478: No Bum Cores
12 Apr 2022Marco discovers TV, Casey’s setup changes again, and John installs a thermostat.
Episode Description:
- The ATP Store is live until 30 April at 8 PM New York time. Order now, or Casey will haunt your dreams! 👻
- Pre-show: Marco has questionable media choices
- Follow-up:
- Tragic Original Gravity news (via Ari Badgers)
- The etymology of “decibel” (via Matt Rigby)
- Don’t forget the iPhone 12/13 mini (via Carl Rozas)
- An aside about House of Prime Rib
- Quinn Nelson’s observation about the Studio Display
- USB-C “KVM” (via abcd)
- On the crummy Ethernet speeds in modern Macs
- On using Canon EF lenses with mirrorless cameras
- Casey’s New Setup (yes, again. 🤫)
- John’s new thermostat
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Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- ATVP
- ATP Store 🖼️
- 🍺🌭😁 ➡️ 🍺🍔😐
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppod)
- Follow-up: Origin of decibel unit
- No iPhone 14 Mini?
- 🍸🥩🥬
- Quinn Nelson on Studio Display PSU
- Sponsor: Memberful
- USB-C KVM-like switch
- Most USB-C Ethernet is slow
- Canon EF lenses on RF mount
- Sponsor: Remote (code ATP)
- Casey’s New Setup™
- John’s thermostat adventure
- WWDC announced
- Ending theme
- After-show
ATVP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We watching severance have you seen severance no no shh I’m not gonna tell you anything about it except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s really good and I strongly suggest a season one just ended it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco renewed for a second season highly it’s it starts out weird and you’re gonna think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what am I watching it’s very very strange where’s the square footage going but trust me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth watching this show it’s very very good I’m actually we also we recently just finished um the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dropout to the one about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos and we’re trying to I’m gonna watch the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WeWork one. But I don’t know, do you guys, are you able to watch shows about Silicon Valley
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and enjoy them?
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say you’re making some interesting choices. Of all the things you can pick, Severance, good, thumbs up, nice selection.
⏹️ ▶️ John WeWork and the Theranos one? Are you gonna watch the Uber one next? That would not be on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Theranos one, I was happy to get through because first of all, it was very well done. Amanda Seyfried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was amazing in it. I wasn’t really following the story when it was happening in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real life. So it was mostly new to me, or at least I knew like the high level overview, but didn’t really know the details.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that was nice. And it was just a very well done show. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts that are more about glorifying Silicon Valley culture, which so far that we work on definitely is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that area. And part of it, I mean, it’s just, you know, different company, different show. But like, I find that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of show hard to get through as a nerd. Like my favorite show of this type is Silicon Valley
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it just did not even try to take our world seriously. I know so many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our world did not think it was funny that kind of hit too close to home to them And I’m I love that show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much because the world of our startup culture and everything is ridiculous And it is totally stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s so much about it that is easily made fun of because it’s so ridiculous and stupid But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a hard time watching shows that Glorify it non sarcastically like the we
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the other shows are based on real people and true stories I mean, Silicon Valley is just, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a comedy, a satire, right? And so, and there’s lots of fictionalized things that have obvious analogs, like what they’re making fun
⏹️ ▶️ John of, but it’s not trying to be, uh, you know, a dramatized version of real events
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. And I feel like that’s really hard to do because we’ve got the whole plumber problem is because we know a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about the business and the companies that are involved and sometimes some of the people that are involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you try to make a TV show out of that, the TV show ends up, you know, trying to dumb things down, or there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of things that they gloss over. that we know the intricacies of and just takes you out of it. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon Valley, you know, all it’s trying to do is make you laugh. And I feel like knowledge of Silicon Valley makes that show
⏹️ ▶️ John more funny, not less. COREY
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were a couple of examples that I can think of, of movies that I’ve seen that are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least adjacent to our world that I thought were enjoyable. Maybe not good, but enjoyable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The, what was the one, the parts of Silicon Valley or something like that? JARED That
⏹️ ▶️ John fiction though. That was like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, documentary thing. COREY That’s true. That was like interviews and stuff, right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, no. I’m thinking of the one with Noah
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Noah Wiley. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, yeah. That one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I enjoyed. What was the one with Tim Robbins and Ryan Filipe Filipe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever his name is? It was super campy and super silly. He was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Robbins was playing like a Gates sort of character. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, shoot. I don’t have to look it up. But there was one, it was years ago now, because I’m old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That one was enjoyable, if dumb. Let’s see. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I liked the Social Network a lot, actually. I thought that… Oh, Antitrust. Thank you, bleh11. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Social Network, I mean, the Social Network was a good movie, but the more you know about
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the more there’s sort of a dissonance with the stuff that’s on the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. It’s hard to make movies about real people, especially when they’re currently alive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Triumph of the Nerds was a documentary. That’s it, that’s what I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John Pirates of Silicon Valley was Noah Wiley, there was the Steve Jobs one with the fast bender. That one
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate it, if I remember right. I absolutely hate it. Yeah, I just don’t watch the fictionalized ones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I’m not gonna like them. They’re usually about some company, like the Facebook ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be easier to like the Facebook ones if I liked Facebook. Instead, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching these shows and it’s like I hate all of the people in the show. I hate every single character in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show and in real life. I just hate all these people. Makes it hard to enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ John No finger traps for you. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s such a good show. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco just wanted to tell people about Severance, a TV show that he is watching not five years after the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what really sucks though? Is that now they just finished season one and they just picked it up for season two, which means they haven’t made season
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two yet, which means I have to wait like a year. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens. Imagine that.
⏹️ ▶️ John you just waited five years and spent five years complaining about everyone telling you about Severance,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is everyone telling you about Severance? I’m sick of hearing about Severance. Then you’d finally watch it after five years and then you wouldn’t have this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That worked for me with Hamilton. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John Still waiting for the Hamilton sequel, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It was, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you what though, it’s weird. Like, you know, we’ve been watching a lot of, you know, current shows and we’ve basically, we’ve ran into old shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we’ve been watching current ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You have not
⏹️ ▶️ John run out of old shows. Seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the record. We’ll leave that there. But it’s so weird now going back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to wait like a week for the next episode to come out. Because we’ve largely not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done that for years for almost anything we watched.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you watch Severance in real time or did you just watch it once it was all out?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We watched it, I think like the first four or five in like a batch because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we jumped in halfway through and then we hit the end and we’re like, oh no, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait till next week, what? And then it’s just been excruciating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you do for Ted Lasso? You didn’t watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that live. So season one, we blew right through. And then season two, we had to do it live. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like going back in time to a long lost pain of our youth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what do you mean I can’t watch everything I want all the time, like whenever I feel like it? How is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you mean? How is this not available?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tangential to that, this pre-show’s never gonna end. You’ve ruined everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have occasionally gone and eaten at like restaurant patios over the last few months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The kids have completely forgotten how restaurants work, most especially that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once you order, you have to cook the food. Like it isn’t that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already ordered and we just grab it and go. You have to sit there and entertain yourself and let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people cook the food. And they do not understand this concept at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we are trying to break them back into restaurants, but they’re having a hard time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it’s funny how things are coming. Everything old is new again. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, it’s restaurants.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hooray! It is t-shirt time, everybody! T-shirts are back and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dare I say, better than ever. So here’s the thing, you know, when you work with people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you genuinely, deeply enjoy and respect, the flip side of that coin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that sometimes they really tick you off. Marco has now twice come up with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, well, he’s done it in two different occasions, come up with my favorite ATP merchandise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jokes. The first one, which John will probably tell me was actually his idea, but my recollection is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Marco’s idea, was the watch edition shirt. Like, there are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three different styles. It was sports. What was the middle one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John middle, sport
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bottom, and then the edition at the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. That happened too long ago for me to remember whose idea it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I honestly don’t remember. I’m pretty sure it was Marco. I’m not 100% sure, but I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally, I am annoyingly accurate about remembering which things I should get credit for. But in this case, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that was a really long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know if our Slack scroll back goes that far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, either way, that one was one of my top two favorites. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually I should, honestly, I should attribute John for this because it was a group effort, but it was Marco’s initial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. That was Marco’s idea. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And then John perfected it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Slack t-shirt didn’t get you, didn’t make your list?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It was good. It was good. We know that was your idea. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. good. So the store is up and you can buy merchandise right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now through the 30th of April. Saturday, the 30th of April is the last time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can get your shirts and I’ll do my normal spiel about that in a second. But let’s look at the merchandise. So we’ve got the M1 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shirt, which is exactly what you expect. It’s the M1 colorful logo with Ultra with a yellow background below
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Very well done. Very nice. The back, I don’t even know what to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this shirt might have caused Syracuse to quit. So because doing this must have been a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you’re gonna say, oh, just copy pasted. No, I’m telling you it must have been a nightmare to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John pasting. It was all done by hand, lovingly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey done by hand. Every line
⏹️ ▶️ John drawn with the line tool or the rectangle tool. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is the shirt that broke Syracuse’s back. And for that, I will always be thankful for it. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Marco comes in is the M1 Ultra Interposer shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So picture in your mind’s eye, you’ve got the six colors M1 logo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Below that, there is a very wide pill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a yellow background, but instead of saying ultra, on the left-hand side it says the word max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then there’s a crude illustration of an interposer, and on the right-hand side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says the word max, but upside down. Because that’s what the M1 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. It’s two M1 Maxes, one upside down. I love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much. I cannot even tell you. I’m dead serious. I love this shirt so much. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might eclipse the different watch editions, whatever, the different watch styles as my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey merchandise gag that we’ve ever done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I love this so much. This is probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John nerdiest one because the number of, first of all, the number of people who are going to recognize an ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt or know what the heck M1 is, it’s already vanishingly small. We
⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? Like people who live in your house with you, when you get the shirt, they’ll be like, what the hell is this? Maybe they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John guess BMW, but no one’s gonna know what it’s about. But then within that tiny circle to get this joke,
⏹️ ▶️ John you also have to know how the M1 Ultra is constructed with two maxes. Like they’re basically rotated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you look at, take an M1 Max die and then rotate it around. So it touches, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like that’s how the Ultra is formed. And so we formed the Ultra badge with two maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, on the shirt, it looks like one upside down, one right side up. Almost nobody is going to get that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet in the ATP audience, most of you listening to me don’t understand what I’m talking about. And also don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John how the M1 Ultra is constructed. And so even if I was explaining it better, you still wouldn’t get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very narrow interest. And I will say because it’s narrow interest, this is probably the only time we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell this shirt. We’ve been doing like an on-demand thing. Like when the store isn’t up, you can get these on-demand shirts for all the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who watch the YouTube videos. And so they don’t have to, you know, get illegal pirated shirts or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re probably gonna put the M1 Ultra up in the on-demand shirt, but this one won’t be there. So if you want this
⏹️ ▶️ John insidest of inside jokes shirt, this is probably the only time you’re ever
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be able to get it. So M1 Ultra Interposer shirt, check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I suggested this, I was joking. Like I made a quick little crappy Photoshop mockup and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, hey, shouldn’t it be like this? But I do not think anybody will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually buy this shirt. I literally think there will be zero sales of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I can guarantee you, I will be one of them. Yeah, John and I will be two. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be two sales. If any of you out there actually want this, prove me wrong, that’s great. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally understand if you’d rather buy one of the other designs. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be shocked if anybody buys this. We’ve already sold two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you and Casey. I didn’t buy mine yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, me neither. I was waiting until the end
⏹️ ▶️ John and almost forget to buy it. And by the way, just the final thing on these shirts, These two shirts, as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John before, all the M1 shirts, these are like the most expensive shirts we’ve ever made because they have so many
⏹️ ▶️ John colors on them and every single color is a separate printing pass. That’s why the badges always match one of the colors in the stripes
⏹️ ▶️ John so we don’t have to do yet another printing pass because every printing pass costs more money. And by the way, there’s a printing
⏹️ ▶️ John pass on the back as well so we apologize for the cost of these shirts. They are very expensive. I will say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we said in the past with the on-demand shirts, the on-demand shirts use a different process for printing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why they’re cheaper. they do not look as good as these shirts. These are the good looking ones. So I know they’re horrendously
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. We apologize for that. It costs us a lot to make them because of all the different colors and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Problem, I was gonna say, this will be the end of the M1 shirts, but we might do M2 shirts. I don’t know. We don’t know what we’re gonna do, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanna put that out there. And that brings us to the next shirt, which is, so you don’t wanna pay all that money
⏹️ ▶️ John for the 17 printing passes that it takes to make these shirts. We do have an M1 Ultra in monochrome.
⏹️ ▶️ John We do not have the Max Max joke in monochrome. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John want the obscure joke, you gotta pay through the nose for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, just like if you want an actual M1 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John All our cores are enabled, no bump cores in our shirts. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing about the monochrome shirt though is that the M1 Ultra and the M1 Ultra Interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John shirts just come in black, but the monochrome version comes in all sorts of colors. So if you want a colorful shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John go for the monochrome one. It’s cheaper because it’s just one printing pass on each side, you can get it in blue, purple, pink,
⏹️ ▶️ John Lavender, green, all sorts of colors. It’s very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and then we have the classic ATP logo shirt. And then we have brought back the ATP hoodie,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is absolutely a delightful hoodie. I cannot recommend it enough. Very, very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoodie. And then by popular demand, we have the ATP pint glass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a ever so slightly tweaked ATP mug. To be completely honest with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, we would have left the mug alone, but we couldn’t because they’re not available right now. Hashtag supply chain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the only difference on this ATP mug is that the interior, rather than being red, is a like a gray, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? It’s a grayish
⏹️ ▶️ John blue, almost like a slate. I mean, we didn’t do this on purpose. We would have got red if we could have. We couldn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John either of these, by the way, during the last sale, they just weren’t available, period. They’re finally available now, but we couldn’t get red. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the way I would rationalize it, now that we are forced to get gray because red is not available, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John thought the interior of the ATP mug was too garish or you didn’t like the color, it made your beverage look because it was red and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, which I can relate to, and you want something that’s more neutral, this is it, black outside, gray
⏹️ ▶️ John inside, and then it makes the rainbow logo pop because it is the only splash of color on the thing. I still think it looks pretty good,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if and when we can get red back, we will do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also to answer Melbo’s question in the chat, no pins this year? Yes, Melbo, no pins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year, because it took us 30 seconds to sell the first batch of pins and 30 years to sell the second batch of pins, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re never bringing pins back.
