Because the answer to many of these things is, well, if you need to do that, I guess you should just get a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right, that is kind of a crappy answer to give somebody, but what if that’s true? Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, all of the reasons why people love iPads, many of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depend on the extreme software limitations that it has. You know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve seen with iPad multitasking over the years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s been a really bumpy road, trying to expand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad software capabilities into something that works more like a laptop in those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of more power usery ways of we’re trying to keep the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly as great as it is. We’re trying to lose none of the greatness, none of the simplicity, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add, somehow, add complexity without losing any of the simplicity. And I think what we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen over the history of multitasking so far is that it basically has failed at doing that. That iPad multitasking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, has largely been a failure in the sense that it hasn’t been very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy for people to figure out, and it has made the simplicity of the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less so and less successful because many people accidentally invoke multitasking gestures and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t figure out how to fix them and stuff like that. So when the iPad, right before the iPad came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, there were heavy rumors that Apple was doing a tablet. Tablets were like the cool thing at that moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that was like the hot thing and everyone in tech was like, tablet to the future. But nerds like us were writing blog posts and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, okay, tablets are interesting maybe, but how are we gonna solve the text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input problem? Tablets, historically, the few that had come out before that, they always kind of had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, not very good text input. And there’s not really a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good way to have a physical keyboard with a tablet, unless you make some giant flip around thing. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onscreen keyboards or handwriting recognition or voice control or something, those are all possibilities, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all have very strong limitations. And when Apple was rumored to be making a tablet, everyone’s like, oh, this is gonna be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And everyone kind of thought that somehow, they would have some idea that would somehow break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through that input, that text input barrier, and would somehow be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the iPad came out, and it just didn’t. It didn’t break through the text input barrier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just supported whatever awkward method you wanted to use, and figure, well, we’ll kick this can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the road and see if we ever come up with anything better, but for now, we’re just gonna stick with the weird balance of options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have, and you’re gonna find ways that you love this thing anyway. Maybe that’s what multitasking is. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what a lot of this pro feature wanting will end up being, where we keep thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, they have to somehow figure out a way to keep every bit of the simplicity and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security and all that stuff, and yet somehow add all this power to it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the answer is they can’t do that, and they shouldn’t do that. Maybe the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually want to do those more powerful things, the Mac is probably what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should be using.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s definitely possible, because they’re so close. Like I agree with you that they screwed it up. Like I think they tried too
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to be different and simple and in the end made something that’s actually more complicated in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of the multitasking. We’ve discussed this a lot in the past. It’s mostly because they didn’t want to just
⏹️ ▶️ John do the obvious thing. But I think, speaking of text input, sometimes the obvious thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is pointing you in the right direction. Eventually they did just make a flippy keyboard and you know what, people loved it. Like that’s the obvious solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, how did we deal with text input? What if I had a keyboard attached? oh, I don’t want a keyboard attached that makes it more like a laptop, a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy. People love it, right? Cursor support, how long did they fight against? No, there’s no cursor on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you talking about? It’s direct manipulation as discussed on previous episodes, right? That touch of my finger,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no cursor. They added cursor support. They did it in an iPad-y way and people love it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And cursor support and keyboard support does not take away from the simplicity of the iPad. If you give someone an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad without a keyboard, they’ll never need to know about cursor support. They’ll never need to deal with a floppy keyboard. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just use the on-screen thing. Like, I think it is possible. Again, we’re not saying you have to be able to do everything you
⏹️ ▶️ John do on a Mac Pro, on iPad. We’re just saying, can we get close to the use cases that would fit
⏹️ ▶️ John on like a MacBook Air? And I think we can, Apple just hasn’t yet. And there are lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of barriers, as Jason’s pointing out in the chat room here, he’s the fourth member of the show this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of the stuff that Apple is doing, like with the Quick Notes and the floating windows, right? It’s like, oh, those
⏹️ ▶️ John might be useful elements, but they’re only Apple and third parties can’t add them, or they’re very
⏹️ ▶️ John limited, or Apple only wants you to float certain things. I saw it recently, somebody had like, they turned sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the Now Playing widget into a floating thing. Like they made like a video player app that shows a Now Playing interface
⏹️ ▶️ John on it or whatever, because they just wanted to have a floating thing that showed the currently playing music, so they could have like a window on screen all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time with their music controls on it. I’m surprised they didn’t get rejected from the App Store, saying, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s only supposed to be for playing video. I don’t want you cheating with the playing videos. You can show a useful thing like music controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you gotta get one of those dongles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m shocked that was allowed, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Totally shocked.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably torn down from the start by the time this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco episode is released.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what Apple wants you to do, I guess, is buy that dongle from Hyper with the physical media
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons on it or something. Like, I think we’re close, and I don’t think it’s unplausible. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you can add this functionality without making the iPad more complicated. Again, we’re not saying you need command
⏹️ ▶️ John line, root access, kernel extensions, complete, like, you know, any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, hold on, by the way, you do need command line. It can just be in its own little sandbox, but command line is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice and really important to lots of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like non-CH rooted,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like sandbox, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John complete, like you don’t need all that stuff. You can, to get back to the Pearl thing that I think I quoted last week, make
⏹️ ▶️ John easy things easy and make hard things possible, right? And we’re not saying make hard things like as
⏹️ ▶️ John easy as they are on the Mac, the Mac makes lots of easy things kind of hard and it makes really hard things possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like if you draw a little overlapping thing, the iPad expands from very, very simple up
⏹️ ▶️ John to about the amount of complexity that you’d have managed to tackle on a small Mac laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is setting aside my continued hobby horse of like the drafting table iPad that’s the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of an XDR, but lays down on your table, in which case at that point, maybe you should, you know, make hard things not
⏹️ ▶️ John just possible, but extremely, you know, extremely possible. Anyway, this is supposed to be a follow-up item.
⏹️ ▶️ John We went off on a long iPad tangent, but I think we are, I think Apple is traveling down
⏹️ ▶️ John this road. They’re just going more slowly than we’d all like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, two things. That drafting table thing would ruin your neck and back. And secondly, is there a way to disable Quick Note
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, why would it ruin your neck and back? Drafting tables are not a new technology. They’ve existed for literally
⏹️ ▶️ John centuries. And I don’t think they’re ergonomically perfect, but they’re not so terrible, or at least not any more
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible than using a mouse and a keyboard. Centuries of humans did tons of work for hours and hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John Monks are illuminating manuscripts at drafting table type things. I don’t think they’re ergonomically that terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have a bad one. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John have a good one. But mice and keyboards probably cause more widespread RSI than
⏹️ ▶️ John monks at drafting tables ever experienced?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe like cumulative total, but I don’t think per capita. Per
⏹️ ▶️ John capita, I don’t know. All I’m saying is it’s not ridiculous. You can have a drafting table type setup
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, especially if you’re doing like fine art types of things. Like the artists choose to work on an easel
⏹️ ▶️ John and not like direct manipulation of what’s on their canvas. And the easel is kind of slanted. Like the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point of a drafting table type setup, kind of like the Microsoft one, is you can sort of choose the angle and position. You have to find a setup that
⏹️ ▶️ John works for you. you can be standing or sitting. It’s not, again, it can,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just chucked it on someone’s computer desk, maybe it wouldn’t fit right, but like any
⏹️ ▶️ John new sort of ergonomic setup, you’ll have to adjust to it, just like people have to adjust to
⏹️ ▶️ John standing desks. How should they work? Where should the keyboard and mouse be? Where should the monitor be when I’m at my standing desk versus
⏹️ ▶️ John my sitting desk? I think it could work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, quick real-time follow-up from non-rev guy in the chat. You can disable Quick Note on the Mac. It’s apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just implemented as a hot corner. So if you go into system preferences, desktop and screen saver, go to hot corners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just preset as the bottom right corner. And so you can just turn that off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even, I’d forgotten it was on the Mac because I had never seen it. And I would have disabled it immediately if it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it keeps like popping up whenever I, you know, hit that corner with the mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which corner is it by default?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Bottom right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bottom right, yeah. Yeah, no, I’ve already got that set to something. Yep, same. Okay, yeah, see mine was just nothing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it overrode it if it was nothing. But yeah, I’m very happy to lose that feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lower right should be show desktop. It’s really handy, everybody, try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s not show desktop, it’s turn your monitors off.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s upper right, because any old school Mac user knows upper right is activated after dark, or whatever your
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iPad Pro, cont’d.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quickly, before we leave the iPad topic, I would like to say, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like this may come across negative if you’re not really listening to what we’re saying, but all three of us are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enthusiastic about the future of the iPad and how it could end up so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the two of us at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that it could be a really phenomenal computing platform. already a phenomenal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computing platform. And I would hope and I would encourage the listener to realize that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, I mean, it may sound like we’re complaining, but I actually don’t think we are. We’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure out a way to make it better because it’s so great and it has so much potential. And I’d also like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to quickly point out that I have not bought an iPad since when Michaela was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely like six or seven months old. Because the last iPad I bought was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro from 2018 with the new form Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco forth. And that thing- Yeah, the first 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch with USB-C. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That’s the same one I’m using still.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it still runs great. Like, it’s running better three years on than I think any other iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve ever owned. And although, you know, in a perfect world, I’d love to upgrade it, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any pressing need to upgrade it. And a lot of people, particularly those who don’t particularly care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple, I really like to say that Apple believes in planned obsolescence, and they deliberately make everything run like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap, so you get new stuff, and who knows, maybe that’s true, but I don’t think it is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this three, almost four-year-old iPad is running great to this day. I still use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, me too. And well, I don’t use it much anymore ever since I did the upstairs laptop, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really enjoyed for many, many years having that just always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the kitchen and ready to go. And the problem is, as we talked about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hardware is so over-provisioned. The reason I bought the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I wanted the pencil support for doodling and stuff and diagramming for quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, and I wanted a really good four-speaker system. I couldn’t care less how fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is because what I do on the iPad Pro is play podcasts and type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into Apple Notes when I remember I need something on my shopping list. Like, oh, next time I go to the store, I better get more milk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll go to my iPad, type that in, and add it to my list. Like that’s the kind of usage I have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I can use one from 2018 and it doesn’t even feel slow. The battery’s not what it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, but I can plug it in frequently anyway and that’s fine. And frankly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, my usage of it has gone down so much since I decided to just have a laptop in that role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t know if I would replace it if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broke. Or I certainly, if I were to replace it, I would replace it with probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad Air, maybe even the base model if it uses USB-C by then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need that advanced functionality. And I think that’s been a problem for the iPad since day one of like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people do with it is pretty computationally easy. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there really hasn’t been a lot of drive for people to upgrade their iPads unless it changed some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other factor or unless they’re old and broke. I think the, I’m very optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the iPad has a clear future, but I think the iPad’s future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is largely going to be what the present is. I don’t see it expanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly from where it is now because I don’t see that as being the right tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the job, for the jobs that it currently today doesn’t do well, or doesn’t do easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s where I see it being a very good product line for the indefinite future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not a particularly expanding one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right, so let’s go back to follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco How long is that? Forty minutes later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good grief. Alright, moving right along.
