479: Never Mind, I'm Out
18 Apr 2022We held out as long as we could, but eventually, we had to talk about him.
Episode Description:
The ATP Store is live until 30 April at 8PM New York time. Order now, or Casey will haunt your dreams! 👻
- Pre-show: Marco has HomePod problems
Pop Hits: {year}(1955–2021)Rock Hits: {year}(1965–2021)- Hard to Handle by Otis Redding
- Hard to Handle by The Black Crowes
- Creep by Radiohead
- AirPlay 2-Enabled Speakers
- Follow-up:
- Hilariously, a third consecutive week of news about Original Gravity, this time via Jared Kole
- Which ethernet controller does the CalDigit TS4 use?
- Intel I225 PCIe
- Ethernet fix
- Sleep fix
- Ecobee & HomeKit cooperation (via Eric Powell)
- Ecobee AC adaptor instructions
Step 3→Scenario A→Alternative solution: 24VAC plug-in transformer
- Some thoughts about 🇪🇺 thermostats via Cameron Wood
- USB-C KVM dev boards do exist, as found by Victor Leung
- Mac Studios have different power supply… suppliers (via Joshua Prismon)
- Ioniq 5 & Kia EV6 & Lucid Air
- RIP, Rob-ART Morgan
- What is Elon Musk, anyway?
- Elon Musk and Twitter
- NOTE: We recorded this episode right before his
demand“offer” to buy the entire company. - Elon buys 9.2% of Twitter
- Elon delays filing with the SEC and “made” $156 million
- Parag Agrawal announces Elon joins the board
- Twitter says Elon won’t get special treatment
- Parag Agrawal announces Elon won’t join the board
- Elon is sued for delayed disclosure
- Paul Singer, Doomsday Investor
- NOTE: We recorded this episode right before his
#askatp- As the M1 is based on the A14, might the M2 skip the A15 and instead be based on the A16? (via Darin Kelkhoff)
- How does Marco stream for Team Arment? (via Uncle Apple)
- Could/would Apple use OLED in laptops and iMacs? (via Simon Ejsing)
- If the Studio Display was released concurrently with the Pro Display XDR, would John & Marco still get the XDR? (via Jon Yergatian)
- Post-show: John’s Sonos Roam
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Chapters
- HomePod alternatives
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Sausage follow-up 🖼️
- Ethernet controllers
- Sponsor: Linode
- Thermostat updates
- Sponsor: Sanity
- USB 4 switch follow-up
- Mac Studio PSU variations
- Neutral: New electric cars
- RIP, Rob-ART Morgan
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Left-crown Apple Watch usage
- Feeding the troll
- 🙄
- #askatp: M2 to be A15 or A16?
- #askatp: Game-streaming setup 🖼️
- #askatp: Mini-LED to OLED?
- #askatp: Studio Display or XDR?
- Ending theme
- Sonos Roam
HomePod alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much do I have to derail this show so we don’t get to talking about Elon Musk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge accepted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could probably do it by yourself you and me together our powers combined could absolutely do it
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re gonna say really mean things about him probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s the last thing I want to do though because then everyone gets angry at us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather just say nothing about him I just don’t like him so much. Here we go, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco derail. Wait, we’re talking about it, let’s derail immediately. I had to restore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of my home pods today. Oh gosh, how does that even happen? So remember how I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few weeks ago, you know, they’ve been working really well. They seem to have stopped breaking and they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working really well. Well, that came to a screeching halt over the last week or so, where they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working very poorly. You know, it’s a stereo pair and sometimes one would just drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out until I would like unplug it and plug it back in. Which one it was would change over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes it was doing that thing where it was crashing in the middle of a response and restarting itself. Like it would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the response and it would say, let me try that again. And then like say the same thing. What? Yes. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing? Yes it is. And it’s doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John more. It sounds like Apple made their own automatic kicking machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John They did. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey totally did. That’s a throwback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a thing. And then eventually, and of course, you know. And so we actually, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, for the music project, thank God we hit the end. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s a clear, so remember, you know, I was saying how 2000 to 2006 was a pretty rough time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the music got much angrier and dirtier and much more explicit and it was pretty rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, then it seemed to get better from about 2007 or so, 2008 maybe, and I don’t know if you recall, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was president between 2000 and 2008?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, so that was a really angry period. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had a change, and from 2008 until about 2016,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was much happier and much, much less angry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and explicit. And then, I swear, 2017 to 2020
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took another massive dark turn. Like I swear, listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to go to Apple Music and say pop hits X for whatever year you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s clear as day. It’s a very clear difference. Like you can tell like what what was the culture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling? Was the culture angry? Was the culture frustrated? You know, was the culture partying? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can feel all those things in the music. It’s trust me, it’s worth seeing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so we’ve gone back now and we decided to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and do the rock chart instead of the pop chart. The rock chart didn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist until, at least in Apple Music, until 1965.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they have pop charts going back to 1955. So we actually started in 1955 pop and we’re going to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until we get to 1965 and we’re going to switch over to rock. And we’re hearing so much stuff, so many songs that I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god, the version of this that I knew was actually a cover of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, what was, uh, what was the spin doctor? No, was it not spin doctors? It was some song that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, now I’m gonna have to look it up. There was some song that I had no idea was a cover and I just recently discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and it blew my freaking mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and the funniest part is the, uh, the original was also incredible. Crud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was that? All right. I’m going to just interrupt you in a second when I figure it out, but I have it on a playlist, the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and soft to find in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there were so many songs too where like they’re not officially credited, I think, as covers, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly like drew like they clearly like just lifted the whole melody of a certain song. Usually it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a jazz artist in the 50s who then like some, you know, white guy in the 60s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifted it or in the 80s or in the 90s. Like I heard we heard this one song yesterday and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just I Want Candy. Like I Want Candy just completely ripped off but it was and it was some jazz song I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never heard of like this is it’s it was so incredibly similar. I heard a song that I’m pretty sure surf
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I think Margo you need to spend some time on YouTube But there’s a whole sub-genre on YouTube of is
⏹️ ▶️ John song X or above of song Y Y or why not?
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll find that highly educational
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up real-time follow-up It is hard to handle by Otis Redding as covered not by the spin doctors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but instead by the Black Crows my mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, that’s a pretty different band. But okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you will absolutely recognize at least the Black Crows version when you hear that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you were to hear the Otis Redding version, it is not that particularly different, but it is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunningly great. I will say I have possibly the best playlist in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of music history, which is all like funk and soul music from about the 60s. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is something like 50 or 60 songs that are just perfection from top to bottom. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to share that with with everyone and this is on it. That’s how I could find it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly. And there’s a lot of, like, you know, last time we did this we started in 1960 and we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at first until all the ATP listeners wrote in to say pop hits X. And when I was just doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play the top songs from year X and it would play at the top, it would say play in the top 25 and then it would play the top seven and then wander
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. So we’re hearing a lot more now than we did before and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many good songs in the, I mean, you know, it still sounds like the 50s, but there’s a lot of good music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from back then. Like we just hit Tequila, the song from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I didn’t realize that was from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 50s. I would have guessed 60s, but like, oh man, there’s so much good stuff in here, and it’s so refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to just hit play and not have to worry like every song transition, wait, do we have to skip this because Adam’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, or because we don’t want to hear all this dirtiness?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, didn’t you, like everyone gave you the solution to that, it was like the turn off explicit content on the HomePod, did you just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I didn’t, I forgot about that. I was too busy trying to get the HomePods to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should just do it, it’ll save you, it’ll save you some trouble later, because I’m pretty sure the Rockets are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco F-words in there too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but not for a while. Like, you know, we have a few decades to go before those are really in there, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least in any significant quantity. There’s certainly innuendo, but I mean, heck, there’s innuendo in the 50s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs. It’s just different
⏹️ ▶️ John innuendo. You’re gonna get the radio edit of Creep, which I think is better than the one with Cursing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree, actually. When I first heard the version of Creep that had the F-word in it, I was like, oh, that’s actually less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a good song. Like, it didn’t fit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know? I freaking love Radiohead and Creep has never done much for me, which probably makes me completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without taste. But hi, welcome to the last eight years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No comment. So anyway, so my HomePods were like exploding and I was trying to figure out, all right, what do I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here? Like I see a few people had commented over the times that I was complaining about this, that doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a full restore fixed them for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don’t you just restore your HomePods?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Well, I mean, look, it works for the Apple Watch. I’m like, all right, so let me give this a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did the full restore of both, you know, you plug it in while holding it down, it spins red and then it tells you it’s going to reset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a pretty easy process. I actually got them both done and repaired in a matter of maybe 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes or less even, it was quick. It’s been working better. But I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started looking, I’m like, you know, what if these do die? And if it seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both a physical flaw that all HomePods have, the whole thing about like, you know, slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frying one of their components with some weird power. So there’s a physical flaw they seem to all have over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the big HomePod actually runs different software than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod mini. So my theory is, well, they’re probably gonna slowly let more and more bugs creep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the big one that just kind of never get fixed. Whereas the little one seems to work better. We have both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the house. We have little ones in little rooms and they work much better, much more reliably and faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if my HomePods die, I might be able to briefly get along with finding new ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on eBay, but eventually I’m not gonna be able to do that anymore. And so let me take a look at what other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 2 compatible speakers exist. Now, helpfully, Apple maintains such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list on their website. So I went through and opened up every single page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that list. This was disheartening. I would say at least half, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even two thirds of them were 404s. Cool. Just all these old products that have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they were valid page responses, but it was for discontinued products. Many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco others were like sound bars, which I’m not looking for, you know, it’s like, cause this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t going under a TV, this is, you know, trying to be a speaker on my kitchen counter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, and many others were possibly useful for that purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but ugly or very limited, or they had like, you know, a single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two inch driver in them. And it’s like, well, that’s going to sound like crap. I like, I could just have the HomePod mini if I want that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sound profile. Like if I want a single, small driver doing all the work, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just get a HomePod Mini and put it up there. That’s, you know. But looking through this list, I was trying to figure out, like, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there anything that could directly replace them? And the answer is pretty much no. The biggest hurdles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve found are, first of all, just like the speaker configuration. Like most of them have, as I said, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe one small driver somewhere in there. At best, maybe a passive radiator as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco woofer, similar again to the HomePod Mini. but these are in like multi-hundred dollar products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or there are these massive, like really high-end things that are really huge that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be ridiculous to put on a kitchen counter or wouldn’t fit at all and are very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other issue is the voice assistant situation. We’ve had the Alexa products in our house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. We know what we get with that. A decent voice assistant that’s fast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable, but that is just relentlessly trying to get us to give it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. hey, did you know you could also ask me to do all your shopping for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it never used to be like that, but it’s gotten bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you know you can make voice calls? Just give me access to all of your information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and contacts and let me beep at you and blink my light at you in different colors that you have to then learn how to disable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s getting really bad. And so I don’t really want the Amazon assistant in my house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can help it. Also, I have had poor luck with things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Sonos products to have the Amazon Assistant built in, where products that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon Assistant built in, but are not Amazon products, tend to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lesser version of it. They tend to be very limited, or have weird little bugs or shortcomings that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon’s own first-party products don’t have. But Amazon’s first-party products sound like crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also had a lot of reliability issues with my last set of Echoes, and so I don’t really wanna go that route.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard that Google has a good Assistant. I’ve heard that from John, I’ve heard that from lots of other people. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have thought like, maybe I should try a speaker with the Google assistant built in, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of feel dirty about that. I don’t like Google. They’re a really creepy and morally bankrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. I think they get away with a lot simply because Facebook is worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Google is certainly no shining star of morality and trust.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s an option, but I don’t love that option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then Siri, well, we know what Siri is. Siri is a really, really well-meaning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy-conscious, frequently failing and very frustrating assistant that works about two-thirds of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time and poorly at that. And Siri is only available in HomePods. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are no, as far as I know, there’s no other speakers in the market that have Siri built in. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want AirPlay 2 and Siri, HomePods or HomePod Minis are my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only options. If I want AirPlay 2 and I’m willing to take Google Assistant, I have a few more options.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s gotta be something with Siri because my thermostat, I believe, is an AirPlay speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John and has Siri built in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They, yeah, remember when they did that demo, or the keynote where they had the big virtual house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were CGI flying through it, they talked about how they were adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of program put Siri into things like thermostats, but I think it’s only in thermostats. I don’t think it’s gotten any further than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that yet. You know, Apple does a lot of these programs where they’ll announce some kind of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration and partnership program, and then, you know, there’s only ever one thing for it or no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things ever released for it. So, you know, I don’t know, until something comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. But anyway, so it really showed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me like doing this exercise, like what I landed on was things I would be most interested in trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be a couple of decent you know multi driver speakers that had AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support and Google Assistant built in and there’s only a pretty small handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those and they’re really expensive over a thousand dollars expensive it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showed me like wow the HomePod was actually not that bad of a deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what it was like if you try to find that kind of speaker arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that kind of that kind of speaker capability. Multiple mid-range slash tweeter drivers, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big subwoofer, you know, that’s that’s big for its size, some kind of DSP to adjust things. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s actually pretty uncommon and it’s especially uncommon for under $500. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appreciate the HomePod even more now that I tried to shop for its replacement and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more hoping that Apple is the one to replace it sometime in the in in the not too distant future because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing else really will replace it unless I’m willing to compromise heavily on some other
⏹️ ▶️ John Good luck. Couldn’t you just separate the voice assistant from the speaker part? Like get some other small, turdy
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to be the voice assistant but have that little voice assistant use the speakers that you buy as their
⏹️ ▶️ John sound output source?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can, and I thought about that. Downsides of that would be like, you know, on a kitchen counter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want a whole bunch of boxes and wires. I want something that’s integrated for there. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m gonna make a whole separate system, well then I’ll make a real speaker system, like, you know, over by the TV or in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office, I have a pair of passive speakers driven by an amp that I’m fine with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that kind of context. But on the kitchen counter, you want something integrated. And again, even, you know, looking at the HomePod and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it offers, other products that offer similar, like multi-speaker driver arrangements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not only more expensive than the HomePod, but much bigger than it. So like, they really, Apple did a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good job designing this product that nobody except me wanted because they made it too expensive for what the market wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they made a really nice high-end product and I really hope they do it again sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the HomePod Mini is great in my bathroom and not many other places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I really want, I want that big HomePod back. So I’m just hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine lasts as long as they can. Then who knows what I’ll do after that. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking around at the options was not promising.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, it’s that time of year once again. It is time for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP merch. We talked about it last week. We’re talking about it this week. And I believe we have one more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode where I will remind you. Is that right, John? One more episode where you will get your reminder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pull the car over, to step aside, to do what you need to do to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember that it is time to go to ATP.FM.Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alexa, remind me in one hour, buy ATP merch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, mean person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, Google, remind me in one hour, buy ATP merch. Hey, Siri, remind me in one hour, buy ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Mark. How did that
⏹️ ▶️ John not activate any of our stuff? I don’t know. You leave that on? I mean, I don’t know. One of us has to have something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last time your watch interrupted the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m wearing a regular watch tonight. Just that wouldn’t happen. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, anyways, so we have several options available to you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember that if you cannot buy anything right now, that’s fine. Pull the car over, step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the side of the sidewalk, tell your children, hold on just one moment. Well, maybe you shouldn’t do that, but just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do what you need to do. Remember that Casey said, remember this moment. Think about where you’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you can order some ATP merch. Envision that in your mind’s eye and think about ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that merch when you get there. Do what you got to do. So what do we got? We’ve got the M1 Ultra shirt and the M1 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interposer shirt. I won’t belabor this too much, but the M1 Ultra shirt is exactly what you would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M1 Ultra Intraposer shirt is where it says Max adjacent to an upside down Max, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very, very, very good in-joke. Marco, how good of an in-joke is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s actually selling quite well. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5X what the Ultra shirt is selling as.
