504: Too Much Apple in My Apple
13 Oct 2022Apple adds ads, Casey discovers Sonos, and Marco’s out before we get the check.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: In a move that surprises nobody, Marco lost a bet
- Follow-up:
- On portraits and AI image generation
- Glove boxes open via touchscreens‽
Match contentsetting on the AppleTV (via David Comay)- John says “👍🏻”, with reservations
- Mac window management and Stage Manager
- John’s new iPhone case
- Repairing original HomePods (via Timo Bruck)
- AI image generation and photography
- Apple is turning into Google/Facebook?
- Upgrade+ #427: He Renouned Lederhosen
The segment in question was the Upgrade+ segment of the week, which requires membership. - Ninety-Five Theses
- Dithering, 30 September episode, ~8:40 in
- Paul Haddad
- Sebastiaan de With
- MJ Tsai
- TV ads?
- Upgrade+ #427: He Renouned Lederhosen
#askatp:- When will we get a bezel-less Apple Watch? (via Bryan)
- Why would one want a M1 Max Mac Studio over an equivalent M1 Max MacBook Pro? (via John Enger)
- Why does router range matter? (via Andy Hyde)
- Post-show: Casey has some thoughts about Sonos
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Chapters
- Caved
- AI image follow-up 🖼️
- Touch-screen glovebox release
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Apple TV “Match Content”
- Window-management follow-up
- iPhone-case update
- HomePod repair
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Apple increasing App Store ads
- Sponsor: Memberful
- #askatp: Bezel-less Apple Watch?
- #askatp: Mac Studio vs. MBP
- #askatp: Router range
- Ending theme
- Not a Sponsor: Sonos
Caved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretend like I’m holding a hundred dollar bill. I’m out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re out of what? You’re out of a hundred bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the stupid ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? What brought you over the line? Is it everyone else has one and you don’t? What happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen to you, Marco? Did it just happen to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was running some errands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you found yourself in an Apple store somehow. You have no idea how.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I literally had to kill time and I was in a mall. Mm-hmm. I was getting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toe… What? Is it the hook? What’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco square hole that you can put stuff into on the back of a car? Like, is it the toe hook? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hook. What is that thing called? The hitch, isn’t it? No! The hitch is the ball thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you put into the square hole. What’s the square hole called?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should know this. I understand the question you’re asking and I don’t know the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I was getting a square hole installed on my car And it took a few hours and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey had to- Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were you doing that? What are you putting into that square hole?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, uh, a, um, shackle thing so I can pull or be pulled if I get stuck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are so worried about this- this is huge Casey energy- you are so worried about this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’ve spent inordinate amounts of money to prevent from ever happening and now you’re spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more money! No, actually I negotiated as part of the deal when I bought it. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if he’s really far down the beach and he needs a watch that can survive the rugged conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what happened was while they were installing the hole in my car, I had like a few hours to kill in the area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They gave me a loaner of some terrible, some much worse small thing. I went to the mall because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a couple errands to run and I went to the Apple Store and it was the first time I had seen the Ultra in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I did not think, oh my god, I have to have that. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not think, oh my god, that looks awesome. Then when I tried it on, I I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not think, oh, this fits me great. Because none of those things are actually true, in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, just to very briefly interject, I was in an Apple store doing one of the returns we spoke about a few weeks ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I put an Ultra on my wrist for literally 10 seconds, and I immediately looked down. Maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did tell the story, I don’t know if I did, but I immediately looked down and thought, oh, that’s way too big. Now, Aaron was standing next to me at this point. He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, I think you could pull it off if you wanted. And this is the conversation that I think you would have had a few weeks before that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in saying, if you believe it’s not too big, it’s fine. But, you know, because everyone else will think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine regardless. But I looked down and I was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, not for me. So I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear you. And you and I are both on the teeny tiny wrist committee, right? Because you also have the smaller of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sizes. Yeah, I wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, before the Series 4 redesign, I wore the bigger one, the 42, and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happier with the 40 and 41. Anyway, oh, and by the way, some real-time follow-up, everybody in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chat is pointing out that apparently the square hole that you put in the back of a car to tow things is called the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco receiver, or the tow receiver, or the hitch receiver.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’ll give myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on that. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense. Receiver makes sense because it’s a hole, so it receives whatever square object you’re inserting into there. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m in the Apple Store and I try this thing on just out of curiosity’s sake,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is massive. and I don’t really think it, you know, the look didn’t do anything for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it definitely didn’t fit me. However, I started using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, I’m instantly pushing the action button alongside the crown every single time I push it because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very difficult not to push those at the same time when you’re first getting used to this thing. But what I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly was everything looks and feels extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different compared to other Apple watches because of a number of factors, mainly that the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so large, secondarily because the screen is totally flat and doesn’t have the little curved edges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you know tertiary that there’s just you know the extra button and a little bit different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ergonomics and everything and so it’s such a size difference that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not quite it’s not it isn’t as severe as going from the iPhone to the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s that kind of change where like it’s a bigger enough size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have to kind of rethink how you lay things out, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use the space, what how big things should be, where things should be on the device. Just poking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the OS and the setting screens I realized oh I have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these for my app design. Oh sure you do. Because and and I it didn’t help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like the day before I had seen a screenshot of Overcast running on it and I’d seen it in the simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was, you know, it looked weird, but it was fine. But I saw the screenshot of somebody actually doing it in use. I’m like, oh, that looks bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s, I can’t, I can’t just leave the layout the way it is. I have to actually customize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for the bigger screen because it just looks stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If only there was a simulator you could use to do this sort of work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. But when you’re doing design work on the Apple watch, I know from previous experience, like I’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll, I’ll be coding up something. I’ll do it in the simulator first and then I’ll run on a device. Like, oh, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I thought it would be. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you always have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do so anyway it is so the screen is just so different it’s such a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size it is not just the same thing but a little bit bigger like it’s radically different and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew first of all I do from poking around the OS Apple has a lot more work to do to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the OS work and feel right on this device and the watch face situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is dire I would say on this on this device I’m not a huge fan of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general watch face situation on the Apple Watch as a whole, but on the Ultra in particular, it’s dire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s bad. But all this is to say, I knew instantly as soon as I handled it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I have to do real design work on this thing. And so I ordered one that day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course you did. This surprises nobody. And as much as I’m giving you a hard time, like I do understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re saying. And yes, it is unquestionably, again, as much as I’m pulling your leg, it’s much better to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a physical device to do this sort to work on, but yeah, this is not surprising. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, I guess, or congrats, I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to say in this context. What are
⏹️ ▶️ John you gonna do with it? Like, besides it being a dev thing, do you think you’re gonna end up wearing it at all? You think someone else
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house is gonna wear it? It’s like, is it gonna be like a very small iPad mini for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we have much use for it in the house. Like, all three of us wear the 41 size, so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we have a ton of use for it within the house, but I’m going to wear it for a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I figure out the app design. And because I have to be familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the size to know what feels right. But I don’t like the way this looks on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. It is also long sleeve season starting up now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my sleeve situation is such that they exist and therefore this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not good. Because as soon as you try to tuck this under a sleeve, like, you know, when you have a watch under a sleeve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s always awkward, especially when you have those, like the ribbed sleeves and the bottom of sweatshirts and stuff. You never want a big watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that situation. It’s awkward. And this just makes everything like a thousand times worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John could wear it. Yeah, there you go. The Defender’s already got a watch. Your Tesla’s jealous. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so even though I said I wasn’t buying a watch this fall, I bought a G-Shock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this ridiculous thing, and a refurbished Series 6 for Adam. So
⏹️ ▶️ John here we are. Well, your Prince of Tides G-Shock. Still didn’t get that reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, still didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome, though. I’ve been doing a lot of sand driving. I love that G-Shock. It’s fantastic for that purpose. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing it, and it looks ridiculous, but I’m extremely happy with the actual functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of why I bought it to be this thing in the car. It’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as much as I’m, again, pulling your leg and giving you a hard time, have you found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the truck is sufficient for sand driving? Is this hitch because you’re genuinely worried that you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get stuck, or maybe that you expect to get stuck, or is it just like, you’re trying to do everything in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your power to make sure this is never going to be a problem ever, ever, ever, ever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mostly the latter, because I am not good at asking for help. And the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the idea that I would be one of the newbies who just got a permit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get stuck and I have to call somebody for help, I know many people who would come help me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be mortified, though. I want to avoid that. especially because if those people were not able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come out at that moment or help me, then the other, what you’re supposed to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is call nine one one and explain to the Suffolk County police where you are and the situation you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. And they arranged for a $700 tow truck. Oh, I really don’t want to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for multiple reasons. Like, that’s just sounds awful. So, um, it’s mainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have been told by everybody out here, Everyone gets stuck sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like every single person who’s driven here for years, they all say that. Everyone gets stuck sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so not only do I kind of want to try to prove them wrong, like, hmm, maybe I won’t get stuck, let’s see. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, I want to be able to help other people if I pass somebody who is stuck. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, I have found, I think, since I have gone through the trouble of installing a tow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hole in my car and have all these recovery boards, that’s probably going to mean, kind of like when I bought a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco snowblower and it didn’t snow for two years it’s probably gonna mean I’m never gonna use this stuff and I’d be fine with me I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gladly have made that trade-off to to to have not not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever getting stuck but I also think that hmm how do I put this some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are they get bad information and Long Islanders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really good at it and so I have heard the tips i have heard for driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the sand here oftentimes are very different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this from the tips that i hear from the community of australian sand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving off-roaders and they seem to know what they’re doing a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah i would trust the aussies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like it seems like driving on sand is a big thing down there
⏹️ ▶️ John but their sand is upside down it’s totally different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swirls the opposite direction But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the advice that they all give basically comes down to like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you need really is ground clearance and low tire pressure. That’s the secret to everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco according to them. So I lower my tire down to like, you know, 20, 22 psi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most driving around here. And I know I could go lower if I really had to, if I got stuck. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been great. No one else here lowers their tires that reliably or that far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone’s like driving around on 30 psi like yeah, it’s low. No. It’s it’s for off-roading that really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not very low for my what I understand Even 20 is not that low for off-roading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I understand, but anyway I think just having low tires plus good ground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearance plus a pretty seemingly great all-wheel drive system on the defender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been amazing like I’m able to hop in and out of the deep tracks. No problem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s been glorious It’s so easy. The chances of me actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever getting stuck, I think, might be lower than average, simply because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only do I have a decent vehicle for it, but I think more because I’m actually bringing my tire pressure down, and no one else seems to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. They also tell me things here like, oh yeah, to get out, just accelerate. That’s oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the opposite of what you want to be doing. So yeah, there’s been a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of information passed to me, and some of it’s been very good, but far from all of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you ever do get stuck, just to remind you, you are obligated to take pictures and video
⏹️ ▶️ John of it because that’s going to be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yes. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have plenty of time waiting around for someone to come and save you anyway, so you should just go around the car with the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and show the situation that we need to see it. It needs to be documented.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Honestly, to build on this, I don’t know that I’ve ever FaceTimed with John or Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can tell you right now, if you don’t get a three-way FaceTime going on this at this moment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will never speak to you again. I will quit the show and you’re all fired. I that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey must have this happen. And listeners, I’m sorry. This is a perk of being on the show. You may never get to see this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I want to see it. I want to be there virtually and watch this as it happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it probably won’t, which is too bad. I mean, which is excellent.
AI image follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, none of us are particularly active on Reddit, but there is an ATP subreddit, which I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember what it’s called anymore. I should have thought this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco through. Wait, there is? In my mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. I didn’t create it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco forget what it is actually. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’ve ever been there. I cruise it. Like I’m subscribed. I’m such a newbredditor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, there is an ATP Reddit that I look at. It’s an ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think. I think that’s it. ATP FM. I’m pretty sure that’s right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then somebody set up a robot to like post when shows go up. I had nothing to do with any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, but I’ll occasionally look at it. This is not an officially sanctioned thing. It’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally I’ll take a look. Well, anyways, somebody commented on Reddit after the last episode. This is Yallam on Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who said, this is with regard, I’m sorry, to AI images and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI image creation and stuff like that. And whether or not that’s like, you know, stealing and whether that’s art or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, et cetera, et cetera. So Yalom writes, I’m surprised I made it through the whole AI image generation segment without mentioning the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time technology completely bulldozed the art world. The bread and butter of the industry used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be portraiture. And those painters certainly realized what they were looking at the first time they saw a photograph.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It may be the first time that three of them have ever passed up the opportunity to talk about cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is accurate. But that was a good point. And I don’t remember any of us bringing that up. But yeah, portraits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to imagine. Obviously, we weren’t there. But I got to imagine portraits were a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way back when. And then suddenly photographs were a thing. And sorry, portrait artists, you were basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told tough noogies.
⏹️ ▶️ John They still paint portraits, just like they still have horses. A couple of people wrote in with similar points about photography.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them was noting that after the invention of
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera and spreading throughout the world, you saw art go in different directions,
⏹️ ▶️ John less representative. I’m not sure if the timelines line up exactly, But certainly there was kind of an explosion in non-representative
⏹️ ▶️ John art around about the time that photography started to come into development. So maybe there are some
⏹️ ▶️ John analogs there for AI art versus human-made art, as we’ll call it, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, real-time follow-up, I used one of the AI art generators to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generate an icon for the little tiny app I’m making for the sand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I was wondering what that was about. I didn’t want to ask you publicly in case it was just kept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey close to the vest or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really simple. It’s just like showing the tide info and letting people report where the conditions are. That’s it. I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI generator to generate an icon for this. And not only was I laughing my butt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the whole time, here, I’ll show you. So this was the first one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I generated. I’ll have to put these in the chapter art, which made me laugh. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like a Wrangler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend. It’s a Wrangler driving into a wave.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a good situation. I would not recommend this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why it’s funny, John. That’s the point. It’s humor. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I eventually landed on. So this is a white Jeep. I made it white.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Driving on the edge of the sand in the water. So one tire is in the water, and they’re definitely getting stuck.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love how the AI image generators have, I mean, you don’t have any text, but they do have a big problem with text because they don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John text is. But also, they have a problem with understanding symmetry.