Trust This Computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. We were talking about, I think this was in the context of John, your son
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing development in writing his own apps. We were talking about setting up an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch for development, which is everyone’s favorite thing to see in Xcode. Marco and I immediately said, oh, reboot everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Andy Norman pointed out, make sure you’ve looked at the watch and noticed if it’s asking to trust the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took me a couple of attempts before I noticed that. I didn’t realize that was something that could interrupt this whole process. I’m going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pay close attention now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s the worst because if you, okay, so when the first time you connect a watch to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or the first time you plug in your phone in development mode with a watch paired to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think this I think it resets every major OS version or the edit and of course if you restore either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device the first time on the phone it will say trust this computer and You got to hit trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enter your passcode It’ll do the same thing on the watch if there’s a watch paired to that phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you either miss that or if you dismiss that dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t show again until I think you reboot at least the watch, if not both devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you miss that, this is correct. Like everything will just not work and it kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of hard to figure out why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’ll just spin and it will not tell you why it’s failing. And in the
⏹️ ▶️ John case of my son’s thing, it stopped him from deploying to his iPhone. He couldn’t deploy his app to his iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John He said, oh, I’ll deploy it to your iPhone just as soon as I get his watch set up and it would just never finish. And so, yeah, we had
⏹️ ▶️ John the process of rebooting and trying everything again. Eventually we saw that dialogue. I forgot to mention last week, I just didn’t want people
⏹️ ▶️ John to get stuck and not understand why they couldn’t progress. Reboot everything, try again, make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John you watch, make sure the watch is close by, that it’s charged, it’s in proxy. I had him put the watch on his wrist just because I’m like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t like being on the charger. I was trying to do everything to say, everybody’s cool, we’re all near each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re starting this whole thing over, and then you have to watch for that little thing to pop up and then make sure you tap the
Follow-up: Photo-slideshow apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some recommendations for slideshow apps to fix Marco’s problems. All of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will go away if you just use the right app. Right, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’ve been keeping track of them and of what people have said. I’ve shown Tiff a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the options. Yeah, so basically, by far, the most recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option is an app called PhotoMagico, which we’re probably gonna try out when we make the next slideshow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A few other people recommended that we just use iMovie or Final Cut Pro. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think we didn’t jump to that, and I should let Tiff talk about this at some point, but the reason why we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump to that is because iMovie had really good, or not iMovie, well, back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, but Photos, previously iPhoto, has really good templates where you can just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of select a whole bunch of photos and just say, here, just make something using these, and then I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjust if I want to. And it will do things like multiple photos on screen at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once, and have them flip around in custom ways, and blend into each other, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like a tile arrangement or have them appear as though they’re in like one of those flipping photo album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco books. You know, so it’s that kind of like that kind of, you know, wonderful, friendly consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco template for photo slide shows that shows more than one photo on screen at once. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing that’s hard to find a replacement for at least a good replacement for. And PhotoMagico isn’t even, I don’t even think does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that necessarily, but that seems to be the highest recommended thing for this. A few other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options people also recommend something called Adobe Premiere Rush, which I haven’t tried yet, but we do have the Adobe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, all the crap subscription that, you know, we pay absurdly for it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually makes sense for us to do that for, you know, barely for other reasons. But, so I will probably try that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. So we’ll see. I will follow up next time we have to make one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what you want is what they call motion graphics. Another, I think, term that comes from the analog age that is weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like, oh, you want things to move? You need motion. That’s why Apple’s app was called Motion, it did motion graphics.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John PhotoMagico does multiple images, but it maybe doesn’t do all the themes and stuff. When you were saying the
⏹️ ▶️ John images, looking around, it was making me think of two things. One, iDVD had
⏹️ ▶️ John menus that were like that. Like, I remember doing a baby thing where an Alex was a baby, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like a mobile, like that you put over a baby’s crib, and that was like the menu,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then in the mobile, you’d have little thumbnails of movies playing. Like, it was a template that you threw in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically motion graphics that look really cool and professional. but only thing you add to it is your movies get displayed here
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll play a little music or whatever, same things for slideshows. And the second thing I maybe think of is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the screensaver I use on all of our computers is, it’s called, what is it called, floating?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a theme for Apple’s like show photos from my photos app thing. Let me just pull it up here,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Screensaver, it’s a top-left screensaver, it’s called floating. And it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John just a bunch of floating images and you can tell it to pull images from a folder full of images or
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell it to pick an album from your photo library. It gets angry when you have hundreds of thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos in your photo library, but you can eventually hook it up. Of course, because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t understand families, the only person who can use that screensaver connected to the actual photos
⏹️ ▶️ John library is my wife because she owns the photos library. But what I’ve done to work around
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, periodically I just go to the photos library and I do a full export of all of my favorites
⏹️ ▶️ John into a folder, redundantly storing them is just a bunch of JPEGs in a folder and then I point the screensaver
⏹️ ▶️ John at the folder instead of the library. But anyway, the reason I bring this up is this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John screensaver, the one that shows a bunch of your images, totally broke in Monterey. Like Monterey, the original
⏹️ ▶️ John version that was released 12.0 and 12.0.1, this would just show a black screen and never show an image.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was fixed in 12.1, so I’m happy to have my screensaver back. It took me, I didn’t notice until I read about it on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John because I also have my screen like go to sleep sleep. It’s like, you know, if you leave my computer idle or you
⏹️ ▶️ John lock the screen by chucking your cursor to the upper right corner, it’s supposed to turn on the screen saver, but then shortly
⏹️ ▶️ John afterward, it will go totally black and turn off the monitor. So I never even noticed it was broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should have thought, you know, you haven’t seen the screen saver run in a while because normally you chuck the cursor and you just leave. And then by the time I come back,
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen’s black. I’m like, oh, it probably went to sleep, right? But no, it was just totally broken. It was some, maybe it was some weird
⏹️ ▶️ John OpenGL thing. I don’t even know, but anyway, it’s fixed now. And that reminded me of what you were thinking of, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a bunch of images and I wanna show them in some cool way as like a bunch of photographs that
⏹️ ▶️ John are being thrown onto like a virtual table or as tiles that flip around or as floating things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the screen server has many different versions of that. I wonder if these are all like Quartz composer things and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why they can’t port them, but it seems like Apple somewhere. Oh, interesting. At the very least has
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of these themes already done. It’s just that they may be in some legacy technology they can’t easily port to iMovie or Photos
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Canon ending 1DX line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Canon’s flagship DSLR line will end with the EOS 1D X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John III, eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to say EOS, not EOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, this is not my world.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know about Canon EOS? They had a big marketing campaign when you were a teenager. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because obviously we would have been paying attention to that then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, exactly. Until
⏹️ ▶️ John you were at Canon EOS. Anyway, I just brought this up just because I think we talked talked about it on a past show of like, and I think a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John are confused. I think I pointed this out once before. I think when we were talking about like, oh, Casey was
⏹️ ▶️ John told the story about being a Disneyland and all the photographers have a fancy DSLR they take your pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of. And I was like, well, they have a fancy camera, maybe not necessarily a DSLR because DSLRs are kind of old
⏹️ ▶️ John and creaky. And I think when people hear DSLR, they think big digital
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, but that’s not what they should think. SLR doesn’t just mean big digital camera. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John single lens reflex, that’s what SLR stands for, Mark?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a type of camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and it’s got a flappy mirror inside it, that when you take a picture, a mirror physically moves out of the way to
⏹️ ▶️ John allow light to hit the sensor, and then the mirror flaps back down. And it is a setup that
⏹️ ▶️ John has mostly been supplanted by what they call mirrorless cameras, which are so weird, they’re defined by the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they don’t have. Mirrorless cameras work like you would imagine if you just started in the digital ages.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a sensor, and there’s a thing that opens to let light hit the sensor, and a thing that closes that stops light.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, they even have ones that you can use electronic shutter where it just stays open all the time and just use electronics to
⏹️ ▶️ John record the image. But no more flappy mirror, which has pros and cons, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, the market and the world has decided that the advantages of mirrorless far outweigh
⏹️ ▶️ John any disadvantages of you not being able to look through the lens of your camera with a prism and all this other crap that you can do with an SLR,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So mirrorless is one, even the
⏹️ ▶️ John standard bearers The standard bearers for SLRs and DSLRs Canon and I imagine Nikon will follow and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think Sony has any SLRs right now Or if they do they’re very obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John The DSLRs are going away, but that does not mean big digital cameras are going away They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just all going to be quote-unquote mirrorless cameras. So nobody freak out It’s not as if we’re all gonna have to use iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John from now on if you like interchangeable lens fancy digital cameras rest assured There’ll be still be a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John companies willing to sell you some for the price of a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and keep in mind also like what this item like what this news item actually is Many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people interpreted this to mean Canon is not gonna make DSLRs anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not what this is Canon makes many lines of DSLRs. The very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very very top of the line one is the 1d X series That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what they are saying They’re not gonna make any more of after this current one
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the writings on the wall for the rest of them though, too Like it’s just the start starts from the top like what you read the quote
⏹️ ▶️ John from from the CEO Market needs are rapidly moving towards mirrorless cameras. So
⏹️ ▶️ John accordingly we’re increasingly moving people in that direction. You’re right It’s not a definitive statement But this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John way the world’s going and just to describe why mirrorless is winning The big
⏹️ ▶️ John giant mirror that flaps up takes up a lot of room It’s like a little periscope type thing where the light has to go in then
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to bounce off the mirror then it goes Up to the little prism then it comes out the little eyepiece which lets you essentially look with your eyeball
⏹️ ▶️ John optically through the lens that is going to take the picture, which has lots of cool advantages to it. But it takes up a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of room. Mirrorless cameras are just smaller because you don’t need room for the mirror. You don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John to flap the mirror up and down. You can do shutters, you can do mechanical shutters much faster, and then you can do electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John shutters. You can’t do an electronic shutter with, if the mirror’s in the way, because when the mirror is there and you’re looking through the eyepiece,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sensor can’t see anything because the mirror is blocking it. And when the mirror flaps up, now your eye can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see anything. So it’s blacked out briefly. So the mirrorless mode is just
⏹️ ▶️ John this sort of more straightforward way to get Light directly onto the sensor And you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like well, how’d they do the eyepiece? well they have a digital thing where you’re seeing a readout from the lens like it’s taken a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John for For digital cameras to get close to the performance of dslr, but now they’re getting in the ballpark
⏹️ ▶️ John So the dslrs are slowly being phased out just because mirrorless are smaller So this doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John the complete end of all them tomorrow but it seems this is sort of the company signaling
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going in that kind of like all car makers are going in the direction of electric. It’s gonna be years and years before the internal
⏹️ ▶️ John combustion cars are gone, but every single car maker has said, we’re kind of planning to go all electric and they
⏹️ ▶️ John put all these fancy dates. We’ll be all electric by 2030, 2035, 2040. We’ll see if they hit those dates, but they’ve all announced plans. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially Canon saying, yeah, the SLRs are probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this, because they’re acting like their highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end one, I mean, I’m sure there’s many reasons for that. First of all, I don’t think the 1DX series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been selling in great volume recently. But also, you know, there’s, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure there’s, there’s much stronger competition for mirrorless cameras at that segment as well. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the reason this is significant, even though, you know, they didn’t, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention, for instance, the 5D series, which is still extremely popular, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that is also, the writing’s on the wall, I think, for that as well. That’s very popular in different markets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the reason this is big news is that even though Canon’s not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re getting rid of all of our DSLRs, to ax the flagship one, and from Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all companies, like Canon has probably been the most successful DSLR company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by probably a pretty big margin, especially at the higher end. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to exit is as significant as like, if BMW said, all right, all M cars from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now on are gonna be all electric.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or Ford said they’re no longer making cars, which they said several years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And by that I mean they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John making trucks and SUVs, which by the way, in case you didn’t know, Ford hasn’t made a quote unquote car in what, three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did anybody notice?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying. Most people don’t realize it was, hey, Ford, they make like pickup trucks and SUVs, right? They make cars too,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And most people would say yes. And I’d say, okay, name a 2022 model of Ford that’s not an SUV or truck.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can’t because they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t make them. Mustang,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mustang, Mustang. No, it’s not a car if you looked at it, it’s the Mach-E. Isn’t that an SUV now?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s the Mustang Mach-E.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Isn’t it like a crossover? I mean, he’s talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just being a turd because your point is completely fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I mean, I think that, what is the latest model year of the Mustang? I think that they’re still making them as far as I know. They
⏹️ ▶️ John make the flat plane crank one. But the point is that’s not a new car that was developed
⏹️ ▶️ John for 2022. It’s a car that they developed continue to sell. And I guess they make new model years each year with different trim
⏹️ ▶️ John levels and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. To go back a step, you know, I don’t think of it as a car, John. I think of it as a horseless carriage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s not a, it’s a mirrorless camera and a horse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John A crossover. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not station wagons. They’re crossovers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Also, I would like to slightly real-time follow up and correct you. I would not talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about going to Disneyland. I go to the one real Disney park.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know Disney World. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, I agree with you on this a hundred percent, even though I’ve never actually been to Disneyland, but come on, just look at the maps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Disneyland is like one one hundredth of Disney World. I understand it’s the OG. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John No Epcot. Epcot is my, is unsurprisingly my favorite part. Of course. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s most people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s a lot of people’s favorite part. It’s the nerdiest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part. Without doubt. Uh, anyway. All right. So we should probably try to squeeze in a topic or to you before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we jump to ask ATP.
QD-OLED TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, you would like to get on your soapbox about new TV stuff at CES?