⏹️ ▶️ John Five to 6X what the regular one is. And I think that’s odd because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, not that I’m saying people should buy two shirts, but like the joke works better
⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of knowing that the regular shirt exists. And if you just buy the joke one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m probably gonna get both of them. So who am I to talk? Nevermind, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, we’ve got both of those shirts. They are black fabric with yellow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra or Max Max symbols on them. And of course the multicolor M1. Then if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer more color in your life, we have the M1 Ultra shirt as you would expect, but only ultra, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max Max. And that is available in a rainbow of colors. And then we have the traditional ATP logo shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have brought back the ATP hoodie, as well as the pint glass and ATP mug with a slight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change that the ATP mug is gray on the inside, not red because hashtag supply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chain, all of this stuff is available until the evening of Saturday, April 30.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So please, if you, if you don’t mind, go to ATP.fm slash store, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, John, If people really just want to support us, and they don’t necessarily need yet another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast t-shirt, even though the Introposer shirt is so freaking good, what could they do, John, to support the show?
⏹️ ▶️ John You forgot to mention that if anyone is already an ATP member or wants to become an ATP member, you get 15% off.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go to your member page on ATP.fm, you’ll get there. You’ll find a promo code. You can put that
⏹️ ▶️ John into the little promo code field during checkout, and it will reduce the price for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John So definitely all ATP members should remember to do that. And if you just want to get 15% off, just sign up for membership
⏹️ ▶️ John for one month, use the code, and then cancel
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your membership. And a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have been doing that. I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John the merch sale bump, the member numbers are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John go up, and then when the merch sale’s over, the membership will go back down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So what can you do? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up to get the merch discount, and then, oh, look over there, is that sparkly something? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anyway. Is that Elon
⏹️ ▶️ John Musk? What Casey was alluding to is that these are expensive things, the shirts are expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re limited run, that we
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive because we do 17 printing passes on them. And of course, the cost of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up because of supply chain stuff, yada, yada. It might seem like you’re really supporting the show a super duper amount
⏹️ ▶️ John by buying the super expensive T-shirt, and you are, and we appreciate it, but only do that if you actually want a shirt. If you don’t want a shirt, just
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for ATP membership. You will get stuff for that as well, and it will cost you far less money, and we will get more of it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, this is all great stuff. And I am just sitting here so smug. It’s funny, I’m stealing your valor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, Marco, because it was your idea to do the Max Max shirt, but because you were kind of pumping the brakes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John little bit. Because you
⏹️ ▶️ John were poo-pooing your own idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Yeah, exactly. Since you were pumping the brakes, this is very like opposite day, because I feel like I would be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one to pump the brakes on my own idea, and you would be the one to just run with it. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m running with your idea, and I’m telling you that I’m claiming it as mine. And so yes, the HCP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 Ultra Interposer shirt is the clear winner so far, and let’s keep it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we actually made it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John One more thing on the merch this time. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posted a Photoshop joke, and then you guys made it into a shirt. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John works. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John The mugs and pint glasses, like I said last week, those are the ones where we have to guess how many people
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to buy them and order a bunch ahead of time. And we were afraid that we’re going to end up with a bunch of leftover ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the pins, where we just sold them for years and years and couldn’t get rid of the last of the pins. So we actually
⏹️ ▶️ John reduced our order because we were afraid we weren’t going to sell through the things that we have. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as we like the gray interior ones, we didn’t want to be stuck with five years worth of gray interiors when the people who want the red interior
⏹️ ▶️ John you going to bring the red one back? And we’re like, sorry, we got to sell through another three years worth of gray ones. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we reduced those orders. What that means potentially is that we could sell out of the mugs
⏹️ ▶️ John or pint glasses. I don’t think we will. I think we’ve got plenty. I think we’re going to have leftover, but just FYI, if you really want a
⏹️ ▶️ John mug, you broke yours last time, or you just want a different mug, or you want one that’s, you know, less
⏹️ ▶️ John loud than the red interior one, maybe consider buying your mug or pint glass sooner rather than
⏹️ ▶️ John later because it is plausible that we could sell out of one or both of them. Again, I don’t think we will,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just wanted to give people a heads up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say it makes a very nice desk mug for like holding pens and scissors and stuff. That’s how I use mine. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what my wife uses it for. I’m kind of insulted by it. It’s like, we got this nice mug, why don’t you use it as a mug? She’s like, no, I like it to hold my pens.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a pen holder, it’s a mug, but yes, it does look good on your desk. So if you want to use it to hold pens, apparently that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very common usage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, atp.fm slash store or atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey join. And despite what John says, you can feel free to just let that membership cruise. It’s not gonna hurt you. There’ll be more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey merch sales in the future. You can do it. I have faith in you.
Sausage follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We have, is this the third consecutive week of Original Gravity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey News? Never in a million
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they a sponsor? What’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously, never in a million years did I think we would somehow milk this for three weeks, but here we are. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Jared Cole, Original Gravity-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A.K.A. the Beer and Sausage Place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. The Original Gravity people have put up an Instagram post saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, guess what? Guess who’s back again? No, it’s not Eminem. Good guess, though. You know him, love him,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Bavarian sausage. Starting today, and this was what, uh, the 16th of March, the People’s Wiener
⏹️ ▶️ Casey returns. So come reunite with your old friend at Original Gravity. It is only but one of the many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sausages they used to offer, but it is at least one option back at Original Gravity. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, it’s a start, but hey, maybe by the time we get there, they’ll have a full sausage menu again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I feel like I do want to have a word with whoever their person is doing copy for for their social media stuff, because they used
⏹️ ▶️ John W-H-O-S-E, who’s, instead of W-H-O-apostrophe-S for who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re ignoring that. They probably had some beer first, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. No apostrophe in the people’s wiener. It’s just, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come on. Well, I’m just glad that we have sausage follow-up again, which is kind of amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a little picture of a little sausage and some fries, so there you have it. I was gonna say that we did it
⏹️ ▶️ John because we recorded that episode, but again, this was on March 16th, so. We did it retroactively, kind
Ethernet controllers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Ethernet controllers, we were talking last week about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it, Realtek has a really crummy implementation, or perhaps just crummy drivers for their Ethernet controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we were trying to figure out, what is the deal with my beloved CalDigit TS4?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently, somebody reached out to CalDigit or found the answer from CalDigit. Oh, you reached out. OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said you had asked them last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually behaved like the journalist that I pretend to be sometimes and said, hey, we’re, you know, we want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about this on ATP. can you confirm like which Ethernet chip you use, whether it’s this, you know, the RTL, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, whatever, three, that’s the bad one or the six. Yeah, and today they responded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and said, the TS4 using the Intel i225 PCIe to 2.5 gigabit Ethernet controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is neither of the Realtek chips, it’s an Intel chip. And I haven’t followed the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development of, you know, different like NIC chips for a very long time. However, back when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cared about such things, Intel always made the best ones. So I don’t know what the exact deal is with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS and the driver support of this thing and whether it will work at full speed and everything. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing that they’re using an Intel chip, to me that’s very good news because they used to, again, they used to make the best NICs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world and they probably are still very good. Whereas Realtek is, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of hit or miss with their products usually. So this, I’m happy to hear this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then I had made offhanded mention of the fact that you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flip some magic switch in the hardware area of system preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get Ethernet to work more reliably. And a couple of people reached out asking what the crap I was talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it completely slipped my mind to put that in the show notes, but I have put it in this week’s show notes. So I put that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link in there. Additionally, a couple of people pointed out, maybe I just stumbled upon this, I don’t remember how I got here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one way or another, I found that they have a FAQ post with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sleep issues. And apparently it’s better under the most recent version of macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s still got a little bit of wonkiness. So what they say on this page is, there are some short-term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ongoing intermittent issues in macOS 12 and up affecting some Thunderbolt docks in general after macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going into sleep mode. So they have two recommendations for you. You either turn off sleep mode, which is what I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my own volition unrelated to any of this, or, and this is interesting, reconnect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dock each time you reboot prior to sleeping it. And apparently you only have to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once, but once you boot your machine, disconnect the dock, reconnect the dock, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magic happens. And then you don’t have the problem anymore, according to this page on their FAQ. So I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to pass that along. Again, there will be links to both of these in the show notes.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers. Linode.com
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I’ve been running servers for a long time since I believe the year 2000 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, I’ve used a lot of web hosts in my day and Linode is by far my favorite one. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I’ve been sticking with them for the longest. Once I discovered them, I gradually moved all of my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to Linode and I haven’t left because it is just such a great host. They have any plan to suit any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource level and any budget. So they have things starting at just $5 a month, all the way up to whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your needs might be for hardware needs. They have specialty plans like GPU compute plans,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high memory plans, dedicated CPU plans, and other services that you might use like block storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kubernetes support, centralized supporting tools like Terraform. It’s just an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service. They have a great control panel. They have a great API to automate stuff. They also have amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support and they offer that same support 24 seven 365 to every level of user. So whether you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spending five bucks a month, a month with them, or 5000 bucks a month with them doesn’t matter, same level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of support and I’ve used it and it’s fantastic. Linode is also just in my opinion, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best value in the business. I have seen again a lot of hosts, and I’ve stuck with them because value matters a lot to me. I buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of servers. And so that you know, any kind of value difference really adds up for me. And Linode is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing value. As tech moves forward, they always adjust their plans to give you even more for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your money. So it’s just fantastic to be a Linode customer. Visit linode.com slash ATP,
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a free account there to get $100 in credit. Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web host for hosting all my stuff and for sponsoring our show. I don’t know.