⏹️ ▶️ John That may be true of the pint glasses and the mugs too, because they’re also the type of thing where we have to guess how many we’re gonna sell and then
⏹️ ▶️ John we buy them up front. So I really hope we’re not selling
⏹️ ▶️ John mugs and pint glasses for the next five years, but who knows, it could happen. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco see. It’s the danger
⏹️ ▶️ John of guessing how much people are gonna want things. Turns out supply chains are hard. Yeah, at the very least, my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John wants a bunch of pint glasses because now these are her favorite glasses in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey house. Same, same. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want them because they’re taking over the cabinet. Like they’re so much wider on the top than I have my favorite glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like these cheap ones from, what are they, from Crate and Barrel or something, that I like, and they’re just cylinders.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, but these are like, you know, it’s a pint glass, so it’s wider at the top than it is at the bottom and we store them upside down. So these take up
⏹️ ▶️ John more room and they’re slowly like overpopulating my kitchen cabinets and kicking out my glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take your own advice. Alternate. You don’t store them all upside down. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a deep cut, that’s a deep
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cut. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John alternate. No, that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more space that way with,
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s so much crap filtering out of the air in my house. I don’t want that settling in the glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Inside the cabinets?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s everywhere. Oh my gosh, anyway. All right, so we’ve got the pint glasses. Those are dishwasher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safe because the logo is etched. It’s not painted, it’s etched. And then the ATP mug, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not dishwasher safe. You should treat this with care, come now. And I believe it’s a 14 ounce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capacity on that, which hopefully is enough for whatever liquid you’re putting in it. So to recap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M1 Ultra shirt with a yellow Ultra pill underneath the M1 logo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the colorful M1 logo, the M1 Ultra Interposer shirt, Probably my favorite ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joke shirt of all time. Although I was reminded in the chat that I do take credit for the wheels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Mac Pro shirt, being a little more expensive. I will take credit for that. Still not on my list of my favorites,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a close runner up, or honorable mention. Excuse me, Marco. Anyway, M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra Interposer shirt with the Max Max on it. Those are available in black only in various sizes and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot. Then the M1 Ultra shirt in monochrome, which is a little bit more affordable. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a variety of T-shirt colors. the ATP logo shirt, the ATP hoodie, the ATP pint glass, ATP mug,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this available until Saturday, April 30th. Now, here’s where I remind you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a couple of things. First of all, if you are an ATP member, which you can do by, which you can join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you want to by going to atp.fm slash join. If you’re an ATP member, you will get a coupon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code for you and you can enter it at Cotton Bureau and save, what is it, 15%? Do I have that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15% off. And if you buy probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or at most two pieces of merchandise, you’ve already basically paid for the first month of membership.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So definitely check that out at e2p.fm. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re driving, if you’re walking, if you’re doing the dishes, if you’re doing something right now where you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just can’t place the order, do Casey a favor. Stop what you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pull over. Pull to the side of the sidewalk. do what you put the dishes down for just a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go to ATP.fm slash store and order now, because every time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time I get, Oh, did I miss it? Yes, you missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Order now. ATP.fm slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some very enthusiastic people in the chat said they forgot to use their discount code. A cotton beer is really good about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just email them and say, Hey, I made an order and I forgot to use my discount code and then just send them the discount code you would have used.
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll give you the credit for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know it’s a hassle
⏹️ ▶️ John to do back and forth in the email, but they will give you the credit for it. So yes, if you’re an ATP member, don’t forget to use
⏹️ ▶️ John your code. Just go to atp.fm.store. There’s a link to your member page where you’ll, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John paragraph of text at the top tells you what the deal is and links you to it. So you can get your code and paste it in the promo code
⏹️ ▶️ John field when you’re checking out and yada yada. So yeah, and then the same picture we made last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like your case, you were saying, this is a perfect time for you to take advantage of this. Buy a membership,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a bunch of merch, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can cancel your membership. And then nothing, John. Forget to cancel your membership. And then walk away. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we’ll see. So last year, finally, I have to say last sale, not last year, I guess it was last year, the last sale
⏹️ ▶️ John we did, people finally took my advice. We had this pretty substantial bump in membership and then
⏹️ ▶️ John most of it went away after the sale was over. So that’s good, you’re using it the way it’s intended.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you might as well just get the discount. But the second thing I’ll say about that, and this is special for this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John The Comm Bureau told us that the prices on all of our stuff is going up. Right. So the cost to us, ATP on
⏹️ ▶️ John all these products has increased for the sale. We have not passed any of that cost onto
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Unlike Apple. So all the prices are the same as they were before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, the ATP shirt is the same as it was before the M one ultra shirts, the same as the M one pro and the Mac shirts, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all the, you know, all our prices are the same, but you should know that our costs for each one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John is more than it used to be. And so I will say what I’ve said in many past things, buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a shirt or a mug or a pint glass or whatever, if you want that item. If instead
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, I want to support ATP and you think, oh, if I buy a $35 t-shirt, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that support ATP? Buying a membership for $8 supports
⏹️ ▶️ John us way more, believe it or not, right? Even just for one month. What I’m telling you is that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to give us money, membership. If you want a cool t-shirt, pint glass mug,
⏹️ ▶️ John hoodie, these are cool products, you should get them. But don’t feel like you’re, you know, like, well, I don’t really want
⏹️ ▶️ John this stupid t-shirt, but I want to support the show. And surely if I buy two expensive t-shirts, I’m supporting the show a super
⏹️ ▶️ John duper amount. If you just want to support the show, buy a membership. And you get something for the membership too. You get an ad free
⏹️ ▶️ John episode and you get the bootleg and you know, you get stuff for the membership too. But if you just want to support it,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a membership. If you want cool merch, buy cool merch. And I will add that
⏹️ ▶️ John we have not changed prices, even though our costs are going up, I’m not sure how long we can sustain that. We’ll see how
⏹️ ▶️ John this sale goes. If our margins are so slim that we, you know, barely make any money on the sale,
⏹️ ▶️ John next sale, maybe some of the prices will go up. So if you wanna get something, even if you just wanna refresh your ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt because your old one’s looking a little ratty or whatever, buy now because prices may change during the next sale. That is another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Apple won’t tell you, but that we will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I wouldn’t even say may change. I think it’s all but guaranteed that the prices are gonna have to go up next
⏹️ ▶️ John year. Unless the supply chain changes and all of a sudden our costs go down, who knows, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When does that ever work in our favor? When does anyone say, due to supply chain efficiencies, we’re now lowering our prices?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John happens. It happens
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Apple just never passes the savings on to us. They just keep selling the same 16 gig RAM upgrade for $600 for five years. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we should move on. But Marco, 16 sold, Marco, of the Max Max shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John we should really not be saying is, I don’t think anyone’s gonna buy it. What we should really say is the first person to give us a legit
⏹️ ▶️ John story of someone noticing the shirt and understanding it in public. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say no to an understanding in public who’s not an ATP listener, that’s gonna be miraculous. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, even if you allow it to be a listener, it’s never gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, and the best thing about this nerd shirt is, if someone does interrogate you about it, then you
⏹️ ▶️ John are kind of obliged to explain it to them, and there’s no way to explain that without making you look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagining like the look on the other person’s face as their eyes glaze over and like, oh no, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did I ask for more information about this? I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like you could sheepishly explain it to be like, I know this is boring, but you did ask, so I’ll explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Or you could exclusiastically explain it, in which case they’d be like, what’s wrong with this person?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean, in all fairness, I think certainly the three of us and probably most of our listeners have seen that look
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. No, but that’s why I love this shirt because it’s the type of thing, it’s like when you wear like a
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt from an obscure band that you know nobody’s heard of how cool you are because you’ve heard of the obscure band, only the uncool version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, really, really sound it while they’re gone.
🍺🌭😁 ➡️ 🍺🍔😐
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got to do some follow up and, uh, I would like to start with the most important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco follow up. It breaks my heart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It breaks my heart. We’ve gotten news via RE Badgers that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Original Gravity, Marco and I’s beloved beer slash sausage place in San Jose,
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is it not my beloved place? I’ve eaten there plenty of times. Is it, is it one of your beloved places, John? I mean, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the only places I’ve eaten. So yeah, I guess so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of the only tolerable places that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey ate in San Jose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of the two places in San Jose that I can think of that the three of us approve of, this is one of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except it’s not the way it used to be. So Ari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes to us, if you’re coming to San Jose just because of original gravity, please don’t. They don’t have any sausages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore and have turned into a sit-down overpriced burger place just like any other boring place in South Bay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the beer and sausage place is now the beer and burger place and is apparently not as good and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there once too. Didn’t they used to have grilled
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cheese? They had a, yeah, they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, they had a, like, you know, 10 or 15 different things on the menu.
⏹️ ▶️ John like greasy and bad for you, they had it. That’s true. And now they just have burger, which is greasy and bad for you, but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I’m not gonna lie. If you look at their website and you’re gonna have to click on the food tab, and then it just scrolls to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey food section of the single serving page, the burgers do look pretty damn good, and so do the French
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fries. But I loved this sauce. They had like 10 or 15 different sausages and they were delightful and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, though, like at least they still have all the beer. And what made them good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not just the sausages, but that they were, I think, the only place we found in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in San Jose that actually had good service and consistent service. That’s also true. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as they have beer, some kind of food and good service, they’re still significantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, ahead of the pack there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t just have good service for San Jose. They had good service for anywhere. in particular, if it’s the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of restaurant where you order at a counter and then you just go sit anywhere you want and someone comes and
⏹️ ▶️ John finds you and brings you your food, that never really works out that well, except at this place, they
⏹️ ▶️ John would come and find you and bring you your food in a timely manner. I don’t know how they did it. It’s a miracle of service,
⏹️ ▶️ John because most places where they have that, even if they have a system, they can’t find you, but if they don’t have a system, it’s like you’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John know if you’re ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get your food. Yeah, I ate at another place in San Jose that you order at the counter, they give you a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, you go sit down, and you’ll be sitting there forever, because they gave you a number for no reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t actually ever bring the food out to you. And you have to eventually walk up to the back of the counter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, hey, I’m just checking, you know, how’s my order going? And they’ll be like, oh, here it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. The why’d you give me the number? This means something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere else in the world, but not here. I’m telling you, all of San Jose, it’s the Truman Show. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all actors, no one knows how to do the job until you ask them, they’re like, uh, I, I don’t know what to do. I guess I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to go figure out how to do this. Who except original gravity there. They seem to know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing. And so I hope this change doesn’t ruin them. Cause if I ever go back to San Jose, which we’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, I guess, if I ever get to go back to San Jose, that’s the first place I’m stopping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And since we’ll get questions about it, what is the name of the vegan place that we all like? What do we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s like right across the street. It’s like a vegan Indian place. Uh, it’s called like good vibe. Just, it’s like something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey good karma.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it is. There it is. Yeah. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good. Yeah, that place is also very good.
Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppod)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon. This is my favorite
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco all want to look our best. Now it’s springtime coming up, you might want to get some new spring essentials.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mack Weldon makes the best essential clothing and it’s perfect for all seasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, going to the spring, I’m gonna look at some of my t-shirts, maybe get some new t-shirts, maybe keep some long sleeves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wardrobe there. Maybe get a nice new light jacket or hoodie and Mack Weldon has all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so great. They even have the daily wear system. All their clothes work together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s just a fantastic brand. Let me tell you right now, I’m wearing Mack Weldon underwear. You know, look, I’ll say it. I love their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underwear. I’m always wearing it. That’s 100% of my collection of underwear is there. So I’m wearing that every single day. I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing their, their boot socks right now. Their boot cut socks is wonderful weave because it’s a little bit cold today. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their silver t-shirt, which is made from actual antimicrobial silver fibers in the fabric blend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it basically never stinks. Like I wear these almost all the time. Like I’m almost always wearing a Mack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weldon silver t-shirt. Earlier today I worked out I use the Ace sweatshorts. I love the Ace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line. They have sweatpants, sweatshorts. It’s just fantastic. It’s sweatshirts even. Super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soft, really premium feeling. And I’ve had a lot of my Mack Weldon stuff for years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started wearing their stuff maybe five years ago. And I don’t think I’ve ever had anything of theirs wear out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. So it’s really nicely made stuff. It fits well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fabrics are really nice, it looks good, they have things that range from casual to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workout wear to semi-formal, even to formal. And all sorts of pieces all across the whole line. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful. Check out Mack Weldon for yourself. Save 20% on your first order by
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Find your perfect look for this spring. Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for sponsoring our show.
Follow-up: Origin of decibel unit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so now that we’ve got that covered, we need to go to etymology corner. I feel like we should be on fun fact right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Matt Rigby writes, as fans of arbitrary and obscure measurements, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may enjoy the additional info that a decibel is in fact one tenth or a deci of a bell, with a bell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being a measurement for the loss of signal power over a one mile stretch of 19 gauge telephone cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The measurement we use today to measure all kinds of things, including an idling Mac studio, its origins in the early telephone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey age of the late 19th century and is named after Alexander Graham Bell.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love these units of measurement that are sort of not based on physical properties of matter but instead are sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John experimental measurements. And this one requires a mile of wire. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to just reproduce the, you know, where does this come from? Unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the old, you know, before, I think they converted all the measurements to physical properties. Like there used to be like the kilogram
⏹️ ▶️ John weight that would be kept in this little vacuum chamber but it would be losing atoms over the years. And so the kilogram would be changing and
⏹️ ▶️ John people are all upset, right? For this one, like I do, you know, I mean, I’m sure it’s probably physically
⏹️ ▶️ John based now. So I’m all right in with more followup to explain it. But like the idea that to sort of reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John or accurately, you know, if you had to keep around one, you have to keep like a one mile stretch of 19 gauge telephone wire around
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’d have to stretch it out and then decide what temperature it has to be and how long it has to, you know, that temperature has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John consistent over the mile that you stretch it and then what tension should it be under and should it be on the ground or not? and then
⏹️ ▶️ John measure it’s and then and now we’re stuck with it I suppose but
⏹️ ▶️ John I really do hope that decibels is switched to physics-based measurement because it seems like the most
⏹️ ▶️ John inconvenient one to reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way real-time follow-up here the m1 ultra interposer shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just got the email from Cotton Bureau saying that it’s crossed the threshold to be printed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there you go some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick looking at the page indicates that they’ve sold 17 of them which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outselling the other ones like four to one at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, see, see.