⏹️ ▶️ John That soapbox is just exciting news.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to talk too much about this on the show other than me hemming and hawing about what TV I’m not going to buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bad that we— Same as
⏹️ ▶️ John it ever was. I feel bad that we hadn’t talked about this years and years ago because this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is not like— The
⏹️ ▶️ John story is always podcasting. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is not like— Speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of Disney. This is not like a new technology. Like when I was going—I was looking for like explainer videos, figure out I’d have links to
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes to explain some of this stuff. and all the explainer videos I was playing were like six years old. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not new technology, but the news at CES related to television is that someone has
⏹️ ▶️ John actually shipped the television with this technology in it, which we thought was coming and there’s some interesting stuff about who is shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But anyway, the technology is QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED, which stands for quantum dot OLED, brief review of
⏹️ ▶️ John television technologies. So most people probably have at this point flat panel LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions, which uses technology similar to what is in most of our Mac screens or computer monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a backlight that shines light, usually white light, out. And then there’s a bunch of little pixels in front
⏹️ ▶️ John using liquid crystals that have red, green, and blue subpixels that turn on and off and allow varying amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John of light through. So when they’re all open, you get red, green, and blue filters with the white backlight shining through
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And red, green, and blue combined to your eyes make one white pixel. And when you turn the shutters all the way
⏹️ ▶️ John off, it tries to block all of the backlight light. The ones in fancier screens, like the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, Pro Display XDR and the MacBook Pros, and the fancy iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John are called Mini LED. And what they do is instead of having one giant white backlight, they have a bunch of smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John white backlights, like 2,000 of them. And instead of the white backlight being on all the time, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only on behind the pixels that need to light up. So if you make the screen all black, they just turn off all the black lights. That gives you better
⏹️ ▶️ John blacks. And if you have some part of the screen that’s light and some part of the screen that’s dark, they just turn on some of the backlights.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously there’s a problem called blooming where the backlights are not the same size as the pixels. So if you have like say
⏹️ ▶️ John a starry night where there’s a black sky with a pinpricks of light, there’s no pinprick backlight. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to turn on like a, you know, one centimeter by one centimeter backlight behind the pinprick star.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that may, and the, and LCD shutters are not that great at blocking the light. So you’ll see a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of a halo glow around the light when really you should just see one pinprick of light. But anyway, that’s LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John technology. And you often see it described as an LED TV. That’s just referring to the backlight. The backlights of these
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions are LEDs instead of being cold cathodes or whatever they were before.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s still a liquid crystal display in the front controlling the shutters, right? So the best TV technology
⏹️ ▶️ John for many years has been OLED, which stands for organic light emitting diode, where there’s no backlight. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John no big white light behind a series of filters. Instead, every single pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John emits its own light. And so you can turn on and off individual pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John Our iPhones have OLED screens, right? So when you do an iPhone, you know, and you want to make it a starry night
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPhone, where it’s all black with pinpricks of light, all it does is turn on the individual pixels that are the stars.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s no halo effect on them or whatever. Problems with OLED is they can’t get as bright because LED
⏹️ ▶️ John backlights can get super duper bright. And then OLEDs have burn-in problems if you do make them super bright and
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs also wear out. It’s a bunch of limits of OLEDs. But in general, for
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions, the best TVs you can get are OLED because it is much, much better on a television to be able to control the individual
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels. It’s just a shame they can’t get quite as bright Televisions is another problem, but the brightness thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is you know if you’re looking at in a well-lit room or whatever You know it has to be brighter than
⏹️ ▶️ John You know a little phone screen or whatever so most modern OLED televisions are actually WRGB
⏹️ ▶️ John which is they have RGB subpixels, and then they have a big honking white subpixel And that’s just to boost
⏹️ ▶️ John the brightness right so they mix in white like an actual white light With the colors and
⏹️ ▶️ John as you can imagine they can wash them out a lot of it is there like if you want to make the screen entirely white to use mostly the
⏹️ ▶️ John white subpixels, but that’s called a WRGB OLED and all the best televisions use that right
⏹️ ▶️ John now. The only company in the world that makes a WRGB OLED for televisions is LG and they make it for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody. Anybody who has an OLED television as of before CES 2022, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an LG panel on there. So Sony’s television, Panasonic’s television, uh, Philips,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Sharp, they’re all LG OLEDs in there. But OLED is the best in town because you
⏹️ ▶️ John can control the individual pixels, but it doesn’t get that is bright. So finally, QD OLEDs is let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John take OLED TVs, which is the best available thing, and let’s fix some of their problems. Their main problem is they can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John as bright, right? So what can we do to help with that? The way OLEDs actually work
⏹️ ▶️ John is they don’t have, you can do this with OLEDs, but they don’t do it for expense reasons. They don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a red, green, and a blue sub-pixel, or even a white sub-pixel. What they have
⏹️ ▶️ John are individual pixels that are bigger than, I think they’re bigger than the three red, green, blue. But anyway, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John individual pixels that just emit blue light. That’s what, they’re still individually controlled, but every individual
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel is just blue. And so how do you get all the colors? Well, they put filters in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of every pixel. There’s a little green filter, a little red filter, a little blue filter, and a filter that turns
⏹️ ▶️ John it white, I guess, I think, yeah, I think that’s basically how they work. I’m not sure about the white sub-pixel in
⏹️ ▶️ John WRGB, but anyway, there’s filters. But of course, filters lose you some of the light, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re taking a blue backlight and you’re trying to like, you know, change it to red, green, and blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John You end up losing the, the, the wavelengths that are not the color you want them to. And that reduces the brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is one of the problems that all it’s have. So the reason I’m talking about all of this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John quantum. Oh, it sounds like a sci-fi thing. And I put some link in the show notes that explain how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, quantum dots are many, many years old, but they’re finally to the point where they can put them into television,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully in an economic way. We’ll talk about that in a second. And what they do is they have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John blue backlight, because that’s like the cheapest way to make it. You know, it’s not a backlight. I’m sorry I said that. Every individual
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel is a tiny blue pixel, right? Every individually controlled pixel on an OLED is a tiny blue
⏹️ ▶️ John individually controlled OLED. The quantum dot sits in front of each one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John individual pixels and changes the light to be the wavelength they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them changes it to, one of them changes it to green, one of them changes to red, and they just let the blue one straight through.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the quantum dot thing does it using some physics stuff that’s explained in these videos in a way that loses
⏹️ ▶️ John you almost none of the light. It like changes the wavelength of the light without like blocking it or
⏹️ ▶️ John filtering it. It just changed, it’s quantum physics. It’s literally quantum physics. The bottom line
⏹️ ▶️ John is now you have individually controlled pixels where you don’t lose as much of the light through the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John red, green, and blue filter thing. They’re red, green filters in this case. You don’t need the W subpixel anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need the big honking white subpixels. You can have red, green and blue sub pixels and you get almost 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the light from the blue OLED that’s behind it. You do get 100% in the blue case cause there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even any quantum dot in front of that, I think, I think it just comes through as blue because it’s blue, you know, LED.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what that means is OLED televisions with way better brightness without
⏹️ ▶️ John the white sub pixel to wash out the images. So they have better color reproduction and all the same advantages of OLED. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John this is super cool. In theory, maybe also less burn in because you don’t have to drive the pixels as
⏹️ ▶️ John hard because you’re not losing as much light to the filtering. And the harder you drive the pixels, the more they wear out because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have organic compounds in them and crap. We’ll see. All right, so right now the only company that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLED panels is not LG, but Samsung. Ooh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung also makes televisions, but Samsung is not shipping QD OLED TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the same kind of deal with like LG display and LG electronics. There’s like this adversarial relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John between the people who make the panels people who make the TVs. So the only company,
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I’m aware, in 2022 that’s selling a QD OLED TV is Sony is selling a QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED containing a Samsung QD OLED panel. No pricing has been
⏹️ ▶️ John announced yet and there’s some scary things about it that say it might be like $8,000 in which case I’m not getting one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the situation now and I find it really exciting. If you’ve never heard of QD
⏹️ ▶️ John and you might have heard of QD quantum dot stuff for QLEDs because quantum dot
⏹️ ▶️ John LCD televisions also exist where they use quantum dots instead of filters, but with an LCD backlight,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those have all the same problems with the backlight thing. If the backlight is across the whole thing, that’s bad. And if the backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John has 2000 regions for 4 million pixels, that’s also bad, right? So quantum dots are not new, but quantum dots
⏹️ ▶️ John plus Oled is new and I’m super excited about it. Um, I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John talk more about the Sony television on rectifs because that’s where I get to complain about the stands people put on televisions, but
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the TV news for 2022. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason it’s related to, yeah, I mean, it’s a tech stuff too, but also in terms of Apple stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking for what is the sort of next step in, I guess, iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also even like Pro Display XDR type stuff it’s either quantum.oled, which I can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine them maybe using on an iPad someday, or micro LED,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is where instead of having a blue LED with three filters in front of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John every individual sub-pixel is its own colored LED. Those are insanely expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and not within the realm of commercial viability or size viability for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John devices yet. But we’ll keep your eye on that. Meet back here in five to 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I mean, are you ever really going to buy a new, I almost said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new computer, I’m so used to saying that. a new television, like is this ever really going to happen? I
⏹️ ▶️ John I was waiting to see what they were gonna say at CES, because the rumors ahead of time thought somebody was gonna ship a
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLED TV, and we just assumed it would be Samsung, because they’re making the panels, but now it’s Sony, and that makes me want
⏹️ ▶️ John it more, because I hate Samsung, like their TVs are more scummy. But before CES,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, I should buy a Sony A90J when they get cheap, like as soon as the new TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John come out, like I should buy the last of someone’s inventory Sony A90J which is like the one of the better
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the best OLED televisions from last year in particular I like it because they have a heatsink in it and the heatsink
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory helps with image retention. It just seems like a good idea for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John All of the new top-end OLED TVs have at least one or two models with heatsinks in them so I feel like Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John was ahead of the game by introducing one last year but I figured you know like I know QD OLEDs coming out if
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLEDs are eight grand or something then maybe Maybe I’ll get an A90J for under $2,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen the pricing for the Sony yet, so we’ll see.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco your next move with Squarespace.
UWB for future AirPods?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was a very interesting article that came out, or that I was made aware of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime last week, and it was on whathifi.com. It’s a pretty funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name for an online magazine. And it’s an interview with Gary Gieves, I hope I pronounced that right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is the vice president of acoustics at Apple. And you know, some of this is exactly what you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect from this sort of thing, but some of it was really, really good. And there’s a few quotes that I think John and I have pulled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the article that I’d like to read you. Gary says, so from the analytic to—oh, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me give you some more context. So this is about, you know, creating the new AirPods 3 and to some degree the other AirPods as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Gary is very much in charge—maybe not in charge of, but very integral to creating these,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly with regard to doing the mathematics and science behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acoustics, right? Is that fair summary?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a couple of quotes from the article. So from the analytic tuning, we work closely with an expert team of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey critical listeners and tuners. Many of these are folks from the pro audio industry, and really what they try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do is intentionally refine the sound signature for each product. AirPods in this case, so that it’s accurate, but it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting and moving. So they’re trying to work with people who are actually doing this sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing for a living and trying to make it sound good, which is pretty excellent. Moving along, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey further down in the article. When watching a movie on Apple TV, oh, I just thought this was fascinating, using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spatial audio, the virtual speakers are placed further away from you than when you’re watching on an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me kind of repeat that and change how it’s phrased. So if you’re doing that spatial audio thing, which is like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fake surround sound, like the computational surround sound, if you’re doing that with an iPhone, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual center, if you will, of all of that audio is, and I’m making the numbers up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s like, you know, a foot in front of your face. Whereas if you do that with an Apple TV, they place the virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center of all that audio, like six feet in front of your face. so it seems to be commensurate with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen you’re watching, which is obvious once you hear that, but I don’t know, I just think that’s really cool. And then a final
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote from this, obviously the wireless, oh, this was kind of the money quote of the whole article.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously the wireless technology is critical for content delivery, but also for things like the amount of latency you get when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move your head. If that’s too long between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you feel quite ill. So we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of Bluetooth technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a number of tricks we can play to maximize or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth in, I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently he smiled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone is taking this, and I think reasonably so, to mean, hey, guess what? Apple’s gonna do some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey custom thing instead of Bluetooth or some like custom overlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps, of Bluetooth in order to get more bandwidth and less latency from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their wireless headphones. And- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the more reasonable interpretation is when someone says that, and we’ve seen a lot of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John people on stage saying this type of thing, is they talk about a technical limitation in the abstract, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’d like to tell you is, and future products will fix that in some way, but then they stop
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves and say, well, of course, they’re not gonna tell you about future products. But the only thing they’re saying is here, we would like more bandwidth,
⏹️ ▶️ John and our future products will have more bandwidth. But there’s lots of ways future products can have more bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s a new Bluetooth standard. Maybe they use wires for everything. Probably not likely. Maybe it’s a totally