Thermostat updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about Ecobee’s. Eric Powell had some interesting feedback and Marco, can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summarize one more time what your issue or confusion was with the interaction of Ecobee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically that every time I would control the Ecobee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostats through HomeKit or they would control themselves through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a schedule I had set in their app, a lot of times things would mess up you know when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever has control would switch whether HomeKit did the last command or whether Eccobee’s internal stuff did the last command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was oftentimes very weird I would often do things like ask HomeKit to turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the heat in this room and instead of turning off the heat it would go to like auto mode where it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like will use heat or AC to maintain one of these temperature ranges you know it’s which is very different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off so stuff like that, like weird stuff would happen, it would, or I would, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell HomeKit to do something and it would say okay, and then I would look at the thermostat and it wasn’t doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it was just, it was a very strange situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Eric Powell writes, I think I know which problem Marco might have been talking about as he wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone with that. Ecobee has two hold types, a permanent hold, which of course lasts until you change it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a temporary hold that only lasts until the next schedule change. With HomeKit, for whatever reason, Ecobee decided that if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use the home app, the Dingus, etc. to change the temperature, it would put the thermostat into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a permanent hold instead of a temporary hold. Comments on Reddit complained about this for ages with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tips on how to MacGyver your way around it with shortcuts, for example. However, finally last year they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relented and changed the way this works via an update. Now the system will do a temporary hold when you use one of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomeKit options and will revert back to the scheduled temperature when the next schedule starts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Got it. So now it apparently is is better at maintaining both a schedule in the Echobee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and a schedule on a thermostat. That being said, I don’t plan to try this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was a pain in the butt and having everything controlled only via the Home app and its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own automation and scheduling and voice control is working fine for me. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I think so often we run into problems with smart home stuff if multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystems or apps are trying to control the same thing. So I think having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only one of those things controlling it, whether you go all in on Ecobee’s app or all in on HomeKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think go all in on one or the other, don’t try to mix them because it’s just asking for trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although speaking of mixing them, something somebody pointed out with the little sensor things that come with
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the Ecobee things, I mentioned that like they’re a temperature sensor and they’re wireless and they’re powered by a little, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, coin battery type thing and supposedly last a long time and they’re really neat. And then when I added
⏹️ ▶️ John it to HomeKit, I saw the multiple things that were like the various sensors in addition to just temperature. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the present sensor or whatever. Someone pointed out that you can use these things, even if you don’t care about the
⏹️ ▶️ John temperature in the room. First of all, you can tell the ecobee which ones should contribute to temperature calculations and when they should. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just say like, during nighttime hours, ignore all the temperature sensors, except for the ones that are upstairs
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. And the other thing you can do is because they’re present sensors, you can do stuff like when someone walks into the room
⏹️ ▶️ John or if nobody has been in this room for X amount of time, fire off this automation, all sorts of, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re mixing and matching. I know you just recommend to use just one, but like if you use the ecobee to control
⏹️ ▶️ John the temperature, but then if you just added HomeKit automation, sort of just using the smart sensors as devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they would probably stay out of each other’s way because I don’t think there’s any way to sort of do the equivalent of like execute
⏹️ ▶️ John this shortcut, you know what I mean, from the ecobee. Whereas in the home thing, if you just use the present sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John device and say, when no one has been in the living room for two hours, if any of the lights
⏹️ ▶️ John are on, turn them off, that’s the thing that you could probably do with, you know, home kit and shortcuts and automation
⏹️ ▶️ John that you probably couldn’t do with Ecobee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then John, tell me about how you found instructions for your weirdo setup after all.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not really quite the same as my setup, but it’s like, it’s the equivalent. So the reason I didn’t find it is because if you honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John answer the questions that these various like wizards guide you through on their website, do you have X, do you have Y, do you have Z,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You’ll never find this because one of the things is asking you like, it leads you down the path of like, do you have like the
⏹️ ▶️ John AC adapter that plugs into the wall? And I mentioned, you know, I didn’t have that and I don’t want that, and you’d run a wire up your wall or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would never go down that branch. But practically speaking, what that little wall wart adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is doing is the same thing that those two other wires I found buried in my wall are doing, is they’re providing 24 volts AC.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, instead of being plugged into the wall, it was shoved into my breaker box to a little transformer that
⏹️ ▶️ John was mounted to the wall next to it, and then up through my walls through a cable. But it’s the same thing, electrically speaking. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do follow these steps, and I’ll put a link in the show notes, which is not a direct link, but it’s as direct as I could go.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you follow the link in the show notes, then you click on the section that says step three, then you click on
⏹️ ▶️ John the section that says scenario A, then you click on the section that says alternate solution, you will in
⏹️ ▶️ John fact reveal a wiring diagram that shows, hey, what if I have basically a W1 wire,
⏹️ ▶️ John an RH wire, and then I have two other random wires that are essentially 24 volts
⏹️ ▶️ John AC coming off a transformer? Which in the diagram they show to be a little wall wart, but in my house
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not. And the solution they have doesn’t require putting two wires into a single hole. Instead, they put
⏹️ ▶️ John the 24VAC, they put one into C, the common wire, and they put the other one into RC. And then they,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the thermostat wires, they go into W1 and RH. And I’m sure that would work on mine
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. In fact, if I ever need to disassemble mine and reassemble it, I will do this just because it’s simpler than my weird solution
⏹️ ▶️ John of melding the two wires together. And in my house, I don’t have, like, RC
⏹️ ▶️ John is in theory for like cooling and RH is for heating, but I don’t have any cooling. So just having W1
⏹️ ▶️ John and either RH or RC, you just tell the thermostat which one you want to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that means turn the heat on and it should work fine. So I’ll try that if I ever have to open it up, but for now,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything works and I’m not opening it back up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Cameron Wood writes, lots of issues in discussion on this week’s ATP on smart thermostats. Worth noting that it’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ballgame in Europe for your listeners. They use different wiring setups and different products. Nest, Tato,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tado, and Hive are pretty good follow-up mentions for your Europe listeners where ecobee isn’t available.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, I mean, we don’t mention this. It’s implicit. Uh, but yeah, we’re, we all live in the U
⏹️ ▶️ John S and anytime we’re talking about anything that might vary between the U S and elsewhere, just assume everything
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re saying only applies to the U S we have us plugs, we have us electrical systems, we have us roads, just
⏹️ ▶️ John any of that type of stuff that varies from country to country, you know, we, we can’t tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John what to do in other places in the world, cause we honestly don’t know. And, you know, in this case, like the manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John might even be different. some of these manufacturers we’re talking about might not even serve those regions. They might be US only,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they might only be, you know, the US and the UK or something. So we’re sorry that we can’t offer a broader perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John but do keep that in mind before you rush off to do something based on home automation that you heard us talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ John because homes are very different across the world. Yeah, same F in the chat room was asking how I get by
⏹️ ▶️ John in the summer in Boston. Yeah, window units. It’s not great. They’re heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don’t you either do the HVAC or do mini splits?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, mini splits are awesome. You know the answer to that question. Yeah, I know. holes in your house I know but yes
⏹️ ▶️ John are a worthy hole. I don’t understand why anybody does mini splits they’re so hideous. They
⏹️ ▶️ John work really well that’s why. The hideous inside the house the hideous outside the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John My house does not have much going for it but the one thing it does have going for it is that it looks nice on the outside in terms of being
⏹️ ▶️ John a nice house without a bunch of ugly crap all over it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I cannot fathom living in a place where it gets over 70 degrees with our air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John well, the window units do the job. They’re a pain to install and a pain to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uninstall. Yes, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those look great in your windows, John. They look stupendous.
⏹️ ▶️ John They look better than mini splits, let me tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe inside the house. I strongly disagree on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Definitely outside, because they go through the windows. The windows are already an area where there’s stuff going on. They don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the wall and end up looking like these warty things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you have a nice day and you want to open the windows, you have one that you can’t use.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have plenty of windows, don’t worry about it. This is plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, not far be it for me to convince you that you’ve made the wrong choice with regards to your employment, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe you should have hung on for like another six months just so you could get, you know, amass the money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that you can do proper HVAC.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a money issue. It’s a house disruption issue. We’ve talked about this before. I do not have
⏹️ ▶️ John any air ducts and those little skinny ones they try to fish through your wall. Like fishing anything through my ancient walls is a big project
⏹️ ▶️ John and would just the house would crumble to dust. It’s the type of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you open the wall and you end you ended up discovering oh my god there’s a whole second air duct in here
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s any secret air ducts if anything there’s probably just bodies buried in there and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco old radiators and rats and a bunch of old razor
⏹️ ▶️ John blades from the little razor blade hold that is in the you know the medicine cabinets we talked about before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did we talk about this before
⏹️ ▶️ John yes we have on this show I’m pretty sure we talked about I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think so I don’t think we did John I know the thing you mean like the kind of thing you mean but I don’t think we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t know again this may be US only we don’t offer this disclaimer but it’s fresh in my mind because I just mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the US at least back in the day when they made a house they’d put in like
⏹️ ▶️ John a medicine cabinet which is like a little thing that’s recessed between the studs in your bathroom wall and it has a mirrored
⏹️ ▶️ John door on it usually and if you pull on the mirrored door it opens up and there you put all your medicines and other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John right it’s a medicine cabinet in the bathroom right and what they would have in the back of the medicine cabinet it would just be like a metal
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s like in the wall to make with little shelves or whatever there’d be a slit in there and what
⏹️ ▶️ John that was for was when you used to shave with like straight razors back before disposable razors and stuff. When you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John done with your razor blade, you’d remove it from your little handle and then you would shove it through the slot
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would just fall down the stud cavity in your wall to the bottom of the stud cavity.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey To somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you serious? This is a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and the reason they do that is like, oh, it’s a razor blade, I don’t want to put it in the garbage because what if like a toddler goes over and finds
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the garbage and plays with it and they’ll cut themselves or whatever. So razor blades are very, very small and very, very light. And they figured, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the life of this house, It’s not like they’re going to fill the stud cavity with razor blades. Just let it fall and it will just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t they put a metal bucket or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John something? Mask it, yeah. No, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John goes into the wall. And so in many houses, if you tear open a bathroom, what you will find is a little pile of rust,
⏹️ ▶️ John a little pile of rusty metal, or potentially a big pile, depending on how long that was done, the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who lived there and how long they did it, right underneath where the medicine cabinet was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had no idea this was a thing, genuinely, no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet you can find good pictures on the internet of what does it look like when you find a pile of those in the wall. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good example of like that childlike thing of like, look, they’re not going to fill this. How long will this
⏹️ ▶️ John last? 500 years, 1000 years, the house is going to disintegrate before this ever becomes a problem. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially found a permanent, it’s like a radioactive waste storage, like I know what we can do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John the studs in our bathroom and it will never fill up, only this is a system that actually works.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco again insanity.io slash ATP. Thanks to Sanity for sponsoring our show.
USB 4 switch follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we had some interesting feedback with regard to USB-C KVMs, and we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how Intel has like a dev kit that does this sort of thing. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Victor Leung wrote us to point out that there is the MCCI model 3141 USB4 switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which apparently is a computer controlled programmable 2-to-1 switch connecting two USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Type-C receptacles to a single USB Type-C plug. It is compatible with USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosts and devices as well as older protocols such as Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.2, 2.0, USB Type-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternate modes, and of course power delivery. And this looks like exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks like basically a packaged version of that Intel dev board. Which is really interesting and really exciting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sounds kind of great until I point out that the list price is just shy of a thousand dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s quite a switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So from the same anonymous friend of the show that wrote us with regard to the Intel dev
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit, this individual wrote, they did a nice job on this, but they just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finished reading the docs. It doesn’t have quite as much fanciness as the Intel board, but it covers the basics.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But oof, the price is almost $1,000. Bananas. There are literally three USB connectors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an MCU, an analog mux, and diodes mux in there. That’s like $25 a parts. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey must have done this on spec to Microsoft and then realized they could charge Microsoft essentially an arbitrary price for finished units and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no one would care. So when you can charge a trillion dollars for something, guess what? You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. Subtitle, The Apple Story.
⏹️ ▶️ John more like the government contractor story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very true. Very true. Very, very true.
Mac Studio PSU variations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m assuming this is John that put this in here. Tell me about this video from my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best friend Linus Tech Tips.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Joshua Prisman sent this in, apparently, in the latest Linus Tech Tip video. I forget what the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John video was about. They were taking apart some Mac Studios. But they had enough Mac Studios that they just happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to have taken them apart. And they found two of them that are the same model. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John one is the Ultra and one is the Mac. They were literally the same model, the same SKU that had entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John different power supplies in them. and you can look at the video, we’ll put a timestamp link, you can see them holding up next to
⏹️ ▶️ John each other. They’re both, you know, circular, they’re both the same size and shape more or less, because they both have to fit in the same case, but they are
⏹️ ▶️ John not like each other at all. Two different manufacturers, one is Light-On and one is Delta.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s some speculation that one of the problems people are having with Mac Studios is not actually related to the cooling system, but just related
⏹️ ▶️ John to like electrical noise from the power supply. And they didn’t say this in the video,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s too hard to tell with just two of them, but it would be interesting to know the people who are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of an electrical buzzing noise, which one of the two possible power supplies do they have? Or maybe there’s three possible
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. Like, and they say this in the video, it’s not uncommon for Apple to source parts from multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturers. Very often they have multiple suppliers for commodity parts like the RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John or no one’s looking at the individual capacitors saying, wow, my Mac, it’s the same as your Mac, but my capacitor
⏹️ ▶️ John is made by this company and your capacitor is made by that company. In this case, the entire component of the power supply is made by a different company. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done that in the past and other Macs as well. But I, you know, and it’s good. You’d need quite
⏹️ ▶️ John a sample to be able to nail it down and say, is the electrical noise just manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John tolerances and variation across all the manufacturers or is there one manufacturer that’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John susceptible to this than the other? Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no way to tell which power supply you have without
⏹️ ▶️ John opening the thing up and the Mac Studio does not want you to open it up. And if you did open it up, Apple would probably be able to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wouldn’t suggest it, but just FYI, you know, Whether this is because of
⏹️ ▶️ John supply chain stuff and they were worried one manufacturer wouldn’t be enough to supply them so they had to have two of them or
⏹️ ▶️ John they just farmed it out and two manufacturers came back with designs that both qualified according to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John specs. Who knows, but either way, there’s some variation going on inside the Mac Studio.