⏹️ ▶️ John When the normal people come there, they’ll get the normal shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I don’t expect this ratio to continue, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s just kind of funny. People
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room are disproportionately inclined to get the joke shirt. Yeah. That’s fair.
No iPhone 14 Mini?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Karl Roseless writes, you mentioned the upcoming iPhone 14 non-pro Max, saying that it gives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote normal people the option of a big phone. Don’t forget to pour one out for the iPhone 12 and 13 mini. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is nice for people who want bigger phones, but sad for those of us that like the small or maybe reasonable sized phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I forgot to mention that last time we were talking about the phone lineup. I know we talked about it in past shows, but just to refresh everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, the current dominant rumor is that there will be no mini 14.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you like the mini, get the 12 or 13 mini and then just try to use it for as long as you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe Oppo will bring back the Mini, maybe they won’t, but it doesn’t look like it’s in the cards for the 14.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a shame. I mean, I say that, you know, I’m not helping here by having bought the 12 Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then the 13 Pro, you know, so I’m not really helping the cause, but I really did love that phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mini phone. And I wish that they would continue to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to make really great small phones. And we’ll see if that ever becomes a thing again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it really does sound like this is not a thing. and the rumors have been no more mini with the iOS 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or with the iPhone 14, they’ve been saying that ever since like halfway through the 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini cycle. So it seems like it just wasn’t really selling well from the start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we all kind of, we had our speculation for reasons. Obviously people do love big phones. Even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they say they want small phones, they end up buying big phones a lot of the time. But also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the question of whether there’s a small phone market or whether there’s a cheap phone market, and then the distinction between the SE versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mini, and also our theories about like, well, maybe with COVID, people couldn’t get into the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store and actually see and feel these things. And if they will have a chance to get in there and see and feel it, maybe there’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more swayed to it. Well, now people have been able to go to Apple stores for a while and it seems like it’s still getting canned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s unfortunate, but we’ll see maybe in the future, they’ll try to make their phones smaller and lighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. I hope so, because the 13 Pro is an amazing phone, but it’s a big heavy brick in my
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think it’s a mistake to get rid of the mini. Like we said, whenever we talk about diversifying product lines,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t all sell in equal amounts. Like there’s always going to be the ones that are popular or the ones that are less popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you get to have a diversified product line when you sell overall a lot of a product. If you sell a small
⏹️ ▶️ John amount, you can’t have 17 different models because then you’re just, you know, it costs a certain amount of money overhead for each new model you
⏹️ ▶️ John have, right? But I feel like the iPhone sells well enough that there’s room for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John small, medium, large, instead of just medium, large. I think there’s room
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for the mini. Of course it’s gonna- It’s large and extra large at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but whatever, like a diversity of sizes and a diversity of price points. The
⏹️ ▶️ John mini, you know, sells way, way less than the other ones. But does it sell so little that it’s not even viable? The
⏹️ ▶️ John total number of iPhones is so high that I think most phone manufacturers would kill to sell as many minis as Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did. So I don’t quite, you know, like I understand every new variation you
⏹️ ▶️ John add, you know, eats into your profit margins because it would be, you know, there’s less overhead to make those same people just buy the next size
⏹️ ▶️ John up or whatever. But I feel like this is a kind of an Apple nickel and diming type of things. Like let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not super duper, like it is your most popular product. If you can’t diversify your most popular product
⏹️ ▶️ John into a reasonable range of sizes, then what can you do that with? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just wanted to do the mini every other year or something, I feel like there’s a compromise here. You know, when everyone says, oh, the mini didn’t sell well, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t make it. I think people are envisioning that they sold like 10 of them, right? But they sold millions, right? Just
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s plenty to support a product. So I do really hope it comes back.
🍸🥩🥬
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside, I just I keep thinking about poor original gravity. Marco, can we promise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each other, you and me, that if we get word that House of Prime Rib is folding, that you and I will make the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trip for House of Prime Rib? I know we’ve talked about this before, but for real,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we make sure that we do that? Oh, if we can. I mean, that place, from what I gather, I mean, I haven’t been there in like five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, but from what I gather, that place is so incredibly popular that I think if they announced they were closing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down at some point in the near future, I think they would be booked up solid and we wouldn’t be able to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in at any price. It would be all like the people who are the insiders who would get in, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’d have no chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re probably right. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also because they are always that busy, I think the odds that they are going to shut down are pretty low. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A thousand percent agreed. But one of my favorite restaurants in the entire world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot say enough good things about House Prime Rib. It is so good. It’s one of those things that like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really this is what you’re excited about? Really? This thing that’s been the same way probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a hundred years? Yes. excited about because it’s freaking perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like when you hear somebody describe a restaurant as an institution, House of Prime Rib
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the institution. Like it is the epitome of that description of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a restaurant. It is the best version of that that I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, sorry, I just, I miss that place so much.
Quinn Nelson on Studio Display PSU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, who has some very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strong but unusual opinions about the studio display. But one of the things that Quinn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has said via Twitter in this case, and I’ll just read his tweets, I can’t drop the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the studio display was originally slated to be the quote $2,500 to $3,000 quote mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LED and then changed late in production. The reason, math says that it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a 285 watt power supply. Even with the laptop connected, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey input output, screen brightness maxed, and speakers blasting, it barely draws over 165 watts with peak everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s a whole lot of extra power that the power supply can handle. But why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t personally buy this. I think that this is just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quirk of the display or maybe Apple just leaving some padding, so to speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do understand where he’s coming from, even though I don’t personally think that this is the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there’s all sorts of complicating factors that could be, you know, the reason why that power supply is spec’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it is. One of them, you know, I didn’t follow Quinn’s math here, like I didn’t actually look into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But, you know, keep in mind, again, like with all IO connected, like those are, those ports have a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maximum wattage that they are spec to supply. The laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, is going to be pulling you know, 100 watts from the cable if possible, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like Quinn kind of for most of that, but like if any of those were missed, you know, efficiency losses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s a lot of things that could be like slightly, you know, missed or could make a big difference here. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that Apple would design this product to have this fairly different component
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it and then swap it out and not change anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it, I think that’s generally not how Apple designs hardware these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. I think we always hear stories from the rumor mill of like, oh, at the last minute, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulled Touch ID from this phone or whatever, and it’s like, no, that was never meant to be there, like the rumor was just wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think these days, Apple, when they design hardware, they do so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty intentionally and with a lot of lead time and the odds that they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that big of a change so late in the game that they would not change out the power supply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that reason alone, I just don’t think it’s very likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was at least one product, I forget if it was like an iPod touch or an iPhone where, or maybe it was an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John even, but there’s some iOS device handout thing where if you looked at the logic board inside it, you saw
⏹️ ▶️ John like the connectors where a component would be on the more expensive phone, but they just didn’t put it in that one. Do you remember
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Are you talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPod Touch with the missing camera?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, that might be it. Yeah, like, my point for this is that that was a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time ago, and I think the Apple of today wouldn’t even do that. You know, sometimes you do need
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a quote unquote last minute, meaning a year before the product is announced,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John When hardware designs, where you make, let’s say you design a logic board, and you decide, actually we’ve decided this product isn’t gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have a camera. But you don’t redesign the logic board, you just don’t connect the component there. So, you know, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John why go through the expense of redesigning and revalidating the board or whatever? Just leave the traces with nothing connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. Right, so that can happen. But the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Studio Display, and we’ll link to the iFixit Teardown video if you don’t know what the inside of this thing looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m not gonna say Quinn’s not familiar with the inside of Apple products, he’s constantly tearing them open. And he even said this in the video
⏹️ ▶️ John and in his tweets, Apple over-designs a lot of stuff. That’s kind of their
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like probably the biggest example in many senses of the word is the 2019
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. If you look inside that thing, it’s so over-engineered. Everything in there
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much more expensive to make, every little part, every piece of plastic, every piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John metal, the circuit board, everything being machined and precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John fit and custom made and color matched, right? It’s massively
⏹️ ▶️ John over-engineered. There’s no reason any of that stuff needs to be like that. It’s, you know, it’s the old Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which is, it’s not just his thing, it’s like a, you know, a folktale, whatever, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John inside of a cabinet or a drawer that nobody ever sees, or the back of a piece of furniture that’s carefully designed,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s up against the wall and no one ever sees it, but the craftsman sees it. The craftsman will know it’s there, so they do a good job of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple over-engineers its hardware. So when you look at the iFixit teardown of this laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, this, the Apple Studio Display, they do a gag in the beginning where they ask a bunch of sort of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have never seen the insides, and they show the insides of an iMac and the insides of the studio display, and they say, which is the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and which is the display and a bunch of people get it wrong. That doesn’t show much of anything just because they both have circuit boards
⏹️ ▶️ John in them or whatever, but look at the studio display and look at how nice it looks on
⏹️ ▶️ John the inside, right? That’s how Apple makes things these days, especially things that go anywhere near
⏹️ ▶️ John the pro realm. Like look inside the Mac studio itself, the little, you know, it doesn’t look like a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John mini in there. It looks more like a tiny Mac pro. Everything precisely fit, all sorts of custom
⏹️ ▶️ John parts. Everything is all color matched inside there as well. So when I look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the studio display, I think, yep, it’s a typically over-engineered, modern Apple piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of hardware. Hopefully over-engineered in all the good ways, as in, oh, they over-respect the power supply because
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want to run a power supply at the ragged edge of what it’s able to support or whatever. But not so
⏹️ ▶️ John much that like, this was an entirely different product and they just sort of changed
⏹️ ▶️ John plans a year ago and made a slightly different one. Now, that could be the case because Apple is known to
⏹️ ▶️ John reuse pieces like power bricks and other things where they’re just like, why make one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John when you know if I make a power brick this size we can use it with two of our laptops and we don’t have to make one special
⏹️ ▶️ John for the other one because you can just use the same part for both. That is definitely an Apple move. So I would say, watch to see
⏹️ ▶️ John if they do release the mini LED version of this. And when that one gets torn down, how many parts
⏹️ ▶️ John does it share with this one? Maybe that will bear it out because it is like Apple to say, hey, we’re gonna make a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John different versions of this, whether it’s the Mac Studio with the Ultra and the Macs inside it or whatever, to basically
⏹️ ▶️ John try to share as many parts as you can, or like the M1 Mac Mini, reuse the power supply
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Intel one just because, well, I make a new power supply, even though it’s massively oversized for the M1, it
⏹️ ▶️ John works fine, just keep using it, right? So I don’t entirely discount this, but I do say most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John weirdness of the inside of this and other Apple products is just because Apple, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John on their pro-ish products, loves to over-engineer things, as in putting more
⏹️ ▶️ John time, energy, and also money into things that other manufacturers do not.
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USB-C KVM-like switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we had a little bit of, well, more than a little bit of feedback about multiple computers and one Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor. And I’m not going to make the obvious joke here. You’re welcome. Steve Wado wrote, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just got this to try to share my studio display between a MacBook Pro and a Mac mini. I have my peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugged into the display, so when I switch with this, everything swaps over. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable decon USB-C type C 8k updated switch USB 3.1 C gen 2 cable for video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by direction 8k 30 hertz 4k 120 hertz power delivery 200 watts 10 gigabit per second data transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey splitter converter. Oh, I made it. Okay, so this is basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a HDMI switch. But instead of being for HDMI, it’s obviously for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB C or I guess not Thunderbolt, maybe Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, it’s so it’s it’s it’s very much like a KVM. So it’s like it’s a two to a one in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two out or I guess two in one out switch that only switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C, not Thunderbolt. So what’s interesting about this is that, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the description of it, they specifically say, you know, in their Amazon description is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not use this with the LG monitor and Max, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first generation LG UltraFine monitors were Thunderbolt only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe the newer generation of them added USB-C support so they could be used with iPads, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically any monitor that did not work with the original iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will not work with this, but because it is USB-C but not Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now it does seem to support all the high data rates and everything, and so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is apparently supporting the USB-C, you know, display mode or whatever that is at the low level,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is literally just USB-C, not Thunderbolt. But most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern, nice monitors, including the studio display, will actually switch properly that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this should theoretically work with that. Will it work with the XDR? I don’t think so, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John but- I don’t think it can do that resolution over USB-C, but I can’t keep track.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it might work with the XDR, but it definitely does work with the studio display.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the thing about a lot of, when you’re looking for a Thunderbolt whatever, it’s very easy to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John find a USB whatever that’s not actually Thunderbolt anything because the connection looks the same. And often
⏹️ ▶️ John it will do the job that you want and so you don’t care. Like if it supports the resolution you want and it supports all the peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything works, then what do you care whether it’s Thunderbolt or USB? But you do have to be careful. And usually the way you can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell is if it’s Thunderbolt anything, it’s way more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if it’s Thunderbolt anything, it will usually say Intel certified in the description and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will always have the Thunderbolt little lightning logo on the port. If you don’t see that lightning logo, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Steve continues. I literally just plugged it in a few minutes ago and it seems to work just great, unless I’m missing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some little detail around resolution, et cetera, but I think it’s okay. Speakers and camera work great and everything still identifies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the system as a studio display. I haven’t messed with spatial audio, I just use the speakers, which are excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So according to Steve, this is an option if you just want a sort of KVM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of thing that’s literally just one USB-C port that you can plug your studio
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it make some sense for Apple to have supported this? They might just get it for free with the chips that they’re using, but aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John there still, I mean, I suppose people have older computers, like a Max that you might want to connect to
⏹️ ▶️ John the studio display that don’t support Thunderbolt, but are listed as supported by the studio display?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what? I mean, they still have USB-C though? Like the first generation MacBook? The adorable, maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple wants to acknowledge Anybody still uses those things? Maybe they just get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it free as part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the chip set. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, this- I mean, the keyboards have already broken by now anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not errands, not errands. By using this KVM, you’re basically like forcing your computer to speak USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John because the KVM, this thing supports USB-C, but not Thunderbolt. And then once you do that, apparently the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John display, Thunderbolt display, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco remember your names.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently the studio display is just fine with that. And you know, that’s why I asked the follow-up question,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, does the camera work? Does the speakers work? And yeah, apparently it all works great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then tangentially, an anonymous friend of the show wrote, there is in fact a KVM switch for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt that would let you multiplex two inputs to one output and thus build a switch for multiple Macs to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one Thunderbolt monitor. It’s part of Intel’s Thunderbolt developer tools, which are used for stuff like hot plug testing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since test software can poke the quote unquote switch from input A to input B. But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like none of the Thunderbolt dock developers have yet thought of shipping this as an actual product.