⏹️ ▶️ John So look at the wheel on the Jeep on the top and look at the headlight, the right headlight, or the headlight on the right-hand side of the second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or the mirrors are also wrong. The second one doesn’t have a driver’s side mirror.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it doesn’t know or care that a wheel should be radially symmetrical. And
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with the headlights. They should be two circles that are the same. It’s the side one of the headlight is going to have a big blob in the middle of it. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel is going to be melted. And I feel like this AI art is a little, People talk about machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ John as like ethics laundering or morality laundering. You can say, I didn’t do it. The computer did it. This is kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John artistic laundering where it’s like, yeah, it’s ugly, but I didn’t do it. The computer did it. It’s like, cause I feel like you could
⏹️ ▶️ John draw a better icon than both of these. It would take you longer than the 30 seconds it took to generate these,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they certainly need some help here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But what was great about this was within a couple of minutes, I had gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through 20 or 30 different proposals that the AI had generated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I found what I wanted the icon to basically be conceptually. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now what I can do is take this one I like, the second one here, take this one and then go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an icon designer and say, hey, here’s a concept. Can we make something based on this concept?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it saved, it gave me so many concepts to work with with no effort and no cost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That has tremendous value. And in the meantime now, while I wait to actually arrange that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an actual icon designer, I have a placeholder that I can at least develop the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have this on my screen, not have the Apple crisscross default thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This technology, I think, has a huge amount of use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t involve destroying artists. much more about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a part of the artistic process and you know it doesn’t it might replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some work that is happening but I think ultimately this is just going to be another tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our lineup that artists use as part of their process of you know being
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna keep that Jeep tilted so much? It looks a little too it looks like it’s gonna fall into the ocean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the point that’s why it’s funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the Jeep can absolutely handle that that angle. I guarantee a Jeep can handle
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what your app is going to prevent, right? It’s going to prevent you from not realizing it’s high tide and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anything else
⏹️ ▶️ John in a Jeep that’s tilting over into the ocean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that’s why it’s funny. Like in both cases, it’s like, wow, this something has gone horribly wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is pretty good stuff. All right.
Touch-screen glovebox release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about how awesome it is when you have to use a screen to open your glove box
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what it is that has caused the entire internet to send at least me but probably all three of us
⏹️ ▶️ John links to the Cadillac Lyric Reviews showing that you open the glove box with a touchscreen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco can confirm to me I’m pretty sure that’s been the case on Tesla’s know where the history of Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the model 3 but on the model s there’s a button There’s like three buttons in the whole car. That’s one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Well, anyway the model Tesla did it first, like so many things. And so, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess Cadillac is on their big PR campaign for their EV, but they are not the first
⏹️ ▶️ John car company to open the glove box via the touchscreen. And they’re, you know, in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of the controls inside the Cadillac, is that called the Lyric? L-Y-R-I-C, maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone should look it up. Anyway, as for the controls inside that Cadillac, the Model 3 still
⏹️ ▶️ John is the champ in terms of not having physical controls anywhere. So yeah, Tesla did it first, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ John to everyone sending it. And just to reiterate, no, opening the glove box on a touchscreen is not a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. Put a button or a handle on the glove box, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so an internet friend of mine just sent me his video review of his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand new Model Y. And one of the things he points out, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, one of the things he points out is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have to go into the screen and bloop, bloop, bloop in order to open the glove box, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is bananas. And that’s Tesla for you. Aaron’s car does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a physical latch that you can operate, but it does have a physical button, which I also think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a bit ridiculous, but that’s neither here nor there. And also, since we’re talking about ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, I would just like to point out that whenever I get on my high horse, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all too often, about how dumb Celsius is for ambient air temperature, because it is dumb, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always telling people, oh, you know, if you have to use a decimal point, then I think you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of failed. And every Celsius aficionado, which is the entire world except America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is quick to point out, oh no, we never use decimals, we never use, maybe we’ll use half degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once in a while, maybe, but you never, ever, ever see that. Me, me, me. Well, you know what I’m looking at on this Tesla Model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Y video? This is an Australian, and you know what it says on his screen? 20.0 degrees Celsius. Point zero, people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m telling you. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably goes up in 0.5 increments, right? Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume so. I don’t know, but I would assume so. people, come on.
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Apple TV “Match Content”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, we accidentally glossed over something last week in Ask ATP. David Comay had written
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and I had kind of lumped this in with another question and I think we glossed over it by accident. So David wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given John has a new TV and clearly has a number of input sources connected, what advice beyond his past blog posts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would he suggest in 2022 about settings for color, etc.? Here’s the key. In particular, we have an Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K and are curious about the match content option in the late TV OS and what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best to be set or unset on both ends of the HDMI cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know we talked about this before, but I did wanna actually answer the question since it was part of Ask ATP and we didn’t get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I went off on a tangent about color calibration, but to reiterate, the match content setting, it’s a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John name, but you do want that to be turned on on your Apple TV. What that’s telling your Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is to do a feature that Apple TV didn’t always have. send the content to the television
⏹️ ▶️ John in the format that the program is in. So if you’re watching a movie and the movie
⏹️ ▶️ John is 24 frames per second, you’re telling the Apple TV, send 24 frames per second to the television.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may think, how could it ever do anything different? If the movie is 24 frames per second, of course the Apple TV is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John send 24 frames per second to my television, but it didn’t do that for years and years. For years and years, the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John worked like a little computer, like your Mac does or whatever. It had a fixed refresh rate. Whatever the refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John rate is on, you know, ignoring the, what do they call it on the MacBook Pros? Do they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco call it promotion? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, ignoring promotion. Before the advent of promotion and before the advent of different refresh rates for
⏹️ ▶️ John screens, computers would just pick a refresh rate. Like on your CRTs, you could pick whichever one you wanted. LCDs
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly are 60 Hertz, and it just shows everything at 60 Hertz. And that’s what the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John was like. It was a little computer that had video output running at 60 Hertz all the time. So if you watch a 24
⏹️ ▶️ John frame per second movie, it would output that at 60 Hertz. So it would show, I don’t know if the math,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t do the math off the top of my head, but if the number of frames per second did not, it was not an even multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John of, or couldn’t divide evenly into 60 frames per second, sometimes it would show one frame for longer than the other, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, right? It was the reason the Apple TV wasn’t a good video device for years. Then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John they added this feature called Match Content and that says, we won’t do that anymore. We will send whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the video dictates, we’ll send that to the television. You’re watching a 30 frames per second, television program will send
⏹️ ▶️ John that to the TV if you’re watching 29.97 we’ll send that whatever it is. What is it? And
⏹️ ▶️ John PAL was like 25 frames per second or something. I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s called PAL, not pal.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco PAL, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They have weird things in there. I’ve never had to say it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, but I’ve always assumed it was pal. Just like ours is ints.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think, well, it’s, PAL is not a mispronunciation. It is just a reading of the letters in
⏹️ ▶️ John the abbreviation. I pronounced the letters individually correctly. Anyway, I don’t know which
⏹️ ▶️ John those two things it is, but yeah, they have different frame rates for their television over there. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John it stands for phase alternating line and it’s pronounced pal, totally, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so you want that to be turned on. The downside of that though, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a downside and I’m telling you to turn on even despite this downside is that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you enable that, the Apple TV chooses to run its interface like the little thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John all the little rectangles, it runs its interface at whatever refresh rate decides to run it at.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you play something, it has to switch from whatever it was running the interface at to whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you’re watching is. And they’re probably not going to be the same because I think the interface always runs at like 60 hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John but pretty much nothing you’re going to watch on Apple TV is 60 frames per second. And even if
⏹️ ▶️ John it was 30, it doesn’t just like frame double it up to 60. It switches to 30 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second or 24 frames per second or whatever, which means there’s like this blackout interval when you launch
⏹️ ▶️ John an app or when you start playing something or whatever, depending on how quickly your television
⏹️ ▶️ John setup responds to that change, it can be kind of annoying. Like, instead of having this interface where you just
⏹️ ▶️ John go bloop bloop bloop play and it starts playing, it’s bloop bloop bloop play, black screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe your television pops up an overlay native to the television because it’s like, a lost signal on HDMI 1,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh wait, no, here it is, and then it comes back. That can be annoying. The best
⏹️ ▶️ John way to fix that would be for television manufacturers and streaming box manufacturers to get together
⏹️ ▶️ John to make that switching way way way way faster than it is now. Kind of like how when we got
⏹️ ▶️ John the the R Max, like changing screen resolution or attaching external monitors were suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John a bazillion times faster and we didn’t realize how slow it was before until we saw how fast it could be. We need
⏹️ ▶️ John that moment to happen for televisions. But in the meantime, I’m going to recommend endure the
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid screen blackout thing. Because what you want to see is each frame
⏹️ ▶️ John of the video you’re watching Displayed for an equal amount of time on your television if your television supports and most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the modern ones do Actually running at 24 frames per second or some multiple thereof some even multiple thereof
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re watching a 24 frames per second movie That’s what you want to happen So turn on match content and
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing with the match HDR SDR thing turn that on as well I think it’s two separate settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically what you’re trying to tell the Apple TV is hey Apple TV Look at the video you’re trying to send,
⏹️ ▶️ John find out what the properties of that video is, and then send that to the television.
⏹️ ▶️ John From that point, it’s up to the television to correctly receive that and display it. Some televisions can be annoying about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in particular some receivers, my receiver, can be annoying about this where you have to convince them, Oh, HDMI 1,
⏹️ ▶️ John turn on enhanced HDMI with like, they have these weird words that basically say,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I support 4k? Should I support 120 frames per second? Should I support HDR and they come
⏹️ ▶️ John by default often turned off and so you may be wondering why the apple tv can’t go into Dolby vision mode
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know can’t show something at the right frame rate and you don’t understand why Go to your television and or your receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John and make sure they are set up to Use all the features that you just paid for like it boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind that you pay for this fancy You know television or receiver with all these features and they default to like a really
⏹️ ▶️ John safe sdr Uh non 4k, usually not non 4k, but they default to dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John settings sometimes So that’s what you want in both ends. You want Apple TV to match content in both frame rate and HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John SDR and you want on the television and receiver end to have all the bells and whistles turned on.
Window-management follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about Mac window management and stage manager, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked a lot about Mac window management in the last episode and I wanted to make a point about stage manager that we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about a few times before. I think when we originally covered stage manager, I noted that on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes a lot more sense to me than it does on the iPad and related to Mac window
⏹️ ▶️ John management, even though Ventura is not out yet, I think stage manager will appeal to
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people. in particular people who like the idea of spaces,
⏹️ ▶️ John but need a better visual representation. Because stage manager is kind of like spaces on a
⏹️ ▶️ John single screen, where you’ve got these icons along the side, although you can turn them off if you don’t want them there, that are groups of
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, and you can switch between those groups of windows. And unlike on the iPad, setting aside the
⏹️ ▶️ John stability things, unlike on the iPad, there’s not a lot of weird limitations. You can’t just have, it’s not like, oh, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John only have four windows in each thing, and you can’t position the windows. It just works like regular Mac windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can move them anywhere you want. You can move them, drag them easily between groups because you have like a mouse cursor and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just very sensible. And if this appeals to you, if you think in terms of groups of windows, but
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to think in terms of spaces where you’re swishing from side to side from one set of things to another,
⏹️ ▶️ John try stage manager when it comes out in mature, it may appeal to you. There’s still the weirdness of like, well, what happens when I make a
⏹️ ▶️ John new window? What happens when I un-minimize from the dock? Does it go back to the space it came from or does it un-minimize
⏹️ ▶️ John into the space I’m looking at right now? not space, whatever the hell they’re called in Stage Manager. I have no idea. I’m glad I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to write a review of this because- Clumps? Yeah, what the heck is, what do you call that? What is the nomenclature
⏹️ ▶️ John for a blob of Stage Manager thingies? That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone writing their Ventura review will have to figure this out when they describe it, but try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a nice hybrid of a bunch of different things that we had. Of course, it’s yet another
⏹️ ▶️ John way to manage windows on the Mac as if we didn’t already have enough. But hey, they threw another one in and assuming it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John crash your Mac or do weird buggy stuff, I think a lot of people will find it very appealing. So give it a try.
iPhone-case update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you have a new iPhone case,
⏹️ ▶️ John John? I do, finally. The tyranny of the squeaky clear
⏹️ ▶️ John case is over. The saga. Yeah, I got my
⏹️ ▶️ John first of two black leather bare bottom iPhone cases that I ordered.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the Ryan London one. They won the shipping race that came here first.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was kind of half afraid that when I put it on, it would squeak, because people would get it into my head. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the black DLC coating on the stainless steel. that’s what’s causing the squeaking error, but no, no, it just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a normal phone case. You put it on, does not move, does not squeak, does not creak,
⏹️ ▶️ John fits perfectly. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, the John Syracuse a review.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, it’s the case itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has one little stamping thing on the, on like the lower left when I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at an edge. Uh, but it’s not a place that I really feel the back is entirely unmarked.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s nice. No logos, no anything like that. They did a really good job with the
⏹️ ▶️ John volcano blister mound. I don’t know, uh, thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco around the camera Mesa,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Cause the Apple clear case has just a wall, right? And this has a kind of a gradual
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth thing. And they did a good job of, it’s like, it’s black. So it’s slimming and the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the little mound or taper also minimizes the gargantuan thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have to say, I think I mentioned this when I was talking about the clear case, I was surprised that I was using the wall
⏹️ ▶️ John around the camera mesa to rest my finger on, kind of like a very tiny pop socket
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Now it’s not there anymore. Now it’s a little slanty leather thing and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use it to rest my finger on anymore. I’m sure I’ll get over it, but it’s like, it’s amazing how I formed that habit in only a few short
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks and now I have to change it up. But the good thing is the whole rest of the case is leather and will get grippier
⏹️ ▶️ John over time and is already pretty grippy. It doesn’t do the thing that I want it to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the buttons, I know this. The bull strap case is exactly the same. The buttons are not recessed in a little divot.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are instead poking out of a giant mound. So not only are they not, you know, sunken
⏹️ ▶️ John in, but they’re actually, they start coming out from a lump that’s already there. They feel good, they work
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but they are sticking out more than I wanted. I mean, you can’t have everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John The case itself is also a little bit thicker than I expected. I mean, it’s just plastic wrapped in leather, so it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s thick thick. There’s no other stuff in there. There’s no other additional padding, but it may be the leather is
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker or whatever, but it feels a little bit thicker than my extremely cheap OXR
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 12 Pro case, which is currently on sale for $5.50. And it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John ostensibly leather. But yeah, I’m happy to have a leather case on my phone. I’m getting used to the
⏹️ ▶️ John little mound volcano thing. The thickness does
⏹️ ▶️ John have ramifications. Like, it looks a little bit like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how to describe it. It looks like it’s wrapped in leather. I know, duh, it is wrapped in leather, but it looks like it’s wrapped
⏹️ ▶️ John in leather rather than like being the Apple cases often look like they’re just made of leather
⏹️ ▶️ John this Looks like a case that is wrapped in leather if that makes any sense So it is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker and chunkier But it also feels better and it’s cushier and is definitely nicer than the Olex our case
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of leather quality So I’ll let you know in the bolster app case gets here. I probably won’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John Swap it on if it is not significantly different because I’m perfectly happy with this one the way it is
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m just happy to get that clear case off there. Oh, and the MagSafe ring seems to work fine. So I give the Ryan
⏹️ ▶️ John London case a tentative thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, remind me, do you use MagSafe anywhere? You said you do in your car. Is there anywhere else that you use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe? Like for example, you know, the battery pack, which is, as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussed many times, hilariously overpriced, but actually quite nice. Do you use that or MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging or anything like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have a MagSafe puck on my nightstand, but I don’t put my phone on it, I put my AirPods on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. Because I’m just so used to plugging in my phone. We do have the little Apple battery
⏹️ ▶️ John pack thing, but my wife uses that, I don’t use it. And like I said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have the MagSafe charger in my car, I was starting to feel bad for my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I felt like I was abusing the battery because it would never go down below 95% during the course of the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John day. And I feel like I should, I’m intentionally not charging my phone times when
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to. Like when I’m making dinner, I would listen to podcasts while I’m making dinner or whatever, and I would plug in my phone. My phone
⏹️ ▶️ John would be in the other room, plugged in, and I’d just have my AirPods in, right? Bluetooth range is fine. And I would plug it in so it would charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m intentionally not doing that because I want my phone to go below 50%. Because I want, it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John for the battery for it to go below 50%. So I don’t use the battery pack. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use any other MagSafe charging. It’s just the cars, because now we have the little MagSafe mounts in both cars, so no matter which car I’m driving,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just slap it on there, and they both charge while we’re driving. So that’s it for me and MagSafe. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another thing I’m interested in seeing if I’m gonna get like a circle worn into the back of the phone. Cause obviously with the clear plastic one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really, it’s already got a circle. You can see anyway, and it’s pretty durable. But with leather, I imagine I will slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John wear in kind of a circle from a slapping it on the thing. but we’ll see.