Neutral: New electric cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now’s the time that Marco, you and I really have to combine our powers to avoid talking about Elon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Musk. Have you looked into any of the newer offerings for electric cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Ioniq 5 or anything like that? Because we’re going to do a mid-show neutral apparently. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of new stuff coming out that looks at a glance, at a glance, looks really really
⏹️ ▶️ John good. The Ioniq 5 is not new and it does not look really good. I mean, I mean, I guess it’s a nice car, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, for the broader definition of look.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I don’t find it appealing at all. There’s the was the Kia one that’s based on the same platform looks a little bit better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually I haven’t been paying much attention except for like, you know What we hear from friends like a like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Alan and arc over at fun fact, you know I’ll talk about all this stuff, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t been looking too much just because It’s almost like my heart’s been broken so many times by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promises of cool electric vehicles that then just never come out Or that eventually come out and it’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the concept and it sucks And so I when things do come out, that’s that’s good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t pay attention to the press anymore in that whole subject area because it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so heartbreaking so often
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey was just describing cars that are out have been out for a while There’s also the being also the BMW ones that are out or
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t think they’re particularly Particularly appealing the Lucid Air by the way is also out and it is more or less exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what they said It would be combined with what you would expect which is this is literally the first car from a
⏹️ ▶️ John new manufacturer So it’s very much like the first model s but you did have one of the early model s so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you’re Unfamiliar with that that experience really not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that early. I mean it was
⏹️ ▶️ John early enough that there was weird problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? No, not really. No, I don’t have any weird problems I mean I had like, you know I had to like replace the door handles once but like
⏹️ ▶️ John that and the electrical not the electrical the the sort of Software gremlins in the first versions of that and with it crashing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t really I mean that didn’t that wasn’t any It wasn’t like the drivetrain crashing. It was like the screen crashing and that yeah Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John fan. So the Lucid Air is like that too. The drive train and the car part of it itself seems to be fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every review is going gaga over it. Of course, it’s super expensive as well, but it’s like amazing. Amazing range, amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John performance, amazing sort of, I don’t know what the equivalent is, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John miles per watt hour, very efficient, huge on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s great about it, but the software is like, it’s a little immature, maybe a little wonky. It’s not poorly performing
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Rivian, where the Rivian is like, this feels kind of janky and slow. It’s fine, but it’s definitely like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this is the first car from a manufacturer that hasn’t done this before. And some of the integrations
⏹️ ▶️ John they promised with third-party stuff is not quite up to snuff yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re willing to deal with those early adopter stuff, and probably the door handles will break, because everyone knows something weird
⏹️ ▶️ John with door handles. It’s just a rite of passage. That’s how we know it’s a futuristic car. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. But anyway, the Lucid Air actually did launch and is pretty amazing. and the tech in it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John from everything I’ve seen, like the tech, the drivetrain tech in Lucid Air is the leader in the entire industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Possibly also the battery tech, although I think the jury’s still out on that one, but the drivetrain tech is for sure the leader.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the smallest, most powerful, like the best in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John size and weight for what you get out of it. It’s still slower than the, what do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it? The Plaid? Yeah, it’s still slower than the Plaid because the Plaid has three motors and this one has two, but I think Lucid
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna make a three motor one And when they do, probably the, well, maybe by then, the Tesla Roadster will be out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, that whole arms race is not important. It’s like the Lucid Air is zero to 60 in two and a half seconds. Like, who
⏹️ ▶️ John cares that it’s not 2.1? It’s fine. You’ll be fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would suggest if you ever do look at another car, since you seem to like the Model S type stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Lucid Air is 100% a Model S, attempted a Model S competitor, give
⏹️ ▶️ John a peek at it because the reviews have been pretty amazing and it is actually out. actual customers have actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s good, but I mean like, but right now like I, I’m actually, so I’m, you know, I’m not looking for a replacement. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought my car out at the end of its lease, because I don’t like the new Model S’s and also don’t want anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s in the market right now. And so I’m hoping to get a lot of years out of it because, you know, frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Model, you know, the first Model S I had was I think a 2015 model year. My current one’s a 2018 model year. And even in 2015, I think it was already like three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four, like the car had been out for like three four years before that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they actually had worked out most of the early problems by the time even my first one came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the time my 2018 model came out, it was a pretty mature platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, speaking of that, have you ever looked at a video that shows you the revisions of the door handle between the first
⏹️ ▶️ John one and the one you have? No. It’s pretty fun engineering and it mostly makes you think the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who made the first door handle were just like someone needed to talk to them. Because they
⏹️ ▶️ John like you look at you like there’s no way that’s gonna be reliable and guess what it wasn’t and the new one has like
⏹️ ▶️ John one 18th the number of parts and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s so much more
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable it’s like oh geez guys anyway yeah they figured out eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and like but the thing is like if I’m gonna jump into one of these newer alternatives that’s out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all I would lose the supercharger network and that’s still not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great thing to lose like right now the supercharge network is still very much a competitive advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get I get that over time, eventually that will become less the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but right now it’s a huge competitive advantage. And once you’re accustomed to it, you know it’s one thing if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying your first electric car, maybe you don’t know what you’re missing, but if you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had access to the Tesla Supercharger network, to lose that to buy another electric car that can’t use it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d feel that hit, like you wouldn’t enjoy that when you take long trips.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you might be able to make it upstate without going to a charger, because the Lucid one has 520 miles of range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it upstate just fine, if I’m fully charged. But my car right now has been sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the beach parking lot for a few weeks. I probably parked it at 75%. It’s probably now more like at 65% after,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe after 10 days, or after two weeks, maybe it lost 10%, something like that. Maybe not that much, but it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loses pretty slowly. But anyway, so I’m gonna get in the car tomorrow when I arrive there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m gonna wanna go directly somewhere far away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s really nice when you have excess battery capacity and good range, it’s really nice to be able to do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also really nice if you don’t have the range to make it home, to be able to stop somewhere because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you couldn’t plan very well, or you couldn’t leave on a full charge. Having a big battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having the supercharger network together add flexibility for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but you get about half the range of the Air. So yes, it’s good to have the charging network, but it’s also good to have double
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough, but I mean, that’s also probably a ridiculous amount of money. I haven’t even looked at the pricing, but I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John absurd. It’s not that bad. I mean, they’re trying to sell like the fancy one to the early adopters, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John actually the long range one is cheaper than the top of the line because the top of the line trades range for performance, which is probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice you would make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, maybe, but still, yeah, I wouldn’t. But still, like, being in the Tesla ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I have the massive supercharger network. I have my problems with their software, for sure. It’s still designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, as far as I could tell, a moron, who has never driven a car before. They haven’t added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a circular steering wheel back either. Yeah. But seriously, whoever is designing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only shouldn’t be designing car UIs, shouldn’t be allowed to design car UIs. It’s literally less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe than it was before. If there were some kind of professional licensing to design car UIs, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have the license revoked. That’s how bad it is. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually related to weird, bad decisions made in Tesla cars with the
⏹️ ▶️ John yoke steering wheel that we were alluding to before. I saw my first story about a non-Tesla manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John offering a yoke-style steering wheel as an option.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m like, please
⏹️ ▶️ John people, of all the things to copy, don’t copy that one. At least it’s an option.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was Lexus, by the way. Wait, which car? It was Lexus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. Well, they’re not in for their fantastic design either. But anyway, so, you know, besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my recent software UI issues with Tesla, their platform is mature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very reliable. I know that I’m gonna go back there tomorrow and it’s not gonna be dead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll be able to get in the car and drive where I need to go, and I know it’ll be fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can trust it, it’s proven. I know that I can stop at superchargers, and they’ll all be perfectly fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ll all have space for me. They will all have working chargers. The first one I pull up to will almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, and I can tell from the car before I even get there how many spots are free and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the car can navigate me to get there very easily and tell me when I will need them and when I won’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also know that if the car breaks or if I need parts or if I blow a tire again, I know how to get that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have really good service infrastructure in place already. They have dealers, they have service vans that drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around. That’s not, you know, when you go, when you have like a brand new brand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to give up all that. And it’s much more-
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they don’t do all of that. All the manufacturers do all the things you said. It’s just a question of whether they have as many charging stations. They all
⏹️ ▶️ John will tell you how the distance to the nearest charger and how many spots are open if they’re part of the network and they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John a service van come out to your thing. Like, that’s the other thing with Lucid, they’re in the, remember the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla used to offer like, well, $7,500 rebate from the government, which is the thing that we have if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a new electric car manufacturer, and unlimited charging at their stations, and free,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’ll come to your house and fix stuff or whatever. Lucid is still kind of in that phase where they can offer all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to the early adopters, whereas Tesla is in the phase where they’re kind of doing belt tightening and you don’t get a free supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. But the service experience is not ideal, let’s say, if they can’t get parts
⏹️ ▶️ John or are annoying about it or whatever. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I’ve lived through like Tesla as a younger company with the first Model S that I had, and now that I’ve had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second one, Tesla as a more mature company that has like, you know, just more mature software, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mature service infrastructure, more, you know, all that stuff. The idea of going backwards to somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has less of that stuff figured out and basically being someone’s beta tester again for my car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a high tolerance for that. So I would rather, you know, either,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, first of all, I’d rather keep this car as long I can before getting anything new. And then when it comes time that I have to replace this car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather either stick with Tesla. Hopefully they have something I like, you know, better by then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or go with a manufacturer has been around for a while and that that happened to have started making electric cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometime sometime in the intervening time. So I’d be more likely to go to, you know, check out like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audi e-tron or something from BMW or something like that, you know, as opposed to one of these brand new companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that started from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should definitely test drive it though, because by then it’ll be the same age as your original Model S, like they’ve had a
⏹️ ▶️ John few years, work out the kinks, blah, blah, blah, fix their door handles, do all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Definitely worth looking at doing. By all accounts, it is sort of better built even than the current Tesla. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another place where it’s not taking other manufacturers as many years as it’s apparently taking Tesla to figure out how to build cars
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly without squeaks and rattles with all the pieces aligned. So we’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we narrowly avoided talking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Avoid talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about EMS by talking about Tesla for 15 minutes. Good job
RIP, Rob-ART Morgan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to say just a quick note of memorial for the author
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Bare Feet, the website that always had amazing benchmarks of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro configurations and CPU options and GPU options and always had tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of great comparison work, all these wonderful graphs and everything. The guy’s name was Rob Art Morgan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Robert Arthur, but he wrote it as Rob Art Morgan, and he just passed away. I was just learning about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tonight, and that was really sad to hear. I’ve been following his site, Bare Feets, for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, for years and years and years, since long before this show and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically since I started paying attention to Mac stuff, like forever ago. So yeah, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quick note of condolences to his family, and I really did enjoy Bare Feets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, so it was really sad to hear. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what it says about me or him that I just assumed it was like a bunch of teenagers doing that site, because they were always so
⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiastic about like, like, let’s see how fast this is against that. And let’s try this and let’s soup this up and let’s overclock that. And let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stick this video card into a Mac Pro. And it just seemed like a bunch of, you know, like really excited,
⏹️ ▶️ John nerdy teenagers, just trying to like, trying out all sorts of cool tech stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he passed away at the age of 77. So he was not a teenager.
⏹️ ▶️ John just not recently. At some point, but he was not, he was not a teenager when he was sticking cool video cards into Mac Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was also surprised that he, that he was that old, but yeah, it was a great sight and I, I’m gonna miss it.
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Left-crown Apple Watch usage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk to Elon Musk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no, no, it’s not. How about ask ATP? Is it too early? It’s too early. Oh, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John why you so against this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco topic. I have a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch and a night watch now. Can we talk about that instead? Other than you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John don’t like Elon Musk. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. So here’s the story. So as I was working out, you know, with like… People are going to be mad at you, just FYI. Who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares? They’re mad if I I talk about it, I’m mad if I don’t, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway. No, they’re more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So back to Apple Watches because it’s anything but him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And by the way, this
⏹️ ▶️ John will stay in the notes and we’ll just get to it next episode. There’s no escape.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s always an escape.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s like the supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ John network. It’s everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how much stuff is buried in our show notes because something comes on top of it and then eventually it just falls off the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John That could happen, but this one will probably stay because this one is growing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I realized that, you know, so most people, I don’t think most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people know this about the Apple Watch, that if you don’t like the crown on the right side, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip it. You can have it, you can flip the whole watch physically and then go into settings and you can, if you go into settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the general, I think orientation is where it is, you can set which wrist you have the watch on, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also change whether the crown is on the right or you flip the watch over and put it on the left, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the software will then flip the screen as necessary. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever you’re doing a workout or something, you do a pushup or moving your hand in a certain way where your wrist goes up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very easy to accidentally push the Siri crown button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and invoke Siri when you don’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never had that problem. I was doing pushups a few hours ago. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run into, I’m not saying your lived experience is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on the shape of your wrist, maybe how low down the watch can slide. Because if your watch, if you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a big bone on your wrist, Like I do with stopping the watch from sliding real down close to your wrist, then when you bend