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, but you can’t have it. Yeah, this is like, if you are a manufacturer, Like say you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John CalDigit and you’re making their Thunderbolt docks, this is apparently a piece of hardware that you can, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John get from Intel or somebody to help you develop your hardware product. And it basically
⏹️ ▶️ John acts like a software control switch which can do Thunderbolt things. But I’m not sure you could just take that
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, OK, we’re going to package this and resell it. It’s maybe part of some developer agreement when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John this piece of hardware. But it shows that it’s definitely possible. It’s just not a product that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the anonymous friend did share a picture with us. We are not at liberty to share it with everyone else, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I can assure you this picture makes me think that this is absolutely a factual thing. And plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this anonymous friend wouldn’t lie. So this is a real thing. It’s just we can’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, tangentially related, I’m going to share a picture of a friend of mine who
Most USB-C Ethernet is slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a lot of follow-up in kerfuffle with regards to USB Ethernet adapters that are apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow on modern Macs and James Badger writes gigabit USB C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet adapters mostly use the Realtek RTL8153 chipsets Realtek’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last driver for the RTL8153 is for Mac OS 10.15 Catalina. On newer Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions The OS will fall back to the default quote Apple ECM quote driver Which has slower transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speeds and will noticeably increase CPU usage during transfers. The two and a half gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adapters sometimes use the Realtek RTL8156 instead. The 8156
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses the NCM macOS driver, which is much higher performance. We also got some feedback from Lex Postma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this as well. But yeah, apparently if you use the, what is it? 81, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did it go? 8153 chipset, which is like almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C thing dongle that has an ethernet adapter on board.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s no bueno in modern versions of Mac OS. So you need to find something that’s basically two and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit to be more likely in the safe zone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or use Apple’s Thunderbolt controller, which I’m using through that stupid adapter. It’s a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricey. Like you can get free for reference, like you can get a 2.5 gigabit adapter with the 8156,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good chip set for like 30 bucks. So these aren’t super expensive things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you don’t ever plan to use the two and a half gigabit capability of it. So that’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option. And just to clarify, as far as I can tell, I did some research on this earlier today, as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple sold Belkin USB-C ethernet adapter is the crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chipset, the 8153. As far as I can tell. Mine is about 100 miles away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or about 50 miles away right now, so I can’t actually check mine. But I did as much research as I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be that’s the case. I also I somebody said somewhere like on hacker news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the CalDigit TS for the new CalDigit dock might be the nice chip the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how can I figure that out? I’m running one right now? How? Where can I go to find this out and system?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there’s like a text command, you can run to list like what it’s using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey If you check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that blog post, you it’ll, it’ll be in there. Yeah, but and I actually emailed CalDigit earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today to ask them, but I haven’t heard back yet. So we’ll see. But yeah, basically, if you wanna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure of it, if you actually search like Amazon or whatever for RTL8156 USB adapters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will find adapters that are two and a half gigabit that actually say specifically they have that chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in them. So that’s probably the safest bet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, it’s not like the chip set is crappy or anything. It’s just that there’s no, apparently no more
⏹️ ▶️ John driver, custom driver for it. And so it falls back to some generic driver that does a bad job, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think someone said that like Apple’s response to, you know, investigating this was like, Oh, well, the manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John of those product need to supply Apple with the correct drivers for their new driver model,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. So this is basically just a driver issue. This could be solved with software. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like Apple is saying that, well, it’s not our responsibility to solve this with software. The hardware manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John need to work with us to supply the correct driver that we will then bundle with macOS. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John your RTL8153 chipset will go back to performing the way it’s supposed to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I do think it’s kind of galling that Apple is still selling that terribly slow Belkin USB-C adapter in their stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as their only USB-C ethernet adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is so much info for me to look through on this command. I am not going to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure this out during the time that we’re recording, if you want me to participate at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holy jamolis. I’ll have to look into this, but there’s a lot here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there is. I read it earlier. It took a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. I’m not even talking about the blog post. I’m talking about the command output from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John command that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just ran. I would put a gist up and have the chat room go through it, but I don’t know if there’s something private in here. Who knows?
Canon EF lenses on RF mount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nevertheless, we’ll move right along. Tell us about Canon EF lenses and how they can work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or cannot work with mirrorless cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I put this in here. Turns out, so there was a question an episode or two ago in Ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a person who owned a bunch of Canon EF lenses trying to choose between,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to the mirrorless world, trying to choose between the Canon ecosystem and the Sony mirrorless ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what we didn’t know at the time, and what we, or at least we didn’t say, we got a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people wrote in, both named Chris, who told us that Canon EF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lenses can be easily adapted to their new RF mount on their mirrorless cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The adapter’s apparently about 100 bucks and it works really well. They say there’s not really any major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance losses by using it. So that’s pretty cool. I didn’t realize that. I figured there was probably an adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I was surprised to hear that it’s kind of, you know, once you pay for it, that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of free in the sense that you don’t seem to lose much benefit of the lenses by using them through the adapter. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s cool and that changes things. And if I had a bunch of EF lenses, which I mean, we kind of do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re more my wife’s, but that would certainly factor into my decision as well, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of those EF lenses are really, really good and it would be a shame to lose them.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s always an adapter, but like the thing that people, the downsides that people have
⏹️ ▶️ John cited is like, well, maybe you get fewer frames per second if you use the adapter, because the sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of communication between the camera and the focusing system and everything aren’t that good. The second one that
⏹️ ▶️ John no one mentioned that I’ll throw out there is, you know, the technology inside lenses moves
⏹️ ▶️ John on, particularly the focusing technology is one of the reasons why I was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John being a little bit hesitant about the the 55 millimeter prime lens we were talking about last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John time a new lens is made, they improve the little motors that move the elements inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the lens, the focusing elements and everything to make them faster and quieter or both.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you have a big collection of really expensive Canon EF lenses, you know that are many many years old
⏹️ ▶️ John They haven’t gotten any worse They’re just as good as they always were but it is possible that newer Canon lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John for mirrorless or otherwise Have faster or quieter focusing or both
⏹️ ▶️ John and But otherwise, yeah, it seems like the adapter is able to pass through all the things that needs to pass through but
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes You’re the performance of your lens will even be slightly less than it was when it was directly
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to the full frame. But in other cases, I would say like, maybe there’s a newer lens. And the good thing about lenses,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have good resale value. So if you really do want, even if you’re moving to Canon mirrorless, sell
⏹️ ▶️ John all your Canon DSLR lenses, you’ll make probably pretty good money on them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then to put that money into newer equivalent lenses that have more modern technology inside them. I’m not sure if Canon is as
⏹️ ▶️ John aggressive at updating the guts as Sony is, but I would imagine they
⏹️ ▶️ John are because even like the third party Sony lenses from year to year, you have to be careful you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally get the quote unquote old one that has like the noisy
⏹️ ▶️ John focusing motors, just like the noisy Mac Studio. Is it totally inaudible or is it the loudest thing you’ve ever heard and you can’t use it
⏹️ ▶️ John at weddings because it’s so noisy.
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Casey’s New Setup™
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have sort of kind of breaking news. Uh, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new setup here at my desk and that’s not breaking news. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco breaking news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you don’t have a new setup at your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But this is hypothetically the end of the road because I am looking at an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio display right now. It is beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I love it so much. It is so delightful. I am so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this thing. In so many ways, it is the anti-casey monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was a fortune. It doesn’t do a lot of the things that I wish it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t care. It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful. Everything about it, I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Physically, the case, I got the VESA mount one, and I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on a not particularly great stand, but that’s a choice that I made. that’s not the fault of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the monitor, but the monitor itself, it looks so pretty. It’s so nice. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beautiful. And the screen of course is excellent. I have it next to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Ultra Me, and the Ultra Me just looks awful and dated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and chintzy and crummy by comparison. And I mean both the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case and the screen, it’s probably a placebo, but I really feel like the screen is genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only is it brighter, but it just looks better to me. Now this ultra fine is on the earlier side of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ultra fine display, so that’s probably part of it. But nevertheless, I genuinely think it looks better.
⏹️ ▶️ John way better. Before we move on to the sound, I want to say on the appearance, that’s not just your imagination. We mentioned this on a past show that
⏹️ ▶️ John the studio display has a higher maximum peak brightness than the LG does just from the
⏹️ ▶️ John product specs and also people have measured it and seen that’s the case. People have also looked at the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John model number of the panel and it is not the same model numbers in the LG, it’s also not the same model numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 5K iMac, I believe. And in people doing side-by-side comparisons of, you know, with measurement
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment and everything, not only does the studio display get slightly brighter, not a lot brighter, but brighter
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that you can notice it without measuring instruments, like you can notice it with your eyeballs, but the black levels are also
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better than the LG display or the iMac. It’s not dramatic, you really need to see them side-by-side
⏹️ ▶️ John to notice that, but it is a real thing. You can even see it in YouTube videos, Like you don’t need to, you don’t need measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment. You don’t need to trust a bunch of people doing it. You can just look at the side-by-side photos of the two monitors right next to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John The blacks are a little deeper and the brights are a little bit brighter. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know if I want to tell Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John this to make him potentially find things wrong with his monitor, but the one complaint I have seen about the studio
⏹️ ▶️ John display, and I feel like it could be manufacturing tolerances, but it could just be a
⏹️ ▶️ John fact of life of the display, is minor vignetting around the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the XDR has been getting around all the edges as Marco’s complained about in the past. Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to tell with the menu bar because the menu bar has shading and is translucent anyway, but if you just fill the whole screen with white
⏹️ ▶️ John from top to bottom, covering everything, including the menu bar, you could check to see if you see a little bit of a shadow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John actually. Thank you for offering. I’d rather not.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a thing you might note. I only saw one person post a picture of it and I could see it and I could like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, my XDR looks like that. So even for $5,000, you can’t escape that because it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say it’s inherent in the technology that they’re using to backlight it, but it is difficult to control
⏹️ ▶️ John when you use this kind of technology to make a monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, if you can also find some masquerading in it, you can really make it a theme.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There it is, I was waiting for it. Nicely done, nicely done indeed. So yeah, so this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it looks better. It sounds so much better. I was suffering through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the UltraFines speakers because I haven’t yet put together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an amp for the speakers that came in my Marco Christmas box.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you waiting for? I’ve updated the firmware on my Marco Christmas present.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all the settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought a lens for it. I bought a new SD card. I’m just,
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t even, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey still in the box? I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey busy, all right? I’ve been busy. Nevertheless, so the volume is great. And you know what’s an amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great feature on something that outputs an audio? having a linear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume control. And this has a linear volume control. It doesn’t go, you know, quiet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slight less quiet, slight less quiet, really loud, louder, et cetera. Because that’s what the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does. Like one, two, and three are linear. Then when you’ve jumped from three to four, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deafening by comparison. And so this is linear, which is excellent. It works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via the CalDigit TS4, which is also excellent because as mentioned earlier, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG Ultrafine, at least the UltraFine I have doesn’t get full 5K if I plug it in via the CalDigit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is annoying, but you know, it is what it is. The screen is completely happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going through the CalDigit, no issues. It wakes much faster than the UltraFine does,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m not at all surprised by. Also real quick about the CalDigit TS4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is working really well. It’s a fortune, it’s like 350 bucks or something like that, but I really like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only thing I will say, and I don’t think I said this on the show before, The onboard Ethernet, which I still haven’t figured out if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the good or bad Realtek, but the onboard Ethernet, which is two and a half gigabit, it didn’t work for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beans when I first plugged everything in. And it turns out that you have to go into, I know this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is off the top of my head, in system preferences and network, and then if you go into like advanced for the TS4, or for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Ethernet connection on the TS4, whatever that last like tab is, I think it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware settings, there’s a bunch of different options, including using energy efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet, and you have to turn that off because reasons. I don’t really understand why, but CalDigit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommends this. Once I did that, it’s been extremely reliable. And I have heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from other people who sleep their computers frequently that waking the CalDigit up from sleep can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little spotty. I don’t know if that’s a macOS problem or a CalDigit problem. I don’t sleep my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely ever. So for me, this is not something I’ve run into, but that is something to consider.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also finding a CalDigit TS4 right now is freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impossible. Yeah, you can’t. I tried to buy one like when it first came out. I tried, I looked again today when I was doing this research.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re, they’re nowhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So it’s, it’s a pain in the butt in that regard. But, uh, but as a quick aside, I do like the CalDigit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TS4. It gives them, I give it my thumbs up for my use cases. Again, be a little careful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you sleep your computer often or whatever the case may be. Uh, we did a video call this morning using zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, we, we were talking to someone and that was my first experience with center stage. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera is kind of garbage right now. Like your, your face looks very porcelain. I think I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell describe it that way and it was accurate. Um, I mean, I don’t think it’s, I shouldn’t say it’s garbage. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not garbage. It’s just not what you would expect from the hardware that you know is in the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’re being told I would have got better with time software, software, software, but um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I found it serviceable for the sorts of things that I need to do. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those people who wants, who is thinking about setting up a 4k camera pointed at your face, you know, on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top of your monitor or whatever, it is not that nice, but center stage super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did not see any, or if I did see any, I didn’t notice of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, like delay where you shimmy to one side or the other, and then, and the, and the quote unquote camera person is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, huh? Oh, shoot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I got to move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I didn’t personally see any of that. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m not saying it’s not a problem for others, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see any and center stage is super cool. It was Aaron and I talking to our financial advisor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Michaela would come in and out of frame from time to time and it would shimmy over to show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michaela and then as she left, the frame would tighten up on Aaron and me. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really cool. It wasn’t a thousand percent perfect, but I wouldn’t say I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw a sleepy camera person. It’s just occasionally the camera person made a choice that I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have made. But all in all although super thumbs up for Center Stage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see. Oh, the LG, everything about it looks like garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I hate it. And one of the first things I thought to myself. So I’m using this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to monitor a Visa stand because of reasons that are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting. And so I have the studio display directly in front of me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the LG taking the position that the 4K display had previously taken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s offset to my right. and it’s at an angle, you know, compared to the studio display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And within two minutes of setting this all on my desk again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had for a fleeting moment, the thought to myself, should I get a second one of these? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the LG, I hated you whining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco about how the stand is and how, Oh, you can see the LG logo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, hold on. I don’t think I ever complained about the logo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you did. You absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole thing is hideous for lots of other reasons. You know, the weird proportions of the bezel, the big like forehead on top,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the plastic everywhere, the stand is ugly. Like there’s lots of other things about it that are ugly. The actual LG logo, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find that offensive. What I find offensive is the incredibly mediocre build quality of everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I agree with that and hashtag Marco was right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is ultra meh, but I genuinely, for a fleeting moment, thought to myself, maybe I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just get a second one of these. Wouldn’t that, no, shh, shh, stop,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you order now, it’ll probably come by the fall. That’s also true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’ll have the pro version with the mini LED.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m genuinely worried that that’s going to happen, that there’ll be a pro version.