HomePod repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we should briefly mention, Marco, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need a repair on one of your army of original HomePods, listener Timo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bruck wrote in, since you mentioned original HomePod failures on the show recently, I wanted to let you know about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick’s Fix, who will fix them for $60 plus shipping. If you want to watch, he live streams the repair on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For my HomePod, the issue was a shorted diode, but he lists other common failures on his website. And if you click
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through to look at this, oh, there’s a lot of common failures. There’s a lot of options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, which is kind of sad. But anyways, Timo writes, if you want to do it yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s got a tutorial on YouTube, which is like 30, 40 minutes long or something like that, but we’ll link both of these in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The common issues list, man, it’s something else.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s weird. The thing that’s weird is like, it’s not as if Apple doesn’t have a lot of experience building electronics,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like you would expect something like this if Apple made, say, a car. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John experience making it, but they make like literal millions of electronic devices. And for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John this stupid big HomePod that apparently didn’t sell very well. So how many of them they even made? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a complicated device. It’s not expected to go underwater. People don’t put it in their backpacks and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t survive more than like five years without what you would think would be like rookie mistake things of
⏹️ ▶️ John diodes burning out or amplifiers being driven to it. Whatever these problems are, they seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like problems that Apple in particular should not be making with a product. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t quite understand how it happened. I mean, maybe the type of things that happen all the time and they just fix them in revision two and revision
⏹️ ▶️ John three and just because there was no revision two or three, they never got fixed, but it’s really an anomaly in the history
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple stuff. I can’t remember any other device they’ve made that has sort of such a seemingly low
⏹️ ▶️ John degree of difficulty in terms of electronics, like the basic electronics stuff. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not super high wattage CPU, it’s not super fast, it’s not cutting edge. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it sits on a counter in an air conditioned space. It doesn’t go out into the world, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not an Apple watch, it doesn’t go into backpacks, and they just can’t stay alive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, we heard, back when the HomePod was being developed, we heard that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a whole bunch of changes, and the project kept getting restarted, or changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, or refocused, and restaffed, and all these other, it seemed like the HomePod project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a mess, take it out the door. It makes me so sad, because again, it’s a great product in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ways, not in all ways, but it’s a great product in many ways, And yeah, it does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really unfortunate that there’s so many actual physical flaws with its design. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, my bigger surprise, this came across my radar last time we talked about them, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months ago. My biggest surprise is that there is anybody out there who actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loves HomePods enough to do these repairs. And there’s people out there willing to go have these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. That was a happy surprise to learn about. But, unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my problems with the HomePods, I don’t think fit into any of these categories of like the common,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, physical failures. I suspect mine are just like both software related
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also them just kind of generally flaking out, which is hard to pin down.
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Apple increasing App Store ads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are hearing a lot of rumblings these days, on and off, but this is flared up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again recently, about how Apple is really cranking up their interest in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing advertising all over the place. And most recently, this has come up with regards to TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’ll get there in a minute. But over the summer, there was a post on 9to5Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how the App Store will be adding more search ads. reading from this post,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new advertising placements in the App Store will allow developers to place ads outside of the Search tab and search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey results. First and foremost, there’s a new advertising slot coming to the Today home page of the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple notes that the rest of the Today tab will remain focused on curation and discovery. The ad spot will be clearly marked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an ad using the same blue banner and background as search ads. The second new advertising placement is coming directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to product pages themselves. This means that developers will now be able to place ads on the product pages for other apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This spot is located at the very bottom of the product page beneath the banner section that shows the other apps by that developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Developers won’t be able to target a specific application when bidding for product page ad placement. For instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter wouldn’t be able to target Tweetbot specifically. The ads, however, would be relevant for each of the product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pages. This means you could and probably will see ads for direct competitors on app pages. I…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. This… Oh, I have so many thoughts about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, I have bought a lot of search ads over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last, what has been about three or four years they’ve existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Whatever it’s been, I mean, I have bought a lot of them. I have spent a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disgusting amount of money on search ads, and it’s for the simple fact that all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-hanging fruit of easy to get people, well, I got them already. So now I have to get there harder to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people if I want my business to maintain and grow its user base. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started buying search ads when they came out, and I’ve at various times paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable amounts, and various times when I wasn’t paying attention, paid unreasonable amounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a number of, I think I have a number of takeaways overall. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I unfortunately see search ads as a necessary thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in today’s app store environment. Like if you want people to find your app, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanna grow your user base, even for free apps, you gotta do search ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whatever Apple says about their, the value of the App Store in terms of discoverability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are providing, that was more true in the very distant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past. Recently, the App Store is just a giant search engine, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanna rank highly, you have to play games. And those games range from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just being good, which is, that helps, but also you gotta play games like buying search ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or keyword spamming or doing unscrupulous things that I don’t and won’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I view a lot of this stuff as the necessary evil that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. A lot of this is within Apple’s control to make better though, and they just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The product page thing that you just mentioned, Casey, this is the new thing that there’s, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been adding new ad units over the last few months. They first, a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, maybe six months ago now, they added a unit where if you go to the search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box, before you even type anything in, there’s an ad unit that shows right below it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple tries to use their ranking system, or intelligence, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they call it, to appropriately place personalized ads in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that spot. So I thought, well, let me try it. So I created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a campaign to use that spot. I gave it, I forget what, maybe a few hundred dollars, you know, just to try it out, to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, all right, what can I get for this? It burned through the money so comically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast, and I got almost no installs from it. It was terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco targeted. Whatever they were doing to target that, and they gave you very little control over it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was awful. It was just setting money on fire. So that was fun, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the regular search ads that I’ve been using for years, the relevance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithms are still comically bad. And you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust developers to know that Apple’s app store relevance algorithms are terrible. Just search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any keyword in the app store and you’ll see for yourself that half the results
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really poorly matched to that keyword, that the rankings of things that you think should be higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not, and they’re beaten out by apps that kind of, you know, play the scam system better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, see for yourself, you’ll see like, the App Store search and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevance and ranking algorithms are still extremely like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web 1.0 rudimentary, very simplistic, not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned any lessons from the web, basically. You know, it’s exactly, it’s like, you know, it’s like searching,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Yahoo in 1997. Like it’s that level of sophistication. Like, you know, when Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came around and like made everything better with page rank and all these like fraud detection algorithms and they like stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using like keyword stuffing as a thing, Apple seems to have learned none of those lessons. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store search and relevance algorithms are really rudimentary. It’s like comp sci 101.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve written search engines that are better than the App Store search engine. And that’s not saying much because it’s never been my full-time job. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ranking algorithms are terrible. When they do things like show something on the product page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can’t buy a certain product page specifically. You can just say, put my app on relevant product pages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What that tells me is, that’s also gonna probably be setting money on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I going to try it? Of course. Because that’s what we have to do as developers. Sure, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try it. I’ll probably set a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars on fire just trying that out. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the business. You try buying ads. I have burned more money on less effective ads before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m going to try it. But I have little hope for it. And it seems like what Apple is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just gradually increasing the ad load in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places around the app store and the iPhone. And it’s not hard to see why they’re doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The heavily growing part of the company, when the hardware seems to be mostly, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, kind of mature slash stagnant, the growing parts of the company largely are quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. Services is a wonderful euphemism for what’s actually going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, what services seems to be largely comprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, composed of? I always get those wrong, is App Store revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a huge chunk of it. App Store revenue is itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge chunk of the 30% cut and everything, but also search ads. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a massive business. This is, Facebook has made a ton of money in app install ads over the years. Twitter has made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some money, whatever they were capable of figuring out through all their crappy leadership with app install ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App install ads are a really big deal, and they make a ton of money for whoever’s doing them, and Apple has put themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the position to make the most money doing it while also kneecapping everybody else who was doing it, so yay, good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple. So what this means is that app install ads, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge deal, but Apple has huge incentives to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep tightening the screws on the App Store, to not give up a dime that actually matters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to not only not lighten up on the fees and stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep adding more ways in which we as developers need to be paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them more money, because that’s a huge growth area of their business when they’re running out of huge growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas in their business. So this is only going to continue. There is no doubt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my mind, this is gonna keep happening, They’re gonna keep adding more and more ads around the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more and more ads specifically around the app store. Whether it’s in product pages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows? Maybe when you launch an app, they’ll put up a little sheet sometime saying, hey, maybe you wanna try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XYZ Tweetbot instead? They’re gonna keep doing this crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is the business they are now in. Apple is now an ad company and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a ton of money in a very important growth area via extraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from app developers. So that’s what this is. I hate that this is what it’s become. However, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality of the business. This is what it has become. And they’re gonna keep making really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy ad units that have really crappy search relevance algorithms. And I’m gonna keep spending a whole bunch of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them because I have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you really feel? You know, I recently read after Steve, the, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it, Trip Minkle? I forget the guy’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco name. It was a great name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the book I had mixed feelings about. I really encourage you, if you are an Upgrade Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey member, I’m pretty sure that it was discussed on the October 3 episode in the Upgrade Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segment. And I think I landed between Mike and Jason. Jason seemed to really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dislike it, and Mike seemed to really like it. And I was kind of in the middle. But one of the thesises,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thesis, thesai, of the book was. Thesos. Thesos. the thesis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the book was that all Tim Cook cares about is money and business-y
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things and he ruins everything. And I think that that’s not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate, but if you are to take it as accurate, I think this is one of those ways where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple needs to show growth, like you were saying, Marco, and it seems that this is an easy way for them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get growth without putting a whole heck of a lot of effort in. And from a business perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this makes a ton of sense. And I think it’s smart from a user perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s super gross and I don’t like it at all because in a, in a world where,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, so much of our lives are inundated by ads, including this very program, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t happen to be an ATP, a member, by the way, ATP FM slash joined, uh, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you know, we are sponsored this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by ATP membership.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. No, I mean, obviously we try, genuinely, we try to do our best to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we only present ads that we think will be genuinely relevant to the people that listen to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you tried listening to Upgrade? Cortex? Connected?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, in any case, it’s just, it’s not a great look for Apple, which is this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that seems to be resisting, you know, just cranking out dollar bills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by way of advertising, and instead is trying to crank out dollar bills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by making good products. And now it seems to be falling and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allowing itself to be overcome by the lure of the almighty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad dollar. And that’s just a bummer. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that I love about Apple TV Plus, as an example, is that I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting interrupted after the very beginning. This is what’s been great about Netflix until soon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it starts having ads here. But you know, it’s one of the great things about a lot of these services. And now we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming back around to let’s put ads everywhere and it just stinks. And, and, and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I’ve always perceived Apple as being better than this, which is probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I don’t know if ignorant is the right word, but probably wishful thinking on my part. Um, but I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concur, Marco, like there’s no way that this faucet is going to be turned back off. And if anything, it’s going to be opened even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wider with time. And it’s just, I don’t, I don’t care for it. I wish it was different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, also, like there is value in app store search ads. Like I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just saying, basically, yeah, it sucks that we have to do it. But the reality is there is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many apps out there that again, as developers, you kind of do have to do stuff like this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you’re lucky, you can get away with not having, you know, paid promotion of your, of your app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even then, that only lasts for maybe if you have a good launch, great. Then you’ll have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the blogs write you up and you get pressed or you get some little bit of traction, that’s great. But you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point going to have to go to paid promotion if you want growth. That’s just what happens. Trust me, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been on this ride before. This is what happens to everybody at some point. Whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth it or not, that’s a different story. It’s hard to make work, really. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve done a lot of different paid promotion and it definitely has not all been worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, I would say only a very minuscule part of it has been worth it. But again, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the famous saying, you don’t know which half of your ad dollars are working until you’ve spent them. Even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not always. But anyway, if the search ad system was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, like if it actually had better ranking, better relevance matching.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just in general if it was less dumb about what ads it chose to show and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when and how, I would actually like it. As a developer and theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even as a user it could occasionally help. But the way it is now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just reeks of Apple’s crappy mediocrity when they don’t have to compete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the way the App Store is. And of all the issues and attitudes that come up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therein. App Store search ads suck because they’re really half-assed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why Apple does a terrible job of search ranking and relevancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of us are burning money unnecessarily. God, you wouldn’t believe what they think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast is sometimes. It’s not hard, okay? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s such a sealed box, you can’t see what they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their relevancy and you only have very little control. There’s this whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface, I do the advanced login, there’s this whole thing where you can set certain keywords, you can set them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as exact or not exact, you can set the negative keywords, say don’t match this, don’t match broadly this or exactly this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s all sorts of things you can do there. But the basic relevance, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up just cleaning up after their mistakes so often with like alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, even though the LLC name is Overcast Radio LLC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ok, don’t match me against radio apps. Ok, fine. Well then, why are you matching me against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free music downloader apps? I can kind of see, you know, it’s a podcast, downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music, ok, well, let’s turn that off. Now here’s all these apps that literally just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist to rip off Spotify to like download Spotify songs past the DRM or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why am I being rant against those? Oh, it’s considered a news app so I’m being rant against police