⏹️ ▶️ John your hand, like when you’re doing a pushup, if your watch can be down that low, the back of your hand would hit the crown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, I do have a John Siracusa nubbin on my wrist. So that really helps. That does help.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also, it happens more like if I’m wearing gloves, like weightlifting gloves, like, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the edge of the glove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push the button pretty easily. So yeah, I decided, you know, let me try flipping my watch around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and wearing it that way for a while. It was great during the workout, and I hated it at all other times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t this the Chalk and Berry approach? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, I think Chalk and Berry has been around
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s not the only one who does this. Like as people are pointing out, the watch asks you during setup, which way you want it. So I bet a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to do that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it asks you left or right wrist, but I don’t, does it tell you, does it ask you about orientation, about like the crown orientation? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John so. At the very least it’s prominent in the settings on the iPhone app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I can strongly recommend if you do any kind of like, you know, thing where you’re wearing weightlifting gloves or other things in your hand that push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that button a lot, flip it over, it’s great. However, I hated it during the rest of the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it turns out I scroll with the crown a lot. I was just not getting used to it. It also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it looks right. Because obviously the watch is designed very clearly to have the crown on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the upper right. If they sold one where the crown was on the upper left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of the lower left, I would probably buy that. There’s actually in the watch world, that’s an occasional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option that you have. Like certain watch models, it’s called something like Destro. There’s some term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it, but there are certain watch models will have the crown on the left side instead of the right. And I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those, my crazy oil-filled sin. It’s a ridiculous thing. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one of those. It’s great because it never gets in your way, but when you do have to like set it, it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re wearing on your left hand and you’re right-handed, that is kind of annoying. It’s more made for left-handed people to wear on their right hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway. So I would totally buy that if they sold the Apple Watch that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is much nicer and I’d get used to it for scrolling. However, I can’t get over the look as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my permanent solution. So, I took out an old Apple Watch from my drawer of old hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I set it up as a second one, and it was totally fine. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically the end of this topic. I wish I had more to keep delaying the inevitable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a very easy experience. I did have to kind of reset the watch, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install clean, because it was freaking out if I didn’t do that. Otherwise, it was a very easy experience, And yeah, that’s how I do
Feeding the troll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. What else can we talk about? Let’s start Ask ATP, because we have a lot of it together. We’re not starting Ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I abstain. I abstain, because there’s no winning this fight.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think at this point, I think it might actually be more interesting to ask you why
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want to talk about this than to actually talk about the topic. Because of all the things for you not to want to talk about, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like Casey not wanting to talk about the Mac Pro, because he’s not into big, powerful tower computers. Why don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to talk about the Elon Musk investing in Twitter thing? What is it about this topic that is so upsetting?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I hate Elon Musk and I hate investment talk and I hate Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t think you hate Twitter and investment talk? What is investment talk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I don’t care. We don’t cover Apple’s quarterly results. We never talk about them unless there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something really interesting that comes out, which it usually isn’t. We don’t talk about, hey, you see Facebook’s new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investment in Uber? We don’t talk about that kind of stuff because we’re not a financial podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a financial story. This is not a finance. I mean, it touches on finance, but it’s mostly about
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter and the power of billionaires and quote unquote free speech. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we talk about stuff like that all the time. We talk about app store rules and the ability for people to get things into stores and how much power
⏹️ ▶️ John big tech companies have. It’s like it’s totally in that exact same wheelhouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only difference is it involves Elon Musk now, which granted, I know you don’t like him, but this is an opportunity to,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, say mean things about him. It’s not like we’re gonna, you know, it’s not, I don’t know, I find it fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ John that you are so repelled by this. Thought you were afraid people were gonna yell at you because the Tesla people will come? You already said all these nice things about
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla. So they’re gonna like you now. They’re gonna say, yeah, Marco loves Tesla, supercharger network forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should still fire their software designer. But no, that’s, look, he is a clown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the cars that came out of the car company that he made, but he personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a character that I do not enjoy. And he is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much like, you know, some of our more negative political figures over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last couple of years. He thrives on attention and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so often provocative in such a way to get negative attention or to get attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in bad ways. And I just don’t wanna support that. I don’t wanna give him the attention that he wants. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay attention to the things he does as much as possible because I don’t wanna feed the troll. That’s what he’s doing. He trolls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world and the last thing you wanna do is feed the trolls. And I don’t wanna support that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to have him dictate what we talk about. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engage in the public discourse, oh my God, can you believe the thing he did today? Look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the stupid thing he said. Look at the crazy thing he did. Like, I just, I don’t want to feed all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is so much more in the world that’s better to talk about, although I’m drawing a blank right now for more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I just, I don’t want to feed him. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John related to that though, and related to Tesla cars actually, This is actually, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that is not really relevant to this topic, but it is relevant to one of the reasons why I soured on Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John cars. And why I, you know, it’s not because I don’t want to support, you know, Elon Musk. Like he’s got, like
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t care if I buy a car. Like he’s fine, right? That’s not what I’m talking about. Mostly what I’m talking about is that, and this is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of true of Apple too, when you have a big personality who’s very much in control
⏹️ ▶️ John of a company, whether it’s Zuckerberg or Jobs or Bill Gates or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though the company is made up of tons and tons of people, the founder’s personality,
⏹️ ▶️ John the person running the company, their personality can’t help but come through to some degree because
⏹️ ▶️ John despite what all the hundreds or thousands of other people in the company think or feel,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if the company is tightly controlled by sort of a very hands-on,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, CEO At the top, the instincts of the employees
⏹️ ▶️ John and the judgment of the employees can be overridden just because Steve Jobs said everything’s gotta be
⏹️ ▶️ John leather in this version of the Mac OS and no one else likes it and no one else wants it and everyone else thinks it’s a bad idea, but in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John the buck stops with him. And so he just makes it happen. And so you’re like, boy, Apple has bad taste. And it’s like, is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has bad taste or is it because one person very high up happened to have tasted disagrees
⏹️ ▶️ John with yours and they have the ability to make it happen across the organization? And that’s a tiny little detail, it’s not a big deal. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tesla, the thing that really soured me on the company is in fact very
⏹️ ▶️ John well tied to Elon Musk as a person. Because it eventually, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the, it’s not that the Tesla fans do this or whatever, but the sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John the general discourse and attitude around Tesla very much reflects Elon Musk’s attitude. And Elon Musk’s
⏹️ ▶️ John attitude, and I’m gonna compare this to Jobs, because he has a similar thing, but slightly different, but Elon Musk’s attitude towards
⏹️ ▶️ John about Tesla and the cars is pretty much, if there’s something wrong with
⏹️ ▶️ John a Tesla car, you got one and it has a defect, or you don’t like the fact that the defroster isn’t up here, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John your complaint is, legitimate or not, you have some complaint about the car, or your thing came and it has got weird
⏹️ ▶️ John panel gaps, or you’ve been waiting too long to get your thing, or they changed the price on you when you pre-ordered, whatever your complaint is about
⏹️ ▶️ John the car, Elon Musk specifically, the person, not Tesla the company, but Elon Musk specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ John the person, as evidenced by his own words, which he has plenty of online, mostly on Twitter for you to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John his attitude is basically like, as soon as you say something bad about Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s time to discredit you, say you’re just trying to short the stock, you’re a hater, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and let me just dig up dirt on your background and dox you and just like all the worst kind of things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine. It’s like the second you are not 100% loyal to Tesla and say anything bad about it, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s legitimate, it doesn’t matter what your complaint is, Elon Musk wants you to die. and you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John not literally, right? And it’s like, so what? He’s a big baby, like you said, he’s just loud, he wants attention,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s just one person. That’s not the company. The company is filled with really good engineers and employees who wanna make
⏹️ ▶️ John the best cars and believe in the mission and are doing real good work and, you know, and look at how revolutionary Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been and so on and so forth. I agree with all that, but at a certain point, I got the feeling that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the reaction of the company to any problem, anytime they do anything wrong, is to
⏹️ ▶️ John discredit the people who are complaining about it and deny that anything is ever wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I never want to buy something as important as a car from a company that I feel that attitude
⏹️ ▶️ John coming from, as opposed to like, you know, a company that’s like, if there’s ever anything wrong with our car,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’re going to swoop down and say, what do we have to do to fix this? We’re going to fix it right away. And now, you know, you can name a million
⏹️ ▶️ John car companies like, well, they’re all like this. Like Volkswagen is lying about their emissions things and they got caught in it and they
⏹️ ▶️ John were forcing their engineers to, you know, make their things, fake stuff out on tests to spew
⏹️ ▶️ John chemicals in the air. What a terrible company or whatever. Or like the, Unsafe at Any Speed, but I don’t remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John company that was. Was that Ford?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh no. Or the Chevy Corvair maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know exactly what you’re thinking of, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t remember now. Yeah, the car’s gonna blow up, but we’re not gonna tell you about it. Like, all car companies are bad or whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I get where you’re coming from with that, but just like my feeling is that Tesla as a company, because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John way Musk runs it, is not the type of company that I trust to make a car. And that’s my personal
⏹️ ▶️ John decision. I don’t think that, you know, again, the cars are what they are. And if you like them and they’re the best fit for what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want, you know, by all means, go for it. But that’s what I feel for him. And that’s why I became disillusioned with Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I sold my two shares of Tesla stock, like, you know, five years ago, whatever it was, because I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, as long as he is running this company, it is never going to be run the way I think a car company should.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t agree with any of his opinions or tastes and his entire attitude about basically
⏹️ ▶️ John everything he does, not just Tesla, but everything he does. He acts like, I’m trying to find the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John analogy for it, but I think we’ve all met people like this. It’s like, if you are not 100% for them and it is sort of a sycophant
⏹️ ▶️ John and telling them everything they do is great, as soon as you have one single complaint about
⏹️ ▶️ John anything, it’s all at war, you are persona non grata, and you are
⏹️ ▶️ John just a terrible person, and you don’t understand, and you deserve the full force of a multi-bazillionaire
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to rain down hell on you from high. And he’s not above doing shady
⏹️ ▶️ John things and telling people in his company to do bad things. And to the extent that he’s able to force them to do so
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re on the same page as him, stuff like that happens. This is before we get into like all the
⏹️ ▶️ John labor relations stuff and the racist things happening in his factories or whatever. You can’t blame the person on top for
⏹️ ▶️ John every single thing like that. But when you see his actual attitude and you see those things happen in his company, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John fits. I can see how he could know about that and not care because it’s not, you know, it doesn’t concern him
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not a big deal and too bad for those suckers or whatever. So anyway, I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ John the same page with you with not liking Elon Musk. And so much so that it just turned me off
⏹️ ▶️ John to his entire line of cars and pretty much anything that he does, I felt like he is, you know, ill-equipped to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned I would bring this back to Steve Jobs. His attitude was kind of similar and like, but not quite the same
⏹️ ▶️ John because Steve Jobs desperately wants everyone to like his products. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t like them, if you don’t like them for a stupid reason, he’s gonna be bad about it. But in the end, he does
⏹️ ▶️ John want you to like them so he’s gonna fix the product. Think about AntennaGate. He thought that was a stupid controversy, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John next iPhone had a different antenna, right? And he was pissy when he said, you want a bumper? Fine, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a stupid bumper case, right? He thought it was unfair and stupid or whatever, but the bottom line is he wanted the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a better phone. So it’s not like he said, in fact, all future iPhones are gonna have this antenna design
⏹️ ▶️ John just to say how terrible you are. Like sort of the Musk attitude started the yoke steering wheel. You don’t like the yoke steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel? Guess what? The round one’s not even an option. I know you saw pictures of it, but forget it. Everyone’s getting the yoke, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a subtle difference because Jobs was also a jerk, but he was a jerk in a much different way, in a way that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think produced better products and was more aligned with attempting to
⏹️ ▶️ John do right by the customer. Steve Jobs would berate underlings and yell at employees
⏹️ ▶️ John because they weren’t serving the customer as well. If you wrote to Steve Jobs with a sob story, he would
⏹️ ▶️ John forward it to one of his people to say, fix this. And he’d be mean to the people who work for him, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ John great. But the point is, he wanted it fixed for the employee. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John Musk would say, find this person and get them fired. I know they don’t work for us, but you can probably dig some dirt
⏹️ ▶️ John up on them. But they’re really annoying us, and they’re probably just trying to short the stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for me, I avoid talking about Musk because the contingent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people who treat Tesla as their team, And we’re guilty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, all of us, for various things, arguably the three of us for Apple. But I like to think that we can criticize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and find problems with Apple. But as you guys said, especially John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you criticize Tesla and or criticize Elon, there are people for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whom Tesla and Elon are their team. And they will do anything, like you said, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make it very clear how disappointed in you they are. And that’s what bothers
⏹️ ▶️ John on that point, Casey, though, about the fans, that happens and that’s a thing and it’s annoying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those fans have no control over how Tesla makes cars, more or less, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, and that’s why it’s so much worse for me that it’s the, like even if there was a rabid fan base like that, like
⏹️ ▶️ John arguably Apple has had, and if you ask some people, continues to have a rabid fan base like that. And it’s annoying and it sucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s, you know, it’s not fun to be on the other end of that. But that’s sort of a sideshow.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the CEO of the company is like that, if the CEO of the company has an attitude that’s as bad as or worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than the worst rabid fan type thing, that’s bad. Because the CEO is supposed to be trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to make customers happy and make better products, not
⏹️ ▶️ John say, the second you have any kind of complaint, I hate you forever, and I’m not going to listen to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, completely agree. But let’s try to soldier through this real quick. So Elon Musk has invested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Twitter. And we’re going to go through a quick timeline, which is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s do some ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to go through a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco timeline. opportunity everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fantastic A. Uh yeah do you have any peli clamb he’s dea
🙄
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Verge wrote at some point, I guess like a week ago now, that Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter amid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaints about free speech. So he bought just a little less than 10%. According
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the filing, Musk purchased the stake on March 14th. He has long been one of Twitter’s highest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey profile users and recently polled his over 80 million followers about the platform’s adherence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to free speech. Twitter’s share price was up over 25% in the pre-market trading on the news. Musk has been publicly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calling into question whether Twitter’s approach to free speech via a poll conducted on his Twitter account on March