⏹️ ▶️ John custom thing. And so that’s the mystery of like, all this is an Apple person saying is, yes, Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John is bandwidth constrained. We don’t like it. And it’s a thing we’re going to fix. So that’s sort of like confirmed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says future audio products will have more bandwidth, which is like, duh, they have all this lost audio that they can’t play over their headphones. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a situation that’s gonna stay for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so wait, so let’s pause right there. This is what I was about to get to. and it’s an important point. So Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been working really hard to get their entire catalog, if I’m not mistaken, I might have the particulars wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t really matter, to get a lot of their stuff to be lossless. So typically when you compress audio, we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this on ATP a bajillion times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compress audio, you arguably lose data that arguably nobody can hear anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one way or another, another approach you can take is to compress it in such a way that you are not losing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any data, hence lossless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically zip for audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually it’s a good way of looking at it. You’re exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works slightly differently, although not that much differently. And it’s the same, similar effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so a lot of people are really into lossless audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will let you decide, listener, if it’s snake oil or not. But one way or another, I kind of think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is too, but that’s neither here nor there. One way or another, in order to send lossless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio to a, say, a set of AirPods, you need a lot of bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to do that, or at least compared to the Bluetooth standards of today. And so if Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to say, oh, our fancy schmancy new AirPods 2 support lossless audio, which we conveniently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have in our entire Apple Music Library, then hey, guess what? They’re gonna need to have a different method of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey communicating between your phone or computer or what have you and the AirPods. And so that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what everyone’s putting together, and this is what John was just starting to say, is that, hey, Apple’s saying they want more bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They probably want it because of this big push for lossless audio, snake oil be damned. And so this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to fall into place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the way, the next step in the story is a good, I talked to Max Tech, his YouTube channel
⏹️ ▶️ John that tries to sort of summarize and gather up all of the rumors, kind of the way we do on this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Max Tech had a good video collecting this info. And here is the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor that I think makes a lot of sense. And I’ll be kind of, now that I’ve sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of read all about it and everything, I’ll be kind of disappointed this ends up not being true. Again, all the Apple person
⏹️ ▶️ John said was, you know, more bandwidth would be good and dot, dot, dot. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was probably going to do a thing with where I met with one way that Apple can get more bandwidth and other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that is useful to Apple in many different ways is to use ultra wide band, which is something
⏹️ ▶️ John you should have heard of if you listen to this program or if you watch Apple keynotes, because Apple has been shipping the
⏹️ ▶️ John U1 chip and many of its devices. And that is an ultra wide band chip. Right now, Apple uses it to help you find your air
⏹️ ▶️ John tags and unlock your car. And what was the thing they showed? They had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some- AirDrop. It lets you do AirDrop slightly cooler. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s a very minor difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the, as it’s relevant to audio, here are some stats about it. So first, bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we were just talking about that. Gary Gieves says they want more of. Ultra-wide, ultra-wideband apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up to 675 megabits. that’s as compared to 2.1 megabits for Bluetooth 5.0 and 9.2 megabits for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John high-res lossless audio. So plenty of headroom there. Like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple’s audio is 9.2 megabits and that’s not, you know, that can’t fit in the 2.1 megabits of Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ John but 675, you’re fine. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Power consumption. Another thing that’s important to Apple. Apparently ultra wide band uses 10 times less power than BTLE,
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth low energy. So that’s great. We’re, you know, it’s looking really good. Range,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the one that seems iffy. I put citation needed in the docs, but actually there is a citation in the video.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of different things you can find about the range of ultra wideband. It varies widely, but this video
⏹️ ▶️ John cites a paper that says, in their testing of file transfer using ultra wideband, they were getting 25 meters
⏹️ ▶️ John versus 10 meters for Bluetooth. In practice, as I walk around my house, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John extensively tested the range of Bluetooth as I leave my phone, like in the kitchen, and go up to the attic
⏹️ ▶️ John while listening to a podcast. I know how to move quickly throughout the house to
⏹️ ▶️ John not run out the audio buffer and to get back into the range, but Bluetooth goes much farther than you think
⏹️ ▶️ John it does. And so if ultra wide band is anything close to twice the range, I think it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John The next one is latency. You might think this doesn’t matter too much when you’re playing a song or something, but latency
⏹️ ▶️ John is super important to things like AR. That’s what Gary was talking about in this thing here of like turning
⏹️ ▶️ John your head and the audio not lagging behind it or whatever. The latency of Bluetooth is
⏹️ ▶️ John not great in this article that we’ll put a link to in the show. They measured it to be 20
⏹️ ▶️ John to 30 milliseconds at best. An ultra wide band that this company called Spark has demonstrated
⏹️ ▶️ John a sub 0.2 millisecond latency. So from 30 milliseconds to 0.2 milliseconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly down to 0.1 if they really push it. So way lower latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that, by the way, that would allow it to be probably used as a live monitoring headphone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which current Bluetooth headphones just cannot do because of, among other problems, latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you wanted to say, have that be your live monitoring headphone while you’re podcasting or playing music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or recording video or something, right now we all have to use wired headphones to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of latency, if it can be that low, you know, end to end, that would allow live monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that would be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of that when I, I was just thinking I heard a discussion between some people about this, but I realized I didn’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ John a discussion. It was actually a Twitter conversation that shows how I sort of like reify things in my brain. When
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m reading Twitter, I actually hear the voices of the people talking, especially if I know them. And it was someone responding to someone else that
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. They’re like, oh, Apple keeps removing these headphone ports and it’s terrible because if you’re doing live
⏹️ ▶️ John audio monitoring, you need that zero latency connection. I was like, A, nothing is zero latency and B, you don’t need it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John zero. It just needs to be low enough that you don’t notice. This person
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking about editing video. You know, all the things you just talked about, real-time applications where it’s annoying if there’s even a few milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, if it can be like the low single digits of milliseconds at the most,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that really enables a lot of those applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and if it can be.2 milliseconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be as good. Here’s the, like, in this quote here from this article, the.2 milliseconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John this company says, this is far beyond what Bluetooth can do, and it’s even faster than what many commercially available
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-wired mice can deliver.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So sometimes USB wired
⏹️ ▶️ John peripherals can’t even get this low latency. So this would solve the latency problem
⏹️ ▶️ John for devices without headphone jacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, at the protocol level. I mean, you would still have whatever the software stack is that’s feeding it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So there would be other complexities to overcome, certainly, but that would go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long way for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and as the article interview with the Apple person said, very relevant to VR
⏹️ ▶️ John AR goggles and whipping your head around and having spatial audio on having the audio correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John and very quickly react to how you’re moving your head. Like this is very relevant, as I said, very relevant to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John interests. Like all the specs that we’ve read so far. And finally there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spectrum. You know where it’s also relevant? Wireless headphones for games. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably I would assume game controllers, like wireless game console controllers, I would imagine that would also be very valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, although most of them don’t use spatial stuff. And the lag they do, because I use wireless audio
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones when I’m doing Destiny things. And the lag, it’s not like editing audio in real time where you’re kind of annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the lag. And it doesn’t do head tracking, so there’s no sort of spatial queasiness.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the lag that is there is not as big an effect if you’re not doing that. But the VR headset
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is more relevant. And by the way, Sony did announce a new VR thing for PS5, but they did it as
⏹️ ▶️ John a press release with no pictures. It was great. They
⏹️ ▶️ John described it. They’re like, we have a VR headset and it has this many pixels per eye and
⏹️ ▶️ John this many frames per second and this much latency and these features. And no,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t tell you anything more about her or show any pictures. But.
⏹️ ▶️ John different school. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Maybe in girlfriend VR helmet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. God, that took me a
⏹️ ▶️ John second. Well done. So Spectrum. We’ll put a little
⏹️ ▶️ John link in the show notes that has this graph from this Android Authority article showing the Spectrum. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if the scale on the bottom is, if the scale is to scale. But as the
⏹️ ▶️ John name, you know, would make you suspect, ultra wideband uses a
⏹️ ▶️ John very wide band of spectrum. They use like 500 megahertz wide channels.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the thing that makes ultra wide band work is that it’s very, very wide, like lots of different frequencies.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this was made possible by freeing up a bunch of frequencies that maybe were used for analog applications in the past. So it’s very, very wide
⏹️ ▶️ John band and it’s out of the way of other standards. Like it’s out of, it’s not in the same range as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which are both in
⏹️ ▶️ John the, well, they can both be in the 2.4 gigahertz range, so Bluetooth can mess with Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not using five gigahertz Wi-Fi and everything. But ultra-wideband is super wide,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it can avoid interference and other things, and it doesn’t interfere with any of our existing standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s very, very low power, in fact, according to this article, below the noise floor of most of the other standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like invisible to them because it’s so low power, they ignore signals that are that low.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, this, I read all this and I’m like, you know, I knew the U1 chip was in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew about Ultra Wideband, I knew what it was capable of. Like a lot of the things that the applications were saying like, how you
⏹️ ▶️ John can use it to find your air tags or point it at your phone to airdrop with people and stuff. Use the
⏹️ ▶️ John improved ability to get time of flight information for multiple devices so you can tell how far away it is and
⏹️ ▶️ John which direction it’s pointing and stuff. And knows when you get close to your car, like. But I never thought of it as like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we just use this as a replacement for Bluetooth? And believe me, we need a replacement for Bluetooth. Bluetooth sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s gotten so much better over the years, but it really is the main thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John annoys me about wireless audio. I like the fact that every device
⏹️ ▶️ John has Bluetooth. I like the fact that my car has it, my phone has it, my iPad has it. I don’t like how long
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes for things to connect and disconnect. And Apple’s tried to do the best they could to make that better with its whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John H1 chip, and it is better, and I actually do like the automatic switching, even though Marco doesn’t and I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we let me interrupt you real quick? I have been a I don’t think I’ve said it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve been in an automatic switching apologist for a long time and after the 95th time that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actively listening to something on my phone, but one of the kids is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the aforementioned iPad to play like a kid friendly like educational game and because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s because I hadn’t touched my phone in a while and the and and the iPad is actively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being used, suddenly I’m like out in front of the house and my stupid AirPods Pro, which I still love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are suddenly jumping over to the iPad. Even though I’m actively listening to a frigging podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally decided that at least for the iPad, I am turning off auto switching. Because what is nice is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I misunderstood it, but I think it’s by device. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to disable auto switching for the AirPods, you have to turn it off on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every device that has ever connected to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which actually in my use case is kind of nice because I want it on my computer and I want it on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, but I don’t want it on the iPad that the kids occasionally steal to play kiddo educational games.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have to mea culpa a little bit and eat a little bit of crow and say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am at least partially embracing the no auto switching lifestyle because it was driving me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But John, I interrupt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I, sorry, is there a way for me to disable the prompt on the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It tells you
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad, iPhones, AirPods are nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Yes, when I walk in from a dog walk and Adam and Tiff are watching Adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Time like six feet away on the TV in front of the front door and it pops up a thing and I’m like, now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, all right, don’t click my headphones right now because it’ll take the audio from the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please, if anybody knows how to turn that off in a quick way, please let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you could just turn off Bluetooth on your Apple TV somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Can you? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the remote control is Bluetooth. I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, yeah, that kind of feature probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works great if you are single and live alone. If you’re the only person who’s ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the devices that are physically in your place, that probably works fantastically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it breaks down a lot once there’s multiple people around. Then it’s like, okay, well now somebody could be watching the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV, and you could be walking in with your dog listening to a podcast, and not be able to click the button on your headphones now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’ll take the audio from the TV. And by the way, they have to then look this giant overlay saying, hey, AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro nearby, you wanna connect? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Well, and it’s funny because I am terrible in that I use the little case cover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the AirPods as like a fidget spinner, which I know I shouldn’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, God, so it’s like constantly popping up on people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s the thing, is that it’s on the TV like constantly, which is my fault. But Aaron, literally today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron said to me, because we were standing in the kitchen and you can see the TV from the kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was looking at Aaron, but Aaron, I guess, happened to be facing the TV and I’m doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip, flip, flip, flip. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just doing it over and over again. She’s like, leave it, leave it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Seriously, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like she was talking to Penny.
⏹️ ▶️ John get you a dedicated case just for fidgeting and just remove the battery from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. You’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but seriously, it was basically like she was talking to Penny and she’s like, can you stop playing with your AirPods, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, what? Oh, right, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John we get back to the ultra wide band, I will say that I still enjoy the auto switching. Like when I’m sitting in my bed at night watching a TV show
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iPad and someone texts me something on my phone, I pick up my phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still watching the TV show with my AirPods in, I’m watching it on the iPad. I pick up my phone, my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone brings down the overlay that says like, oh, John’s AirPods, but the audio is still coming out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPad. And then I look at the message and it’s like, oh, someone sent me a funny TikTok. So I tap on the funny
⏹️ ▶️ John TikTok, it starts playing immediately through my headphones. And then I put down
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone and the audio goes right back to my iPad. It’s like magic, it works exactly like Apple says. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to manually switch, I would never do that. But I do want to see the TikTok, but I don’t want to annoy my wife with TikTok
⏹️ ▶️ John audio. I love the auto switching, can’t live without it. Can’t live without everything that has to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth because it really is not my friend and it takes way too long. That’s setting aside all of those stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today I learned that I can send you funny TikToks. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John this ultra wide band stuff, I really hope these rumors are true because every, I think, I couldn’t look this
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but according to this video, Every iPhone since the iPhone 11 has had the U1, even like
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheap SE stuff, I’m not sure about that. Certainly all the flagship phones have. But the point is, these U1 chips are
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. And we talked for years, like why are all these U1 chips in these Apple devices? What are they doing there? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I guess they can use, you know, again, when it was just AirDrop, it was stupid. And every time they add a feature to it, it’s like, oh, maybe that’s why they added the U1.