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanners? What? Like it and this is what using search ads is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a constant battle of going through what they think your app is and what they think is relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to and just saying, not that, not that, not that, not that. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these crazy things is that Google’s relevance algorithms that are actually good would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never in a million years guess that you were relevant to XYZ, but Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithms are crap. And so what that results in is, not only is the experience crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for users because they’re getting ads that don’t make sense, but then the experience for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers is, we’re not finding customers we could find and we’re paying too much for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the worse ads are targeted, the more you pay as the advertiser to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually reach the right people. So it’s just, the whole system, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a crappy system, poorly implemented to do something that benefits mostly just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. And if they did a better job of it, it could be a lot better and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could benefit a lot more people. But it’s just such a crappy, mediocre system the way they’ve done it. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly neither the will, nor frankly the ability to make it any better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you collected some quotes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the sort of snarky, cynical take from a few people in our community. If I was good, this is from Paul Haddad.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s the Tweetbot person, right? He says, coming next year, download ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of downloading the app that you want, the app store will randomly download the highest bidding app.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the cynical take there of like, what will Apple not take money for? Because in some
⏹️ ▶️ John respects, taking money for advertising, search advertising, is
⏹️ ▶️ John trading off on the user experience. Now, like Marcus said, sometimes not always, because
⏹️ ▶️ John advertising can be useful to people. You may be looking for an app and you don’t know what you’re looking for, so you search
⏹️ ▶️ John for something, and then one of the ads is actually relevant. If the algorithm actually works for once, you’re like, oh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll look at that app. So there is some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user benefit. That’s basically what Instagram is. It’s a giant shopping app that occasionally you can see pictures of your
⏹️ ▶️ John And so there is some upside to that to users, but there’s an awful lot of downside, which is why so many things, including
⏹️ ▶️ John our podcast, allow people to pay more money to not see ads because at a certain point it just gets annoying. So
⏹️ ▶️ John how far will they go? Well, you know, they’re putting ads for other supposedly relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John products on the actual product page. You drill all the way down to the overcast page and then there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ John things advertised there. So maybe, would they allow a different app to be downloaded randomly? Because, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way they make money and this is, let’s have an auction. Who wants their app to be downloaded one out of every a thousand times
⏹️ ▶️ John that Twitter has downloaded, right? So bid against that, TweetBot. Maybe you’ll get downloaded by accident and the user will
⏹️ ▶️ John hate you. All right, Sebastian DeWitt says, “‘Apple shouldn’t get into the ad business. “‘Pushing ads
⏹️ ▶️ John in their platform opposes their goals “‘and core values and will only erode user trust. “‘Are the relatively minor
⏹️ ▶️ John profits worth the price “‘of bad experience and lost goodwill?’ I don’t think the profits are minor. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the one problem with this statement here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing, it’s a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, we don’t know exactly because they don’t break it down to that way, but there is large potential upside
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re already potentially making a lot of money on that. So it’s not minor, but this gets to what a lot of people feel like. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this doesn’t feel like a premium experience. It goes against Apple’s quote unquote core values, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the user experience above everything else, a premium experience that you pay more money for, a premium experience doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tend to have as many ads or any ads, right? So I definitely feel that. And here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John MJ Tsai said, your core values are what you do on an ongoing basis, not the talking points that
⏹️ ▶️ John you broadcast or what you did 20 years ago under different leadership. This is the cynical take of saying, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco constantly get up on stage
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, here are our values and we value this and we value user experience and we respect the user
⏹️ ▶️ John and we have the whole privacy angle and all these core values and it’s like you can say that all you want
⏹️ ▶️ John but your actual values are what you do, right? And not what you did 20 years ago under
⏹️ ▶️ John a different leadership is implying that different leadership, maybe Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of annoyed by the same things that the users that we just read the quotes from are annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John by and would not want his company to do something that annoys him Whereas Tim Cook either has a higher
⏹️ ▶️ John tolerance for annoyance or his desire to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a successful company and be a success as a CEO overrides the annoyance that
⏹️ ▶️ John he might feel dealing with this. And that gets to the larger point about search ads and advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. The reason it is inescapable is unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ John for people like the people I just quoted and us on this program who
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like ads. Most people have determined over years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years that they will gladly watch ads in exchange for paying less money.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like they’re suffering under the yoke of ads. When given the choice to do something free with
⏹️ ▶️ John ads, people will take that choice. Most people will take that choice. And it’s not even because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have the money or couldn’t pay for it. They just can’t be bothered to pay the, you know, $1.99 to get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of the ad banner at the bottom of their solitaire game. they’ll have that stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John ad banner there rotating and burning their phone’s battery for literal decade and
⏹️ ▶️ John never pay the $1.99 to get rid of the ad. That’s the choice people make.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been made in every medium, radio, television. Yes, there’s always been things that you can pay for that have less or
⏹️ ▶️ John no ads or fewer ads, but the vast majority of people go, eh, I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John take the cheap one with the ads. It’s one of the reasons like Amazon made the Kindle with special offers, right, with ads
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. If people can pay less for a Kindle, I’m like, yeah, whatever, I’ll just ignore the ads. It’s not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying everybody loves ads or that they’re the ultimate evil, but I’m just saying like they
⏹️ ▶️ John have utility for people with products reaching customers and customers writ large have decided,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we’ll tolerate ads. I’ll tolerate ads if they help me pay for the newspaper. My newspaper will only be 25 cents
⏹️ ▶️ John because the advertisers pay for everything. And sometimes when I went to classifieds, it’s nice that the ads are in there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The human population will accept ads in
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange for hopefully some amount of money not being, you know, some amount of cost not
⏹️ ▶️ John being passed on to them. That’s why it’s basically unavoidable, especially as Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly removes the ability of other people to do effective, you know, install-based ads where
⏹️ ▶️ John they can determine with 100% certainty that you ran this ad and this number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John installed your app because of it and we’re charging you this much. And, you know, like this sort of direct connection
⏹️ ▶️ John between you pay for advertising and you can see exactly how effective it is. Apple has been slowly breaking that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s leaving them as the, not the only advertiser for app vendors,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the best one, the most powerful one, because they own the platform, they have access to all the information,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they can choose how much they want to expose to people and how much privacy they want to preserve, so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it means also that as they edge other people out, they have to fulfill the role
⏹️ ▶️ John of advertiser. Because if they edged everybody out and said, yeah, but we’re also not gonna do any ads, that wouldn’t benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John the market for apps on the phone because some users, again, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to see ads, but some users want to make that trade-off of seeing ads in exchange for not paying for things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also people with products want to get them in front of customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John potential customers. And if Apple refused their money and said, no, no, no, we’re not going to run an ad platform. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John run any ads in the app store at all. Oh, and by the way, Facebook, we’re not letting you run effective ads anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John for app installs. Like that would be not good for the overall market. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we think of it as a quote unquote necessary evil, but I think it’s just a natural part of any market
⏹️ ▶️ John that advertising is a thing that has value. To the extent that the market is
⏹️ ▶️ John weirdly shaped because the platform owner has a stranglehold on it, that causes ads to be
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive than they should be. Because Marko talking about how his ads, you know, how the relevance algorithms are crappy or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a more efficient market, those ads would become cheaper because they’re crappy. But when the only game in town
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple, they don’t become that much cheaper. I mean, I suppose all the people buying the ads say, I’m not gonna bother buying the
⏹️ ▶️ John ads, but when it’s the only game in town, people just keep end up coming back to us, well, maybe I’ll try this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so people end up, you know, throwing money at it to say, maybe I do this, maybe do that, maybe I’ll try this ad slot, maybe I’ll put this keyword,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we’ll do this. And it’s probably not a particularly efficient market in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing those ads at what their actual value is, especially if they don’t do the complete connection of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, telling you exactly how effective ad is in each slot and all that stuff. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not particularly healthy, but it’s unavoidable that there will be ads. And the final point
⏹️ ▶️ John related to like the inevitability of advertising and what it does to companies and you know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John any individual likes that or not, it was on the September 30th episode of Dithering,
⏹️ ▶️ John John Gruber and Ben Thompson’s podcast. It was around eight minutes and 40 seconds into the podcast, Ben
⏹️ ▶️ John said they were talking about something related to advertising, I believe, and Ben said, I wonder if an advertising-based
⏹️ ▶️ John company is constitutionally incapable of really excelling or putting the necessary investment into any
⏹️ ▶️ John other sort of business model. They were talking about Stadia and Google and everything, and how Google seems to have a hard time making,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, products that you sell to consumers, but they’re really great at advertising. And so that’s the question
⏹️ ▶️ John here, the open question. Is it possible for an ad-driven business to make good products?
⏹️ ▶️ John And on the flip side, is it possible for a product company to do ads well? Well, despite
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco saying Apple is a services company and they’re an advertising company, they’re still a product company. That is what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re best at. Apple’s attempts to get into the ad business have not been smashing successes.
⏹️ ▶️ John iAd wasn’t great. Even the search ads show that they’re not really good at being at
⏹️ ▶️ John selling ads. They’re good at controlling their platform such that they have less competition. And then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, what are you going to do? We’re practically the only game in town or the best game in town. But looking at them
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to, let’s say, Facebook or Google, both of those two companies are much better at selling
⏹️ ▶️ John ads and making ad marketplaces than Apple is. And then the Google Stadia example was,
⏹️ ▶️ John what about these companies like Google and Facebook that make all their money, basically, from ads, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John also suddenly want to make products? Oh, Google wants to sell Stadia, which was a little video game controller and a cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming thing. Or they want to sell Pixel phones or tablets or that weird
⏹️ ▶️ John sphere-shaped speaker that never shipped or whatever. and Facebook tried to make a phone too, and Facebook’s bought Oculus and they’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset things. If your company is built around advertising, can you make good products? And
⏹️ ▶️ John this, making this question is setting up at sort of like two extremes, where if you’re really, really good at making
⏹️ ▶️ John products, it means you care about the user experience, you’re very focused on building physical things that you sell to individual
⏹️ ▶️ John people who have to give you money for them. It’s not like an indirect market where people throw money
⏹️ ▶️ John over a wall and see if they get some result back. You have to appeal to actual consumers, you have to support the products, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to advertising where it’s all about gathering data and making an efficient market and
⏹️ ▶️ John giving a small number of quote unquote customers, being the people who buy ads from
⏹️ ▶️ John you, giving them access to enough information to feel like they’re making an effective use of their marketing dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two very different markets. And historically speaking, the companies that are good at one have not been
⏹️ ▶️ John good at the other. It’s not like Google’s good at making phones. The Pixel phones are good. And they’ve made some good hardware products.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it definitely is not their strength. And certainly they haven’t turned it into a huge moneymaker. You would think
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, they make Android. Shouldn’t they be the biggest seller of Android phones? But they are not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Pixel, Nexus before it, are not the biggest seller of Android phones. And on the flip side, Apple, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got all this money and they’ve got all this technology. They should do great in the ad business. And historically, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John not. And to the extent they’re doing great now, it’s because they’re fencing out everybody else with the thing they are good at, which is controlling
⏹️ ▶️ John their platform. So I do wonder. That’s what the commenters
⏹️ ▶️ John are worried about. If Apple suddenly becomes good at ads, will that change the company that they are? Will
⏹️ ▶️ John they become worse at making MacBooks and iPhones if they become better at being ads? Are those
⏹️ ▶️ John two core strengths and sets of values that are required to excel in both of those areas
⏹️ ▶️ John opposed to each other? It’s almost like you need to split off into a separate company that is ruthless and cutthroat
⏹️ ▶️ John and runs its ad business like a real ad business. On the other side, it’s the product company that makes things that appeal
⏹️ ▶️ John to users. And I do worry about that. Like that I feel like is underlying You know, lots of our fretting about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and services. We talked about this before, like not just ads, but just services, how being
⏹️ ▶️ John a service company, you pay me money, I give you some network-based service that you get to use,
⏹️ ▶️ John is different than selling someone a product and making the profit from that. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, I’m not gonna say they’re in the middle of a transition, but they’re definitely off on their, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like the finding yourself trip where they go off to Europe and go backpacking to see what kind of company do we wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John be. You know, services, that’s where the money and the growth is, so we really need
⏹️ ▶️ John to investigate that. But at the same time, if you ask anybody in their product organization, they still
⏹️ ▶️ John really care about making good products and are trying, big home pot aside, are trying really hard to make really good
⏹️ ▶️ John products, and for the most part, still succeeding. And I would say, if they’re trying really hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a great advertising company, they’re still not doing great. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t seem to be excelling in that area. So my hope is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is kind of constitutionally incapable of being a really good advertising company. And that’s to their credit,
⏹️ ▶️ John because in the end, they are first and foremost a product company. And they will always necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of kneecap their advertising business, because they can’t do what it takes,
⏹️ ▶️ John or can’t organize their entire business around that type of market,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it will screw up their products, and they’re never going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I don’t have as much faith in them, I think, as you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like Tim Cook’s Apple, and I don’t know if this is him, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below him, I don’t know. But Apple under Tim Cook prioritizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profits over product quality. And it’s not to say that they always will take the most cynical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco route to get there. They try to blend as much as they can, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the insidious thing about putting ads and promos all over your platform for all your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new services and everything is that once you say it’s okay to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, degrade the experience of using the music app on the phone to constantly, incessantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promote Apple Music to people who don’t subscribe to it until they subscribe. Or to degrade the experience of the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store until people get Apple Arcade or whatever. Once you say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay to send promotional push notifications to make sure people have Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco News or to promote the new tier of iCloud storage or whatever, once you break that line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you see the numbers go up, it becomes much easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to then justify, you know what, we’re having a bit of a soft quarter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s break that line a couple more times and get those numbers up because we have to. And then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually just becomes, this is just what we do, what are you talking about? What do you mean we don’t send promotional push notifications?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you mean we don’t have ads and people setting screens for other products? What do you mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course we do that. Look, we’ve been doing it for years. Apple has not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only fallen down a slippery slope, but has jumped off of a slippery cliff with a lot of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last five years, maybe more. They have decided that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is acceptable now, that the iPhone is no longer purely about serving their customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really about serving Apple and hoping the customers come along for the ride,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s turning the customers more into like a resource to be squeezed. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of just squeezing us on the purchase price of the iPhone, which is something that we do willingly, now they are squeezing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us as, you know, let’s get those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s that profitability per user number that everyone’s always talking about in the industry? ARPU average.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s it, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’re just like ARPU blobs. They just want to squeeze us for even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we are now an ongoing resource for ongoing revenue. And there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new and exciting ways that we can be annoyed into getting squeezed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what happens here. That’s what all the people making these smart comments, that’s what they’re all worried about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I’m worried about, that Apple has decided that it is okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to degrade the user experience in order to promote something that helps them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they just keep doing that more and more and more. They’re converting from a company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes money by pleasing customers with really great products into a company that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money by badgering their customers until we give in.