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 25th. Like I said, free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. So do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this principle? The CEO asked before noting in a follow-up tweet that quote, the consequences of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this poll will be important. So the Washington Post wrote that he delayed filing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a form that announced his either intention to or completion of purchasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stock that he did. And because he delayed that, nobody knew he was going to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stock. So then he bought the stock. Then the stock went up 25% or whatever I just said. So he basically made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey himself $150 million. Must be frigging nice. Elon Musk was 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days late in publicly declaring that he had amassed a huge stake in Twitter. That omission may have earned him $156 million,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to a half dozen legal and securities experts. That’s because of a 50-year-old law that requires that investors notify the Security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Exchange Commission when they surpass a 5% stake in a company. Musk reached that benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on March 14, and according to the filings. but he made his public disclosure only like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week or two ago. In between, he continued to buy stock at the price of around $39 a share, bringing total stake to 9.2%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey After his disclosure, Twitter’s share price rose to roughly 30% and is now above $50 a share. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea is that if people knew he was planning on buying this much, the share price would have gone up before
⏹️ ▶️ John he could buy it all, because you can’t just buy it all at once. It’s just too much stock, right? So he’s buying it slowly over time. And when you cross
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5% threshold, you have to tell people so that all the other people who have Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John stock know, Elon Musk is about to buy things, the stock’s probably going to go up and that would drive the price up. But by not telling
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody, he got to keep buying at the low price because nobody knew that he was planning to buy 9.2%. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when I say he made 156 million, it’s because he was able to buy the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ John his shares at the low price that was quote unquote artificially low because he didn’t disclose
⏹️ ▶️ John as the law dictates that he’s supposed to that he was planning on buying more. But what the hell does Elon Musk care about laws
⏹️ ▶️ John involving finance? He breaks them all the time. In fact, he’s forbidden from being on the Tesla board because
⏹️ ▶️ John of past law-breaking, most of which the SEC didn’t punish and just slapped him on the wrist. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John he was banned from being on the Tesla board and got some sort of other wrist-slapping fines
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But basically he just – he breaks the law when he feels like having to do with finance, which is one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do when you’re a billionaire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the many, many things. All right. So after that happened, Perik
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agrawal, who is the Twitter CEO, wrote on April 5th, at At about 8.30 in the morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited to share that we’re appointing Elon Musk to our board. Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it’s become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear to us that he would bring great value to our board.” And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a little while later, Twitter says Elon Musk won’t get special treatment from its rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, totally. Neelay Patel wrote, “‘Twitter’s in a tough place with Elon on the board. He’s promising changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the company’s telling us, and by extension its employees, Elon is not going to make content policy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decisions. So then five days after the announcement that he’s going to be on the board, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter CEO writes, Elon has declared that he has decided not to join our board. The board and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had many discussions about Elon joining the board and with Elon directly. We were excited to collaborate and clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the risks. We also believe that having Elon as a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders was the best path forward. The board offered him a seat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We announced on Tuesday that Elon would be appointed to the board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance. Elon’s appointment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the board was to become officially effective on the 9th of April, but Elon shared that same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning that he would no longer be joining the board. I believe this is for the best. We have and will always value input from our shareholders,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether they are on our board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input. There will be distractions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged. The decisions we make and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we execute is in our hands and no one else’s. Tune out the noise and stay focused on the work and what we’re building. Tune out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the noise like Elon Musk, you say? Like cheesy peasy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we have any comments on this? You want me to just told
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the final stage. The final stage so far, and then I’ll comment on the whole deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Elon Musk is then sued for delayed disclosure of his Twitter stake. Twitter Inc. shareholder sued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Elon Musk alleging the billionaire committed securities fraud by delaying his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disclosure of his stake in the social media company. In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey District of New York on Tuesday, Mark Bain Rizella alleges that Mr. Musk didn’t properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disclose his Twitter stake within the required time frame. The suit alleges that the move personally benefited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mr. Musk and could have hurt other shareholders who had sold the stock.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where we are today. By the time you hear this episode, who knows what else would have happened. But this is totally
⏹️ ▶️ John in keeping with Marco’s description of the typical Elon Musk type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first thing you have to understand is the sort of very basic, you know, 12 year
⏹️ ▶️ John old boy misunderstanding of free speech that why aren’t I allowed to do whatever I want on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, that’s, you know, my first amendment rights are being infringed or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is I would hope that everyone listening to this understands the difference between Twitter deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re allowed to post on Twitter and the US government putting you in jail for saying something. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John different things here, but people get it into their head, the idea that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that I should be able to say whatever I want on Twitter and that if Twitter does
⏹️ ▶️ John anything to impair my personal ability to say what I want to say, that’s infringing my rights
⏹️ ▶️ John and a great injustice. As opposed to, you know, what it actually is, which is a private company deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re allowed to do on their platform that you don’t even pay to be on. And even if you did pay to be on, it wouldn’t matter. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a ridiculous, nonsensical thing that basically amounts to a temper tantrum. Elon Musk has been on Twitter for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. He says all sorts of things. Mostly he commits securities fraud on Twitter by
⏹️ ▶️ John pumping up stocks and then, you know, or maybe not securities fraud, but he does things
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, hyping up Dogecoin. All he’s got to, he’s got so many followers, all he’s got to do is say something
⏹️ ▶️ John to hype it up and people get all excited about it. And so he can drive the price of, you know, cryptocurrencies
⏹️ ▶️ John up and down, depending on what he says, and he can drive the prices of stock up and down, depending on what he
⏹️ ▶️ John says. Sometimes it’s legal, sometimes it’s not. But it is a power that he has as
⏹️ ▶️ John a person with a very big sort of cult following of people who are willing to put their money where his mouth is.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just, I mean, there’s nothing inherently wrong with having that power, except that what he does with
⏹️ ▶️ John it is jerk people around and enrich himself to no good sort of end that
⏹️ ▶️ John benefits the world or anyone other than him for the most part. Despite his reputation, it’s like, oh he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John saving the world with electric cars like his at his attitude and ideas about how to quote-unquote save the world are
⏹️ ▶️ John so terrible and so stupid that the good he does is very often eclipsed by the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John he is also doing at the same time. So that’s like why is he doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and why why is he buy a bunch of stuff well when you’re you know argue I don’t know if it’s the what stats are but someone said
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s the richest person in the world or close to the richest person in the world when you’re annoyed that Twitter is
⏹️ ▶️ John not letting you say which one which by the way I don’t know why he’s annoyed he’s not like he’s getting banned from Twitter or Twitter stopping him from saying stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like whatever, he’s cranky about something. Maybe he’s cranky that people respond to him and say mean things and he’s not allowed to like ban
⏹️ ▶️ John them from Twitter. But what you can do is you can just, you know, become the biggest shareholder in Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, you can make a bunch of money at the same time is if you don’t tell people you’re buying stock and you just say a bunch of stuff about Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the stock price goes up after you Oh, and by the way, I’m a big shareholder now. So you made me a lot of money, whatever. He’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares. He has so much money doesn’t even matter. He’s doing stupid stuff, right? And then him
⏹️ ▶️ John going on the board was so clearly a move by the Twitter CEO to try to put some controls
⏹️ ▶️ John on him, which honestly, it’s a pretty optimistic that they’re thinking this is gonna have any effect because he doesn’t care about laws
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. But if you’re on the board of a company, usually there’s some rules that you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it mentioned in this little thing when he didn’t join the board that you that you’re you’re obliged to act in the best interest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the company. And Elon Musk would never do that. Like he
⏹️ ▶️ John He doesn’t, he would never want to be constrained to act in the best interest of Twitter. He doesn’t give a damn about Twitter. He
⏹️ ▶️ John gives a damn about himself. So he would never join the board under the constraint that he has to do
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s best for the company. He wants to do whatever the heck he wants. So I didn’t understand why he was ever gonna be on the board
⏹️ ▶️ John and now apparently he isn’t because either he never had an intention to be on the board or he found out
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone told him, you know, if you’re on the board in theory, you’re supposed to do things that are in the best interest of the company. He’s like, oh, well, screw that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna do that. I have complete control of Twitter now anyway because the stock price went up a bunch when
⏹️ ▶️ John he bought all those shares. Everybody who’s a shareholder and the whole board on Twitter is like, great, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all richer now. But all he’s gotta do is tweet, Twitter sucks, nevermind, I’m out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And their price will go down, right? And so now everyone is addicted to the price hike, the artificial price hike that he has
⏹️ ▶️ John gained by just saying, hey, Twitter’s great. They’re sort of beholden to him.
⏹️ ▶️ John If he gets angry, he just has to tweet something that makes their stock price go down. And you could say
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, they’re all millionaires anyway. Do they really care their stock price goes down? I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John there is actually a set of people who are already very, very rich, but nonetheless
⏹️ ▶️ John care a lot about whether the stock price of the company that they are in the process of running goes up or down. And some
⏹️ ▶️ John people that’s, you know, kind of part of their job, like as the CEO, you’re not going to be the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John for long if everything you do causes stock price to go down, depending on how the governance structure is set up
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are a lot of shareholders. They’re going to say, Hey, I have a bunch of stock in your company. I’m losing a bunch of money or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get it. But the power that he has, which is based on nothing more than his, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say nothing more than his popularity, which is, you know, nothing to sneeze at or whatever. He’s got that power,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether he’s on the board or not. So he declined to be on the board. And now he’s being sued. And it’s like, anytime I see something
⏹️ ▶️ John like this happening, I lose so much faith in the legal system. I’m glad that
⏹️ ▶️ John some shareholder, presumably some rich shareholder has taken it upon themselves to contribute some of their millions of dollars to
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, track this down. But like, if we, if you know anything about the United States,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is very rare that a rich person faces consequences for anything ever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Almost no matter what they do, no matter what crimes they commit, it is so rare to see
⏹️ ▶️ John a someone actually face consequences for, you know, breaking
⏹️ ▶️ John some law having to do with security or finance or, you know, it’s just, it used to be that at
⏹️ ▶️ John the very least, like the big rich people would designate some smaller rich person as a fall guy, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sort of, uh, I don’t want to give spoilers for a TV show that Marco hasn’t seen, but sort of like a popular TV show where it’s assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to find someone who’s going to take the fall, uh, so that the, you know, more important,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, quote unquote, white collar criminals can get away with it. But nowadays it’s like, we don’t even need to do that. We can just, we’ll, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, our banks are too big to fail and we can pay for the best lawyers and we’ll just wait
⏹️ ▶️ John this out and eventually some criminal will be president of the United States and they’ll dismiss all charges and we’ll all be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I don’t have any faith that this lawsuit will go any more, go anywhere, and I don’t have any faith that
⏹️ ▶️ John anything can constrain what he does because in the end he’s got a lot of money and he’s got a bad attitude and he’s got bad ideas about
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and he is just like, like a, I don’t know, like a, like a sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of spiky billiard ball just bouncing around in the United States just
⏹️ ▶️ John destroying everything in his path, making a mess, generally being a jerk with
⏹️ ▶️ John no rhyme or reason other than to do things that he thinks are cool, make
⏹️ ▶️ John himself more money, amass more power. And I kind of feel bad for Twitter because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck with this guy who has like taken an interest in them and decided to use their platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now by merely, you know, tweeting and spending
⏹️ ▶️ John a few million billion or whatever it is of his own money, he’s the biggest shareholder
⏹️ ▶️ John and the company and they’re all beholden to him because he made the stock price go up
⏹️ ▶️ John and he can also make it go back down and boy this is just not good for Twitter. And why do I care about this? Because I like
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter. I use Twitter every day. I get a lot of value from Twitter. It’s certainly got problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like the changes over the past several years of Twitter have been
⏹️ ▶️ John starting to go in a better direction in terms of content moderation. They still have a long way to go. from
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’ve heard from everyone on the inside, like there are people inside Twitter who want to make things better
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have made some moves in that direction. Elon Musk doesn’t care about any of that. To the extent that
⏹️ ▶️ John he has any influence and control over Twitter, all of his influence is going to be to counteract all the things that I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to happen on Twitter. And disclosure, I’m not a Twitter shareholder. I have no stock. I don’t know anybody at Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this is just me as a user of their product that I enjoy. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John him to be involved in any way. And related to that, I’ll put this link in the show notes to this New Yorker
⏹️ ▶️ John story. It’s called Paul Singer, Doomsday Investor.
⏹️ ▶️ John have some personal experience with what they call activist investors. That’s when someone
⏹️ ▶️ John invests a lot of money in your company with the goal of changing what your company is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically the attitude is like, I see your company, whoever’s running it now is doing a crap job.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like if I could tell everybody what to do, your company would become a lot more valuable. So I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John invest a whole bunch of money and so I will own some large percentage of your stock, which will give me some
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of power because once I own a large percentage of your stock, if I suddenly sell it all, your stock price will go down
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone who owns stock is gonna lose a lot of money if I do that. So once I do that, you better start listening to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’m an activist investor. I’m gonna come in and I’m gonna say, look, here’s how you can make money. Those people tend not to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a good reputation. This particular story is about one guy who’s got a really bad reputation, the Paul Singer guy,
⏹️ ▶️ John because he comes into your company and he says, you could be making more money. And here’s how you do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Lay off all these people, cut everything to the bone, remove all R&D, squeeze
⏹️ ▶️ John every last penny out of this thing, stock price goes up, I sell, I get out and your company is left as a dead husk, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a business thing to do private equity that you know, that whole angle is like, you could be making more money
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ran your company with less regard for human life, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s usually true, you usually can find a way to make profits go up, increase the stock
⏹️ ▶️ John price and the people who come in and do that as activist investors, and then they sell all their stuff and they make a big profit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the company’s dead after that. There’s so many stories about that. So many companies that were perfectly fine. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John one the one that hit me close to home for silly nostalgic reason is Toys R Us, which is a toy store that I grew up with.
⏹️ ▶️ John Private equity came into that one said you could be making a lot more money Toys R Us and they just wrung every cent out of that company
⏹️ ▶️ John and then left it and then just crumbled to dust after they made their money. It’s it’s not quite the same thing things activist investors, the similar
⏹️ ▶️ John type of attitude of like, I’ve got a lot of money, that money gives me power, I can use that power
⏹️ ▶️ John to make even more money from your company, which I don’t give a damn about. And once I made money, I’m going to leave
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t care what happens to you. And so I hope that doesn’t happen to Twitter. But when I see Elon
⏹️ ▶️ John Musk coming in doing that I have bad flashbacks to activist investors
⏹️ ▶️ John of the type of like Paul Singer and the Toys R Us folks that just gives me bad vibes. I hope it never happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to Twitter. In the end, the best thing that could happen to Twitter is Elon Musk says, Twitter’s filled with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of boat toes. I’m out. Sells all his stock. Twitter stock price goes down. Everyone is sad, but then it rebounds
⏹️ ▶️ John in three years and we can just forget about him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What a troll though. What an absolute troll he is. All right, let’s cheer each other up. Let’s do some Ask ATP.