⏹️ ▶️ John But imagine if ultra wideband becomes the wireless audio
⏹️ ▶️ John connection standard for all AirPods, starting with the new AirPod Pro 2
⏹️ ▶️ John and continuing for like revisions of all their products after that, including their ARV or headset, including
⏹️ ▶️ John all future AirPods. Maybe they’ll also support Bluetooth because they have to work in cars and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But please bring on the ultra wideband revolution. If this works as advertised with these
⏹️ ▶️ John types of specs, it seems so much better than Bluetooth. And again, ultra wideband is not something Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John invented. It’s an open standard, just like Bluetooth. Anybody can implement it, I think. If Apple does a good job
⏹️ ▶️ John with this, and if this standard is better than Bluetooth and all the ways that we know
⏹️ ▶️ John with like modern eyes and the use cases people are gonna use it for. I want this yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we can kind of get it yesterday because if they introduce, unfortunately they’d be AirPod Pros too and I don’t like the Pros because they
⏹️ ▶️ John go in my ear canals, but if they introduce AirPods with ultra wide band, it’s not like you have to buy all new devices to use
⏹️ ▶️ John them. All the way back to the iPhone 11, they’ll work. They won’t work in your car, and which means I hope they
⏹️ ▶️ John also support Bluetooth, but wow, I would love, and I don’t care about the high bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John for the lossless, I don’t care about any of that. We just want the range, the power, and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, more reliable connect-disconnect. So as far as I’m concerned, bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’ve had those U1 chips in the phones for a few years now, and when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first came out, it’s always been the story of, everyone’s kinda wondering, they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some kind of other plan for these. They’ve been putting them in for so long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve done suspiciously little with them in public. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea has always been, I bet they’re planning on using these in a clever way in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. And I think the fun thing where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air tags show you how to zoom in on the air tag when you’re getting near your object, that is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the only plan they had for that. So I think this is a very, very plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theory that this could be the direction they go with the AirPods. and I hope it’s true, just like you. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really want this to be true because Bluetooth is awful for so many reasons. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco served us well for many years, but its time has passed and this would be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this works nearly as well as they say it will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up from Alex Sabensky in the Apple TV. Settings, remotes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and devices, Bluetooth suggests nearby AirPods off. And I will put that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I’m doing that yesterday. Right after this podcast, before I go to bed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that on both Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs. The other good thing about ultra wide band is because it’s not a proprietary thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, it could also be in all of our cars in the future too. It’s not like, oh, Apple’s doing its own
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like this is why it’s better than Apple coming up with its own protocol and its own everything, right? It’s using
⏹️ ▶️ John a newer, better industry standard that suits this purpose. And I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John ultra wide band would also be better for all the same reasons in all of our cars. Obviously car technology
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a long time to catch up, so I’m not holding my breath for that. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, but in the meantime, we’ll be able to buy some $12 thing off Amazon that plugs into the cigarette lighter and offers an ultra wideband
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the big question. This rumor is true. Does Apple continue to support Bluetooth everywhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they probably, and obviously like phones would still have Bluetooth to work in cars, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John main use case. But like maybe the AirPods no longer support Bluetooth, so you can’t use them as generic Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones anymore, or maybe the first version has both the ultra wideband and Bluetooth, but then eventually they
⏹️ ▶️ John dropped the Bluetooth in the headphones only, because it’s not like people are using their AirPods to connect to their car, I don’t think,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s like more of a-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but like, do Macs have ultra wideband chips in them? Like do the recent, the M1 Macs have that chip?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Macs don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ID. That’s true. Just because
⏹️ ▶️ John something is cool and works in lots of Apple products doesn’t mean Macs have that, but I think that’s stupid, and I think Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John should have U1 chip. I don’t know if they do. Like maybe the M1s do? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. I don’t remember hearing about it, so I would assume they probably don’t, but that could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go to a system profiler and look like the device tree on your Mac and see if there’s anything that looks like a u1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean would it show up here
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere? I know we’ll find out by next week someone someone who works at Apple Tell us oh the Macs have u1 chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right Do we have time for a little bit of ask ATP?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we can pick and choose questions. Is there anyone? What are the questions here? any one of these three that you like.
#askatp: When does John sleep?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one I would like to ask because I want to know the answer to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’ve talked to you about this before, actually. Nathaniel Gorey writes, how much sleep do you each get on a night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on average? In particular, does John sleep at all? Preach. He seems to have an endless list of commitments between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a jobby job, regular podcast, app dev, destiny, media consumption, oh yeah, and two kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I would also like to know, John, when do you sleep? And I know we’ve talked about this in the past, I think privately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly, but I don’t understand how you do as much as you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the answer is, I don’t know how much sleep I get on
⏹️ ▶️ John average, but the answer is not as much as I should. Like that’s the unfortunate answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have a lot of commitments over the years. I have adjusted things in
⏹️ ▶️ John my life to fit the amount of time and energy that I have. has
⏹️ ▶️ John varied when my children were very young, like infants and toddlers, obviously it
⏹️ ▶️ John was much worse. But on the other hand, I think I had fewer podcasts then,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It didn’t have as many, like, it’s a balance, right? I have the number of podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John I have and what my recording schedule looks like and the job that I have and how much time
⏹️ ▶️ John I spend and all the other stuff like it just barely fits, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of doesn’t fit because I’m not getting enough sleep. And the way that works is, you know, how do I get to
⏹️ ▶️ John do any fun stuff? Like if I have a day where I just, you know, from the moment I wake up, as I’m always doing something right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the day ends, and I felt like I’ve worked like the entire day, because it’s like, you know, doing kids stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ John the morning, getting kids off to school, and then a regular nine to five ish job,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus or minus working from home COVID weirdness, ferrying kids around doing other stuff, and then getting
⏹️ ▶️ John dinner, and then cleaning up after dinner and then doing a podcast and by that point like now my
⏹️ ▶️ John day is over now I get to have the me time right and how do
⏹️ ▶️ John you end up having me time or do you get to play destiny you get to watch some TV shows sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John to get more quote-unquote me time the way I do that is by cutting into sleep because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the one part of the day that has some flexibility I can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John you know work fewer hours at my jobby job I can’t really record fewer hours of podcasts because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of regular schedule and a commitment. I can’t avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John driving kids around or doing you know all that stuff or whatever. So the only thing that is a flex
⏹️ ▶️ John block kind of is sleep. And that’s why I don’t get enough sleep because I’ll want to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John you know not just one episode of a show but I’m actually I’m behind two episodes or I’m behind in one episode and
⏹️ ▶️ John three of my shows or I want to do a thing in destiny to take several hours to complete or whatever. And yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John end up eating into sleep. Weekends do still exist, though. And I try not to have any podcasts on weekends
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can at all help it so I can play more destiny and weekends if I’m not doing other things right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to get eight hours of sleep. I do not. I like usually if you want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John like what my current situation with the current set of responsibilities and stuff like that. In general, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John in bed by midnight and the alarm goes off at 630. That’s That’s not enough sleep. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not recommend this approach. Do not do this. That’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that really is. So my, well, Aaron’s alarm goes off, I think like 6.15ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then usually I’ll loiter in bed for just a few more minutes before I get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bed. And I’m out of bed no later than 6.30 on a weekday. And I am usually climbing in bed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around 10, give or take a little bit, and I’m usually not falling asleep until around 11. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting easily an hour more sleep than you are, John. And I feel like I still accomplish quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit less. Marco, what’s your schedule?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really boring. I go to bed most nights around 1030 and wake up most mornings around 630. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get the eight hours you’re supposed to get most nights or something close to it. Maybe one hour less if I stay up too late
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching TV or something. But it’s pretty boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t always get this much or little, depending on how you look at it, sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s kind of where I am now. That’s why when I briefly did sleep tracking with the Apple Watch this past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall, and I stopped doing it after about a week or two because I’m like, well, this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really actionable information that this is telling me. Right now, in this point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life, I seem to have fairly normal, functional sleep, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for more sleep tracking,
Dog-tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to feel like an underachiever with your sleep, you should get, I recently got a new tracker
⏹️ ▶️ John dog collar thing that I’m trying for my dog.
⏹️ ▶️ John does. I was going to say for you. Yeah. And it also does sleep tracking. For your dog?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. And I’m fairly shocked by the numbers in the dog sleep tracking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, dogs sleep a lot. I mean, they’re kind of supposed to. They’re made for that. Like, they’re built that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That they do get a lot of sleep normally in a healthy way.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what’s your guess? I mean, I still don’t have like, I think I only have maybe like a couple weeks worth of data here, but what’s your
⏹️ ▶️ John guess for sleep numbers for my dog?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hours per day? Oh, geez, I would say, I mean, dogs seem to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very light sleep a lot. They’re almost like screensavers. Like if you don’t play with them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few minutes, they go into power save mode and just fall
⏹️ ▶️ John asleep. Well, my dog is young. It’s not, she’s only four years old and she goes to a doggy
⏹️ ▶️ John play date most days during the week where she sees other dogs and runs around in the backyard and is just generally a crazed beast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna say something like 16 hours a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was gonna say somewhere between 12 and like 18. So yeah, I’ll go, are we doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prices right? Are we doing prices right rules?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Prices right rules, $1. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would say 15 hours. What did Mark say, 16? 16, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, damn. But here’s the breakdown. 8.9 hours
⏹️ ▶️ John per night, because my dog is up by like 6, 6.30 a.m. every single day, which is one of the reasons the household has to get, or at
⏹️ ▶️ John least someone in the household, although it’s usually my wife, she usually does this for me, has to take the dog out at 6.30 a.m.,
⏹️ ▶️ John although the whole house starts that time of day on the weekdays anyway, just to get everyone up and out. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John during the day, 9.3 hours average nap time. And that’s with going to
⏹️ ▶️ John a doggy play date and going on multiple walks and doing a lot of stuff and getting way more steps than us during the day, because it’s step tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John too. As the notifications frequently say, my dog is crushing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Crushing it by sleeping 18 hours a day getting like 37,000 steps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I fully understand this is not an endorsement. You just got the device, but what, which tracker are you using now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is actually a good tech story. Like the reason I have
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of tracker collar thing is because my dog is, is my dog is a flight risk. Uh, same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there any way to fix this? Cause it’s driving
⏹️ ▶️ John me. There is in theory, but like you read a lot of stuff about, and here’s, here’s the thing. Dogs with very
⏹️ ▶️ John strong prey drive are very difficult to train to come back to you because the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole training process relies on you having something that the dog finds motivating. So you can use like pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John of steak or hot dogs or whatever you think, like a whole live chicken, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you think your dog is going to be into.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. To get you. As soon as you get something that the dog finds desirable, you can train a dog to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John right. The problem comes when the most desirable thing in the entire world
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as far as the dog is concerned
⏹️ ▶️ John is the squirrel, the bird, the whatever. and nothing you ever have, no piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John food, meat, treat, nothing you ever have will ever compete with what’s out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s impossible to train a dog to do that. Now, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not always true because maybe that is interesting now, but maybe when the dog was a puppy, it was more interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in whatever you could find and I just did a bad job of training, recall or whatever, but my dog has a
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very strong prey drive. So birds, squirrels, rabbits, Those are
⏹️ ▶️ John the most interesting things in the world. And so when we take the dog to the dog park, which is unfenced because of annoying people live near
⏹️ ▶️ John me, who who consistently block the ability for us to put a fence around a dog
⏹️ ▶️ John park because they think it would be ugly or something because their dogs aren’t flight risk or because they just don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I don’t like those people. We
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey take our dog to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco dog and she run and she
⏹️ ▶️ John runs around and plays with the other dogs. And it’s like she’s on a timer because eventually when she gets bored of the other dogs that are
⏹️ ▶️ John there, she will see a bird a mile away and say, you know what? I’m going there now and she’s off like a shot. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we need, too many times that happened, we said we need to get a GPS on this dog. So we want to have a GPS so
⏹️ ▶️ John when the dog runs off, we can pull out our phones and literally be able to track this dog anywhere to find the
⏹️ ▶️ John dog and bring it back home, right? So we had this, what, the whistle thing for the longest
⏹️ ▶️ John time, but my dog is small. It’s like a 40 pound dog. And the whistle GPS
⏹️ ▶️ John is a big cube. Like it’s literally like a rectangular solid. And I feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ John putting this big rectangular solid on the collar. It’s not very heavy, but I feel bad when the dog’s laying down and like the little
⏹️ ▶️ John cube is in the way, I’m always rotating it out of the way. So it’s, you know, it’s just, I wanted something that was slimmer. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, me and Marco are Instagram ad victims. Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So advertising,
⏹️ ▶️ John half of my ads on Instagram are now dog stuff because they got my number on that. And there was this
⏹️ ▶️ John new company, I think I saw them like a couple of years ago. Maybe they were even a Kickstarter. They was like, now a new
⏹️ ▶️ John GPS dog collar. I’m like, wow, that looks way slimmer than the big brick that I have now.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I just forgot about it because I figured the company would go out of business and never make a product. But somehow they did make a product and it’s a real
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping thing and I started getting Instagram ads for it and I ordered it and it is slimmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are other problems with it that I’m currently working on because it’s this weird detachable thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s integrated with the collar but I’d rather not have it integrated with the collar. I’d rather just have it attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to the collar and just have a conventional collar. So I’m working out the collar details, still iterating on this process.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is I got it, it is slimmer. The app is a little bit fancier than the old one. It
⏹️ ▶️ John does sleeper tracking, the old one didn’t. The other hand, the whistle did lick tracking. How much
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is your dog- It did licking
⏹️ ▶️ John and scratching. How much is your dog licking and how much is your dog scratching and is that abnormal or not to see?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, anyway. That’s interesting, yeah, because yeah, those are common problems for dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I would notice them in person. Like I don’t need the app to tell me that, but it’s interesting that it did that. Really only we’re just using it for the
⏹️ ▶️ John GPS feature. But the main thing I wanted to check is like, how good is the, how long does the battery last and how good is the GPS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when the dog is lost, does it update once every five minutes? Because that kind of sucks. You’ll always be, you know, behind
⏹️ ▶️ John where the dog was. You’ll get to where the dog was five minutes ago, but now it’s not there anymore, right? So this seems to work
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty well. It updates every 60 seconds. The battery is pretty darn good. The original whistle
⏹️ ▶️ John battery was terrible. The new whistle battery is so good that I forget to charge it because it’s like, you can last like a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new one says it lasts from one to three months. I think one month is probably what it’s gonna end up lasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what’s the name of it?