⏹️ ▶️ John The distinction I was making, like the thing that is keeping Apple from being an effective
⏹️ ▶️ John advertising-driven business is that they’re only willing to do all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple, but they’re not gonna sell an ad in the music app to Spotify. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John an advertising business, of course you would sell that ad spot. It’s an incredibly valuable ad spot. Why would
⏹️ ▶️ John you not allow everybody to send, put advertisements in your notifications, in the settings screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple music app? Like, why wouldn’t you do that? That’s what an advertising driven company does.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as you said, Apple is serving Apple. It’s the joke hierarchy that we’ve been passing around our little
⏹️ ▶️ John community for probably multiple decades of Apple’s order of priorities
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what’s important to them. Number one is Apple. Number two is users. Number three is developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple is number one. And so yeah, Apple gets to tell you that you can buy more iCloud stories.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple gets to remind you for the umpteenth time that you can subscribe to Apple Music, right? Apple gets to put an ad in your settings
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. But an advertising company would sell all those ad spots to the highest bidder.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I think Apple is not going to do because they still have that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it may seem like if it was really a slippery slope that would have just gone all down and there’d be ads everywhere. They still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna be that company. They still wanna sell a premium experience. It’s just that very often I feel like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John drinks its own Kool-Aid to the extent that they think, oh, we’re sending you, those aren’t ads. We’re just telling
⏹️ ▶️ John you about our great products,
⏹️ ▶️ John And that sounds so insane to us. Like that doesn’t make any sense, but there is a little bit of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, internal thinking, right? Now, if you really press people, they’re like, oh yeah, okay, so I guess it is ads and we
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do it less. And I bet they would say, but see, it’s only us doing that. And that means, and there
⏹️ ▶️ John is something to this, that means they will necessarily always be a limited number of things, because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John just doesn’t have that much stuff to advertise and they’re only one company. So you’re not going to see 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John times more of those ads if Apple is the only one who can place them. We’re all annoyed because we liked it when there
⏹️ ▶️ John was zero of those things, that Apple didn’t do it at all, because, you know, again, under the fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John of Steve Jobs would never do something like that, but wasn’t Steve Jobs around for iAd? I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the time. Yeah, I think the first
⏹️ ▶️ John one, yeah. Right, right. So, but anyway, we would like there to be less of it, to my earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John point, most of the people on the planet have shown that they’re okay with some amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of advertising. That said, the people who buy Apple products are not most of the people on the planet, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I have heard complaints about those Apple ads inside Apple products, because that is a relatively new thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who have been using Apple products for years, but mostly people get over it. And it boggles my mind when people
⏹️ ▶️ John get annoyed, like, oh, I hate that thing telling me to buy more iCloud storage. Let me go back to my Solitaire app with the flashing ad banner on it that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using for five years. Pay the dollar 99, oh my God. Sometimes the apps don’t even let you pay the dollar 99, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, by the way, I, oh. Crafty craft. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the app that Adam uses to mod Minecraft on the iPad, like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make Minecraft mods.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it have an ad banner on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Oh, you don’t know. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to watch a 30 second movie to continue using the app?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so let me just be clear. We pay for this, I think it’s like $4 a week. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those weekly subscription scams. We pay for this because it’s like a major creative outlet for him and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to support that and everything. But this is the most abusive, manipulative garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever, like, I can’t believe Apple lets us in the store. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only is it, so you pay for it to get rid of ads, But then it’s still full of ads, just a few, a few of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And then they have this like in-game gems currency that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to spend to use things like the save button. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend gems every time you save something. Are you kidding? So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run out of saves for the day. Oh my.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes me so angry that like this horrific app is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only and best option to do this on the iPad, and it is just downright abusive to children.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple’s making 30% of all that money. Good for you, Apple. I’m so happy for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casino games for children, yeah, it’s another place that Apple has decided they’re okay with things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a good thing that the App Store is protecting us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. The other, the final thing that Casey alluded to before is like there’s rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John today, that we’ll put a link in the show, it’s the story, although I haven’t had time to read it because it just came out today,
⏹️ ▶️ John about they’re gonna have a ad product that they’re selling in the TV space. This, again, is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a no-brainer. Netflix doing streaming services ads. Television
⏹️ ▶️ John being sponsored by companies that buy ads is not a new technology. It is a thing that the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John world accepts. And yes, people will pay a premium to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a network that doesn’t have ads, like HBO or whatever, but most television is not HBO.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most television is television with ads. And if you give people the choice between Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John without ads for more money and Netflix with ads for less money, a lot of people are gonna take Netflix with ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple has a TV streaming product, and it seems like they’re investigating,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, having ads. Now, as someone who doesn’t like ads and is willing to pay to get rid of them, I’m annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple TV always tells me about the other Apple TV shows before I watch an Apple TV show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? People who are very sensitive to ads and are willing to pay money to get rid of them, it’s like, there’s nothing I can pay to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop Apple from telling me about the Apple in the Apple. There’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John much apple in my apple. Yo dog, right? And every streaming service is like this. HBO,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to watch a show on HBO? Let’s watch House of the Dragon. Oh, there’s another show on HBO? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John season two of White Lotus coming out? A, I already knew that. B, I’m already going to watch it. C, get off my TV. I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to watch the show. I already pay for HBO. Why are you advertising this to me? I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pay again. Do you think, I mean, you’re afraid I’m going to cancel because I’m going to get done with House of Dragon and I’m not going to know that the new season
⏹️ ▶️ John of White Lotus is coming out? cancel HBO? That’s just me. But I am not like most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s the same situation with Apple. If you buy an Apple device, increasingly you will get ads for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple things. If you have an app by the Apple streaming service, Apple TV plus, you will get ads for Apple things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now just like its competitors, Apple seems to be investigating the idea that perhaps there will be other
⏹️ ▶️ John ad slots that people can buy in Apple TV plus. Will there be a different tier for people to subscribe with
⏹️ ▶️ John more ads? Will only be certain shows We’ll see, but it’s kind of not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible to avoid that. If you were in charge of Apple TV Plus or streaming at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would not be doing your job if you didn’t investigate this avenue because your competitors are doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it’s a proven business model, right? You could say, oh, you should be the premium one or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should be the company that doesn’t have ads. Well, A, that ship has already sailed because Apple advertises with its own stuff as we
⏹️ ▶️ John establish. And B, like Apple knows what that means
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of market share. If you try to be, try to take the high road and not do any advertising and only
⏹️ ▶️ John appeal to the people who really dislike advertising and have lots of money or whatever, it will limit your market share,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will limit your reach, it will in the end, in a debate, use a big highfalutin Steve Jobsism,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will limit the size of the dent that you can put in the world because fewer people will use your products
⏹️ ▶️ John because there aren’t as many people who care that much about ads, right? So if you want to go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John largest number of people, you have to entertain this business model and so they are. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s what it’s like if when your tastes and preferences are a little bit outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the norm, you are inevitably going to be disappointed by the largest company in the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John moves in business because for the most part, they’re going to try to appeal
⏹️ ▶️ John to the masses. Still to Apple’s credit, they try to appeal to the masses in a way that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit nicer than their competitors. And I think they continue to do that, but it’s the magnitude
⏹️ ▶️ John of the little bit in that phrase that may change from year to year.
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#askatp: Bezel-less Apple Watch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP and Brian writes, on a recent episode, you all discussed future improvements to the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioning new sensors, longer battery life, and so on. But the most obvious improvement to me would be the complete elimination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the bezel, or perhaps a bezel. I would love a watch face that isn’t black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to appear continuous with the case. As it is, the stupid black border ruins every other color watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face. When do you think we will get a bezel-less Apple Watch? Do we need micro LED tech or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t this sort of the ultra it doesn’t the ultra have very little bezel or my bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know the ultra well No, there is a bezel and it seems you know It’s relatively like the same thickness you’d expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be based on other Apple watches where the ultra is weird though is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the faces still don’t look right on it Like they they really are not like optimized for the size even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stock face that comes with it the wayfinder face Which oh I have I have complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about but that’s fine They can’t make an analog face to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save their lives. But anyway, even the Wayfinder face, you can see a pretty thick bezel around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But what’s weird about the Ultra, again, it has a perfectly flat screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually not a huge fan of totally flat crystal watches. Usually a slight dome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is preferable because totally flat not only looks kind of cheap, also causes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some glare issues that if you have a slight curve you get way less glare and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks a little bit nicer so something to consider for ultra buyers but anyway to answer the actual question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we will get like totally bezel-less I’m not sure I mean the Apple Watch from the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was designed to have black around everything in part to hide the bezels and in part to save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power on the OLED screen because everything about the Apple Watch is designed to save as much much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power as possible because it’s such a constrained power envelope device. Because Black has been worked into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design of all the faces, I don’t know that they would necessarily want to get away from that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they could. Even if they could make whatever kind of screen could go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way to the bezel, which would be, I think, a significant challenge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not knowing much about screen tech, I mean, look at the iPhone, we’re nowhere near that there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, even if they could do it, again, I don’t think they would want to do it. It would require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of different decisions around the whole OS that would mostly end up being more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power hungry. And I don’t see them ever doing that for the Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t need a different screen tech. You could do it with OLED just as easily as you could do it with some hypothetical
⏹️ ▶️ John micro LED thing. But it’s interesting that how the word bezel has changed
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning in this context. What we’re talking about is like the glass, that’s like an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen of an iPhone. It’s like a piece of glass that is, it’s part of the thing that lights up with
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels in different colors, right? When we say that how big is the bezel on the iPhone, we mean
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the edge of the iPhone and eventually you run out of things that light up. This is the last
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel that’s gonna light up, but there’s still more glass, right? So there’s glass that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t light up. There’s no pixels in this area, all around the edge of the phone, top, bottom, left, and right. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the phone, there’s this black border, and it’s because there’s no pixels there. And people call that
⏹️ ▶️ John the bezel. But in sort of television set parlance in the CRT
⏹️ ▶️ John days, the bezel was a piece of plastic that you shoved on the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John that covered part of the cathode ray tube, part of the glass cathode ray tube.
⏹️ ▶️ John It covered often the parts that didn’t light up, right? That was the bezel,
⏹️ ▶️ John that plastic thing. You could do that on a watch today. Just make the
⏹️ ▶️ John metal, titanium, whatever, aluminum case have little things that come up
⏹️ ▶️ John and overlap the screen and butt right up against where the pixels light up, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, it’s a quote unquote bezel-less iPhone. Well, no, it’s not. You just actually made the bezel bigger. But now when I say
⏹️ ▶️ John bezel, I don’t mean the black part of the screen that doesn’t light up around the edges. I mean the old definition
⏹️ ▶️ John of bezel, which is the plastic, you know, or whatever, part of the case that overlaps the thing that does
⏹️ ▶️ John light up, right? They could do that. And I think that’s what this Brian is asking
⏹️ ▶️ John about. It’s like, I want a watch face that goes all the way to the edge. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John some black part of the screen thing to be, you know, interrupting
⏹️ ▶️ John me. So I’ll have a white watch face and then all this black border around it because that part of the screen doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John light up. And then there’s the actual, you know, watch case made of aluminum or titanium or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple wanted that look, they could do it today by making like, for example, on the Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can make a titanium little thing, like hook over the front of the case and cover up those black pixels, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you would have what you want, but they’re not doing that. I don’t know, for fashion reasons, or because like
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco said, the design aesthetic of all the watch faces has always been, if you don’t light
⏹️ ▶️ John up pixels, they’re completely black, and also where there are no pixels is also completely black, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John seamless in that way. But that said, Apple has been slowly, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ John shrinking the bezel, by which we mean shrinking the area of the screen that doesn’t light up with pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of what, the watch, four, five, seven? It’s been getting smaller and smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still there, you can still see it, but it’s been getting smaller. So I think they probably will get all the way to
⏹️ ▶️ John the edge if they ever can, but I’m not sure they’ll ever actually use the old style bezel, as
⏹️ ▶️ John in make the case creep over and cover the part of the glass that doesn’t light up, because that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem part of their design aesthetic. Like the edges of the phone have either been non-existent and
⏹️ ▶️ John seamless in the regular one. And on the Ultra, they look basically like they’re, I mean, Mark, you have it, you can look at it. It’s like they’re kind of vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John walls and then the glass is inside that. They don’t like reach over and overlap onto
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, do they?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not at all. At least, I mean, I don’t know how the Sapphire is mounted in there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it doesn’t look that way. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we’ll see. They could do it. I mean, they’ve been trying to shrink it as much as they can. Same thing on the phones. They’ve been shrinking that
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the phone. They could have made a phone design that did that, but they didn’t. one has flat sides, they go up and down,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do not reach over and overlap any part of the screen, even though that’s a design direction they could have gone
⏹️ ▶️ John and they chose not to. So, you know, hang in there, we’re probably good about the same time as we get third party watch faces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, nothing makes me want third party watch faces more than using the ultra. Because, again, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they almost every existing watch face looks stupid on it. They look stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Underscore is messing with it. And apparently it’s not a super ellipse, Like it’s not the shape of the app icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rounded rectangle. Yeah. He had a Twitter thread where he was trying to make like watch faces that fit inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultra. And he realized that it’s not the super lips shape. It’s actually like flat sides
⏹️ ▶️ John with a radius in the corners. So if you want to put an image on the screen that fits correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John with even borders around it, and you do a super ellipse, it looks wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of course, he’s making
⏹️ ▶️ John watch faces, because why wouldn’t he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be? Also, of course. All right.