⏹️ ▶️ John you kidding? I’m worried. My first studio display is probably going to come around the time of WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m worried that the pro version is going to come out. I’m going to be in another $2,500 for a monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then this will get shimmied over to where the ultra fine is now. And this phantom new studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display pro will be in front of me. I don’t know, whatever, but I adore this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is by some measures, a crummy display. It is by some measures,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply overpriced. I don’t care. And at Snell, not on the most recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade, I think it was last week’s upgrade. Snell talked a lot about how people are expecting this monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to serve purposes that it really probably wasn’t designed to serve. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he did a much better job. I’m not even gonna try to summarize what he was saying I’ll butcher it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with everything Snell said in that version, in that episode of Upgrade. If you want the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorts of things that I want, if you want something that’s nice to look at, both in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen is nice and in the sense of the industrial design is nice, if you want something that will work reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with your computer, if you want something that has a webcam,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want something that isn’t $5,000, if you want something that’s natively 5k,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If these are things that you care about, this is the perfect display for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think it’s poorly priced. It is expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it’s cheap, but I don’t think it’s unreasonably priced. And I am so thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I got this. I am so excited about it. I love it. So two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyper enthusiastic thumbs up for me. Remind me of this when it crashes in the middle of us recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sitting here now, two tremendous thumbs up. I am in love with this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John As always, software could potentially be the Achilles heel. We’ll see. We already talked about Thunderbolt display in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John having problems with software, but that wasn’t running iOS. So hopefully that makes this better or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe worse. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. One of the theories, one of my theories about why we haven’t seen an
⏹️ ▶️ John update to fix the camera is that because the display is running iOS, you’re not gonna get an update until there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS update. And we kind of know how long it tends to be between iOS updates. It’s not like they rush them out unless
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a security patch. So I’m just assuming that whatever camera fix is going to come the next time our
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones get a point update, right? We’ll see how that goes. I mean, there’s no reason they have to do that. They could divorce
⏹️ ▶️ John the two versions. They could make it called Display OS or whatever, you know, but right
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s the exact same build number and it’s probably the same OS and maybe that will diverge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there was another weird side effect to that too that somebody wrote in to point out of like, and sorry, I can’t pull it up right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m sorry, I forgot the name, but somebody wrote in to say like, you know, because it’s based on iOS right now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has an A13 in it, When iOS stops supporting the A13, will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this monitor not be able to get software updates anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s where they could just keep putting updates out only for the monitor. Like, Apple controls this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John stack. They can do whatever they want. But I feel like right now, it’s kind of in the sweet spot. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when the A13 is no longer supported, Apple still has the source code to whatever the last OS that works
⏹️ ▶️ John with that is. And I mean, you’re hoping with the monitor that it’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John need so many updates after everything works in a satisfactory way, it just means that it can just basically never change
⏹️ ▶️ John unless there’s some kind of security problem. I’m still kind of hoping someone will like jailbreak this and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco run Mac OS on it
⏹️ ▶️ John so far that hasn’t happened. One thing I’ll add to the list of things like Casey was saying, if you like
⏹️ ▶️ John X, then you should buy this monitor. If you value something that’s over-engineered, we just talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it before. If you watch that tear down video and I fix it and you see what the inside of this looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John and you see how sort of overbuilt it is and how ridiculous it is inside there and that appeals to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a product you might like because Apple makes a bunch of products that appeal to people who like that type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I like that type of thing both because I get a kick out of it, but also because in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John that means like, oh, maybe it’s more reliable because they use expensive, you know, they buy expensive components
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and again, in theory, the giant fans that are inside my Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John are expensive fans. I mean, not super expensive, but like they’re not like the cheapest fan that they could
⏹️ ▶️ John get of that diameter, right? And same thing goes for everything in there. The screws, the little metal
⏹️ ▶️ John posts, all the little pieces they got, like everything in there is over-engineered.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s spec’d to be better quality than it technically needs to be to get the job done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what you’re hoping is that all of that together makes for a more
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable product over the longterm. Not always true. Software can destroy any, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure the hardware people love this, but bad software can destroy any product. Like if there’s some kind of weird software bug or a driver issue or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t matter how beautifully engineered the hardware is. And you can over-engineer stuff and still have a fatal flaw
⏹️ ▶️ John like the butterfly keyboard or, you know, the butterfly keyboard is probably over-engineered as well. It was just a bad idea
⏹️ ▶️ John and had a problem that apparently didn’t appear until it got into people’s hands and people started, you know, eating
⏹️ ▶️ John potato chips over it or whatever. So it seems like so far the Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John Display mostly is getting the benefits of being over-engineered. Casey likes it, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John him happy. It’s a nice product. it’s very solid. You know, it seems to work reliably with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stuff for now. But the camera’s a little wonky, but even the over-engineered part of that is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, it’s running a version of iOS on an A13. We have some hope that that could be corrected because it’s not like they just
⏹️ ▶️ John built in a bunch of hardware that does one thing inside there. It is a general purpose little computer and it has an OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that OS in theory can be patched to do a better job of that. And the final thing I’ll add about center stage,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a bunch of videos of people complaining about the sort of lazy cameraman in center stage, like, oh, I move my head out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the way and the camera follows me, but then I move it back, it doesn’t follow back. That also
⏹️ ▶️ John strikes me as a sort of a difficult to tune thing. Like, I think of like things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are being tuned like in games or even in like, you know, software inside a car’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of control system. The other extreme would be that it tracks you
⏹️ ▶️ John like as fast as it possibly can, which it could do, because you know, it knows exactly where your eyeballs are,
⏹️ ▶️ John where your face is, like probably multiple times a second. But for the same reason
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t do that type of thing in a game, you wouldn’t want to do it on the monitor, it would be twitchy. It would be like every time you move,
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera would move and it would just be like hyperactive. And if for a second it lost track of your eyes, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John jump to another position and jump back on your eyes and jump, jump, jump. The other extreme is super
⏹️ ▶️ John slow, right? So you’ve got to find the happy medium there. And everyone has a different opinion of what that
⏹️ ▶️ John medium should be. As soon as you notice that you’ve moved back and the camera doesn’t, you’re like, oh, the camera’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too slow. But if you notice that it’s being twitchy, like you just move your head a millimeter and the camera move
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s making people motion sick, you don’t like that either, right? So what you want it to do is, don’t react
⏹️ ▶️ John too much if I do a little bit of motion, but eventually notice if I’ve made a net change in position
⏹️ ▶️ John and it seems like I’m gonna stay there. So you kind of want it to read your mind. Am I leaning over to get a glass of water? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John am I shifting in my seat and this is gonna be my new position? And the only way to tell it is to wait some amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, like, I think if you were the programmer trying to code this up or whatever, How long should I wait
⏹️ ▶️ John after a move to decide that the person has actually repositioned and I should move the camera?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or should I wait a little bit longer to see if they move back because they were just shifting a little bit? And it’s not easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John tune that. It’s kind of difficult to, you know, it’s just a bunch of different parameters, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, to whatever model they’re using to do that. But no matter how you
⏹️ ▶️ John tune it, once it gets out into the real world, someone somewhere is gonna think it’s either too fast or too
⏹️ ▶️ John slow. They seem to have erred on the side of being too slow because I think too fast would be, would look
⏹️ ▶️ John like more of a bug than too slow. The slow will eventually catch up with you and it seems like, oh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it’s a slow computer, it’s not smart enough to go. No, that’s a deliberate choice. Maybe they’ve made the
⏹️ ▶️ John choice to be slightly too slow, but too slow is probably better than too fast. So I kind of feel for the team that is tuning
⏹️ ▶️ John this at Apple because there’s almost no way to tune this to the point where everyone who uses
⏹️ ▶️ John it is happy. That’s their task, that’s what they have to try to do. Find out that one that will make the most people happy and it seems like they missed
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. But honestly, I do wonder with the next revision if they’re gonna like over correct
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it twitchy, But we’ll see.
John’s thermostat adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In wildly unrelated news, your setup has changed and I owe you a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of an apology. We were talking, was it on the show that we were talking about this? It was, wasn’t it? That you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to rewire a portion of your house so you can have a smart thermostat and you didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a common wire where the thermostat was. But you sent a picture to Marco and I, amongst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey others, saying you have successfully installed a new smart thermostat, which means your wiring project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has succeeded. I am very proud of you, John. I’m sorry for doubting you. Tell me about this new thermostat of yours.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m going to reiterate the strategy of if you’re going to change something about the thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house, don’t do it in the middle of winter. Don’t do it at a time where
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as you start the project, the clock is ticking until your pipes freeze. So I waited until springtime basically
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this because I figured, look, if I screwed up and I just don’t have any heat in my house because
⏹️ ▶️ John I just totally screwed it up to the point where I can’t even put back the old thermostat, I can call
⏹️ ▶️ John someone and they can come and fix it and we’re not gonna freeze to death in our house, right? So that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. I love like, just for reference, this morning for my morning dog walk, it was 40 degrees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s still pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John cold. You’re not gonna freeze, your pipes aren’t gonna burst at 40 degrees. And we have actually
⏹️ ▶️ John insulation in our house now, so we can maintain temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John just the sun coming through the windows during the day, like heat is not really a factor
⏹️ ▶️ John around here anymore. So I figured it was a reasonable time to do it. And so the one
⏹️ ▶️ John I ended up getting, we’ll put a link in the show notes, I got the Ecobee, their product naming is
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than Apple’s. They used to have them, a bunch of products called, I think it was called Ecobee Smart
⏹️ ▶️ John Thermostat and they put a number on it and they got up to four and then they thought better of it. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ John the new top of the line one is called the, what is it called? Ecobee Smart Thermostat with
⏹️ ▶️ John Voice Control, which you have to just understand, is that better than the four? Is it worse than the four? Is it better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the three? Is three better than the, it’s just, you could be kind of screwed up. But anyway, as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell, based on the price and the newness of this, this is the fanciest one they make. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even that fancy. It’s not that expensive. It was introduced many years ago, so it’s not even that new.
⏹️ ▶️ John I picked it mostly because I didn’t want one that was particularly smart. All I really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John was to be able to control the temperature of my house from my phone, right? So like if you’re away for a while, or if you’re coming home
⏹️ ▶️ John on a car ride from a long journey, you can turn the heat on, so it’ll be warm when you get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you from experience, that is 99% of the value of smart thermostats. You really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need more than that. That alone is the best way to use smart thermostats. Turn off all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatic prediction features that you’ll just be fighting with them forever. Just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostat that you can program on a schedule if you want to, and that you can remotely control from anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Ecobee had a good reputation as being kind of that back when Nest was, kind of all the rage that
⏹️ ▶️ John Ecobee was like, We don’t really do that. We are just a computer controlled thermostat with a schedule.