#askatp: M2 to be A15 or A16?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, the M1 was based on the A14 core, both from late 2020. For the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, it seems like everyone has been assuming the M2 would be based on the A15. Instead, how likely do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it is that the M2 will come out this fall close to the A16 and be based on its core?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at this point, that’s becoming fairly likely. The only reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we all thought the M2 would be based on the A15 is that the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 rumors were supposed to be for products coming out this spring. Namely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe the MacBook Air was supposed to be the first one, according to the rumor mill. And we kind of knew,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it’s unlikely the A16 core would be shipped this spring. They probably are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing them in the fall for the iPhone, and then maybe a little while later for the M2. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s… option wouldn’t surprise me at this point, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do have to wait until like, you know, October for the first m two base product, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s based on the A 15, it will seem old. Even though I mean, I’m sure you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if you look at like, the scale of you know, the number of cores that are in the Mac chips, and you know how they’re configured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what kind of IO and how they’re clocked and everything. Usually the they’re they’re pretty performant, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s based on a quote, you know, old core, you know, look at the M one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco max and ultra compared to, you know, now that we have are that are based on a core that came out, you know, a year and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half ago or whatever. So it’s probably it’ll probably be the A 16 if we actually are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting until fall for for the first one. But you know, we still the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the M series chips get updated over time is still a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unknown. And until Apple has a few years of updates out there on the market for us to, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, extrapolate from and make predictions on. It’s really hard to really say for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that if I were to wage your guess based mostly on my gut, I think it will be the 15.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’ll be the 16. I think, you know, Apple’s still getting their feet under them and in learning to, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, jog and then run. I absolutely think there will come a time that the M whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is based on the equivalent, also brand new a whatever. I don’t think this year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the year. I think it’ll be an A15 this year and probably for the next year or two after. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime around, what are we on? Like the M4 or 5, then I think it will be, you know, happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concurrently with the A series chips. But John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like in addition to having no historical precedent for how they’re going to do this, the supply chain stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely screwing this up. Like it’s already screwing up a lot of the shipping of products that Apple is making because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John COVID related shutdowns of factories in China. And it is possibly we
⏹️ ▶️ John discussed in the past shows like how the iPhone 14 was going to have still have the 15 and only the 14 pro
⏹️ ▶️ John would have the 16. That could also be supply chain related. You know, it’s hard to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John because supply chain stuff is not always about your most, you know, fancy, expensive part. Sometimes it’s just about
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, some little capacitor or resistor or a set of screws or whatever. Like it doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter what the part is. If it’s if it’s getting in the way of you making completed products, it
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of throws a monkey wrench into the whole works. So I think that is also a factor
⏹️ ▶️ John in what are the next M chips to be. The latest rumor is, one of the latest set of
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors, and again, these are still kind of far out, was that the new MacBook Air wouldn’t even have an M2 on it. It would
⏹️ ▶️ John come out either in the fall or even next year, and it would come with an M1. And that tells me that
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the roadmap previously was to try to update the M series chips, may be pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And it’s not great when that happens, but honestly, a redesigned MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air still with an M1 in it is not a terrible machine because it’s not like the MacBook Air, the current MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air with the M1, people are saying, well, by next year, that’s gonna be dog slow. No, it’ll still be great, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if the redesign gives more benefits like longer battery life, because it’s not tapered anymore, or just a new design,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe with a different screen, I think that will still be a viable machine. But clearly, if that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever their plans were about like revising the Mac line to the next iteration of the M chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if those M chips are being delayed, that really messes up their plans. Cause that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a kind of an important component. And how do you even characterize like an
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade? Like, oh, we’ve made all these computers with M1 based chips. Now we’re gonna make them with M2 based
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. But what if the M2 isn’t available? Do you not revise the computers at all? Or do you
⏹️ ▶️ John like for the ones with the form factor revision, like the MacBook Air, rumored to have to be changed the entire case structure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you still launch that, but just with the different insides in it? Or do you just delay it?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think if things keep getting delayed, if like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John delayed into next year, it may be time for that to be a 16 base. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s, if that wasn’t originally their plan, which it seems like it probably wasn’t, it’s not like they can
⏹️ ▶️ John turn that around and say, oh, nevermind, even though we totally plan to make all these M2 things based on the A15 cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so late now that the A16 has been out for six months, so we should make them A16 based. Like, well, you can’t do that. It’s years lead
⏹️ ▶️ John time you need to make in a Mac-based chip with A16-based cores, and that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John how we’re doing things. So it’s so hard to predict, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John still, no matter how late it is, I think it’ll still probably be A15 based, unless the plan
⏹️ ▶️ John from day one was for it to be A16 based, like, because again, we don’t know what their plan was. If the plan was M1’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be A14, then we’re gonna skip the A15 and it’s gonna be A16, that will still be the plan and they’ll do that. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John the plan was for the 15, it’s still for the 15. You can’t change that now. And even if it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out next year, it’s still gonna be A15 based M2, if that was the plan from the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because the lead times in these things are so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside, I’ve been hearing about the issues in China with regard to COVID and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey factories being shut down and whatnot. If I were to replace my exact setup right now, So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my 14-inch MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at my MacBook Pro and my studio display. My MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro will come in at the local Apple store on Thursday, June 16th. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after, what is that, like a week and a half after WWDC or a week after WWDC. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio display comes in Monday, June 27th. So by the end of June, I can have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my setup back if I were to order right now. That is not desirable at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a lot of the, there was a bunch of tweets about this and about how many different manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has making various products. And I think what I saw was that the MacBook Pros are only made by one manufacturer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if they get shut down, like that’s it. There’s, you know, you have to wait for them to start back up again. Whereas some
⏹️ ▶️ John other products are made by multiple. I think actually Apple is, speaking of multiple manufacturers, I think they’re actually making some of
⏹️ ▶️ John their iPhones in India now. And if those, so if even if the ones in China that are making that get shut down, at least you get some
⏹️ ▶️ John supply. But yeah, the MacBook Pros, I think it’s just one manufacturer. and if they get stopped,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just have to wait.
#askatp: Game-streaming setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Uncle Apple, oh, by the way, that was Darren Kelkoff. I don’t think I mentioned that. Uncle Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, can Marco describe his setup for streaming for Team Armand? If I remember correctly, you said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you each play on gaming laptops and are streaming from an M1 MacBook Pro. How are you getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six video feeds onto one stream? Maybe Elgato capture cards and OBS?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in short, yes. That is exactly what I’m doing. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’ve, have I talked about it before?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember. did very briefly and with a little bit of hand waving going on because we weren’t trying to get into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the weeds at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah so what I have so yeah we have three gaming PCs being captured over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDMI each one runs into an Elgato HD 60s plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is one of these little you know gamer capture devices and those those all I put to USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a mostly into a CalDigit TS 3 plus Thunderbolt dock because it has a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of USB ports, some C some a I also each computer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted the output of the computer’s webcam to be included, like using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the using the built in one I didn’t initially know of a way to do that. And so we just got some cheap Logitech webcams.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The C whatever Logitech webcam is like 50 bucks that everyone recommends. We got a few of those, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, one on top of each computer and then those are also wired via USB into the TS3 Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of that then runs over Thunderbolt into the MacBook Pro. And yes, OBS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is indeed the software running all of this. That being said, this setup is finicky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and unreliable. And I am not super happy with it. And I’m looking to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially maybe change some things up about it if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to keep doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this longer. We actually just had like a little bit of a family meeting the other night at dinner and we’re like, alright. is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaking out about the capture. It’s one of the Elgato’s I believe is flaking out. And I’m like, all right, do we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a family, are we, are we happy doing the streaming? Are we going to keep doing more of it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if we’re going to keep doing more of it, I might want to get more reliable hardware to capture it. But if we’re, you know, if we’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco petering out and we’re almost done with it, maybe we’ll just, you know, keep what we have and, you know, use it till we get bored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and move on to something else. And the family decided we’re gonna keep doing it for a while. So I learned in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the intervening Okay, so first of all, just quick quick aside, the parts that are unreliable seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be those Elgato HD60S plus capture dongles. You know, when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumer grade hardware, you know, a lot of times when people look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the cost of pro AV hardware, which is pro hardware in general, whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro hardware oftentimes is significantly more expensive than consumer grade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware that allegedly does quote the same thing. Now in practice, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not the same thing. Usually the pro hardware has additional features or needs that cater more to pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of what you pay for with pro hardware is it’s just more reliable usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, not always, there are exceptions, but usually it is significantly more reliable or it works better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in more circumstances, or it has more tolerances for so that things are less likely to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to break after a year or whatever. And so that’s the kind of thing you pay for pro hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what I’m capturing with here, Elgato is a fine company, the hardware, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time, but it’s really consumer grade. Like most consumer grade hardware, it seems to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just barely. And so like, I already had to solve one problem. I wasn’t sure if it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bandwidth issue with the CalDigit TS3 Plus hub, or what, but I already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had like one of them for whatever reason, would just never work reliably through the hub. So I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then use up one of my precious onboard laptop USB C ports. So that’s two ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right there. My third port is taken up by, this is actually kind of a happy story,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out if you want a monitor, like a portable monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 12 to 15 inch range, there’s a million of them out there. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really inexpensive. They’re like 200 bucks or less. What we needed, the way we’re kind of set up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like an L shape around this giant kitchen island, I can see the laptop, but Tiff and Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t. And so I wanted a monitor that I could just put in front of them so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see the stream output because otherwise they can’t even see themselves in the webcams. So by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them seeing this, they’re able to see all three of our screens and themselves in the webcam to keep themselves in frame,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So I needed a screen. I first use an iPad for that using whatever the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen mirroring thing is called. And that was both a pain to set up because every time, like literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single time we were streaming, I had to like go into display settings, click on add, add the display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and wait for it to turn on. And that would work about 90% of the time. And that’s not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so eventually I’m like, you know, this is this is stupid. So I just got this external display.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First got one that was some no name from Amazon and it was garbage. It kept flickering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eventually returned that one and got one from Lenovo. It’s this wonderful like little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folding Lenovo like I think it’s about 14 inches and it was again like 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks and it’s it’s pretty good you know none of these are good retina or anything but for the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like an external monitor for showing something to somebody it’s fine so the Lenovo one’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s that’s our monitor but anyway so that’s that’s port number three that’s all my ports right so I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one going one one of my USB C is going to the Thunderbolt hub but with most of the stuff on it one USB C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going directly to the third Elgato capture thing because it won’t work through the hub for who knows why. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the third USB-C goes into this monitor and that’s it. Now I’m full. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this setup I am not super happy with as I mentioned because it is still not 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable. It works most of the time but it’s still not 100% reliable. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking into alternatives. I haven’t had time to do many of them yet. One thing that I didn’t know about when I first set this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up but I’m now experimenting with is this protocol called NDI. And this is a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically a network based video transmitting protocol. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can you can set up NDI on the PCs and on the Mac, this free package called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NDI tools that basically allows you to send and receive video between computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the network. And it can do things like capture the screen as one of the video sources, and then send that over the network, it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture the PC’s local webcam, it’s built into their screen lids and send that over the network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m trying to see if I can use NDI to potentially replace some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or all of this capture setup. Oh, the audio is a whole separate thing. That’s all running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a mix pre with auto mixing and we all have headsets. It’s a whole thing. That’s my thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, but anyway, the video is the real challenging part here. So anyway, I’m looking into using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NDI for some of it. I also have considered other options. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now I’m capturing three HDMI streams, you know, at their right, you know, at whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, you know, 1080 p probably, and then shrinking those down for display and OBS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you could also there exist these boxes that are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDMI multiplexer boxes that you know, like you what you do for like a security camera kind of viewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like, if you want to convert four inputs into a two by two grid on the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a piece hardware that will do that for you for like a hundred bucks. So one thing I could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is put one of those have all the computers going into that and then only be capturing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from one Elgato capture dongle thing and that would probably make it more reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s other challenges with those but they’re minor so I could probably get around that. That’s one option. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option is I could upgrade to better capture gear that is made to capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple streams at once, and that is somewhat good. And that would probably involve some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of PCI Express card in a Thunderbolt enclosure. That’s its own can of worms that I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily tackle if I don’t need to, but that’s an option as well. So these are things I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. I love the idea of having more pro grade hardware to do this. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro grade audio hardware is one thing pro grade video hardware is a different ballgame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro grade video hardware is usually not is, you know, first of all, thousands of dollars, like it’s significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive, and it’s usually significantly bigger, and possibly requires like super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird software. And so that’s kind of a whole can of worms I would hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not need to get into. But we’ll see. I mean, the other thing I could do is just, you know, buy like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra Elgato HD capture cards, and just when one gets flaky, just swap it out. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would hate that option. For like, moral reasons. I don’t like like the idea of buying more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this thing that is flaky is not I mean, I guess that’s my plan for my home pods, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love that solution. So we’ll see. I’m hoping I can maybe I can alleviate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the enough of the bottlenecks with NDI that maybe I can I can then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, simplify things a little bit further. So we’ll see. I’ll play with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of surprised on your like, because I watch some video game streamers or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I suppose they’re not doing three people like you are or whatever. But there are people who essentially do this
⏹️ ▶️ John for their living. And I can’t imagine them dealing with flaky setups. You know, I mean, like, especially if you’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this for like a decade, and as your main career, like, inevitably, those people must eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John find a solution that is actually reliable, because like, you know, they’re streaming for eight hours a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just they’re not gonna tolerate dealing with that. And like, So do all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them have big tower PCs with internal video capture cards? Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe their situation is just so much simpler than yours because they’re just one person who is capturing
⏹️ ▶️ John and streaming themselves and they’re not capturing and streaming three people but they do multi-stream stuff with other
⏹️ ▶️ John people sometimes. So I do wonder what the state of the art is there. I know Elgato is a name I hear
⏹️ ▶️ John come up a lot and maybe does Elgato make an internal card? Maybe that’s why I hear it as well, like a capture card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I think I’d be going to like Blackmagic or something, like one of the pro companies like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have to think, it may be Blackmagic, but I have to think though that despite the existence
⏹️ ▶️ John of extremely wealthy and extremely knowledgeable streamers, there’s this sort of whole
⏹️ ▶️ John middle ground of streamers who do not have billions of dollars and nevertheless stream
⏹️ ▶️ John hours and hours every single day. So there must be some kind of consumer grade solution that is eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable. So I have some faith that you can in some way solve this without
⏹️ ▶️ John moving to quote unquote pro equipment because I just don’t think that streamers are doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of them are doing that, but they just don’t have the money to write like, you know, you don’t make that much money on Twitch streaming unless you’re one of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John big top 100 people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think though you’re right, like part of part of it is that most people don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three people in one room. And most people probably are not trying to run it off of a Mac. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know, and yeah, that could be part of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you but honestly, though, it’s fine. Like the part of the rooms in the Mac seems to be rock solid reliable. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the OBS runs great on the Mac. It’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not something I’ve heard from people. OBS runs great on the Mac is not a phrase that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it does for me. I mean, cause maybe, you know, keep in mind, like what I’m giving OBS as a task
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually somewhat easy in the sense that it doesn’t have to capture anything on the Mac. Like it’s not capturing the Mac screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like, it’s only taking inputs from USB devices and arranging them into a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video signal and transmitting that. And so maybe I’m giving it an easy problem, but that’s been fine. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the PC streamers, I think a lot of them are, almost all of them I think are just one computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably running the capture on that computer. So it’s a computer capturing its own
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re not doing multiple people most of the time, but I think most of them do have a minimum two computers. And maybe it’s because they’re doing capture
⏹️ ▶️ John on another computer, but often it’s because they have like a computer for doing like video stuff and then they have their gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John PC and they’re not the same machine. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. They want to be able to see OBS running on its own thing and have independent controls. But yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s simpler than… What I’m doing is hard mode here for a home setup. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, because this is effectively in our kitchen, I also don’t want a desktop computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be involved. I don’t want a whole bunch of gear if I don’t have… Less gear here is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the setup. I would love for this to be a little more portable or just take up a little less space and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be less complicated. have fewer, fewer individual parts that can break or flake out. But ultimately, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one of the things where like, if you have one, like auto HD 60s put into a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably works fine most of the time. But once you once you want to have three of them working at the same time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, and then by the way, you have to involve a Thunderbolt hub because you don’t have three USB ports on your computer. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many more complexities there. And it’s one of those things where like, these products were clearly designed and tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly for single use cases, simple use cases. And then when someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me comes in like, Oh, how about I just buy three of them and use them at the same time? Everyone’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t officially support that or, you know, or, you know, using,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, you know, going, going to CalDigit, like, I’m literally filling almost every port on the hub. I think I have one port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, like, I’m you I’m plugged like because I have three I got to capture devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and three webcams and a USB interface for for the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all plugged into one. I guess one is not playing to it because it’s anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot going through these devices. Now these devices are all us officially they all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support this, you know, on on the marketing pages for the college, you see things like with every port full,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they they have all these ports, they probably expect you to use them, right. But it’s one of these things where if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually use the full capacity of some of these things, it doesn’t always work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you think or it doesn’t or it often has some kind of flaw, you know, certain things will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like possible bandwidth limitations. Like I found when I was setting this up, that where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things were plugged in on the Cal digit mattered. Now the Cal digit is actually helpful. It tells you it’s labeled on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports, like it’ll say like five gigabits, and it’ll have like a little bracket showing you like, alright, two ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share five gigabits of bandwidth, right? So it’s actually good. So I’ve I spread out like the high bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture cards, kind of like on their own like sections of the hub, so they would so they wouldn’t all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be on the same one to try to help that problem. But there’s still, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still kind of finicky. And that makes me nervous. And I hate dealing with it when it breaks. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should probably switch to something that is a little bit more pro in some area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what that means and whether I can stomach whatever trade-offs it will require, that’s another story.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it means you get a tower PC to be your capture device and you buy one of those capture cards that goes in PC and you
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything in Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that could be the answer. Maybe. I don’t know. I’d rather that not be the answer, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that is the answer. Who knows? I hope not.