#askatp: Mac Studio vs. MBP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Inger writes, I am surely going to be disappointed by your response to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, John, but I’ve been excited to ask you this. John Inger writes, assuming you can cover the price difference, why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want an M1 Max, Max Studio, over the same spec M1 Max MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Said another way, spec for spec, does John’s desktop desktop have any meaningful advantages over Marco’s desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop approach? As far as I can tell, the advantages of the Max Studio over the MacBook Pro are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one additional Thunderbolt 4 port, two additional USB-A ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a 10-gigabit Ethernet port, which in this case John doesn’t plan to use. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the advantages of the MacBook Pro over the Studio are an XDR screen with ProMotion, much better speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a webcam, a mic array, Touch ID, Ask Siri, effectively an integrated GPS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of course it’s portable, so I can go anywhere and still use it. So why would anyone ever buy an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max Max Studio over a same spec M1 Max MacBook Pro? Am I missing something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well if you want a desktop computer and it’s never going to go anywhere, the screen doesn’t do you any good. So you just paid for
⏹️ ▶️ John that and you’re not using it. The speakers don’t do any good because if you’re going to keep it in clamshell mode the speakers aren’t going to help you. The webcam doesn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John good because if it’s closed the webcam isn’t looking at you. The mic erasing deal is closed. Touch ID, the Max Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John has that. Ask Siri, same thing, the display has a microphone or whatever. an integrated UPS, I
⏹️ ▶️ John suppose, but you can buy an external one of those. It’s like, if you want a desktop computer, don’t pay for all that stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop. And it used to be, it’ll be like noisier and slower. Now it’s not really slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it noisier than the MacStudio? Debatable, because the MacStudio is- It’s quieter. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John under some situations, although under
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco heavy load- All situations.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I have to imagine under heavy load that, you know, the thing about the MacStudio is whatever annoying noise
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes, it’s very difficult to make it make much louder noise, where it is possible, although
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult, to make the MacBook Pro make noise, especially if it’s in clamshell and especially if it’s in clamshell in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know. So like, our MacStudio is bolted under the desk here. I don’t think you’d want to bolt your
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro under the desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You wouldn’t need to. Because it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be hard to get at. Yeah, it wouldn’t be a great place for it to be. And then finally, the things he listed. You get
⏹️ ▶️ John more ports and you get faster ethernet, right? So if you don’t want a desktop computer, don’t buy a desktop computer. But if you do want one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t make sense to buy a laptop and then try to use it as a desktop computer Even though Apple’s laptops are
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing as desktop computers, it’s still kind of a waste of hardware and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the best suited. And it would honestly be extreme shame to not use that screen. And you can have it
⏹️ ▶️ John on your desk and have the screen open, but I always found the ergonomics of that where you kind of like make a little high
⏹️ ▶️ John chair for your laptop and it’s got the keyboard open, but you’re not using that keyboard because you want the screen to be up high,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has to be open. So you’re constantly seeing this keyboard and this trackpad that you’re not using. so
⏹️ ▶️ John this awesome screen could be at the right height. I don’t know. Each thing should,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fulfill the need that it does. It would be more of a slang dunk if Apple hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John done whatever the heck it did with the Mac Studio fans that make them so weird and
⏹️ ▶️ John so strangely noisy yet never going above their base speed, but still being noisy
⏹️ ▶️ John at their base speed. So we’ll see what the next version of the Mac Studio looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’ll solve this cooling thing, or maybe we’ll have to wait until they make another case. And I want to reiterate
⏹️ ▶️ John that the fact that mine is bolted on the desk, it is inaudible in that position under any normal circumstance.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is a solvable problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think perhaps John’s point is that, yes, John Inger’s point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, yes, in the circumstance that you literally never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this laptop as a laptop, then yeah, okay, I guess that makes more sense what you’re saying, John Syracuse. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you even once want to move this computer somewhere else temporarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I think John Inger makes a really good point that you’re getting all of that stuff sort of kind of for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not literally for free, but sort of kind of for free. And I think that makes a lot of sense. So if you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are getting a desktop desktop, then yes, Syracuse is right. But if you’re getting a mostly desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop, then still get the laptop, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still feel like it’s like, if you get a laptop and you only use it just once someplace else, It’s such a waste
⏹️ ▶️ John of a laptop. Like it’s not that keyboard that you’re not using the trackpad, you’re not using the screen you’re not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at. Like that’s just, you paid for that, they built it, and you’re just closing it up and hiding it away. It
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems wasteful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really great though. I mean, that’s the thing. Like I agree with what you’re saying academically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think right now we’re in this weird state where because of various, what seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like possibly flukes, where the Mac studio has this weird fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem for noise and the MacBook Pro is weirdly way too good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now that in the current versions of these products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Pro is I think better in so many ways and yeah there is gonna be you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cost difference there because you are paying for a lot of this stuff but you know I’ve I’ve believe me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve rationalized every kind of purchase there is to rationalize especially with computers and true and the reality is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there has never been a time where I’ve said to myself, like, I’m gonna make, I’m gonna get this amazing desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I won’t need a laptop anymore. I probably maybe attempted that maybe with iPads at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever ago, a million years ago maybe, but like the reality is I always also want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop. And if you can have one computer serving both of those rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of those roles, and you know, and you need both of those roles filled, then any value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argument you try to make about, well, you’re paying for the stuff you’re not using by having a desktop laptop. Well that only applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re also going to have a separate laptop, but if you can get away with just having that one be both your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your laptop, which is what most people do, then you are saving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an entire other computer worth of cost. So let’s set aside the price difference for now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people listening to this show, you probably want a laptop at some point in your life, and therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can have one device instead of two, you are saving a ton of money. So that being said, again, like right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have this weird fluke situation where the desktop laptop is better than the desktop desktop. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will occasionally run into a weird thing if you do this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of these weird things are solved if you don’t use clamshell mode. If you actually have the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open as a second screen, most of these problems go away. But if you use clamshell mode full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, you will very occasionally run into a weird thing that’s assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that shouldn’t be assumed. So for instance, the other day I was trying to, I was signing up for a new developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account and the developer app, the Apple developer app, lets you sign up for a developer account right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app for, at least for personal accounts. And they had this thing where to prove who you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, you can use the built-in camera to scan your driver’s license. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the built-in camera on my MacBook Pro is closed and facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a piece of metal. I have another camera, I have the Logitech thing stuck to the top of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR, but this didn’t allow me a way to choose which camera I use. And so I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t do that without like opening up the laptop, which if you’re in clamshell mode, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very disruptive process of alright, lift it out of its like little foldy stand to have it in. Unfold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop with all the cables still plugged in, because I don’t want to lose all my stuff. And like have it like kind of hovering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my hand over on the edge of the desk. That same thing, by the way, is what you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever need to hard power it off. Because the power button is on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you ever need to access the power button, which is not common, but occasionally you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, you have to pick it up, unfold it, hit that, etc. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are occasionally little weird things like that. But that’s, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe every couple of months I’m going to do a thing like that. Once, like once every couple of months. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m willing to tolerate that for all the other advantages of this setup. And I still, now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been almost a year I think, I still am a huge fan of this setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No part of the Mac Studio has made me envy that setup or want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. If they improve the Mac Studio down the road to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, way quieter at idle, So to be as quiet as my MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at idle, and if the power difference between the two gets larger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the Mac Studio can be way more powerful than the MacBook Pro, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be more interested. And maybe the Mac Pro, whatever that story ends up being, maybe that is that story,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll see whenever that comes out. But until then, this is an amazing setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, it has no business being as good as it is, and I’m incredibly happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 MacBook Pro may change things because it may be hotter and make things noisier.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing I would say for having a dedicated desktop, and if you don’t wanna have just one computer, you can make different
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs, right? So say you wanted to have a desktop desktop, but then your laptop, you wanted to pick like
⏹️ ▶️ John the reincarnation of the MacBook Adorable that somehow comes, right? Super light, super
⏹️ ▶️ John thin, weight and size is your ultimate thing. You don’t need it to be your full-fledged desktop. You just want
⏹️ ▶️ John the lightest thing that you can have. Probably still more expensive than buying just one, but it lets you make that
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. It lets you make the ultimate portability choice and then power your desktop. It’s the trade-off of modularity,
⏹️ ▶️ John of having dedicated devices, dedicated special purpose devices. This is the computer that never leaves my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the computer that I’m on the go with, as opposed to making one that has to fulfill both. And if you do have the one that fills
⏹️ ▶️ John both, it can’t be a MacBook adorable size thing probably, because that’s just, you know, if you want the lightest
⏹️ ▶️ John possible thing, it’s not going to be probably powerful enough to satisfy high end needs. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the M1s are, you know, great machines that definitely smeared this entire
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and then the weirdness of the Mac Studio did that. But the M2s made on a similar process that
⏹️ ▶️ John are a little bit faster and a little bit more power hungry. Maybe the fans will go a little bit harder. Who knows what the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio will look like. If Apple has an October event, maybe we’ll see M2 MacBook Pros and people can test them and
⏹️ ▶️ John see how it turns out. But the M1 may be a moment in time that is not repeated, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also to answer, My Name Is T in the chat asks, any regrets on having the 16 inch for all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as opposed to the 14 inch. They say they got a 16 inch for work recently, have a 14 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personal, and wow, the 16 inch is bad to travel with. I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the 16 inch for this purpose because when I do use it as a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost every case, I want as much screen space as I can get. I don’t travel that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often. When I do travel, it is much more frequently by car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only place I really am not super comfortable with the 16 inch is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a plane in a coach seat because we all know that person in front of you leans back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. Then you’re not using your laptop anymore. So game over on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s also mostly true of the 14 inch even. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my trick is get exit row or business class or whatever you can get to get a little bit more room If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to have like a laptop working flight, if you’re like going cross country, get the exit row or something so you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more space on the tray table because in that case, even the 14 inch is a bit uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But with that exception of like tight airline seats, I don’t regret the 16. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love, again, I love having all the screen space and using something smaller, I miss that screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space. And the 16 also has a little bit better speakers, you know, significantly better battery life, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, things like that. So it’s great for that. But yeah, I love it for that purpose. I don’t regret it at all. The actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size and weight of like carrying it, it only feels big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to the other machines. But in absolute terms, this is not a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of weight for an adult in good health to carry. Like it’s not, and if you’re putting it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag, the difference between a 14 inch and a 16 inch in actual like weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that bag or bulk in that bag, You’re talking maybe like what 5% maybe more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight in the bag or 10% like it’s not a ton to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to radically affect your ability whether you can carry it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nicer to have something smaller and lighter if you’re going to if you’re carrying it in a bag every single day like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was working in the city, I would take the train to the city every day. That’s you know with with a bag sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standing up the whole time if there was no seats then walking from Grand Central down to the down to the office that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was you know know, 15 block walk in that kind of context where I’m carrying it a whole lot every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. Yeah, go a little bit lighter. It’s nice. But if that’s not what your life looks like, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly leaving on a desk most of the time and maybe bringing in a backpack on trip sometimes or bringing in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car when you do go somewhere, the difference really is not that big relative to the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers used to be. These are all super lightweight and we’re all very lucky. So anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very happy when I’m using it as a laptop. I’m very happy that it’s a 16 inch because I really do appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having infinite battery life and the giant screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing on the getting to the power button when you’re in clamshell, obviously bolting the Mac Studio into the desk makes it awkward to get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John power button too. The reason I needed to do this recently was, and I was reminded
⏹️ ▶️ John of this as I was about to do with the old way, booting into recovery mode. I had to do it because I was trying to install,
⏹️ ▶️ John uninstall a Wacom tablet kext that like SIP was protecting or something. So I basically
⏹️ ▶️ John needed to reboot into single user mode. I’m like, oh, no problem. just restart and hold down Command R. That’s not how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey works anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John All of the ARM-based Macs to boot into recovery mode, you have to hold down the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John power button until a little thing comes up and has options and lets you boot into different stuff. You can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the Apple menu, hit restart, and then hold down Command R or whatever of the umpteen different key combinations
⏹️ ▶️ John that you would use to enter recovery, single user mode, all that stuff. All of that is behind holding the power
⏹️ ▶️ John button. So no matter what kind of computer you have, even if it didn’t crash, Even if you’re not hard rebooting, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John ever need to do something that requires booting into recovery, and it could be something as simple as uninstalling
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of software that was probably installed so long ago that system integrity protection didn’t even exist and
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow it got like shoved into a place where I can’t delete it even as root, you’re gonna be finding
#askatp: Router range
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Andy Hyde writes, why does router range matter? Many models of router advertise varying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coverage areas. Shouldn’t the limiting factor for wifi range be the power sipping client radio’s upload range,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the router itself? I don’t feel like I’ve ever paid any attention to this. Is this a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these days, is range for routers?
⏹️ ▶️ John They mean like a wifi router. They mean like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Yeah, no, they tell you how like how big of a place, like how many square feet it covers. Like Euro will
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you if you have a home this big, get this thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just thought that was like a thumb in the wind, like order of magnitude thing, just to get you in the right direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think it was any sort of scientific anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s not scientific because they don’t know where your walls are. They don’t know where you’re putting it, but they’re basically more range is better
⏹️ ▶️ John on a wifi router. And what Andy’s asking is like, why does the product
⏹️ ▶️ John I buy from Eero, how can that influence the range? Isn’t the limiting factor of the transmit power of my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you know, or my laptop, isn’t that the limiting factor in how big honking router I get?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not gonna help if my phone is so wimpy it can’t transmit or whatever. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say to that is when routers advertise as having good range, yes, part of it is how much
⏹️ ▶️ John power they have to transmit, but the other part of it is how fancy and effective their antennas are.