⏹️ ▶️ John Since then, eCoopy has added a bunch of features to be smarter. Obviously they’ve added voice control.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s right in the name of this thing. So it supports Amazon voice assistant and Apple’s voice assistant, whose
⏹️ ▶️ John names I’m not going to say. It doesn’t support the Google one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does have some smart features, but all of that stuff, including the voice stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just flat turn off, right? So there is a schedule. You put heat comes on at this temperature. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a straight up schedule. What time, what temperature, until what time, then what other temperature, so
⏹️ ▶️ John on and so forth. On top of that, it layers some mild smarts where it can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John it tries to tell if the house is occupied based on motion sensors that are in the thermostat. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if it doesn’t see anyone like walk by the thermostat or any of its other remote sensors, which we’ll talk about in a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can decide, well, even though I’m supposed to be keeping the house at whatever temperature, it looks like no
⏹️ ▶️ John one’s home right now. so I’m going to turn the temperature down. And it’s very cautious. Getting back to like the center stage camera
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it needs to not sense motion for like two hours before it will make this decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, you can turn off that feature if you don’t want it. If you don’t want to do that and you just want it to stick to a schedule, you can turn that off as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. All right, so anyway, that’s how I ended up picking this product. It is a smart thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ John with reasonably good app support and support for at least two of the ecosystems that are in my home thing. It supports HomeKit,
⏹️ ▶️ John it supports the Amazon stuff or whatever. And the little remote
⏹️ ▶️ John thingamabobbers, sensors that it has, they’re kind of neat. Part of the problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John our ancient house, like it’s basically one big zone, you know, cause it’s a house from the
⏹️ ▶️ John 30s, right? It does not have separate zones for like the bedrooms or upstairs or downstairs, anything like that. It’s just one big zone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thermostat is in a single place in the house. And that’s where the little temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor is. It says, okay, what temperature is it in the house? because again, because we’re in an old house and because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it depends on how it’s positioned on a lot and the sun and everything, there are rooms in the house that are way colder
⏹️ ▶️ John than the other rooms. And the one the thermostat is in is not one of the colder rooms in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the house. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if the thermostat thinks, oh, it’s perfectly fine, in one of the bedrooms, it might be much, much colder.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you turn the temperature up there too much, you know, to make that bedroom comfortable, then other places will be too
⏹️ ▶️ John hot. So it comes with these little tiny sensors, which are very adorable. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are like powered by, I’m assuming they’re like watch batteries or whatever, those, you know, coin battery type things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they said they’ll last for a year or whatever. We’ll see how that goes. But they’re completely wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, tiny little coin battery things and you stick them and they’re like the size of like, you know, a half
⏹️ ▶️ John cent piece on a little pedestal. Stick them wherever you want in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a temperature and motion sensor. So one, it does like the presence thing of like, I think it does the presence thing
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, to say, is someone in this room? And two, it will take the temperature there and then it will sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John average all the temperatures together to come to a reasonable whole house temperature that it wants things to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like all the other features, if you don’t wanna use these sensors, don’t use them. Don’t buy them, don’t add them to the thing. The smart thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with one of these little sensors, but you can buy more and stick them around the house. The voice assistant thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought I was just gonna turn that off, especially since a lot of people said, oh, well, you know, I don’t like it because sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I try to talk to my phone, but that thing answers or whatever. But I think maybe HomeKit’s gotten better with that lately. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s in, my thermostat is in my dining room, which is also where my Google Home is, and also
⏹️ ▶️ John where my Amazon voice assistant thing is. So now I have one room in the house where I can
⏹️ ▶️ John ask questions of all three assistants, and you know how I love to do this. To pit them against each other at the dinner table
⏹️ ▶️ John to see who is going to fail more spectacularly at answering some question that we have, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey Alexa, tell Siri I’m not talking to Google. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or yeah, I just, yeah, Google destroys everybody just FYI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just so much better because Google search, it’s not the assistant, it’s because Google search is so much better at figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out what you mean. Like basically all it’s doing is like speech to text thrown into Google search box. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the same way you would do in a webpage, that’s why Google wins because it just does that and Google search is so
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. And of course, you know, Siri is weird and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I turned it on to use it with Siri. It’s nice, you can ask it questions, it’ll tell you things. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John the display on the front of it. It’s got like a weather display. And of
⏹️ ▶️ John course it shows the temperature and stuff like that. This is one of the areas where I would have paid more for fancier
⏹️ ▶️ John technology, but there’s obviously not a market for it. If you look at the Ecobee, it just kind of looks like a black
⏹️ ▶️ John squircle. It’s a black rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It’s not particularly attractive, but like whatever. And the aesthetic is like, it’s like the old Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s all black, but then some portion of it is the screen and the screen is a black background
⏹️ ▶️ John with white lettering on it, but it’s an LCD and it’s not mini LED, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the backlight is not entirely black, especially as the lights get dimmer, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn’t have an ambient light sensor in it. So you have to kind of pick the backlight level that high,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t make it look like a gray rectangle where the screen is, right? But also isn’t too dim
⏹️ ▶️ John to see in the daylight. Obviously if they used OLED, maybe they’d have burn-in issues or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it would be a little bit fancier if they had used like, you know, mini LED backlight or, you know, OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John or micro LED or some other ridiculously expensive technology just to preserve the aesthetic like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Watch now does. But they didn’t. So yeah, I’m mostly happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It does what it’s supposed to do. I sort of told the story in reverse here. I guess I should get to the installation part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which might have been exciting if I had destroyed everything but I had a couple of strokes
⏹️ ▶️ John of luck. I will say for the instructions for installing these, All of these, every company that sells
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these things, like they know that installation is the biggest hurdle to getting you to buy one of these, because you’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I buy one of these, like how does it work? I don’t know how thermostats work. I don’t even know how mine work. It’s just on the wall. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John mess anything up. They all have extensive like tutorials
⏹️ ▶️ John and instructions with immediate branching paths to say, hey, if you don’t want to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John hire a pro, find an expert in your area. Like you just pay someone to do it or whatever. But if you want to do it yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll have tons of instructions. It comes with instructions, there’s instructions on the web, there’s instructions in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a million videos on how to do it. Like, Ecobee has a thing where it’s like, which product did
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy? What does your thermostat look like when you pull it out of the wall? Which ones do you see? Do you see a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that looks like this? Do you see a thing that looks like that? Like, it’s sort of like a, you know, a wizard type thing where they just
⏹️ ▶️ John interview you, take a survey and say, okay, you’ve described what you’ve seen and you’ve described what you bought, so here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you should do. And it’s a step-by-step, step one, label all your wires, step two, disconnect them and put them, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, It’s so good about telling you what to do, but of course it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to be step-by-step instructions based on what it thinks you’ll find in
⏹️ ▶️ John your home. And the thing I find in my home, in the tutorial they give, in all the tutorials,
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, okay, look behind your thermostat, what do you see? Okay, I see X, I see Y, I see Z. And then you hit the
⏹️ ▶️ John next step and it says, sorry, you cannot use our products. It’s just like, you flat out can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. You need to get, in case you mentioned before, a C-wire installed. And you probably don’t know what a C-wire is,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m just telling you, like there are no instructions for you. You don’t even have the thing. You need to call somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John and get a C-wire installed. And they do have like a product that comes with this, even it says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to install C-wire, that’s a whole separate set of instructions. And by the way, in the box, you’ll find this little octopus
⏹️ ▶️ John of wires that if you can figure out how to install this octopus of wires onto your
⏹️ ▶️ John furnace or whatever, it will give you a C-wire. And we’ll try to explain to you how to do that, but we’ll give you
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of dire warnings about like, you could probably let somebody else do this. It’s like, you know, they also have a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of like, oh, and if you don’t wanna do that, what if you just, you know, we give you an AC adapter, you can just plug it into a wall plug, but
⏹️ ▶️ John who wants a wire running from like a wall adapter? You know, you don’t want that wire running to your thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ John on the wall, you know? And it’s like, well, you could run that inside the wall, but that wire is not rated inside the wall. Like it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John real complicated real quick. They’re basically saying, if you don’t have a C wire, you need to get one. And there are lots of different ways to get them, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all complicated and they’re not that great. Right? So that was the problem I was facing. That’s why I was like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just run myself a new cable. And I knew I was gonna be on my own on that. Like I pulled up, this is the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of the internet. You can find like the PDF specifications for everything in your house, no matter how old it is. You know, you just gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John find the serial number, the model number, the make, hope the company’s still in business. And I found all like the
⏹️ ▶️ John wiring diagrams for my furnace, for the box that it’s connected to. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured, you know, I found the right cable to get and I found where it was routed and did all the stuff. I was all ready to go. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, I think I know how I’m gonna run all this stuff. I have a, my furnace has like an external breakout
⏹️ ▶️ John box where all the relays and everything are. It’s by I think, TACO brand, T-A-C-O. It’s a common brand
⏹️ ▶️ John of this type of switch. And I found the exact model and saw the diagram. And I’m like, this is exactly where the C wire will go. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this will go there and this will go there. And it’s gonna be great. But then when I took
⏹️ ▶️ John the old thing off the wall, I had taken it off the wall before to look at what wires I had to determine that I didn’t have a C wire.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now when I’m doing the actual project, I took everything off, like unscrewed the thermostat and also the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John was mounted to, like the little plate that it was on. And when I removed everything and saw the hole in the wall
⏹️ ▶️ John and started digging around in the hole in the wall to try to pull out these disgusting fabric-colored,
⏹️ ▶️ John fabric-covered, non-colored wires from inside my walls,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I found buried inside the wall when I was rooting around in there was another wire.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey modern wire. Because I could tell because I
⏹️ ▶️ John had just bought thermostat wire. When you buy thermostat wire, the one I bought comes in a brown
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber sleeve, like the insulation is brown,
⏹️ ▶️ John a color you usually expect to see, like kind of dark brown, right? And you can buy a thermostat wire,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy, it’s like 18-3 and 18-5 is how many conductors are inside it. This I think was,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s such a thing as 18-2, I think, maybe 18 is the gauge or whatever, anyway, there were two conductors
⏹️ ▶️ John inside it. So it’s a brown thermostat wire with two conductors buried in the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I pulled it out of the wall, I’m like, what the hell, what am I gonna do? A C-wire, just for people to know, is
⏹️ ▶️ John one wire that goes to the quote unquote common terminal on your, you know, furnace thingamabob,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I’m like, well, I know this isn’t coming from my furnace thingamabobber
⏹️ ▶️ John thing because I know there’s only two wires coming out of it. I can see them, they follow them. And like, there’s only, it’s only two conductors.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the ancient disgusting wire that’s probably as old as my house, right? So where does this black wire,
⏹️ ▶️ John the brown wire go? So I followed the brown wire down through the wall through the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know, maybe the people who installed our furnace like in 2002 or 2004, whenever we got our furnace
⏹️ ▶️ John redone, maybe they did this, but coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out of my, what is it called, the circuit breaker box? What is that thing called?
⏹️ ▶️ John The fuse box? It’s not fuses.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s called the circuit
⏹️ ▶️ John breaker, or the panel, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a word for it. Anyway, the thing that has all the circuit breakers in it, right? The panel. Coming out of that
⏹️ ▶️ John was, there’s a bunch of metal tubes coming out of it that contain wires or whatever. One metal
⏹️ ▶️ John tube was coming out of it, and it led to a box
⏹️ ▶️ John that had, you know, like a junction box, and then stuck on the top of the junction box was
⏹️ ▶️ John what looks like a transformer type thing with two conductors
⏹️ ▶️ John coming off of it. And those are the two conductors that go into that brown wire.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, what the hell is this? It’s just coming out of my circuit breaker. Someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it’s a doorbell wire. It wasn’t going to the doorbell. It only went, it went from there directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to the inside of the wall near my thermostat. And that little transformer thing is 24 volts. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I hadn’t purchased as part of this project, which I should have had ages ago, but didn’t, was a multimeter. Multimeters are very handy
⏹️ ▶️ John to have. Cause I was just constantly going around probing everything. What’s the voltage between this and this? What’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John voltage between that and that? Anyway, 24 volts AC coming right off the thing. So basically
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out of my, the circuit breaker box thing. What the hell is that called? Someone in the chat room get it, because I don’t want to call it the
⏹️ ▶️ John circuit breaker box thing. It’s annoying me that I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Your electrical
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know, but I’m blanking on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what every electrician calls it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Breaker box, whatever. The panel. Coming out of there was a
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated metal tube that went to a junction box that had a transformer that was giving me 24 volts AC. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t know, the common wire, and the thing that the Ecobee smart thermostat and all these
⏹️ ▶️ John smart thermostats want, they want 24 volts AC. Like, that’s how they function. That’s what they want from the
⏹️ ▶️ John common wire. but the common wire is supposed to just be one conductor. And let me tell you, none of the instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll ever find for a smart thermostat tell you, by the way, if you have two random ass wires
⏹️ ▶️ John with 20 volts AC on them, here’s how to hook up our smart thermostat. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John they totally expect for you to have, from your furnace, the wires with all these different names
⏹️ ▶️ John that do different things, and also the common wire, right? That’s what, and the common wire is one
⏹️ ▶️ John wire. It’s just the, you know, another wire is like the hot wire for that. That’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John neutral versus hot wire, right? But all the instructions are like, I don’t have one common
⏹️ ▶️ John wire. I have two and they have the voltage we need. How am I supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to hook them up? So the instructions were a hundred percent useless to me. I tried following the instructions to being like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, even though I was avoiding everything I know about electricity and saying, I don’t know, what if
⏹️ ▶️ John I just pretend, what if I just pretend that the common wire from that 24 volt terminal down there
⏹️ ▶️ John is the common wire for the thing, but that doesn’t work, it’s not even a complete circuit. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, if you do it the way they say and say, I’m gonna label this the C wire and now I’ll just hook everything up the way it tells
⏹️ ▶️ John me, nothing works. Like, you know, it’s not a complete circuit, right? The second thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is, in regular thermostats and most regular thermostats, there’s some way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a jumper. People who do stuff on PCs know about this, is basically take two pins and sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John short them out to each other to connect them so they connect, where you can say, Okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the wire A and wire B, I’m gonna put a jumper between terminals A and B. So A and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the same wire. Like they’re just connected to each other. The Ecobee at least had no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do that. Every one of the little places where you’re supposed to put a wire, the C wire, the W wire,
⏹️ ▶️ John the RH wire, whatever, there was just one hole. You couldn’t put more than one wire in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John One very small hole. You couldn’t even jam two of them in there if you twisted them together or whatever. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John was pretty sure, based on nothing, because the instructions were all useless to me, that the only way I could get this to work was
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed to basically connect both of the wires from the 24 volt thing to make a complete circuit,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them being the common wire and the second one being basically the RH wire. But I already had an actual RH
⏹️ ▶️ John wire from the furnace. So I had to sort of connect
⏹️ ▶️ John the hot wire from the 24 volt thing to the RH wire
⏹️ ▶️ John and then put the now fused RH and hot wire into the
⏹️ ▶️ John RH terminal. Oh God. And that finally worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And this is- I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe you did this. I would have had no confidence that this would work. I would have bailed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried a whole bunch of different combinations as I was like, well, they must account for this. Like there must be a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. But like, it’s basically because my old thermostat there was a jumper between two things or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever but there was just no way to get more than one wire in there. I’m like, well, you know, and to answer
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s question no, I didn’t solder it. I probably should have soldered it. but here’s what I was trying so many combinations
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had just sort of like, you know, sort of wire nutted essentially the two conductors I needed
⏹️ ▶️ John together and put it on. And this was like try 857, right? So I was taking it off, put it on, take
⏹️ ▶️ John it off, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off, put it on. When it worked, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John to myself, you should really take that off one more time and solder it together. And I said, you know what? I’ve had enough