⏹️ ▶️ John You never actually told me. It is F-I, I don’t know if it’s fee or fi.
⏹️ ▶️ John The URL is t-r-y-f-i.com, try fee, try fi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I guess they couldn’t get f-i.com. So you can see it’s way slimmer than a giant rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but on a small dog, the default collars are one inch wide, which is a little bit too wide
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. And I don’t like the tracker to be
⏹️ ▶️ John an integral part of the collar just because I don’t trust that The little hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John things will hold and if the tracking collar breaks off of your dog Right and that you’ve defeated the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John now your dog is loose and doesn’t have the tracker on it So I’m trying to look into a thinner collar That’s not as wide
⏹️ ▶️ John and it also the collar is just a complete collar And then the tracker goes on the outside of it
⏹️ ▶️ John the nice thing about this company is I bought this collar because I saw it advertised and And I got it and hooked it up
⏹️ ▶️ John and used it and it’s going well and everything. And then like two days after I got the
⏹️ ▶️ John collar and was starting to use it, I started seeing Instagram ads for $100 off the collar. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just ordered it and now Instagram, Instagram just constantly was showing to me. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was like the ad I kept seeing, I was like, it’s rubbing it in my face, $100 off. So I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John making jokes in my life. I’m like, I should email these people and just say, I know you shouldn’t honor this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I just thought of Merlin and like the people who are like the Walgreens with an expired coupon saying, I know this coupon is expired,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you honor it anyway? It’s like, that’s the point of the expiration date. No, you can’t honor it anyway, it’s expired.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, yeah, but I’m me, can’t I get the discount? I know you ordered this before we had this sale,
⏹️ ▶️ John but can’t, so, but I figured it’s worth a try. I’ll try to be nice about it. And basically I just
⏹️ ▶️ John sent them screenshots of the Instagram ads and I said, I’m seeing these ads everywhere. I know I ordered this collar
⏹️ ▶️ John like a few days ago and the sale wasn’t on then, but is there any way you can give
⏹️ ▶️ John me the discount anyway? And they immediately replied and said, oh yeah, sure, you’re still within the return window, which is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John them saying, we know that you could just return this and buy it again, but please don’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we’ll save you the effort.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they just gave me the discount, like retroactively, which I thought was great. So this ended up being like a $50 purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John for a brand new GPS dog collar. Obviously you have to pay a yearly subscription for the GPS thing. This one does
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi, GPS, and LTE. So it’s like in every possible band. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John way it does the power savings is you have to make sure it’s on wifi when it’s in your house, because that’s way lower
⏹️ ▶️ John power and it just checks in periodically. And then when it leaves your house, then it goes on cellular and that takes way more
⏹️ ▶️ John power. Anyway, so far so good with the feed thing, still working on the collar.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is actually, it’s hard to find a collar that fits well on a small dog. And like I said, I’m still trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to work through the issue of like, I don’t want this to be a structural element of the collar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like when the transmission and engine are structural elements of fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John sports cars, I don’t want that for my car. I just want a plain old collar where the collar is the collar and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John thin enough that it will go on the outside of it. So that’s what I’m working on now. I ordered like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a whole sort of sub-ecosystem of fee-compatible collars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like third parties make collars that work with this that can sort of latch onto it. And there’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John range of them. And a lot of them seem like Etsy type sellers. So I ordered one and it’s completely customizable. What color, what
⏹️ ▶️ John size, what color do you want the things, what kind of buckle clasp, what thickness, right? Do you want your dog’s name engraved on it or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John But then it’s like two to three weeks for them to, I assume, hand make this collar and send it to me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I ordered one of those a few days ago and a few weeks when it arrives. So hopefully it’ll be better than the default
⏹️ ▶️ John collar it comes with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how much is the annual service? Because I’m looking at this $150 collar, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Instagram ad notwithstanding, but I don’t see anywhere on this website maybe I’m a moron,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it talks about how much the service is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think they advertise too much because obviously that’s where they get you, as they say. Right, the service is the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you pay for it once, but you pay the service every single year. I think they give you 30 days for free. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry about the service, you don’t have to pay anything. You just buy it and you use it. And that’s great for trying it out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it’s $100 a year after that. I think you can get a discount if you buy two or three years in a row. But it’s kind of the same. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John Whistle was the same. The Whistle is like you buy a yearly plan and it was like 100 bucks a year. But for keeping track of your
⏹️ ▶️ John dog, if you have a dog that is flight risk, it is money well spent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just laughing at how big these collars are because Hops wears a 3-8 inch wide collar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically a cat collar. It’s fair. He’s a 14, 15 pound dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s not a big dog. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem with a lot of these GPS things. Tech wise, you can only make it so small, and the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John you make it, the worse the battery life is. So people with very small dogs, difficult although I will say that
⏹️ ▶️ John in my research and looking at all these things I do run across cat cars because cats are also
⏹️ ▶️ John flight risks but I feel so bad for the cats in these pictures because cats are not
⏹️ ▶️ John large animals compared to a 40-pound dog most of the time and so when you put a big tracker
⏹️ ▶️ John on a cat they just must feel so terrible like get this thing off me but I but again I feel for the people who are constantly losing
⏹️ ▶️ John their cats who have cats that are escape artists it better to be able to keep track of your pet You use modern technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think hops is a flight risk, so you’re probably fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, he’s really not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if you see another one of those $100 off coupons on Instagram, let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re there right now, I guarantee you, they are there. If you, let
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me find it. I don’t get dog advertisements, though. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John find the code, I’ll look in my sent mail. It’s like a coupon code that you enter. I’m gonna read it off on the air and sell some college here, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use code ATP for $100 off.
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a referral code thing. I will try to put the referral
⏹️ ▶️ John that, do that. Yeah, I’ll try to put it in the show notes link. there is a referral code.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Also, for whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth, Casey, as John will tell you, I’m sure, as well, this does get easier with age of the dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Puppies will run out anywhere for anything. As dogs get older, it becomes easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep them from doing that, or they will just naturally not wanna run away as much. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep waiting, but obviously, Daisy is not that old. She’s only four years old, so that’s not a puppy, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not old yet either. But she has not lessened in her fervor to destroy every
⏹️ ▶️ John small animal she can find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, some dogs never change, but the odds are on your side that this will get easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sure hope so, because it happened just a day or two ago. We had gotten a bunch of snow—actually, it’s worth briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussing this. So Richmond got somewhere, I would say, around four inches of snow starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monday morning, and the first day of school since mid-December that the kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have is tomorrow, because four days of school ruined Richmond for three days. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, Penny ran out because Declan was trying to go from the backyard within the fence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area to the front yard. And apparently it was not quick enough, and Penny was like, freedom! And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she was running, you know, halfway down the neighborhood. And I looked at Erin and said, basically, if this happens again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope she finds her way home, because I’m not chasing her. And I think I mean that because I’m so sick of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. But I’m not sure. But anyway, so I feel like it would be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have something like this on her. because even though it only happens at most once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month, it infuriates me disproportionately to the amount, to the frequency in which it happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause I am just furious when it happens because she just does not care. She’s like, oh, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are. Ha ha. Now it’s a game. See
⏹️ ▶️ John You just got to be more careful with the opening and closing of the doors.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Tell my kids that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I know. I mean, I, we, it’s, it’s a, it’s a pain with small kids as well, but they can also be
⏹️ ▶️ John trained to do it, especially if they care about the dog. But you can also train your dog to recall this point. I don’t think she’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey She’s passed the trainability point. See if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find something that she likes more than freedom. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey nothing. Good luck with that. Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. I found, I went to the app, there’s like a QR code and there’s a referral. So my referral code for tryfi.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John tryfi.com, my referral code is 59RMG2.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will put this in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco show notes. It’s great podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Use that referral code.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a sponsor. They’re not a sponsor of this program at all. And the code
⏹️ ▶️ John for $100 off, I’m assuming it’s still active, is newyears100, all one word, N-E-W-Y-E-A-R-S-1-0-0.
⏹️ ▶️ John $100 off $150 car. Why? Because they get $100 a year from you, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where the real money is made, it’s not on this device. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just glad that you found something good as a dog product on Instagram, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is one area, you know, I will buy pretty much any cool looking, you know, jacket or something off Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But dog stuff, if you do Instagram and Kickstarter, I’ve had terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luck with any kind of dog-related product,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a holistic medicine, but for dogs. Try this magic powder, your dog will stop chewing. Oh really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try that stupid evidence-based medicine. Try these magic crystals. Don’t go
⏹️ ▶️ John to your vet and ask about allergies. Just try this thing that we wave over your dog’s
⏹️ ▶️ John head and it will tell you that your dog’s allergic to grass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Iodyne. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
Should Apple stop using leather?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something appeared in the show notes a while back, which is an interesting question, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure how to answer it. And the question is as follows. Should Apple stop using leather? Question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mark? I don’t know. I feel like real honest to goodness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leather, like the skin, the hide of an animal, probably not the wisest choice to use anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But aren’t there like in Marco, I presume you would know best of any of us. Aren’t there some pretty good like synthetic or fake leathers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point? You
⏹️ ▶️ John should know about this from the automotive world. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s fair. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been a very big trend, especially recently, to not use leather in cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John even super expensive ones, for all the obvious reasons. Like, aside from leather having to kill animals
⏹️ ▶️ John because they don’t give you their skin for free, raising animals is expensive and bad for the
⏹️ ▶️ John environment and all. It’s like, we can do better than leather. But of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, you want something that feels expensive and is fancy. And in our childhood,
⏹️ ▶️ John fake leather was not a sign of fancy. If you had a fake leather
⏹️ ▶️ John interior or a vinyl interior in your car, it was seen as less, but these days
⏹️ ▶️ John in lots of very fancy cars, there’s a trend towards having things that
⏹️ ▶️ John have some of the qualities of leather, but that are not leather, often they call it vegan leather, which is a really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird way to phrase it, but that’s what they do. And so lots of car interiors from lots of makers
⏹️ ▶️ John and very expensive cars have seats that are made of things and not leather. I’ve never been a big fan of leather seats
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they’re cold in the winter. Oh, strong disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re cold in the winter, even when you have seat heaters and I guess you can pre-warm them. But like, I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John liked cloth seats because they grip you better. And, you know, but I understand cloths can seem cheap and can wear off
⏹️ ▶️ John if your butt, you know, wears a groove in it and leather can be more,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey more sort of tough
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But it depends on the leather.
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes leather wears out near the bolsters and everything too,
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think we can do better. I think Apple should not use leather for all the reasons we
⏹️ ▶️ John stated, but also because we can do better. I think the experiments in car interiors
⏹️ ▶️ John and dashboards and other parts of cars that you touch have shown that there are other better
⏹️ ▶️ John options that are just plain better than leather that feel good, but that are more durable and more grippy
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe also not as cold in the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s the arguments against using leather, I think are worth noting here. Because in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco context of the kind of company Apple is, the kind of values and priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have, especially regarding environmentalism, it is kind of surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If Apple didn’t sell leather goods already, and we’re talking mostly phone cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they also have those weird leather pouches for Macs and stuff, and obviously iPad covers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s mainly what we’re looking at here. If Apple didn’t sell those things initially, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the present day, and they started selling them, I think that would seem weird. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there was no historical baggage, if they just started selling leather stuff as this company that’s all about like environmentalism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re pretty, you know, politically they’re pretty progressive, you know, like that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem odd that they would start selling animal-based leather as a mass market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco item in their stores. Like that wouldn’t be the kind of thing you would expect Apple to do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s – I mean there’s all sorts of ways you could look at this question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all sorts of people’s opinions on the role of animal products in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply chain, our food. One way to look at this is like using animals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very expensive in certain ways. It’s very expensive to the environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very expensive morally in certain ways, and people have different levels of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they care about that. that, but it’s something that is very inefficient and has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of downsides. And like I personally, I eat animal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foods, but I’ve been dramatically reducing how much of them I eat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last year or so because I’ve started caring more about that kind of thing. About like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I could make this dish with oil instead of butter, I’ll make it with of the oil. If it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that big of a difference, who cares? There’s so many meat alternatives on the market now that are really good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of which I actually prefer to the meats that they are being alternatives to. Alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eggs, alternative dairy products, a lot of this alternative, milks and stuff, a lot of this stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have learned to, I have preferred the alternatives recently because they’re just, in many ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re better and I’ve started to realize I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to use animal stuff wastefully, in ways that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really providing a big benefit to me, or in ways that there are good alternatives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because using alternatives is better for the environment, it is better morally, it does solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of problems or reduce a lot of problems. So I think leather, you can look at that same way. You could say, well, if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits to using things that are not leather, we should probably look into that. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. So that question’s answered. Are there benefits to not using leather? Yes, absolutely. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the question is, are there good alternatives? And yes, there are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not necessarily in every possible way or style, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re close enough. There’s enough great alternatives to leather that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple should stop using it. And that’s not to say that everyone should stop using leather phone cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other companies will make them as they do now. And that’s fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that it’s weird that Apple makes leather products now. Like with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today’s sensibilities, today’s realities of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environmentalism and climate change and like the kind of stuff that’s really important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the world, it does seem weird that Apple still does sell leather. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we have enough good alternatives that cover enough of the previous need for leather now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that while other companies will continue to sell it and that’s fine for them, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple should lead the way here and stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, it’s not just like that we get things that are close enough to leather, we have things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John better in some ways than another, worse in some, but better in some ways. And so for your particular application,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may find a thing that is superior to leather in all the ways that you care about for your use case. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t, you’ll find something that is superior to leather in one way, but slightly worse in another way. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are lots of good alternatives and you have to be careful of the alternatives So the alternative is like, oh, this is a petroleum based product. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not great either. Like or it takes some huge amount of energy to make this alternative that it’s worse than like the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of fertilizer and runoff and grazing and methane put out by the cow that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it would it would need it to be a lot to be worse than a cow.