⏹️ ▶️ John That may be because they’re large, because there’s multiple ones or whatever, and those fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John better antennas are better at picking up the potentially weak signal from your phone or your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So when they advertise range, don’t just think is This is how hard that my router
⏹️ ▶️ John can send the wifi signals out. Also think of it as how big the ears are and how it can hear the
⏹️ ▶️ John whisper of my phone when it’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of those things contribute to range and that’s why it does make sense for routers to advertise and
⏹️ ▶️ John work on having better range over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Collide, and Memberful. And thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly. You can join atp.fm slash join and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean to. Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
Not a Sponsor: Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so this is not a sponsorship, an advertisement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, but it’s going to sound a heck of a lot like one. So I had the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently through various events to get a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of Sonos hardware at a pretty good discount. And I had really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Sonos Arc, which is their soundbar for a long time, because it seemed like it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap, well, it’s not cheap at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John easy, is that what I should have said? Nothing they make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is cheap. Exactly. I should have said easy, not cheap. An easy way to get something that is vaguely like surround
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound into my house without doing a whole lot of work. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had like various price watching things, watching for the price of the Sonos Arc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to drop at all. And I’ve been doing this for like six months and they don’t appear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to believe in sales. Like, they’re like Apple. You know, there is no sale, no soup for you. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move along. I was resisting, resisting, resisting, spending almost, I think it’s almost a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks for an ARC. I was resisting it, resisting, resisting it. And then I had, like I said, the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get some stuff at a pretty good discount. And so suddenly, instead of just getting the ARC, I wound it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a whole surround sound system and a portable speaker. Because if you’re gonna save money, you might as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well spend a ton, right? That’s how it works? Something like that? The
⏹️ ▶️ John more you spend, the more you save.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s what they tell me. That’s right, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right. I’m not sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey math works out, but it is a saying. Hey, it makes sense, right? So anyway, so I ended up buying a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of stuff. Now, really quickly, the situation previously was I had a center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey channel and a left and right channel sitting on the mantle below my television because as we all know, my television is up at the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story of my house, even though I sit at the first story. Not really, but that’s what John would tell you and he’s kind of right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know this television is above the mantle and so on the mantle was a left channel, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center channel, a right channel. I also had an external subwoofer. All this was plugged into a receiver that was literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15-ish years old. Uh, the receiver, I think it was barely new enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time to understand Dolby digital. Like Dolby digital was the new hot thing when this receiver was brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. Uh, this receiver predates HDMI. So it was not new at all. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to get rid of it. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to get an ARC. So I end up, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m sorry, this receiver obviously supports, uh, rear speakers and I had rear speakers, but I hadn’t installed them because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t want to run wires like under the floor, through the floor, under. We have hardwood in the downstairs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, you know, I didn’t want to, like, put something on top of the floor, so I’d have to go into, like, the crawl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space or something, or, like, up and around over the ceiling. I didn’t want to—I have no interest in doing any of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I wanted to try this arc. It seemed like the fancy lad’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to get pretty decent sound in all one unit. And so I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get the arc. I was too cheap to get it. and then suddenly I spent like two and a half arcs worth of money trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, in setting up my fancy new setup. And I didn’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole lot of interest in the Sonos ecosystem either. I didn’t know a lot about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seemed that it was not, maybe not competition, but I don’t know if a better word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to describe it, but in competition with like AirPlay, which I use all the time, you know, I have this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Belkin SoundForm Connect that I, that I use as an AirPlay receiver to get, AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the screened-in porch, and then I used the Apple TV connected to the receiver when I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, AirPlaying music or anything like that, and I didn’t really see the point in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to buy into the whole new ecosystem. So really what I wanted was a surround
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound setup for for the living room, and then I ended up getting a couple other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things as well. So I ended up getting an ARC. I ended up getting a sub Gen 3, which is their big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subwoofer. They’ve also just recently come out with a sub mini, which is their little subwoofer, of course. And then two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos One SLs, I think in, I don’t know what SL actually stands for, but it basically means the non-smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the speaker as rear speakers. So I have the ARC, a soundbar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subwoofer, two rear speakers. And so now I have surround sound for the first time in 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And then I also got a Sonos Port to handle turntable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and porch duties, which we’ll talk about in a moment, and a Sonos Roam, which is their like jam box-esque speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This sent me back a considerable amount of money even after the steep discount. But let me tell you, you know how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone says that like Sonos is really, really good and it’s like really awesome and super reliable and you should try it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m here to tell you, and I am not being paid to say this, boy, do I wish I was, Sonos is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, really reliable and you should try it because I freaking love this stuff. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, it’s so great. I am so mad that I waited as long as I, well, not really, because I saved a bunch of money, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am spiritually mad, if you will, that I waited so long, because this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so good. And it starts with even just the box. So it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in nondescript cardboard boxes, because you know it would walk. Even though porch pirates aren’t much of a thing here in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richmond, it would walk if you had a bunch of Sonos boxes sitting on the front porch. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you take the box out of the shipping box. And the Ark, in particular, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so amused by this. And this is the first time that I’ve ever actually wanted somebody to watch an unboxing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will put an unboxing video into the show notes which I cannot believe I’m saying this this is how you know I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so out of my gourd excited about all this. So the way the Sonos Arc, the soundbar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box works is there’s literal like lock switches on either side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the box and then you have to slide these plastic lock switches aside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is at about 15 to 20 seconds in the video I’ll link in the show notes. You slide the lock switches,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one on each side to the other, you know, from lock to unlock. And then you lift up the box. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so dumb and kind of over-engineered and I am so here for it. It was so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so dumb and I’m so, I loved it. So you open it up and every Sonos item
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve bought, all whatever, five or six of them or whatever it was, every single one of them comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like this very neat like cloth, black cloth sleeve with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sticker perfectly placed over the seam of the sleeve telling you which device it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. You can see this at about, what is this, like 45-ish seconds in the video. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open it up and it’s got, you know, you take it out of its little blankie and then you set everything up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sets up super easily and I’m so in love. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these devices, almost all of them, actually everything except the Jambox-esque
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roam, all of them have both Wi-Fi capability and Ethernet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t bother setting any of them up with Ethernet, except I tried to set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the subwoofer via Ethernet and I couldn’t get it to work. That was like the only time I had a problem. But then as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I reset it and tried doing it over Wi-Fi, it worked no sweat.
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you used 10 base t?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I mean it was, I think it was… Come on, dad joke!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I get it. Oh my god. You’re kicked out of the dad club.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously, that was a bad one, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it sound so dumb when I said it. I’m a little disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey myself if I’m honest.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should be. Take his dad card. Temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad card penalty. I know, I’m sorry. I get one demerit. So, yeah, so basically what ends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up happening is you set up the sub, and I ended up doing it via Wi-Fi and not 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base T. I set up the two rears, obviously via Wi-Fi, because if I was willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to run an Ethernet cable, then why wouldn’t I have run the speaker cable 15 years ago? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the arc, the sound bar, gets connected via HDMI, what is it, eARC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enhanced audio return channel, I think is what it’s called. So basically the way this works is there’s a bespoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI connection on my TV, which is an LG C9, and you connect HDMI from the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the arc, and the TV and the arc negotiate or do whatever in order to understand, OK, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to be using this for video really, although it does show a little pattern if you tune to it. What I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to do is pipe everything through this HDMI cable to the sound system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is very similar to the way a SPDIF and optical would oftentimes work, where it would just dump whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the TV saw to SPDIF. It’s now doing this via HDMI. So the Ark on my mantle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has power, it has HDMI and that’s it. The subwoofer has power and it could have ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, but it instead works via wifi, the two rears power and nothing else. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then we’ll talk about the port in a minute, but, and finally I have Dolby Atmos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, you know, 5.1, I have all surround sound and I know that every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other person probably listening to this has been here for 15 years and back when we had an apartment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was easier to run all this stuff and I didn’t care as much, I did have the surround sound set up with the old system and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forth, but I literally never bothered in the 15 years we’ve been in this house. And so having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it all back, it’s really cool, you guys. Did you know that surround sound is pretty awesome? Who would have thunk it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this was particularly relevant, and I tweeted about this earlier today. I’ve been re-watching, or not re-watching, excuse me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been watching this semi-old Canadian TV show called 19-2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the first episode of the second season was both extremely depressing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly done. And it’s about a, the whole show is a cop show and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular episode is about a school shooting. And it was wild sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there and hearing like, you know, shots coming from over my shoulder and hearing the police
⏹️ ▶️ Casey radio over my other shoulder. Again, none of this is remarkable. I know this has been technology for literally 20 years, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than that even, but it’s just cool to experience it again. It’s like, you know, the first time you experience HD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 4K even in certain circumstances. It’s just, it’s cool. And 5.1 is really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The system sounds phenomenal. I am not a connoisseur, but as I’ve said many, many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, I have good sound systems in my life. The BMW actually, the Harman Kardon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMW was incredible, believe it or not. My dad has a ridiculously expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fancy stereo at his house. It just a preposterously expensive stereo. And oh, by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way, the sound of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Defender sucks. Oh, really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, it’s like, it’s like one of the one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main downsides. Yeah, it’s just it’s a ** sounds. It’s a crappy sound system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear that. That really bums me out. Because I would have expected that of all the things I would have expected to be the Achilles heel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would not have been it. Yeah. But anyways, so yeah, so I set this off. It sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. You can do this. I think they call it like true tone thing or something like that where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you literally walk around the room waving an iPad or an iPhone and you look like an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idiot doing it, but it’s allegedly will tune the speakers for your specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room, which is pretty neat. Then I needed a solution for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turntable because the turntable was sitting literally above the old receiver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the turntable has RCA jacks, like analog jacks in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to emit sound and you have to plug that into something. So I needed to fix that problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wanted to at least consider doing something different for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the porch, which again had a sound form connect, which was basically an AirPlay 2 receiver and nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I ended up doing was getting this thing called a Sonos Port, which operates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both on the input and output side. So it has a couple inputs. It has an RCA input,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it has an RCA output. And so the turntable gets plugged into the input,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then the output gets plugged into the amplifier for the porch speakers. And so now this one box,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is also connected via Ethernet, can operate as the turntable-like translator,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, and also operate as the porch speakers. And so that worked out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty well. It took me a little bit of tweaking and trying to figure out how to get it to recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the turntable just right, but I think it was a casey problem. Eventually I got it. What’s really trippy though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’ve never heard a turntable, the way it works is there’s a needle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that touches the top of the record and the needle vibrates and then basically that sound just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets amplified in like five different stages and that’s what you hear. So if you have the sound off on your stereo and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you play a record and you stick your ear up near the needle, you can actually hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the music. Granted, it sounds like garbage, it’s quiet, it’s tinny as crap, but you can hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the music. And keep that in mind as I tell you that one of the things that you set up when you’re setting up a Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port is how much of a time delay you would like as you’re listening to music. Because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think about it, it has to broadcast or it may have to broadcast this to other thing. Well, it absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to pump it to some speaker somewhere and then it could pump it to multiple speakers. So it needs to build,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like a freaking disc man, an anti-skip all of a sudden. And so next thing you know, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re, you’re playing a record and you hear the needle for a moment or two, for a second or two, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear the music coming through the speakers. And it occurred to me, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argue that one of the benefits of listening to vinyl is how everything is analog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet here I am, I have now turned my turntable into a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost completely digital setup, which may be defeating kind of the point, except in the whole tea ceremony
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that you guys have beaten me up about for years and years. But nevertheless, it is pretty cool to be able to listen to my turntable anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s just another input to the Sonos. And so I can pump that to the porch. I can pump that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my little quasi-jam box thing, the Sonos Roam. That is pretty neat. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that in mind, their app is not stupendous, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. And it’ll integrate with Apple Music. It’ll integrate with Spotify. It’ll integrate with SiriusXM. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what’s nice about it is I can go into the app without messing with the television at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and say, okay, I would like to listen to Sirius XM in these two places, or I would like to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple Music in this place, or all of the places, and so on and so forth. And you can adjust the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the app independently. Also all of these devices support AirPlay too. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pump the turntable into AirPlay. That has to stay within the Sonos ecosystem. But anything coming into the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem can come in via AirPlay. So I can AirPlay directly to the porch speakers. I can AirPlay to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the porch and the living room. I can airplay to the porch, the living room, and the roam, and it all works incredibly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so in love with this system, and I am so annoyed that all these dinguses that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always, oh, you should get a Sonos. It works really well, it’s so great. Oh yeah, sure, whatever. I don’t have $85,000 sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around to buy Sonos stuff. Well, you should try Sonos. It integrates so well and works really great,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because oh my God, it’s so good. And here’s the icing on the cake. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get everything set up, and I could still tweak it some more, but I’ve found that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not infrequently, I wanna make like these little fine adjustments to the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the porch as compared to the living room because the living room has a sliding door
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that opens onto the screened-in porch. And occasionally I’ll find that if I’m just using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the macro level volume slider that’s kind of relatively adjusting any of the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are playing right now, sometimes I’ll feel like the porch is just a little too quiet or a little too loud. want to adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the porch. And I can do that via the app, but it’s ever so slightly clunky. You’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap and hold on the volume knob, or what are the thumb, the volume thumb, and then it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expand into a different view where you get individual volume controls instead of the one macro control that you were just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at. And I was getting a little annoyed by this, and I thought to myself, well, Sonos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, has an API. I wonder if I could write some sort of app and stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on, I don’t know, maybe a Raspberry Pi or something like that and make something where I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can put like a, like, you know, like a, like a dimmer, like a light dimmer sort of control on the wall of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey porch. And maybe I could do something like that. And they would, you know, the Raspberry Pi would detect, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, the relative position of the, of this quote unquote dimmer and would make an adjustment to the, to the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume or something like that, I wonder if I could do this. And at the same time I was thinking about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I somehow stumbled on that SpaaS sponsor Lutron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Caseta, they have already solved this problem. So Lutron Caseta has these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things they call PICA remotes, and they’re these little portable remotes that work via their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proprietary radio control. You can use those to control lights. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have, what is it, one, two, three, four, five buttons on them. There’s a big button at the top to turn light on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and up down to dim, a little circle in the center that you use to jump to the particular dim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is your favorite, and then you turn the light off button. And I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to myself, well, oh my gosh, I think that they do this. They actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Pico thing, a Pico switch, specifically designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to control a Sonos system. The Pico Smart Remote for Audio, I can’t link to this easily in the show notes because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really have its own URL, but it’s a play pause button at the top, which would normally be the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up button, then, I’m sorry, the light bulb on button, Then it has up down, which would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dimmer on a light, but in this case it’s obviously volume. The center one we’ll get back to in a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kind of dim to the favorite spot one we’ll get back to in a minute. And then the light off button is skip to the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey song. So, oh my gosh, I can just spend 40 bucks and get one of these, problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solved. Well, then I’m thinking to myself, I wonder, you know, does this really work? Let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me find a review. And I stumbled on my real life friend, Eric Wielander’s YouTube channel, which he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat put aside now, but it is a really good YouTube channel about smart home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And I’ll put a link to this in the show notes. But he pointed out this Pico remote, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pico smart remote for audio, the only real difference between it and any of the other Pico remotes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that instead of a light bulb icon at the top, there’s a play pause icon. And instead of a light bulb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon on the bottom, there’s a fast forward icon. Other than that, it’s the same. It’s the exact same stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so sure enough, I go into the Lutron app and I say, hey, I have a Sonos system, integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. And then I say, okay, I would like to add to my system a smart remote for audio. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I happen to have an extra Pico remote, a light bulb one sitting around. And so within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally a minute and a half, I now have a little remote control that does play, pause,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume up, down and skip forward for my Sonos system on the porch. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging awesome is this? This is so cool. So now I can be sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the porch and I already had a Pico remote on the porch for the lights previously, so I can turn the lights up and down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can adjust it so that the dim is just right, and then I can get the music going and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adjust the volume, so it’s just right. I don’t have to mess about with my phone. Not that it’s hard, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to do any of that. And Erin doesn’t have to have the Sonos app installed on her phone or anything like that. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so freaking cool. The only problem I have with it is I don’t have a reason to use it with the Raspberry Pi anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ll find others, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I will. I just need, somehow I need to get the Synology in on this and then I’ll be all set. I’ll hit the like Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trifecta. But nevertheless, so yeah, so what then I thought to myself, well, this is kind of confusing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have two of these Pico remotes, both look like light switches, but only one of them actually controls the lights. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to Erin about it. She said, well, just take nail polish remover to it. I bet it’ll take the icons off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. Oh my God, you’re right. And so I took a little nail polish remover that she had just on the light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light bulb icons, and now they’re gone. And so now you can tell which one’s which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it gets better still. So I have two playlists that I tend to play if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m outside. I don’t only play those things, but especially when people are over. I tend to use one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two. One of them is my, I call it my Funk It Up playlist. It’s just a bunch of like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a bunch of like soul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and funk music from like the 60s. You can have your dad card back now, Casey. Thank you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you very much. If I remember, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but I’ll probably forget. But it is, without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyperbole, this is the best playlist that has ever been made. And so it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Stevie Wonder and Commodores and things like that. So anyways, I have that, and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the playlist that we use when we tailgate, because that’s just a bunch of random music,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much more modern music, that myself and Aaron and our mutual friend Brian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we tailgate with, that the three of us have been adding to for probably five or 10 years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it turns out if you add these playlists to quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unquote my Sonos, which I guess is you know, basically favoriting them, so to speak, within the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem, then when you hit the little like jump to the correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dim button on the center of the Pico remote, it’ll just cycle through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those playlists. So I could be listening to nothing. My phone could be in another room and I could step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out on the porch, hit the little circle in the center of the smart remote and boom, now I’m listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Now you’re funking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up. I’m funking it up, baby. Now I hit it again. Now it’s like I’m at a tailgate and then I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn the volume up and down. I can play pause. I don’t like this song because Brian added a bunch of country that’s not really my thing. Hey, guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? I just skipped to the next song, baby. Oh, this is so cool. This is so cool and I love it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much and I wish it wasn’t $85 gazillion because I want everyone to experience this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is so awesome. So if you’re on the fence about any of this stuff, I swear to God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have not paid me anything. I did get a discount, but they did not pay me anything. This was completely organic. They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask for any of this. They don’t even know I’m talking to you about this. It is so good. You’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to check it out. I cannot say enough good things about this stuff. Genuinely, like it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so cool to have something that with the exception of the small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hiccup when I was setting up the subwoofer, which again may have been a Casey problem, everything has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just worked. Do you remember when we used Apple products And they just worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you remember that? I remember that. Now I bought some stuff and I spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of money on it. Is this sounding familiar? I spent a lot of money on stuff that I probably don’t need, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounding familiar, and it just worked. And it was so awesome. And I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really have been incredibly impressed by it. And the other nice thing is, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is cool to be able to just go into the Sonos app and say, play such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such on, you know, the main stereo system, the living room stereo system, and not have to have the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. Is that a big deal? No, of course not. And that’s how I was doing it for the last year or so. Ever since we went to the 4K Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to change out some stuff and the way the stereo works, it’s not important. But basically once we went to the 4K Apple TV, if we were listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to anything in the living room, except the turntable, we had to have the TV on because it was the Apple TV that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving it. And now I can just go into the Sonos app and just have it play SiriusXM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a playlist or Apple Music or what have you, and play it to any one of the speakers that I have set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and it just does it and the TV can remain off and it’s fine and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so nice not to have to have the TV on even though like I love the Apple TV screensavers and all that, it’s just nice not to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have that on and worrying about any of that. And again, if I choose to AirPlay, that works flawlessly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not a problem. But now, here it was when I didn’t know much about how the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff worked, I thought to myself, I don’t wanna have another freaking ecosystem in my life, that’s the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I want right now. But now that I have it here, I find that I’m almost never air playing and I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jumping in the Sonos app and just saying, you know, go play this on such and such a speaker. And it’s been working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out so well and I’m so pleased with it. And now I’m gonna turn into like the average Tesla fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or really the average
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, have you heard about Sonos? Let me tell you about Sonos. Did you know how great it is? Did you know you can integrate with Lutron Caseta? Did you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could do this? Did you know, did you know, did you know? I’m now that guy and I’m sorry, but it is so good and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m blown away by how good it is. and I am so overjoyed and happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I just wanna buy all the things. I don’t have anywhere else I need speakers. I wanna find a reason to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of these stupid things and put them places, cause it’s so great. Now, Marko, you had tried it in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? And you were not as impressed. Am I right about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very impressed with some of their products and less with others. So first of all, I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a soundbar person. I’ve learned that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey about myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you have to know yourself and I’ve learned about myself. I’m not a soundbar person. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say the the arc without the subwoofer. I was not particularly impressed with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I added the subwoofer then it made a world of difference, but without the subwoofer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I will say the Sonos sub like the big subwoofer they have is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the nicest home theater subwoofer. I’ve ever seen I’ve ever used and ever heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is one of the very very few on the market that are force-canceling which means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It basically does not generate vibration because of it’s using two drivers at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite angles. It’s a whole thing. Apple does it, you know, all their recent woofers for like, you know, the MacBook Pro and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, it’s a great subwoofer and my preferred setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Sonos Amp, which is a speaker amp that only drives two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, like a left and a right, but has, you know, the HDMI arc input and everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it as a non surround stereo plus subwoofer setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I love that setup because it allows me to use my nice KEF however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pronounced, those speakers, my Q350s, those with the Sonos Sub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are an amazing, I’ve never been happier with a speaker setup than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple pair of Q350s and the Sonos Sub and the Sonos Amp. I love it so much. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds incredible for both music and TV and movies and everything, but especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music. Um, and it’s just, it’s, it’s awesome. Um, but I have tried some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other smaller products I’ve tried. Um, let me see. I just make it get the names right. Hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. So I’ve tried the one, the move and the Rome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of those have impressed me and other people swear by these things. So maybe it’s just my taste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not lining up with what they make in the smaller category here. I have never been impressed with those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three products. And everyone else seems like you like them a lot. So good for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I haven’t had I haven’t a great experience with those in terms of like value for the money. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree that the you know, as you said, like the setup process is great. And that I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no complaints about, you know, setup integration, the tech side of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception that the app is, you know, So, fairly clunky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if, I wouldn’t say it’s fairly clunky. I would say it’s clunky. It’s not perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would even say, I’d probably say it’s not even great, but I don’t think it’s actively bad either,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially because I freaking hate everything that Apple Music is in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of their apps in every platform. But I would agree it’s not like an exemplary app by any stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the imagination, but it is not, I wouldn’t say it’s actively bad either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s in the middle. The bar is low for like iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music playing apps. Like they’re all awful and it’s kind of a shame. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I love them for TV sound and for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 2. And for those two purposes, you only use the apps to set them up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not actually going through the app to play stuff. So it doesn’t matter how much I like the app because I never use the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m extremely happy with them. As AirPlay 2 devices, the amps have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock solid. When I had the One and the Move, I did the same thing, I did AirPlay with those two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were also rock solid for AirPlay. It’s faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more reliable to AirPlay something to play through the amp on my TV speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it is to a HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick it out, I know, right? But you pick it out of the AirPlay picker, you hit the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker, in my case in a living room, a second later, boom, it’s on. HomePods, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even close to that fast or that reliable. So anyway, I’m a huge fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some of their products and the rest, maybe not quite for me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I at least respect them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I totally get that. Oh, and I forgot to mention that they do have some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemingly rudimentary voice recognition that is off by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you. you have to go in and add the voice recognition in order to get it to be enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, which I really like. You know, by default, you can say, hey Sonos, and it’s just gonna ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, but then you can choose to add the voice recognition. And if I understand this correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the voice recognition processing is happening on device. There is no cloud component. But that also means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t just, you know, ask it arbitrary queries. You have to add, you can ask it like the time, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can’t ask it anything complicated like you would, you know, any of the other tubes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to say their call names or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can add them as well. Not as well, but instead you can add Google Assistant or you can add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Amazon one. Yep, yep, that’s true. I haven’t tried that, but I know, I am aware that that is something one could do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so what’s really great about this is that it’s all on device, so it’s pretty quick. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems pretty reliable because the problem set is so small. What’s his name? Is it Gus Spring? What was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guy from Breaking Bad? Yeah. I forget the actor’s name, but he’s the one who talks to you, which is kind of funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Really? That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah. Sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey kind of threatening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does sound a little bit threatening, but nevertheless, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very distinguished, very recognizable voice. But that seems to work well. And it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle semi-complicated requests pretty well. Like I’ve said to it, you know, hey, dingus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop playback on porch. And I’ve said that in the living room. And it’s been smart enough to say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to continue the playback in the living room, but stop it on the porch. And that’s just That’s a silly example, but it’s stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that seems to work really, really well. And I’ve been really impressed with that too. The Roam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is again, their Jambox like thing. I like it a lot. It sounds really good to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ear, given what it is. So I am unquestionably grading on a curve, but given what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, I get a lot of volume and a really impressive amount of bass out of something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximately the size of the original Jambox, rest in peace to the OG. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been impressed by it. And it comes, or you can get one that has, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost a triangular shape. And you can get like a base that you can stick it on so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s always charged. As it turns out, I didn’t realize until later, that’s just a triangularly shaped Qi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco base. Yeah, it charges with Qi. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it would sit on any Qi charger. It’s just, this is, you know, bespoke and so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, all of these people who are so annoying about how great Sonos is, now you to try Sonos, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good, it’s so much better than everything. Well, you know what, you have to try it, it’s so good, it’s so much better than everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Sonos is what Apple should have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s speaker efforts should be like Sonos. And frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m shocked Apple didn’t buy Sonos at some point in the past, because they’ve had a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down times financially. I think before they really leaned heavily into sound bars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were in a bad state. And it turns out soundbars are just cash cows for everybody. So that’s that’s kind of saved their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butts, I think. But but they were in a bad state for a while and they could have been bought for a song, I bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple didn’t. And and it on one level, I’m I’m happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple didn’t because now we have an alternative. Like if if the HomePod lineup keeps getting crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or staying crappy or being buggy, then this is the next this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is where to go. Basically, like this is this is your alternative to it, and it’s not as good in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways It’s better in other ways, but at least it’s a good alternative and the and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see you know I don’t see Apple getting this good like which is a shame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think if Apple brought their Audio engineering expertise like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual like the speakers the drivers the enclosures They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kick Sonos’s butt but Sonos slaughters them on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance, physical quality metrics, reliability, speed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inputs and handling and versatility. Like Sonos destroys them on all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Apple just makes better sounding speakers. And I wish they could, you know, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was something on the market that combined that, whether it was Apple, Sonos or something else. But in the absence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that imaginary solution that combines all the best things of all these things, Yeah, they’re pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. John, have you ever played with any of this? I don’t recall. Don’t you have a Rome or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John I got two rooms now, actually. So I wanted one or she was using mine and I said, I’ll just get you your own.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can you can actually hook them up in a stereo pair, which I thought was funny. I mean, a stereo pair of two
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I still use mine as my shower podcast thing. She uses it as her little office
⏹️ ▶️ John radio, essentially, you know, just to play music in her basement office. What else do I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have anything else? I don’t think I have anything else from them. And it’s weird because the the roams are
⏹️ ▶️ John basically off all the time when they’re not in use. So launching the app shows you don’t have a sonos
⏹️ ▶️ John system. I can’t connect to your things and you have to turn them on or whatever. So I’m really not using it the way it’s intended.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was hoping your your glowing review would convince Marco that watching television and movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and stereo is barbaric in this day and age. But apparently not. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no chance. I love my setup way too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have an awesome setup, but just need more of those speakers that you love in different positions. then voila,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I have to like, then it becomes a much more complex situation. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp is a really, really great alternative to a receiver if you only want two channels, plus
⏹️ ▶️ John But you think you only want two channels, but apparently Casey and I cannot convince you that having
⏹️ ▶️ John more than two channels can be fun. And every modern television channel. But I’ve had it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. I had it when it was new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in like the late. That was in the 90s or whatever the hell it was. Early 2000s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Like, you know, look, 3D TVs existed for a little while, then they stopped because nobody cared.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, surround sound is not a fad. Every television show and every movie is mastered for
⏹️ ▶️ John more than two stereo speakers. And if you got them, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a- How is surround sound different from 3D TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s a thing that people like and it’s not going away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me, let me, so my experience with surround sound was way, way, way back in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mid 90s. My dad, again, super audiophile for all the good and bad that comes with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He not only spent a Brazilian dollars on the stereo, but also, you know, put together a surround
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound system for our main television. We had, we were the only people I knew with a laser disc player, like the whole rigmarole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Early, early, early surround. I don’t know if this is true, but it seemed to me that the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surround sound was just, let me guess what’s coming from the back. Like there was, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t seem like anything was mastered such that this sound needs to come out of that speaker. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, let’s take a guess. Oh, just ambient noise that sounds like a crowd? We’ll just pump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that through everywhere. That must work, right? And occasionally it would guess right. And like in Top Gun, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear a plane go from behind you to in front of you as the same thing is happening on the television. When it did click,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was amazing. But it was very rare. Now, it is clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, depending on what content you’re feeding all of this, stuff is mastered for 5.1. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is mastered such that I want, and this is what I was saying earlier, the sound from this walkie-talkie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this cop show to come from the left rear speaker. I want the scream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from somebody getting shot at coming from—this is a terrible analogy, I’m so sorry, it’s just the most recent example—is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming from the front right speaker, and so on and so forth. So it is a very different experience than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago. And I don’t even remember—I’m probably wrong—but I don’t remember Dolby Digital being this good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it was, or maybe it’s just that mastering has gotten better over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the years, but it is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mastering has gotten better over the years, but also the original surround sound formats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the actual audio formats, were less able to represent perfectly discrete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Like they were like simpler, lower bandwidth and everything. Modern formats now, like they individually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco represent all the different channels and separately encoded and they can have, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can encode positional information so that that way your system can adapt to how your speakers are actually positioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus how the sounds were intended like in a giant soundscape. Now they’re really advanced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Back then they were simpler. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I totally buy that. And I mean, in the defense of Marco, again, I spent the last 15 years listening to stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in stereo with a center channel that probably wasn’t even used half the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it is absolutely compulsory, but I will say without question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a much better experience to have a full 5.1 setup than it is to have just stereo. Again,