505: A Mental Laxative
20 Oct 2022New iPad! Well, it’s the iPad, but not the iPad, which is still in the lineup at the same price. There’s also a new Apple TV, with which you can use the TV app to watch TV or Apple TV+ on your TV.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco rediscovers his love for programming, by procrastiworking.
- Follow-up:
- Apple TV,
Match Content, and HDMI QMS - Casey’s iPhone upgrade, eSIM, and Verizon fees
- Follow-out for Upgrade #429: Freedom Doors
- John’s mouse
- John’s speaker adventure
- Apple Watch Ultra screen size
- Apple TV,
- New iPads!
- New iPad Pros!
- New Apple TV!
- Post-show: Casey got scammed on Amazon
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Chapters
- Therapeutic procrastiworking
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Follow-up: Match Content
- Follow-up: eSIM
- Follow-out: Trackpad gestures
- Sponsor: Kolide
- John’s mouse
- Speaker adventure
- Apple Watch Ultra, one week in
- Sponsor: Linode
- New iPad, iPad Pro
- New Apple TV
- Ending theme
- Casey got scammed
Therapeutic procrastiworking
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, we just gotta get on all on the same page and get the balls rolling. Agreed. Love those balls.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, if someone other than Marco edited the show, that little clip would be like at the beginning or the end of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Just want to point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that out. So this Apple event kind of came out of nowhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not an event. We had an item in the notes that, you know, now is moot and should be deleted.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll go to that now. that was like, oh, rumor is that there won’t be an October event. It will just be a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of products, you know, put out into the world through a press release. But we never got to that topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what happened. So if you didn’t see that topic down in the notes market, you might not have known this was happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw that you were like doing something else. And when you came back online, you’re like, wow, new Apple products, but everyone else knew it was happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s literally what happened. Like I was I was like deep in work mode, which by the way, it’s going amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I decided to this other product. I mentioned last week that I was making this dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little app for sand drivers here to kind of, you know, share like condition reports with each other. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this is an app that’s going to be used by like maybe 15 people. It’s not like a major audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or business kind of thing. However, I’m using it in part as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a break from Overcast, both to kind of regroup after a very difficult summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nothing working that I was doing. that was very demoralizing, and also to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help me learn all the new stuff. Like, this is, I’m doing everything in Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift UI, and the new Swift concurrency stuff, all the, you know, the async, everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is glorious. Like, because what I’m making,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively, is the kind of app that is simple enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that It’s almost like the WWDC video, or the example apps they make, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, oh, I have this simple JSON list that my web service is dumping out, and I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show it in a UI, basically. That’s the… They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a little fancy, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t the food truck app actually had a lot of screens and features this past year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and it turns out, everything needs to have a lot of, like part of what I’m doing requires location
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access, and talk about needing some UI there, to try to manage those permissions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and getting the user to understand what’s going on, especially because for it to work really well, I want some people to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the always location access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luck, like, that’s a whole thing. Like that’s, Apple really does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not want you to do that. And they really make it difficult. But anyway, which is probably for the best, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyways, so, but using SwiftUI and doing all this stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using all the async stuff, oh, it’s finally coming together. It’s finally clicking. Like my journey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with both Swift itself, and certainly with Swift UI, and more recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Async stuff that I barely have used yet, it really has felt like… I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say starting a car in fifth gear, but… That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey not at all what you mean. I know what you mean, but that’s not what you mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That metaphor is difficult, in part because my start was even slower,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in part because I don’t even know how many gears modern cars have. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fifth was the highest gear, it’s like starting a car in fifth gear. And that was back when engines sucked too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so they were not very powerful, and unless you had a fairly hefty, uh, you know, grunt there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was fairly difficult to do. That’s not to say I never did it, but just a bit as you start out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really slow, and maybe you stall a few times, and then you should, but eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you keep at it, you can build up quite some speed. It takes a long time. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how I started all this stuff. And by hopping out briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my massive legacy code base and just trying something brand new from scratch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way quote, should be doing it now, the most modern way, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really got everything moving. Like it’s like a mental laxative for developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block. Like it’s just everything’s moving now. Like I’m on a roll, like I’m super,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy, I’m… because like, you know, I think part of the reason I was so miserable all summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and first half of fall so far is because everything I’m doing with Overcast recently has just not worked. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to tell people, you know, whenever people ask me like, hey, you know, should I be a programmer or could I be a programmer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what the the gist of what I always say is like, look, programming is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of frustration and hitting your head against the wall, followed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by making something and something working. And the satisfaction of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like when it works, has to be motivating enough to you to make all the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff worth it. To make that, you know, the road to get there, banging your head against the wall, being frustrated by weird bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or weird compiler errors or whatever. Like, the process of getting there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the payoff needs to be, needs to make all that worthwhile. And for like the last six months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been on the wrong end of that ratio. Like I’ve been putting so much work in to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server-side stuff that didn’t go anywhere, clients had ideas that didn’t go anywhere, clients had stuff that took longer than I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would because it was using old code. Like there’s been so much like, you know, just to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mix a whole bunch more metaphors, like grinding my gears and just like just generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not getting anywhere and not ever getting that payoff of things working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicely and things being done. And so to take a week to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to help out my local community and myself here in some small way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has some value. But the greater value to me is that it’s basically unfreezing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mental block. It’s a good fix for my developer depression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few months of just like, let me get something that actually works. I’m a programmer, I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And I haven’t felt like a programmer recently. And this has made me feel like a programmer, and I’m very happy about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Even though it’s a dumb little app that is not gonna have a lot of obvious value,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has quite a lot of knock-on effect value for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think that’s extremely important. And I have not had near the slog that you have with Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve been fiddling with something new over the last couple of weeks. And similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not leaving behind this legacy code base like Overcast is. neither of my code bases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are particularly old, but I don’t know, I wanted to scratch an itch and try something, and I’ve been working on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new thing, and it’s using APIs like Apple APIs, but APIs that I’ve not really used before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including a little bit of AV Foundation. So I feel like I’m suddenly Marco Jr. over here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, it is really refreshing to get a clean slate, and I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with every piece of code I write, I learn a little something and I get a little bit better, and I make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more mistakes, But then I learn from them usually. And so every time I write something new,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel, usually I feel proud of that new thing and I, and I see where I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improved in my craft, which is, which is really valuable. I, we don’t need to belabor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this cause we have a lot to talk about, but out of curiosity, what are you thinking about the async stuff? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like I’m great at it, but I do like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I kind of especially like that I can intermingle, combine and async if I so choose, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually don’t for the record. But there is some afford, there are some affordances to, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, going back and forth between the two. How are you enjoying it? And are you, when you say you’re using async
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, are you simply using like APIs that Apple’s exposing? Or are you doing like checked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continuations and checked throwing continuations and the whole rigmarole and making your own async streams?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mostly Apple’s, I’ve made a couple of my own basically to get around Apple APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t yet offer async calls. So frustrating. I understand it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like requesting location permission is one of those things where you have to request permission, then you have to wait for a delegate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call to come back to you. And yeah, I know this stuff is all very, very new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll give Apple a pass for a while. I really hope in the coming years, all of that gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrappers around it that make it async compatible. is, oh my god, it’s so nice when that’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for the few APIs that do offer that, oh man, it’s nice. And so to answer your first part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your question, how am I liking it, so far, I don’t have yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great understanding of what’s happening, like of how some of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey are implemented. Me neither.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I want to go back and re-watch. Like back when it was announced, I watched the WDC sessions on it and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that was not only was that like, what, two years ago now, but also I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it yet. And so the information didn’t stick as well. Now that I’ve used it some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve seen how it behaves, and I’m getting a feel for how it works, now is a good time for me to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and watch not only the intro talks, but to watch all of the talks that have been on Swift concurrency so far to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just learn some of those details of, okay, well, when I do this, this, and this, what threads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it gonna be called on, or what’s gonna wait for what, and what happens when this thing throws and an exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever else. And so there are all those little implementation details that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really feel more comfortable when I know them, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey though you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily need to. I mean, I’m using it right now and not knowing them, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of programmer I am. It’s like I like to understand everything that’s happening below the surface. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually need to know that deep of the knowledge, but sometimes you do. And yeah, I kind of pride myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. So anyway, so I’m really enjoying it, and it’s making me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I came to a realization. I talked a little bit about it on Under the Radar last week. It’s a very good episode if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you find yourself ever in a slump, motivationally, or things like that. But I found myself realizing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more time I spend in Xcode versus other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, like TextMate, Terminal, the web browser, Xcode is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy place. I want to rearrange my priorities and such so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can increase the amount of time I spend in Xcode and decrease the amount of time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend doing other types of work for apps. And so that means less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server work, less web stuff, less running my own backends. I’m still going to have to run them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run less complicated ones that need less input from me, possibly using some managed services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I need to get to a place where I’m doing more Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, because this past summer, I would sometimes go a week without even opening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode. It was that bad. I this is not where I want to be. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gotten to the point now, and I hate to say it. But I finally got to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now where I really don’t want to work on objective C code, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all. But not only that, I don’t want to work on UI kit anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I’m right there with you. I can go on a quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rant and quite a terrorist. I’m sure you could as well about how much of a pain in the hindquarters Swift UI can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. But golly, it’s hard not to look at it and say, well, yeah, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably the future. Like, you know, there are warts, there are blemishes, there are pimples,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are zits, but all told, it’s clearly the direction that I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to walk, whether or not Apple wants us to. I think you could still make an argument one way or the other although certainly the party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line is they do want you to walk that way. But I really think that SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has so much potential. potential. And if Apple really does keep cranking on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I really think it could be quite incredible. It will mean that, you know, things will be different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the developers. They will potentially be different for users. But nevertheless, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really think it is impressive. It’s the same with the async stuff, right? Like, I think the async stuff is more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solid so far, but I really like where this is going and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like when all these things work together and just click.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s such a refreshing experience and so lovely. And I really can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait for both of them to get better. And I mean, coincidentally, this thing that I’m working on that may or may never not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever see the light of day, you know, I’m using Location Manager. And so what did I have to do? I had to wrap PCL Location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Manager, give it an async API. And I would have talked to you about this had I realized you were working on it, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve actually come to think of it. I think you you might have mentioned this and I should have thought about it. But anyways, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we could have worked together for a hot 30 seconds then until we both decided we wanted to do it our own way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then turned our backs on each other. But nevertheless, I want there to be more robust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey async await support in more APIs. I want more control in SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more ways of doing the things that I want to do, or simpler ways of doing the things that I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. But golly, when it really is working well, When you’re not bumping up against one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the many, many, many walls. It is so nice. It’s just so, so nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I’m getting, you know, like when, when you’re, when you’re dealing with a, a very opinionated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prickly situation like Swift, like app review,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of these that, you know, the, again, this it’s, it’s, it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting in fifth year kind of thing. It’s really hard to get going from nothing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hit every single sharp edge there is you hit every single spike, you hit every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinionated wall. And a lot of times in ways that are very frustrating, and that don’t make sense with error messages or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And so it like this is how SwiftUI has been for me. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting really fast at it. And I’m getting to the point where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and I keep hitting instances, where I know how to do the thing I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do in UI kit. And I know that it’s a slog. And I just did it in it in SwiftUI in 30 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m hitting so many of those now. There are still areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s still a buggy mess and it’s very difficult to use. For instance, complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigation hierarchies, it’s still crappy at that. And someday it might get better. I hope it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s still tough for it. However, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer and fewer areas where you shouldn’t use SwiftUI and over time that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to shrink. And Apple is going to keep telling us UIKit is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going anywhere. In the same way they’re saying you can still use VSC. You can, you can still use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UIKit. You can still do these things. However, it is very clear to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many years I’ve been using UIKit since 2008. So a 14 year veteran of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UIKit, It’s extremely clear to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there are lots of capabilities being added to the frameworks that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only do in SwiftUI, even within UIKit kind of areas. Things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you put this kind of thing in a navigation bar, but I want the text to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be over here. I keep hitting stuff like that where I know how to do it in UIKit, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes a whole bunch of hacks, or a huge amount of configuration and a huge amount of code. Or there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that I know really aren’t possible to do in UIKit without rewriting the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control from scratch. And SwiftUI lets me do it in two lines. So I’m seeing now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many areas where I’m using SwiftUI and I’m hitting things that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I couldn’t do either at all or without a whole bunch of work in UIKit that just happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in SwiftUI. And so it’s to the point now where I had to adjust something in UIKit, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it was and it felt like writing assembly code compared to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been doing. It’s like, what? I have to do everything. Why do I need to do all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? This is so clunky. And yeah, so SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think SwiftUI is the future. It’s the present. It is here now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think that anybody who is making iPhone apps in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or iPad, iOS apps, this we’ll get to that but I don’t this whole thing we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calling iPadOS its own thing, okay it’s iOS. Anybody who’s making iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to be using SwiftUI. If you want your skills to be modern and to and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a strong future you need to be using SwiftUI. That’s it UIKit is on its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way out. I’m telling you it It is very obvious when you use SwiftUI, oh, this is where the work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going. And UIKit is not, you know, that’s, UIKit’s clearly in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintenance slash legacy teams mode because there’s still a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of UIKit code out there and there will be for decades, you know, so they have to maintain it. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not where the effort’s going. The effort’s going to SwiftUI. And when it comes to Apple, you wanna be where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the effort’s going. Like, you don’t wanna be where they’re in maintenance mode. they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often put a lot of resources into that. So you want to generally be where the maintenance is going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what I want to do now is really take Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very strongly into the present day, code-wise and API-wise, and to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design-wise as well. That I was happy with the redesign that I did last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter. I need to go further with that, much further, I need to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vast swaths of the app in SwiftUI and vast swaths
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the underlying code in Swift and SwiftAsync and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CloudKit. That’s the direction I need to go, because if I stay where I am, I’m stuck. I can’t go anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so burdened by my huge amount of complex legacy code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to start the very long and initially painful process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of modernizing it all. But the good thing is, I think at the end, I’ll be in a much better place, and it will have a much better future. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, getting a little bigger picture here, I don’t want to sell this app and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go do something else. I want to keep working on this app. I like it. I still use it. It’s still a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. I don’t want someone else to take it and mess it up. I haven’t I haven’t had great experiences with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling stuff, having it be working out well for me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna just keep this. I want this to be kind of my long-term thing. And as an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monogamist, I guess, a serial app monogamist, like you were saying, Casey, a few minutes ago, like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun it is to do something brand new and to see like, oh, this is how I would do it if I was doing it new. Well, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your job is basically like you have one app and you stick with that app for like five to 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hardly ever get to do that. you hardly ever get to get to do things the new way or rewrite things from scratch or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s almost never on the table when that’s the way you work. If there was some, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot new thing I wanted to do, this is the time in my life where I would just go do that. But there isn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to still do this. I just want to do it like, you know, well, and modern and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, get myself moving again. So that’s, that’s what I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. I don’t know. It’s funny too, because even though the, the apps that are already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the app store for me are not that big. And then they make a little bit of money, but it’s not, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not overcast money. And I don’t mean that to be flippant. I’m being genuine. But even still, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work on this new thing that may or may not ever, you know, be a real app, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t help but feel guilty that I’m leaving my existing kids, you know, to wither.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet I feel like in ways that you articulated very, very eloquently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sometimes you just need that. You need that distraction. You need that to, to rev
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your engine and to, and to get yourself just cruising again, and as we beat these car analogies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to death, but, uh, but no, I, I, I agree with you and even though I feel guilty,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I figure, you know, I’ll give myself a little bit more time with this. And if I hit a wall where I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, Oh, this is just, this is just not worth it, then that’s my answer, you know? And then, then that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s that. Uh, but if I continue and next thing I know I’m releasing this to the app store, than hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s awesome. There’s nothing wrong with that either. So we’ll see, but I am also having fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now and I don’t wanna lose that momentum and I hope you don’t either. Now real time-ish follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. The modern Corvette C7, modern 911s, last I checked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven speed manual transmissions. Most cars still six speeds though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so starting in seventh gear, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s totally different for automatics which now have like 12 gears. Oh, and to answer HeyUDVD in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HeyUDVD asks, is there a way to have the smart speed settings in Overcast detect when music is playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and automatically switch to 1x and then resume the faster speed when talking resumes or is it a difficult problem to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve? Well, hey you DVD, now I’m announcing for the very first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of those features that I’ve tried to do over the last few years and have failed to do. This is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have put a significant amount of time into. In fact, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I briefly mentioned that when I talked about the 16-inch and how I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only heard the fans spin up once and it was because I was stressing the CPU and GPU for multiple hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I was doing was training a model to detect music versus speech. That’s what that was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gave it a huge amount of samples that I pulled from podcasts everywhere and was detecting music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus speech and this massive amount of data and it was churning on that trying to generate an ML model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. And And the answer is, yes, it is possible to detect music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not, it doesn’t work as well as I want it to. And there are a lot of limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of costs to doing it that I’m not yet willing to bear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it, for the quality that I was able to achieve. So maybe in the future, if I get it to work better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have fewer downsides, yeah, I’d love to do that. But I’m not there yet, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s one of the many things that I have tried to do and it just didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I remember you talking about that privately with us and I still do admire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lengths you were going through in order to try to get this to work, but I don’t blame you for for not only getting frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by it, but putting it aside as well.