⏹️ ▶️ John But some synthetic stuff, they can end up being very expensive, energy inefficient or use rare chemicals
⏹️ ▶️ John or terrible processes. You have to be careful. That’s why a lot of the car interiors aren’t just we use like vegan
⏹️ ▶️ John leather. but also they say things like not only do we not use leather, but this entire dashboard is made
⏹️ ▶️ John from recycled materials or the seats are made from ground up magazines or like whatever. Like they try to
⏹️ ▶️ John not just say it is an alternative that we didn’t have to kill an animal for. They try to say, and also it took less energy
⏹️ ▶️ John to make. It is, you know, less costly to the environment. It has less external
⏹️ ▶️ John side effects and stuff like that. So we’ve made a lot of advances in those in that area. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, And one example is fancy high-end supercars, if they’re trying to be performance oriented,
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t included leather for years because it’s too slippery. Like you want a seat that grips you. That’s why like Alcantara
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other sort of faux leather, faux suede type of synthetic materials come in because
⏹️ ▶️ John performance wise, the one characteristic that matters the most is how grippy it is and leather just falls down there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you see a leather seat in a car, you know it’s the more luxury oriented one because it’s not as grippy
⏹️ ▶️ John as the other ones, right? I think that’s true of phone cases as well. I said about my leather case that I have on my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it almost seems like it’s synthetic leather. And I would be perfectly happy if it was synthetic leather. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even seem like good synthetic leather. It’s just grippy enough. Like it’s, you know, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what alternative, does it seem like it’s vinyl or whatever, right? I want the performance characteristics of leather, but if you saw
⏹️ ▶️ John this leather case, it would take a lot for you to realize that it’s not fake leather, because it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John so artificial. It’s so uniform, it doesn’t smell like leather. It just has a few of the performance
⏹️ ▶️ John characteristics of leather. So I would totally buy a first party or third party case with fake leather
⏹️ ▶️ John if it felt like this. And I believe that’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. Yeah, and I think moreover, it’s a sign like, you know, Apple care, they care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much about environmentalism in so many other ways. You know, they’ll change the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco materials they use in like their cables or their chip boards, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid certain dangerous or toxic chemicals. And, you know, they make other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions across their product lines for environmental reasons. Even when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not popular or economical super well, they still care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot about environmental concerns and they will make changes for those reasons. Even when they’re worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Even when, like the wires, like the plastic, whatever they were using for the plastic and
⏹️ ▶️ John headphone cables and power cables, for many years before Apple figured out how to make something that was close to as
⏹️ ▶️ John good, they were just plain worse. Oh yeah. The cables were more brittle, They weren’t as nice as they
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be. They didn’t feel as expensive. They didn’t hold up as well, but Apple made the change anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John just to try to prevent whatever environmental harm was coming from the old one. And eventually Apple got better enough
⏹️ ▶️ John at the more sustainable plastic that it’s not as, you know, people have forgotten about the old ones. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like what all the things you hear about, like when I was a kid, product X was made with
⏹️ ▶️ John Y and that’s why it was better. I’m trying to think of a good example. Maybe it’s like McDonald’s fries made with lard. I think that maybe I’m the only
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Beef tallow. Yeah, I’m maybe I’m the only one old enough to remember those. And then they changed
⏹️ ▶️ John to like vegetable oil or whatever and it was way worse. And it took McDonald’s many years
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to get them back to an acceptable level. And people will still say, yeah, but they’re not like they
⏹️ ▶️ John were when I was a kid. But you know, people, eventually those people die and then people grow
⏹️ ▶️ John up just having McDonald’s fries the way they are. And we all move on, right? And on the meat
⏹️ ▶️ John front, the exciting slash weird slash gross thing to look out
⏹️ ▶️ John for, potentially in our lifetimes. As people are always trying to grow artificial meat. You don’t have to kill any animals
⏹️ ▶️ John and it could be like cellularly exactly the same thing as beef. We’re not quite there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s super expensive to do and it doesn’t quite taste and isn’t quite formed
⏹️ ▶️ John the same way as real beef. But you feel like you can see a path to get there
⏹️ ▶️ John because the fact that we can do it now in a not very good way at huge expense,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how technology starts. So we just don’t know how long will it take to perfect this but if you could get it to be done
⏹️ ▶️ John economically, it would literally be beef. Like it would be like, put it under a microscope. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly the same thing as beef. You just grew it in a Petri dish. You didn’t have to kill an animal for it. And then you can
⏹️ ▶️ John grow it and, you know, breed out whatever harmful parts there are, not breed because you don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John animals, but like eliminate the harmful parts and make essentially synthetic meat that is also real meat,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also synthetic, but it’s healthier than real, real meat. And then you can have a whole subculture of people who celebrate
⏹️ ▶️ John killing animals because of course, They only have beef tallow, McDonald’s fries, and they only kill
⏹️ ▶️ John cows to get their beef. But the rest of us will be healthier and happier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing. As I’ve tried to improve this area of my life recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think if you look at the data and health
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studies that have been done over time, and certainly environmental concerns are a big one, carbon concerns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would do the world a lot of good if we ate less meat and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumed less animal products. You don’t have to all become vegans, but just doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less. That makes a big difference. Right now, especially beef, it’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really comically inefficient in terms of environmental stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just eating less meat, not having it be the bulk of every meal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes a long way. Going back to apple with leather, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprising that they still have it at all because I don’t think they actually are selling a huge quantity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of leather. The phone cases, I think, are probably where they have the most of it. I don’t imagine they’re selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of their, like, laptop pouches for $300 or their expensive leather watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands. Like, they probably, most of the leather is probably just phone cases. And Apple’s phone cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are nice, but they’re also more expensive than the competition. And typically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people don’t wanna spend the Apple price on their phone case. They usually buy some other case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause it’s cheaper. And so, they’re probably not selling a huge amount of leather. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why it makes it even more curious why they keep doing it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they had a partnership with Hermes, but that’s all other stuff and fancy. I guess they even did the AirTags
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, isn’t that one leather too?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why it feels like they’re just doing it for like high profit accessory sales. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fancy, like, cause that’s why, I mean, same thing with cars. Like why the expensive ones have leather? Cause it was fancier and it was better
⏹️ ▶️ John in many ways. And you know, it was, it felt more expensive and that’s why it was in the fancy cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like I said, even in the fancy cars sometimes there is a performance characteristic that’s more important than it being a fancy but Apple still seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John hanging on it just because it’s a fancy thing. Like how the 20th anniversary Mac had leather on the like track pad
⏹️ ▶️ John area, right? It’s just, it was the signal from, you know from the eighties on, I mean, it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John been, you know a signal of, of, of fancy things and sort of the modern era or 20th century
⏹️ ▶️ John leather. But these days, I think the tide is turning, not because
⏹️ ▶️ John people care that much about animals, but just because we can make synthetic products at a reasonable price, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for high-end goods. You can afford to use a more expensive material,
⏹️ ▶️ John and consumers can be and have been in many ways convinced that that is fancier.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same sort of cachet that comes with, well, I have an electric car, so I’m not polluting the environment or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a thing that rich people can get behind and feel good about doing it, and it feels fancier to them
⏹️ ▶️ John to have an electric car than to have an internal combustion because internal combustion can feel old and Teslas are cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And if that Tesla comes with an interior that’s made from recycled golf balls or something, that’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can feel it, they feel fancier about that. They’re like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John their friends get into their cool car and their door handle pops out and the weird lights go all around the thing. I’ll say, did you know this dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John is made from recycled golf balls? Like we’re turning that corner now where to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the cool rich person thing doesn’t have to be leather anymore. That can be eventually, we can turn it around
⏹️ ▶️ John where eventually that seems like a barbaric lower class thing and you can sell the rich
⏹️ ▶️ John people the expensive. And in the beginning, the good alternatives are probably going to be more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John than leather. But you know, it trickles down, right? So I think we are slowly turning that corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially in material science where it’s not things that people are eating. Getting people to eat less meat is gonna be much more difficult, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But in material science, we’re working on that well. And like I said, Marco, on the eating stuff, We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making some headway there with the fake meats, not necessarily the lab-grown ones, but like the Impossible Burger and
⏹️ ▶️ John Beyond Burger and all those other things. And fast food restaurants have that as an alternative. I personally think veggie
⏹️ ▶️ John burgers that don’t even try to be like meat are better than the fake meat ones, but that’s just me. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know some people like the other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Same, which one do you like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like Beyond. Beyond tastes like- Smells like- Somebody who has-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Smells terrible. Yes, yeah. Beyond Stuff, yeah, Beyond Stuff is very much not for me. It tastes like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meat designed by people who haven’t tasted meat in a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John My daughter’s a vegetarian and she likes Beyond the best, so don’t take my word for it, but I personally don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Beyond. No, I’m a big fan of Impossible. I use the Impossible grounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I make tacos. In that kind of situation, it’s like, again, it’s- It’s mostly the sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s mostly seasonings and accessories, so it’s like if the, quote, meat tastes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit different, it’s not even that different, but if it tastes a little bit different, nobody cares. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the context of taco night, like you’re there for all the other stuff. The meat is mostly a delivery device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for chili powder and salt. So you’re not really there, it doesn’t really matter. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t made ground beef tacos in like over a year because the value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the meat is not high enough to offset its costs to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world and to my mind. So that’s an easy substitute, right? would for breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have just egg instead of scrambled eggs because it’s healthier and I like the taste better in the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make it. You know, and there’s other things like the impossible grounds, they stay in the freezer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time really nicely. And I’ve so often I’ll like take out a pack of ground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beef to make tacos in the past and I’ll make it and it’ll smell kind of funny because maybe it wasn’t very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin with or something and I sometimes even have to throw it out because it’s like it smells like it’s rotten or something. That’s never happened with impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So it’s just there’s It’s like, you know, like you don’t have to feel weird when you’re like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t, like I hate like having to deal with raw chicken and then having to wash everything, scrub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything down so hard afterwards and worry about, you know, all these bacterial infections.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to find a way to reduce your meat consumption, one thing that’s worked for me was you keep talking about all these things with the
⏹️ ▶️ John ground beef and I’m like, oh, I very rarely have ground beef and, or much less than I used to is
⏹️ ▶️ John shortly after I was first married and we were in our first place together. Both my wife and I had
⏹️ ▶️ John at various times bouts of food poisoning that we attributed to ground beef that we just eat and
⏹️ ▶️ John often in tacos or other dishes with ground beef. So eventually we just
⏹️ ▶️ John right or wrong. I’m not saying this is true because very often people misattribute what gave them food poisoning. They just assume it’s the last thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John ate, which is sometimes not the case because it takes a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, a lot of times it’s like the spinach that was on the burger
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. Yeah, who knows? But anyway, for whatever reasons, both of us just got kind of got turned off
⏹️ ▶️ John to ground beef and just basically slowly but surely eliminated everything that we were eating that had ground beef in it with except
⏹️ ▶️ John with the possible exception of hamburgers and it was just because of bad experience to the food poisoning
⏹️ ▶️ John and yeah foodborne illnesses come on vegetables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all fairness there’s lots of reasons not to eat ground beef it’s really quite right
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know I don’t I very rarely have hamburger they have hot dogs instead which is not any better I realize
⏹️ ▶️ John I just said like it this is this is how people change their diets. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you eventually get to the point where the thing that you used to like starts to turn you off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s where I am with a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And it’s not, sometimes that can be unhealthy. You shouldn’t really be grossed out
⏹️ ▶️ John by foods that there’s nothing particularly gross about them. And my, you know, experience of like
⏹️ ▶️ John misattributing food poisoning to ground beef is obviously not ideal. But all this is to say is if you think
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I can’t possibly live without insert food here, you’d be surprised how you can
⏹️ ▶️ John change over time. And it’s, you know, it becomes, it doesn’t become a thing that you have to work to do
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just actually turned off by it and more turned on by some other food, like it no longer becomes a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to make an effort to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think, again, like, I think it’s very important to think about this kind of stuff as, you know, think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re when you are making a choice about food, consider things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the environmental cost more, more than we have in the past. And that’s not to say like, you know, if I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a steakhouse, I’m gonna get a filet mignon. I’m gonna get a real steak and I’m gonna eat it and I’m gonna enjoy it. I thought you said you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John steak. You said you’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a filet mignon, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is a… No, there it is. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I go with filets is that, first of all, they’re good and I don’t care and second of all, they’re the smallest steak offered because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to have the most room for sides. I don’t want to have 16 ounces of cow in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my stomach and blocking out all the other stuff from getting in. The whole reason to go to steakhouse is to get sides and stuff and the steak
⏹️ ▶️ John I disagree but okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway but like you know the point is like it’s it’s important for you know as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our climate realities that we’re in and our environmental realities that we’re in it’s important for people to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize like okay this this type of thing is more costly to the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or morals or my own health in some way then these other choices I could make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so obviously we’re all humans we like good things we’re gonna get the unhealthy things sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if there are good alternatives that we can get other times, we should probably be doing a lot more of that than we have been doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is an interesting scenario. I just want to bring this up as you keep talking about making different personal choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike things like energy consumption, where it was an actual explicit
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy of fossil fuel companies to introduce the concept of a carbon footprint to
⏹️ ▶️ John make us all think that our individual personal choices about our recycling and living is the way to prevent global
⏹️ ▶️ John warming, it was basically just a way to distract people from saying, don’t regulate us as fossil fuel companies. This will be