⏹️ ▶️ John of this project. It’s working. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna catch on fire. And if a wire nut is good enough for other kinds of connections, I don’t think I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John make this into a soldering project. And so I just didn’t take it back off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the, I don’t think this is going to catch on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? I don’t think it’s gonna catch on fire. It’s 24 volts, it’s nothing. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s well connected. I did a good job. It’s not like I, you know, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s just loosely touching an arcing or something like that, it’s fine. So, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is so dumb because like my, the, you know, what do I have in my house to control the temperature?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have an on-off switch for a heater that is either 100% on or 100% off. That’s it. I have no cooling of any kind. I don’t have air
⏹️ ▶️ John conditioning. I don’t have, you know, I don’t have fans. I don’t have hot air. I don’t have filters. I don’t have humidifiers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have air-to-air heat exchangers. I just have literally a button that says, make house hot now and stop, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is all I have is 100% on or 100% off, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the simplest possible scenario. And even that, like, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John have those two random wires coming off of the breaker box thing, it
⏹️ ▶️ John ended up being completely beyond the instructions. The instructions wanna tell you, like, we’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John show you a circuit diagram ever. We’re just gonna say, you homeowner, just do what we say. Do you have
⏹️ ▶️ John wires with these labels? Then do this. And it’s like, but I have a different situation that you haven’t foreseen. So I need
⏹️ ▶️ John to see a circuit diagram. And I had to basically guess like, look, I know this is just basically saying there’s probably, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the parlance of people who think about DC, a plus and a minus, you know, a hot and a neutral. And then one
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing that can, you know, and the Ecobee thermostat just basically controls, should there
⏹️ ▶️ John be power going to the thing that tells the heater to turn on or not? And it trips a relay, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew it had to be simple. I just, you know, I spent a long time banging my head against the thing, surely they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need me to like, you know, fuse two wires together and stick them into one of these wire holes. There must be some way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it otherwise. And as far as I could tell, there was not. So it was a little bit of an adventure and a little bit frustrating,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I was pretty determined not to give up on it. And I was glad I could find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John work. I mean, the worst case scenario, I could have just run the new wire because I do know where the new wire would go. The five conductor wire,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is 24 volt AC, you know, common wire terminal inside the taco connector box
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to everything else. And it would have just been fine, but I was glad that I didn’t have to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you have something called a taco connector box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want a taco connection box in my house somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John now. You might
⏹️ ▶️ John have one. It’s kind of a teal, you know, box thing with a bunch of relays in
⏹️ ▶️ John it and a bunch of transformers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Ecobee, my suggestion to you is maybe say, look, do you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what a circuit diagram looks like? Here’s what you’re trying to accomplish. And maybe you have some other way to accomplish it. If so,
⏹️ ▶️ John feel free to do that. Because all this, like all the wires inside here have like names that are like
⏹️ ▶️ John W1, W2, G, Y, RH, RC. Some of them make some sense, like RH
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to be for heat and RC is for cooling, but the Ws, the G is not ground. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. There’s a Y and of course the C for the common. It’s like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know there’s probably lots of history behind what these things are called, but like for my simple scenario, I just need
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, show me the circuit, show me where the electricity flows and which thing is the switch and I’ll figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, these things were not designed by people for good interfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel bad for the, I bet people do this for a living, it’s all second nature. But if you have a complicated scenario, remembering which one is Y
⏹️ ▶️ John and which one is G and you know, and the RH and the RC and different zones and just all the different variety
⏹️ ▶️ John of equipment that you can have, because my taco box thing also has like, you know, zone priority
⏹️ ▶️ John and this that like, I have like this four zone thing that’s down in my house, like my house only has
⏹️ ▶️ John one zone. of all the different relays that are right, maybe this is the smallest taco box that you get or maybe they just charge me
⏹️ ▶️ John for a fancy one, who knows. It’s just two little wires, not entirely true. The room in now is zone
⏹️ ▶️ John two, zone two is my computer room. And it is its own zone with its own non-smart
⏹️ ▶️ John thermostat and is literally for this one single room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So getting back to the thermostat itself, do you like, so, I’ve had Ecobee’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my house now for about, I think about a year is when I tore it my nests in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rage and replace them all with these. Did you have any issues getting them onto
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, let’s see. So when I added it to HomeKit, it threw up the QR code
⏹️ ▶️ John and I just scanned it with my phone. And then in the home app, it threw up a thing in front of me
⏹️ ▶️ John and it said, please name these three things. I was like, all right. And it said
⏹️ ▶️ John thermostat, thermostat one, thermostat two. And I was like, what? I just installed one thermostat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it think I installed it, so I deleted the name off thermostat two and thermostat three and Just changed
⏹️ ▶️ John thermostat one to be called thermostat and I tried to proceed and it said nope Sorry, you got to pick a name for these three things and I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you’re talking about go away and I just canceled it, right? and then I But then I looked at the home
⏹️ ▶️ John app on my phone and saw that it thinks now I have a thermostat or something And so I deleted the device from
⏹️ ▶️ John home kit I think every time I go in to do any of the home kit involves deleting the device at least once so I deleted the device
⏹️ ▶️ John once. And then I added it a second time and it did the exact same thing. And what I figured out based
⏹️ ▶️ John on the icons and nothing else because the home app was terrible was that one device
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thermostat. One device is a motion sensor and one device is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a heat sensor or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. That’s probably for automation. So when you can automate, oh, when it detects motion and such and such, or when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detects a temperature of blah, blah, blah, then do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s right. Yeah, but it was confusing because the icons, I was like, I can imagine there being a thermostat and an IR
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor, but is like, one detects motion, but doesn’t it detect motion? Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that the IR sensor as well? I don’t understand. Anyway, once I figured out that it was three different sensors, I gave them
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat sensible names based on their icons, and then it added them to HomeKit. And after that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to work fine. It’s in HomeKit. I don’t do anything within a HomeKit. I use the Ecobee app if I ever need
⏹️ ▶️ John to mess with the schedule, but I could, to Casey’s point, do automations in the home app if I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John based on those new devices that are now there and I’m able to you know do things based on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See what I want is so I’ve had some issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had them recently because one thing I very quickly learned setting these things up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is once you want to control them with home kit never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have their actual app interact with them in any way because they will fight and and they will fight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in weird ways that have weird results. You know, not just like, all right, you said it’s a 68, you said it’s 65, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like that. They’ll change each other’s modes in weird ways. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it breaks in very strange ways. And so what I ended up having to do, because I want to control things primarily with HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I ended up having to do is turn off every bit of automation, every bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like scheduling, programming, automatic modes, turn off everything in the Thermostat app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then never open it again. And then control it exclusively via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Home app in HomeKit. And once I eventually got it to stop doing literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything in its own app, then it started working again properly and reliably in HomeKit. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were a couple of weird snags that I hit. And what’s great, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the aforementioned video camera situation. I’m still using the Logitech Circle View cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which are HomeKit Secure Video. And what’s great about HomeKit Secure Video cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they don’t have their own apps. Like the ones that are purely HomeKit Secure Video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they literally don’t have apps that can control them. They can be controlled only via the Home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. They’re made to natively interface with that directly, and that’s it. I wish somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would make that for thermostats because the Echo Bees, they work eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get them set up and once you turn off all the crap in the app and figure out how to make them stop fighting and figure out how to add them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomeKit. They do eventually work, and once it’s set up, it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I lost hours to this, and it could have been so much easier. If my goal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only to ever control this via HomeKit, someone should make a thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is just a HomeKit thermostat, and it’s designed for that, and there is no other app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. But, and I understand why these companies don’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general. I mean frankly I don’t understand why the thermostat market is so crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because our only options for good WiFi thermostats seem to be either the Nest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostats which I would say are previously good but no longer good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Nest still has by far the nicest looking physical designs and the nicest looking hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or the Ecobee which is fine design wise but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not good. It’s not like a really nice thermostat. It’s a fine wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostat. It’s ultra fine. It’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has nothing on the nest, design-wise. However,
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at the one, this is what I was looking at before I looked at the ecobee. I also looked at the brands you don’t think of. Not Honeywell,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the one I had before was like Luxpro or whatever. The ones that, these are brands that existed before
⏹️ ▶️ John a smart thermostat existed. And their thermostats don’t look smart. they look like a beige box with
⏹️ ▶️ John an LCD segment display, you know, like an old thermostat, you know, like not as old as the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John with the little metal coils inside them with the bimetallic strips and everything, not that old, but the ones with the mercury
⏹️ ▶️ John switches, not that old, but the ones right after that. Ooh, modern digital, they take like two AA batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have a little, you know, LCD segmented display and you program them like you program a VCR,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Those companies do make wifi enabled thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I looked at those because I’m like, look, I just want to be able to control it through an app. I should look at some of these as well. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they work with my weird wire setup because the whole reason you need the common wire as far as I’m able to tell is you need to power
⏹️ ▶️ John the little computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s inside your thermostat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because without that, there is no complete circuit to power the thermostat unless the heat or AC is
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and so, but with these other brands, they’re so low power that you just put two double As
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, right? And so I’m thinking, well, are any of those, are there smart thermostats that I wouldn’t need a common
⏹️ ▶️ John wire for because they’re just so like, you know, such a tiny, they don’t have a big
⏹️ ▶️ John display to power, they don’t have a complicated computer inside there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Not if they have wifi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I would say wifi probably kills you with the battery thing. But anyway, those companies do make smart thermostats, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they do not look smart, but some of them have wifi. But as far as I can tell, most of those don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John or care what HomeKit is. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John not a solution to your problem, but it is a thing to think about that if you just want a smarter
⏹️ ▶️ John thermostat, you can get one that’s not gonna fight with HomeKit because it doesn’t know what HomeKit is, right? But you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John still might be able to, you do need a common wire, but you still might be able to control with wifi. And the other thing that was making me think of is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I talked about this on the past show, the air quality sensor I got for my basement. Did I mention that at some point?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll talk about it in a future show. The one I got has an E-Ink display, which I think is actually a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good idea for a smart thermostat. Oh, is it the Eve? No, it’s like AirThings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay, I have an Eve one. Well, sorry, I have two Eve ones the first one broke really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early. That’s a whole separate story. Everything I’ve gotten from Eve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s just say, I think our friend Merlin has had better experiences with the products from this brand than I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have had mostly bad experiences with Eve products so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure they’re good for somebody, but yeah, they have not
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but E Ink, I think, is actually a pretty good solution for an attractive, smart thermostat,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t need fancy graphics or pictures of my kids on whatever. You know, even though the little weather display
⏹️ ▶️ John is just line art or whatever, and it looks really good. It’s a good solution to how do you put something, a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John display that’s in difficult lighting conditions. The E-Ink is reflective, you don’t need a backlight at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can front light it if you want it to be visible at night and it looks nice on the wall. If you know, and now you didn’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is surround that E-Ink display with a nice looking physical design, which granted is a challenge for some of
⏹️ ▶️ John these manufacturers. but I think there’s a lot of possibility for smarter,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what I’m thinking of is what is the next step up? You have the little metallic strip coil mercury
⏹️ ▶️ John switch, then you have the little LCD thing, and then we jump right from that to tiny wifi computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I feel like there’s something in between there, which is whatever the next step up
⏹️ ▶️ John is before you get to a full fledged computer, it still can have wifi, but could be its own little
⏹️ ▶️ John system. And then, you know, in your situation, if you have a house that does not just have one giant zone essentially, and you have
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have cooling and more complicated things to control. That’s where I’d be looking for like the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Lutron Caseta of, uh, thermostats, like a whole house solution where, you know, it’s all going to work together. Does
⏹️ ▶️ John that exist though? I don’t know, but that’s like, that’s, that’s kind of what you’re looking for. It’s like, I don’t need to be on the cutting
⏹️ ▶️ John edge with my thermostat. I just need it to, to work in my house and look nice on the wall. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Lutron is, you know, does that. It’s like works reliably, works fast. It’s a good company. It’s well supported. They
⏹️ ▶️ John can run anything in your house, and not overly concerned about supporting Google, Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple’s ecosystems to the nth degree or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think like what for me like what and yeah, disclosure sponsor, Lutheran, etc. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I love so much about the Caseta system is that it is its own like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local communication protocol in on in the physical side, like it has its own RF protocol so that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super reliable. It’s way more reliable than Wi Fi. It’s, you know, better than everything reliability wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has a little hub that integrates all of its stuff with HomeKit. And so I have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock solid, reliable control that doesn’t require HomeKit to communicate with themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to work, but I have full control of the system from HomeKit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like that’s kind of what, what limits my options here. But that being said, I don’t, I don’t want to go and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back into the Amazon ecosystem and control everything via their crappy voice cylinders. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really trust Google enough, even though, hell, the people like you saying how good their voice system is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely has tempted me a few times, like maybe I should try them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because the series is so bad. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like asking you trivia questions or what movie somebody was in or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey from their dinner
⏹️ ▶️ John table. That’s what it’s good for. I can’t vouch for it as a home control device, although I did just today, I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ John another Nest outdoor cam, another one of my longstanding products. So I’ll give you an update on that if I can
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to get that installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I actually just ordered two more of the Logitech Circle Views
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to finally decommission two very old Nest Cams I have, just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been running them forever. Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they actual outdoor cams, or are they indoor ones that you’re running outside?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Logitech Circle View is actually an outdoor cam, but the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brick for it, it has a permanently mounted USB cable that’s about maybe two meters long, and the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brick for it is not outdoor rated. But you can do things, like they sell little boxes, You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like little, basically little sealed, like shoe box kind of things that just have like big rubber gaskets. And you can like put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an electrical brick in there with, you know, plug it into an outdoor extension cable, seal the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and then run that extension cable somewhere else. You know, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could do something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Yeah, that’s kind of my plan for this thing. This is an indoor outdoor camera that Google makes. It doesn’t, didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John great reviews, but I’m kind of desperate at this point. And I’m going to sort of, they give you a quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John weatherproof cable, which is just like you said, it is supposedly weatherproof and the camera can get rained
⏹️ ▶️ John on and snowed on or whatever, but at the end of it is a plug that goes into an AC outlet and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not weatherproof. So luckily I have a situation where my camera is near my garage
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can go from the little eaves where the camera is or whatever into my garage where there
⏹️ ▶️ John is an outlet inside my garage that is sealed from the weather because it’s inside the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is my current plan. We’ll see how that works out.