#askatp: Mini-LED to OLED?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Simon Edgsing writes considering the probably huge amounts that Apple is invested in a mini LED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tech Is it really feasible for them to replace it with OLED in laptops and iMacs in the coming years as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rumors seem to suggest? I’m gonna leave this to our display expert. Mr. John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how much Apple is invested in a million LED tech is Apple wasn’t at the forefront of that and it’s not like They invented
⏹️ ▶️ John the technology very often Apple will pay for some of the R&D or pay for the factories or pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the tooling or pay someone to develop a product to their specifications like they will contribute money towards this
⏹️ ▶️ John for other companies to make tech for them. But I’m not actually sure how much they did that with MiniLED because they
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t really first to market with that. In terms of replacing it with OLEDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem that OLED has now is there are no OLEDs that can match the
⏹️ ▶️ John maximum brightness of even the laptop, you know, the 1600 nits that you get out of the XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get out of the MacBook Pro pro screens, that OLEDs, no OLED can reach
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Even on a 10% window, OLEDs can’t reach that. They just can’t get that bright. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John with like unlimited power plugged into the wall. I’m not even sure how it would be for OLEDs in a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John type scenario. So right now it’s not feasible, but in the coming years,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s kind of a, it’s a race and screen technologies. QD OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John has the potential to be brighter than the current crop of OLEDs. Again, I don’t know how well that would work in
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop, but still no existing QD OLEDs can get up to 1600 nits. And it’s not like 1600 nits is the limit. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there is more room, like some video sources these
⏹️ ▶️ John days are mastered to 4000 nits. There’s nothing that you can buy in a consumer level that can display 4000 nits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything is sort of display mapped down to, not display mapped, what is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John Something starts to be dynamic, tone map, there we go. It’s tone mapped down to scale
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the right thing or whatever, The point is 1600 nits isn’t the limit. So I think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still some legs in mini LED that OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John may or may not be able to catch up with. It doesn’t mean that OLED is gonna be useful stuff because in scenarios where you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need that kind of brightness, like the Apple Studio Display, for instance, only goes to 600 nits and even then only
⏹️ ▶️ John on a small window. If you do a full screen, I forget what the thing is in the Apple Studio Display, I think it’s maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John like 100 something nits, 200 something. OLED can match that right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John but of course it would be more expensive. But I think there is the possibility to go to OLED in
⏹️ ▶️ John scenarios where you don’t need the super high maximum brightness. And then to
⏹️ ▶️ John go beyond that, we have to find out which technology eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John reaches and surpasses 600 and it’s not mini LED. And by the way, the reason you don’t want mini LED is because of blooming.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is regions of backlight that are much bigger than pixels, whereas OLED lights up individual pixels so
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to worry about, you know, if you have a black star field and you have a white pinprick of a star,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini-LED has to light up an entire one, like one inch by one inch, or one centimeter by one centimeter, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John square of light behind that pinprick of a star. And so the pinprick is really bright, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John around the star, you get a little bit of bleed through what’s supposed to just be black space. Whereas OLED doesn’t have that problem. It
⏹️ ▶️ John will literally only turn on the two or three pixels that make up the star, and the other pixels will be off and not producing
⏹️ ▶️ John any light. So OLED has that ability. So does Micro-LED, where
⏹️ ▶️ John every single little pixel as its own tiny little LED. If that technology eventually becomes feasible in consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John sized displays and also has high brightness, that is another contender.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the next few years, I don’t see OLED sweeping across Apple’s product line, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John considering how conservative Apple has been on screen technology. On the Mac, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John no OLED Macs. And practically speaking, there are really no
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely popular OLED screens. The QD OLED Alienware Dell thing is like the first
⏹️ ▶️ John like pretty darn good OLED based display, even that because of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, the arrangement of sub pixels on it is a little weird. So you probably wouldn’t wanna use
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a computer monitor. It’s good for as a gaming monitor if you’re just playing a game or whatever, but I mean, you use it to show text.
⏹️ ▶️ John At the very least, Windows seems to not understand the little, it’s red, green, and blue sub pixels are in like a little triangle
⏹️ ▶️ John shape and Windows seems to not understand that they’re in a triangle shape. So it tries to treat them like they’re red, green, and blue in vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John stripes like most computer monitors are, and it adds color fringes on everything. Yeah, not a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John for TVs, not a problem for playing games, but probably not the way you want to read text, at least until and unless
⏹️ ▶️ John operating systems can be updated to support it. So I think you probably got a five-year
⏹️ ▶️ John wait to see something fully replacing mini LED on
⏹️ ▶️ John the screens that have 1600 nits Mac brightness or higher.
#askatp: Studio Display or XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, John Yurgashian writes, if the studio display had been released alongside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Pro Display XDR, would John and Marco still have chosen the XDR? This is a great question, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a feeling will have a very boring set of answers, but this is a really good one. So, let’s start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you have bought the Pro Display XDR, or would you have just bought one or multiple studio displays?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have only bought the studio display, and I kind of am happy it ended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the way it did. I am so happy with this massive canvas of screen space that I have with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XDR that even though the price was very hard to swallow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually really enjoy it. And so, but to answer the question, if the studio display had been available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I wanted to buy a monitor, I would never have bought the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would have bought the studio display, no question. And I’m not as happy as Marco as it turned
⏹️ ▶️ John out the way it did. But in hindsight, as I said on past shows, I have really
⏹️ ▶️ John come to appreciate HDR when I do photo and video editing, given that
⏹️ ▶️ John so many of my photos come off of iPhones and all of my video comes off of iPhones and they do use HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John and my monitor can display it. When at the time, if they had come out together, I wouldn’t have known that. I wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John cared about HDR at all. And I would have been like, studio display, no question. Not even close. In hindsight,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still would have made that choice because come on, this thing is so expensive. of it is not worth the
⏹️ ▶️ John extra size. And you only get used to the size once you have one. So if you’ve never actually had
⏹️ ▶️ John an XDR, you don’t have to worry about that. But in hindsight, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be disappointed because I would be like, okay, the studio display was the right choice. It’s the thing I should have gotten.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the two things I would be disappointed about would be, one, it’s not any bigger than the 5K iMac, so it doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big upgrade in terms of screen size. And two, I know that HDR exists. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Pros came out and they had HDR, it would make me feel even worse because I’m like, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John have it. The laptops have it, but my quote unquote big desktop screen doesn’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would make me disappointed, right? So, but the question is, you know, what would you have done if they come out at the same time? You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, studio display, no question. I mean, this, no one should buy the XDR. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too much money. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Sanity, and Linode. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join atvs.fm slash join. Don’t forget that merch discount if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. This is a good time to do it. Thank you everybody and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to. Accidental, check
Sonos Roam
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked to my Sonos Roam when I got it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you? Wait, you have a Sonos Roam? Yeah. You spent $400 on a portable speaker? I did not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I got a 50% discount, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent $200 on a portable speaker that’s waterproof and I bring into the shower with me and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You bring it to the shower?
⏹️ ▶️ John Jesus. Yeah, I’m literally bringing it. It’s waterproof. It’s huge and heavy. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not thinking of the right… Am I thinking of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wrong product? Oh, the Roam. Rome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, I was thinking of the move. Never mind. Yeah, the Rome is much smaller. The room is like a
⏹️ ▶️ John toddler own bar. Yeah, this the same way you feel about the people who took the defrost button off your Tesla thing. I feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who designed the physical interface to the Sonos Rome like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco speaker, it does what it’s supposed to do. And it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it? No software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it doesn’t. Oh, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey these small. It’s the Sonos Rome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you ever had one of those like $50 Bluetooth portables things, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than that because I replaced the one of those $50 Bluetooth ones with this and the realm is way better sound. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just looking at the podcast, so I don’t care. But it’s pretty good. But boy, the physical interface to that thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just do not know what people are thinking. Like the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John drives me the most crazy is the, I mean, I don’t know what you want to call it, but there’s a button, a physical button that
⏹️ ▶️ John functions somewhat as a power button. But as you noted, it’s shaped like a Toblerone. So it’s triangular
⏹️ ▶️ John in cross section, right? and it’s a long, thin button that is on the ridge of one of the triangular
⏹️ ▶️ John edges. So right away, it’s kind of a pain to press. It’s actually kind of hard to press because it’s skinny and you have to press it
⏹️ ▶️ John directly, you know, because if you press it on a little bit of angle, you’re gonna rotate the little triangle in your thing. And why would you care about
⏹️ ▶️ John how hard it is to press? Because to turn it off, you have to hold that button for like 10 seconds. You hold
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it makes one tone, then it makes a second tone, and then it makes a third tone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I accelerated that to be like 3X,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco even without smart speed. I
⏹️ ▶️ John swear, it’s like five seconds between. And if you do not keep holding it between there, oh, you failed
⏹️ ▶️ John the sequence and then it like starts over. And it’s surprising that you have to press it really hard and it can’t wiggle in your
⏹️ ▶️ John hand because if it wiggles a little bit in your hand because it’s triangular, it’s like, for God’s sake people, a power button. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say that when you said you had to unplug your home pod. I’m like, gee, why didn’t you just turn the power on and off? Oh, because there’s no power
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco button on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio display. There’s no power button on the $5,000 XDR. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John nope. the power button. It’s just a crime against humanity. And why do I have to turn off one? I just let it go to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause the thing, the functionality that’s supposed to make it sleep, if you don’t use it, doesn’t work very well. And very
⏹️ ▶️ John often, if you don’t actually turn it all the way off, when you come back to it, the battery will be dead. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t go to sleep like the setting said it was supposed to. And then the buttons on the other end, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’re going to have buttons on the end and they’re going to be rubberized because it’s waterproof. And the buttons are like volume up, volume down, play pause.
⏹️ ▶️ John But instead of having buttons, It is a flat piece of rubber with the tiniest little
⏹️ ▶️ John plus and minus sort of bulging ever so slightly. Like they’re so small, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John head of a pin and the thickness of the rubber that’s poking up is so small, like you can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John them and you can kind of try to feel for them, but both ends of the thing are rubberized. So
⏹️ ▶️ John angry, I just want someone from like Fisher Price or Oxxo to say, Josh Mahegan buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ John a power button and then buttons that you can press to do the things, not the world’s most subtle
⏹️ ▶️ John little like microscopic nano texture designs for to
⏹️ ▶️ John indicate where you might have to press hard down into the rubber thing to make it go you know sound up or
⏹️ ▶️ John sound down or play pause. So I don’t understand how they fumbled it that badly
⏹️ ▶️ John on this type of product. And it’s got a USB-C thing to charge which is fine although even the USB-C one when you put it down
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge it the USB-C plug does not come out of the device horizontally. It either
⏹️ ▶️ John goes vertically out which looks like the harpoon you know mouse or it comes down in an angle so you better hope your connector
⏹️ ▶️ John is not too long otherwise the thing’s gonna be resting on the wire like your kids are using it or something
⏹️ ▶️ John I just I just with the power button every time I’m sit there holding that power button I feel like I’m using one of those like
⏹️ ▶️ John 80s things for like grip strength you’re increasing your grip strength as I wait and listen
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way sometimes it gets angry because it’s doing something else and it doesn’t play the right tones and you have to start over again because you lost the power
⏹️ ▶️ John off game. Every time I do that I just think about computers when they used to have a button You’d flip and it would turn the power