⏹️ ▶️ John solved by you making individual choices. There is no systemic change we should make. You should just
⏹️ ▶️ John be more careful and take shorter showers. That’s the only way to save the world. That’s a load of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not to say that we shouldn’t make individual choices that are good for the environment, just to say that it’s absolutely not the solution. The real solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is to regulate fossil fuel companies and actually care about climate change at a systemic level. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way to fix it. But and that’s because individuals have very little control
⏹️ ▶️ John about how they get their energy. It’s kind of like cable internet access, but worse. It’s not. It’s like if you don’t want to use fossil
⏹️ ▶️ John fuels to heat your home. Very often, that is the only solution that is economically viable
⏹️ ▶️ John for you in your place and your income level, right? Not everyone can just like, I’m going to live in a solar home and everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be that’s incredibly expensive, right? Sometimes all you can get as well, you can get oil or natural gas
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have control of that because this is huge utilities and fossil fuel companies with huge subsidies from the government. And blah, blah, blah. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, in the case of food, the only thing that can change the
⏹️ ▶️ John variety of the food we get are changes in demand. If nobody wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John eat mealworms, they’re not going to spend 50% of the acreage of your country
⏹️ ▶️ John raising mealworms because nobody wants to eat them. Lots of people want to eat cows,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to use up a large portion of some land somewhere to raise those cows to sell to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your individual choices may not matter, but unlike the case with fossil fuel companies, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you’re going to be stuck in a situation where you say, well, I have to eat beef because it’s the only thing I can buy. Now, it is true
⏹️ ▶️ John that things that are healthy tend to be more expensive. In America, you can get corn in everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything you eat can be made of corn, right? Because it’s subsidized and it’s not that great. Everything you wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be made of corn. Your house can be made of corn.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so there is a systemic issue there, especially with the cost. Because if you want to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way more expensive than just eating corn syrup and corn for everything, right? But on mass,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if we start eating less beef, that will cause less beef to be produced and so on and so forth. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no place where you live where you’re like, well, I, even though there’s no demand for beef, the beef manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John push it on us, and it’s the only food we can buy. That’s true of corn, but not beef. Right? So setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John corn for now, which is technically a vegetable, it is mostly just a sugar delivery device. Changing our collective
⏹️ ▶️ John individual choices about how much meat we eat can actually have a material influence
⏹️ ▶️ John on the food that is made because over the centuries, the food that is made has been the food
⏹️ ▶️ John in some respects that is demanded by the people. Again, they give the mealworm example because in this country, we tend not to eat a lot of insects,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Which is why we don’t manufacture a lot of insects for eating but it’s not because they’re not good food and healthy
⏹️ ▶️ John and and you know, sustainable and economical or whatever. It’s just because people in this country don’t wanna eat insects for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s the only reason, right? Whereas, no matter how much you like or dislike natural
⏹️ ▶️ John gas and oil and coal or whatever, it’s friggin’ everywhere in this country because we, our individual
⏹️ ▶️ John choices can’t change that because there’s a huge infrastructure behind that and wherever you live it’s not like you have a choice of 17 different
⏹️ ▶️ John kinds of electricity and heating in most cases. Maybe you have a choice of one or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the Impossible Burger, if you haven’t tried it, try it out. They sell the, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it, a Whopper at Burger King? Actually, that reminds me-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Burger King sells it. A lot of places sell Impossible Burgers now and you can, in In many U.S. grocery stores, you can get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one-pound little squares of ground, quote, beef, but impossible meat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We always keep a few of those in our freezer. It’s great. Again, for stuff like tacos, it’s fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have a massive steak out of it. I think that might be a little bit weird. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole other thing, too, is meat substitutes are oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not significantly healthier or in certain metrics than meat. It’s not like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, because usually there’s high amounts of oil and stuff in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just different kinds of fat and sugars and everything. Right, but what’s nice is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they can help you not only have a meat-like experience if you don’t want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eating meat, but also they feel like kind of a stepping stone in many ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more vegetable-heavy diet. Like they allow you to go from the traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American diet more easily to like, hey, you know what, maybe every meal doesn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a big block of meat next to a big pile of dairy. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe there’s an alternative way to eat that’s a lot healthier than this. And it’s nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be like a stepping stone on that way. You know, you shouldn’t be eating impossible tacos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single night because you shouldn’t be eating tacos every single night. And you shouldn’t be eating like burgers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every night either, and veggie burgers are not significantly better in certain metrics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a good stepping stone on the way there. In the same way that really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fake leather has been a good stepping stone in that area. And again, going back to where we were starting all this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I do think Apple should stop using leather because it’s not that important to them and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of good alternatives and there’s lots of benefits to stop using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re gonna get someone writing in to tell us how much water almonds use in California Now it’s starving
⏹️ ▶️ John out the rest of the state because for every almond you eat, it’s like 10 bajillion gallons of water or whatever. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things can be grown unsustainably or in environmentally harmful ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just don’t ruin coconut for me. So many good things are made of coconut now. Just make, if coconut is somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible, please don’t tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ John We bought a whole coconut on a lark from the supermarket and were very disappointed when it was completely rotten
⏹️ ▶️ John inside. That’s sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a bummer. Hey, you know, talking about the Impossible Burger, Whopper reminded me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our friends at Fun Fact, where they put the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up at the end, which is unequivocally the wrong place for follow-up. And I tried to convince… Luke Levy
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we follow any rules. It’s all over the friggin’ show. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Loefler Well, so here we are. I’ve got some
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as it turns out. Luke
⏹️ ▶️ John Levy I tried to put it at the beginning, but it’s an uphill battle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Loefler But I would just like to say to our friends over at Fun Fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric and Alan, that follow-up belongs to the beginning. Come on, get with the program. But anyways, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a small segment on Episode 52, which aired a few days ago with regard to the origins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the word vamp, which I think I had kind of casually asked what the origin of that was, or maybe it was one of you guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably John, asked the origin of the word vamp, and they discussed that on Episode 52. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I meant to mention that during follow-up, and I forgot. And so I’m putting it at the end, which is the wrong place for it. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to quickly congratulate our mutual friend, David Sparks, who has decided to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shut down his law firm and go completely and utterly independent with Max Barkey and Max Barkey Labs. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes to check that out. And I just wanted to quickly put a shout out for him as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John The question is, will he be getting more or less sleep now? I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey guess he won’t be staying
⏹️ ▶️ John up at night worrying about his clients if he read his posts, but maybe he’ll be up all night making
⏹️ ▶️ John more of his guides and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, but I just wanted to say congratulations because I’m really excited for him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love when friends go independent, Casey. Took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you long enough, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually got here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, we gotta work on John now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s a lost cause. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey never gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think we’re gonna get worse feedback on telling people you should probably eat less meat than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John when we like… People are fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. Like what do you think is more dangerous to say on a podcast? Like that or like tabs versus spaces?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just going to get the one person that’s going to send us a thing about almonds, but then they’re going to hear me
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about it maybe later and feel bad. Almonds are overrated. It’s not just almonds. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things. If you live in a desert state and they redirect a lot of your water for agriculture,
⏹️ ▶️ John people are going to be angry about whatever you’re redirecting to. Yeah, don’t grow almonds in the freaking desert by sucking all the water away from
⏹️ ▶️ John the one river in your state. But that’s more of a California problem than an almond problem, I feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, almond milk is overrated. Coconut milk is awesome. I heard the top four.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t particularly like coconut though. So I drink almond milk because I don’t like coconut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like coconut flavored things or like those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like crunchy toasted coconut bits that are in some candies. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say you don’t like coconut because you’re the one who didn’t like the toasted coconut because you felt it like it was chewing on like little fibers.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the whole good thing about coconut. So I feel like you don’t like coconut. If you don’t like that, you don’t like coconut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have no idea how much coconut I consume. Trust me, I like coconut.
⏹️ ▶️ John But who was the one, maybe it was Tiff, who didn’t like the little crunchy, stringy bits?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s lots of different, I mean, look, earlier today, like I, see John, you bought a whole coconut and you cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it open and I’m sure that process sucked and then inside you couldn’t eat it, right? The coconut is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one remaining thing I will defend as worth getting pre-cut at the grocery store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it needs to be cut, dried, shredded, and toasted, nine more rounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. No, I just, Whole Foods sells, I’m sure other grocery stores sell, like, you know, cut up chunks of coconut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meat. I don’t like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John no. I want any of it to be dried, shredded, and toasted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s different. That’s a whole different food, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what I- No, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just coconut. That’s the way, that’s the good way for it to have coconut. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People in the chat are saying coconut oil, coconut oil is fine for certain things. No, but when I- Don’t use it for anything. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I like coconut chunks, and I like coconut milk. Those, and not, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say coconut milk, I’m talking about like the Thai kind, like where it’s like the ingredients
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are coconut and water, not like the, like in a big bowling pin shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottle. And it’s like, this is some coconut along with blended with some almonds and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also blended with a bunch of like gums and salts and preservatives. No, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, I’m talking about coconut and water in a solution. Like that’s, that is coconut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco milk. And it’s really good in lots of things, including by itself sometimes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, and those coconut chunks, I also like. Even coconut water can be delicious, though it’s usually pretty sugary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t get a lot of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you like coconut on like a, what is it, like the German chocolate cake? Is that the one that has the coconut in the icing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you like Mounds or Almond Joy? No. See, I’m gonna say you don’t like coconut, because that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey quintessential. Yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of coming around to John on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love Mounds, Almond Joy, and whatever that cake is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Almond Joy’s got nuts, Mounds don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I sang that song to my kids. I’m saying, just why does everyone my age know this song? Because it was an ad on TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in case, because I think they said they were confused about which one had the almonds. I’m like, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me sing you a song.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then I had to go find it on YouTube. It’s like in different versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, great example of what I was just saying about coconut stuff and food stuff. So tonight for dinner, I made butternut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squash soup. Now I wanted like a good protein source. And so I used chicken bone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broth as like the broth base because that’s a fantastic protein source, especially if you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be somewhat healthy. Yeah, it’s chicken based, but you know, That’s one thing where like, vegan options don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a good like, protein heavy broth. That’s not really available yet, as far as I know. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know otherwise, please tell me. But, instead of using cream, as you would traditionally use in butternut squash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soup, I used a bit of coconut cream. Which is basically the coconut version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy cream. Like in a can, it’s weird. It comes in these little skinny cans. But I used coconut cream instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you couldn’t tell any difference at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when you’re baking with stuff, like we have so many milk alternatives, and half the time when I’m baking things, that would just
⏹️ ▶️ John substitute something for the milk and no one can ever tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like there’s so many contexts where we use animal stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we don’t really need to. Like it’s not really making a big difference whether we use it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the case very often though where milk actually is cheaper than the fancy milks, especially because the fancy milks are for
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy people. And so sometimes getting almond milk or coconut milk or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ John way more expensive than getting actual milk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, and that’s a whole different issue as well. Obviously that has to be considered. And of course, there’s the issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how various farm subsidies make certain things way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper than they naturally would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what we’re going to get. People are going to say, you think meat isn’t subsidized? Yes. All the things that are bad for us are subsidized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. And milk is suspiciously cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t care about getting organic milk, if you just get any milk, it is weirdly
⏹️ ▶️ John And milk is like, I’m not putting down milk. I love regular milk. And it is a good, cheap, healthy
⏹️ ▶️ John food that you don’t need to kill the animals for. It doesn’t mean that animals aren’t treated terribly in the way you milk them, but that can be improved. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like milk and butter and stuff like that is the type of thing where it is possible to have a world
⏹️ ▶️ John in which we get butter and milk in a way that is not cruel to
⏹️ ▶️ John animals and that still is also very cheap and makes good use of land. And we’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the type of thing. It’s like a renewable resource type of food product. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the alternatives, almond milk, coconut milk, all those other alternatives, often have more sugar added and lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of artificial things and are expensive to make and produce and are expensive to buy. So I feel like there’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John more people are lactose intolerant these days just that could solve itself with demand based on lactose intolerance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, totally. And as you mentioned, there are certainly a lot of asterisks on the like, well, it’s better for the animals. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better than killing them, But there is still a lot of area for improvement in that. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially anything involving chickens. Beep, beep, beep.