WWDC announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, speaking of breaking news and this time not about my studio display WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been announced it is as always the first week of June and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s not too much to talk about. I don’t think except one little blurb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was said on the announcement It’s so the announcement is joined developers worldwide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from June 6 through 10 for an inspiring week of technology and community Get a first look at Apple’s latest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms, technologies, and sessions. Explore the newest tools and tips and connect with Apple experts and labs and digital lounges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all online and at no cost. Here’s where it gets interesting. In addition to the online conference,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple will host a special day for developers and students at Apple park on June 6th to watch the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the state of the union videos together along with the online community spaces limited in details on how to apply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to attend will be provided soon. So first of all, Marco, you dodged a bullet in that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn 40 after WWDC is over, so you’re welcome. But secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole thing about people actually being on campus, that was unexpected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my eyes, and I think that’s interesting. I don’t plan to apply. I don’t plan to fly to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey California just to watch a couple of videos I can watch at home, but it’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think this makes a lot more sense for people who live locally, or at least almost locally and can
⏹️ ▶️ John are enthused about being in a tight space with a bunch of people. I mean, it’s just, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, I know Apple’s making all their employees go back to the office for certain days a week and it’s a controversial
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever, but sort of an optional gathering of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people in close quarters. I feel like there needs to be something offsetting that. It’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a risk. What’s the reward? And if the reward is you get to watch the same video, it’s a case
⏹️ ▶️ John point that you could be watching your house, but other randomly selected people are also
⏹️ ▶️ John there with you, I don’t find that as much of a reward to account for the risk, especially if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John traveling, but even if you’re not, like, so it’s not like you’re going to, you and all your friends are going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John there. It’s going to be some kind of lottery or something, probably, or, you know, space is limited and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think you and all your friends are going to get in. And if you want to watch with your friends, you just watch it in your house with your friends. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to be in a room full of strangers all breathing on each other so I can watch a video on a screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So not appealing to me. And it’s weird because like, I mean, we still assume at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple hasn’t really said otherwise, but like, obviously the W2C went online because of COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there was a debate of like, even when COVID is quote unquote over, will they go back to in-person? We don’t know because
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like COVID is still a thing now, despite, again, despite Apple calling all its employees back because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John new variants and you know, despite the CDC changing its scales or whatever, there’s still a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people getting it. there’s just fewer people getting super sick because a lot of people are vaccinated. It’s not, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John still a thing, let’s say. So if you’re gonna hold a conference online, I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John at least partly because COVID is still a thing that people are concerned about,
⏹️ ▶️ John why then subvert that by saying, but also let’s have at least one place where we can sort of have a super
⏹️ ▶️ John spreader event. Like we gotta get some people in here to be next to each other. And it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe if you gave them a live show and you broadcast the keynote live and the people who were there saw the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John in person, live on stage people, and then all of us streamed it live, maybe that would be a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John to show up because it’s, you know, watching a live show, it’s spontaneous, interesting things can happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a more exciting event than sitting in a room and watching a video. But they’re not doing it live. They’re gonna prerecord everything just like
⏹️ ▶️ John they have in the past. And then you’re just gonna get to watch the video in a room with a bunch of other people all breathing
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re basically like, the whole thing with W2C is no one caught COVID last year’s WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John like no people who attended it anyway, because it was all online. We were all sitting in our own houses, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re not gonna be able to say that this year. People are gonna come to this thing and I don’t know what their requirements are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be for vaccines and masking or whatever, but people are gonna catch it. They’re gonna catch it when they’re traveling. They’re gonna catch it when they’re in the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, because we’re probably all vaccinated, you know, hopefully a lot of people aren’t gonna die because of it, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John contributing to the spread for a sort of optional event that doesn’t seem particularly rewarding
⏹️ ▶️ John to offset that risk. So I don’t quite understand why they’re doing this. Cause you know, because everything
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with Apple is going to be story. You know, if five people get COVID and have the sniffles,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be a story. It’s like, oh, Apple held this thing in person and these lottery winners, what did they win in their lottery? They won COVID,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s going to happen just because anything Apple does is a story. And I’m not, I’m not faulting Apple for us. I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly reasonable thing to do. And if you choose to go, like maybe you’ve never been to WDC and you just want to do a fun thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, no big deal. It doesn’t appeal to me, but it seems weird that Apple would give this
⏹️ ▶️ John option knowing that there is a big PR downside for it. And I don’t see any upside for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because again, they don’t get to perform live. It’s not too influential press. It’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does Apple get out of doing this? Just all potential downside for a story for people getting COVID and
⏹️ ▶️ John no real upside other than giving, you know, maybe, I mean, I don’t know, maybe the people who attend
⏹️ ▶️ John feel better about Apple than the people who don’t attend because, you know, it’s an exciting experience or something, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it a little bit baffling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems, you’re right, the risk reward or cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reward even, even if you’re not as concerned about COVID, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of going there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I would like to see Apple Park. I think that would be fun. And so that would be the value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me in like, I would love to see this really cool office park that they’ve built.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just go there. They don’t have snipers. Wow! No, you can’t. The visitor center is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a ways. Have you ever known people, maybe even in your family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends, who like they really don’t like people and even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they like you, they kind of want to keep you at a distance and they kind of like don’t want you like touching their stuff or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Apple! Like they Apple really does not like people coming into their space and looking at their stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know touching their bed and stuff. They don’t want that. And so, the Apple Park Visitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Center is hilarious because it is, first of all, beautiful. It is an amazing, like, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made this amazing building. It’s basically a really nice Apple store with some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonuses. However, if you go to Apple Park, the only thing you’re allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go to is the Visitor Center. And the Visitor Center can basically not it can like barely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the rest of the building. And the Visitor Center itself is not in the building.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you’re going to see the building, you don’t get to actually see it, really. Like you get to see like, you can like peer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a window and kind of see it off in the distance and that’s it. Like you see it between some bushes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so actually being able to get into the Apple Park,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would actually be an interesting thing to see. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not gonna have this Apple Park though. It’s gonna be in the Steve Jobs Theater, which is also a little bit distant from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I assumed they were gonna have it in that big outdoor thing in the middle with the big rainbow stage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, maybe you’re right. I mean, there’s not a lot of details about it. I just imagined it would be in the theater, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right. Well, being in that park would be better because people could spread out and they could use the big rainbow stage, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never, I don’t think I’ve ever, has there ever been a thing where they’ve taken random general
⏹️ ▶️ John public people in large numbers and ferried them into the center of the ring? I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not the ring. I mean, so they used to, in very olden days, before we went to WBC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beer bash, I believe, used to be held on Apple’s campus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that was Infinite Loop. Despite my joke about there not being snipers, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Park is way more nailed down than Infinite Loop was. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Infinite Loop is just
⏹️ ▶️ John an office park. You just walk in there in this parking lot. So it’s not like you could wander into the buildings, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John could walk along the sidewalks and see all the buildings and do all this stuff. Whereas Apple Park, despite the fact that there
⏹️ ▶️ John probably aren’t snipers, it really has a go-away vibe, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, they do not want you to be near the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John ring building if you are not an Apple employee. Cause it’s not made like an office park where it’s like, oh, just drive right in. There’s a parking
⏹️ ▶️ John lot park and then you can walk up to a door and then as soon as you get to a door to a building, of course you can’t really get much farther because there’s someone stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John you in security. But Apple Park is very much like it’s, I don’t think there are even
⏹️ ▶️ John fences so much as there is landscaping that is telling you like there is no path
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to go here. you drive your car and you you have to you either an Apple employee and you’re going to one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple employee parking garages which is still distant from the buildings or you’re going to the visitor center and then
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re walking along the paths to the building like I know I don’t actually know I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bunch of high school kids who live near there because there are houses near there have probably like explored Apple Park
⏹️ ▶️ John at night or whatever and found out the extent of the security guards and cameras that are probably all over the place but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah it’s not it’s not inviting it and that’s what I said about going into the center of the ring, the beer bash,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t care if anyone went into the loop, you can just drive your car right in there and if you can find a parking spot, congratulations,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in an infinite loop, right? But that’s not Apple Park at all, so I don’t even know, where would people park?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to the place where they’re supposed to go? They
⏹️ ▶️ John do have a lot of parking, I know they have a lot of parking, but it’s not, it would seem weird to me, so I just assumed it would be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs thing. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. If it’s just gonna be getting together to basically have a viewing party for a pre-recorded keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feels like less of a community event than would be worth
⏹️ ▶️ John They’d probably be pastries. That’s fair. There’s gonna be like some bad California bagels,
⏹️ ▶️ John some coffee that I can’t comment on the quality of, and then some kind of pastries. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John they said it’s for the keynote and State of the Union, so there’s gonna be a break between there, right? Probably, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a long thing. So it’s gonna be come in, maybe someone won’t be there in person today or whatever. People
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room are asking, someone was surprised to say it’s not gonna be press. It seems like it says space
⏹️ ▶️ John is limited and details how to apply will be provided soon. Maybe Apple will, you know, let in any press that wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to go, but honestly, why would press show up if they’re not going to be able to get information that they
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t get from being at home? Will the press be meeting with people? Will they, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John would press come and sit there and watch the video if there wasn’t also
⏹️ ▶️ John interviews with Apple people afterwards? And so far, we don’t know what the deal is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Generally, like with most, most press events they hold, there is some kind of component of like briefings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or hands-on areas or something. And so it does make sense usually, like if you’re called out there for press, then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, do that. But I mean, they haven’t held an in-person press event since COVID either. It remains to be seen whether this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will become that or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And would they really want to do that? Because now it’s like, not only are you gathering a bunch of people together, but you’re gathering all of your press together
⏹️ ▶️ John into a potential, you know, let’s get as much of the Apple press to get COVID all at the same time when our products are being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I think this is what this mostly is, is what we thought it would be, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is remote. And I think that, again, because of everything we said last week, I think that’s great, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the remote conference really is better in more ways for more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. And that’s ultimately what they have to focus on now. At the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale they’re at now, even if COVID wasn’t a thing right now, the scale Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at now, they serve so many more people so much better with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of remote conferences they’ve been doing for the last couple of years. And so to go back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a traditional in-person setup now, I think really would be a regression in a number of pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big areas. So to see them doing this again, viewing party aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we don’t really know what that’s gonna be, but to see them doing the remote conference again, I think is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing, and I’m looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the hybrid approach does make a lot of sense, because like the risk reward starts to make way more sense
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get into like, you know, a concert type thing, right? You mean going
⏹️ ▶️ John to a music concert or a live performance of something, or even arguably going to the movie theater.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you’re there to be entertained in a way that you can’t be entertained at home either because you don’t have a movie theater in your house
⏹️ ▶️ John or because you’re not gonna have a live band playing for you then you’re like, okay, risk reward, right? You know, then you can
⏹️ ▶️ John balance and say there is a reward for doing this. And so it’s worth it for me to take the risk cause I’m all vaccinated
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything and everyone will be wearing a mask and we’ll be outdoors and we’ll be spaced apart and I’ll get to see my favorite band.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s worth it, right? But to go in a room and watch a video with a bunch of random strangers, the
⏹️ ▶️ John risk reward is terrible. So the hybrid one is you do the keynote live. Bunch of people on stage,
⏹️ ▶️ John wherever it’s gonna be, you could do it outdoors if you want people to have more room to spread out, but you do it live and you broadcast it
⏹️ ▶️ John live. They broadcast the keynote live all the time, right? It’s free for everyone. The whole rest of the conference is the same, pre-recorded sessions,
⏹️ ▶️ John free for everybody, blah, blah, blah. But you do the keynote and maybe even the State of the Union live. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then afterwards you have press briefings. And the people who get to attend are all the press
⏹️ ▶️ John that you invite, plus a lottery for other people who want to essentially attend the Apple concert,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That I feel like has the best of both worlds from Apple’s perspective. No, it doesn’t have the best of both worlds
⏹️ ▶️ John for the attendees perspective, because you don’t get the whole week of networking with people in in-person labs or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But from Apple’s perspective, putting on the show in person, gathering the press and then briefing
⏹️ ▶️ John them, that’s a big benefit for Apple. And they’re not, it seems like they’re not going to get this in this one because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just going to be, here’s a video or here’s some pastries. It seems like, but anyway, um, but none of
⏹️ ▶️ John us are going just needless to say. Um, I don’t think any of us are even going to apply to go. I certainly wouldn’t go. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I hope somebody goes and reports back to tell us what it is and what the pastries were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. That’s the important news. What are the pastries? They might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box lunch. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John $150 box lunch in between the keynote of the state of the union to get the real WWDC experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. Oh my goodness. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Remote, and Mack Weldon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join and get that sweet merch discount attp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, check podcast
After-show
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the Taco Comfort Solutions SR504 Switching
⏹️ ▶️ John Relay. PDF is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Taco Comfort Solutions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take a look. I put a link up for you for Casey if you’d put it in the show. I saw it. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Four zones with zone four priority. 24 volt AC power.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just sitting right there, ready to be tapped by those wires.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m glad to hear that your home got smarter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Indeed. Indeed. Yeah, so it goes, I did save my old thermostat because of course I did. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco old thermostat is pretty amazing. It’s put in
⏹️ ▶️ John the attic. The reason I was replacing it is because the buttons were literally not working anymore. So when I tried to like adjust the
⏹️ ▶️ John program for the winter, like it’s got like, you know, set and up, down, and next buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like the up button and the next button like wouldn’t work. Like you’d have to press them really hard and wiggle
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger. And it was like, if those buttons don’t work, it’s kind of a problem because I do need to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, set things up or change things or whatever. So I’m like, it’s time to get a new one. But the amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about this old, you know, pre-computer technology thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was worried like that when I take the batteries out that it’s going to lose my program of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this time turn the heat on to this temperature, you know, the schedule basically. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John no backup battery either. It’s not like it was a watch battery in there that I was afraid of, because I took the batteries out because I didn’t want it to explode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then I was like, where’s the little watch battery? I should, maybe I should be worried about this or whatever. and I read the manual for the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, don’t worry, the only thing you lose when the batteries take out is after one to two minutes, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John when capacitor is like discharged, you will lose the date and time. But your program will be saved forever in some
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of non-volatile memory
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s inside this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m saving it, yeah, if this ecobee thing, you know, craps out or dies or something like that, I can just rip it right off