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Follow-up: Match Content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a much longer pre-show than I think any of the three of us intended, but that’s okay. I think that was valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we should plow through some follow-up before we get to the meat of the episode. And let’s start with Apple TV’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Match Content, which by the way, I tried. I had it off and I tried it very briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I turned it on and I, forgive me, I don’t remember the exact settings because there’s like sub settings or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I just turned it full on. And literally that very day, like an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour later, Declan came running out. I think I was on the screen and Porsche came running out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dad, dad, dad, something’s wrong with the TV. It’s going black like a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like anytime I do anything, it goes black for a long time. It’s like, oh, I bet I know what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I turned it right back off. It just, it was on for like three hours and I decided it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not for me, but that’s just my experience. I know you should probably listen to John cause John actually knows what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he’s talking about, but tell me about HDMI QMS, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the black screen thing is one of the big downsides. I warned everybody about it, but now people are trying and they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you weren’t kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The screen goes black
⏹️ ▶️ John between doing stuff. Yeah, it does. And the analogy I made was to, you know, when we got the
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM-based Macs and all of a sudden changing screen resolution was like instant and plugging in an external monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John was like instant as compared to the Intel days when your screen would go black for a while and then it would come back in
⏹️ ▶️ John at the new resolution. It’s like, we need that to happen. in the television world, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a sub part of the HDMI 2.1a spec, a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John called quick media switching that is trying to address this problem. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does it by leveraging VRR, variable refresh rate, because the variable refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John rate lets things like games not be at a fixed refresh, not have the television not be at a fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh rate. So the television doesn’t say, I’m going to show you 30 new pictures every second. The television instead is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of led by the game and saying, hey game, when you’ve got a new frame, give it to me and then I, the television, will display it. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be on this regimented schedule. I will vary my frame rate based on, you know, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good for games. Well, that same feature, as you can imagine, could be used to seamlessly change
⏹️ ▶️ John the frame rate when going from say a 60 hertz Apple TV menu screen to
⏹️ ▶️ John a 29.97 hertz television show that you’re watching on Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. Why have the screen go black? Why not just use VRR to change the frame rate? That’s what QMS
⏹️ ▶️ John does, but there are caveats. The first one is that it’s part of the HDMI 2.1a spec
⏹️ ▶️ John and like everything in HDMI 2.1, it’s optional. So you’re a thing that says HDMI 2.1
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in the specs, maybe it doesn’t have this feature. Second thing is this thing works
⏹️ ▶️ John only as long as the resolution remains the same. So the only thing that can change is the frame rate,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t know because I haven’t tested this. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if that also encompasses SDR versus HDR. I imagine that’s also excluded because
⏹️ ▶️ John the sentence, again, I’ll read it right from the spec, as long as the resolution remains the same and only the frame rate changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, changing from SDR to HDR, I would say that counts as not only the frame rate changing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still it could help in those cases. Another caveat, both devices have to
⏹️ ▶️ John support this optional feature. So the Apple TV has to support it, which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, and your television
⏹️ ▶️ John or your receiver or whatever have to support it. So you have to have both ends of it. It could be added to devices through a firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John update, according to this fact that we’ll link in the show notes. So there is some hope that you might not have to buy new devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if the thing you have doesn’t even support HDMI 2.1, which is common for a lot of people’s older setups,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can forget about it. I kind of wish they had, you know, reached a little farther
⏹️ ▶️ John for the stars here and said, we’re gonna solve this problem, but only for frame rate. Well, you know, HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John and SDR are a thing. And I feel like that is the main time the most difficult decision I have in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, choosing what the settings are is, going forward, I would imagine there will be more
⏹️ ▶️ John and more HDR content, because HDR content looks better than SDR content. It’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what I’m looking for in my fancy new TV, the best it can do is show me 4K HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John content. But there’s stuff that’s just 4K and SDR, there’s stuff that’s 1080p and SDR, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way down the line. So I would imagine over time, there’ll be more and more HDR. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I run the UI on my Apple TV in
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K Dolby Vision. Like just the little thing with the little rectangles, I run that in 4K Dolby Vision, which just
⏹️ ▶️ John like doesn’t make any sense. Like there’s no HDR content on the menu screen. Like why are you even doing that? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that because I hope against hope that I can go from the 4K HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John menu right into 4K HDR content. And it won’t have to black out the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John because nothing changes. In practice, I can tell you that rarely happens, if ever, because
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe just the way the Apple TV does the app launching where it always blacks it out or whatever, but that’s what I’m hoping will happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, keep your fingers crossed for seven years from now when HDMI QMS,
⏹️ ▶️ John quick media syncing is available on all our devices. Another thing people sent me in response
⏹️ ▶️ John to this was the YouTube app. Apparently, if you watch the YouTube app on your Apple TV and you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have like whatever the hell it’s called where you don’t see ads in YouTube, honestly, I don’t even know what that is that is a lot, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for it for years. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John see ads on YouTube, every time YouTube plays an ad, blacks out the screen because the ads are a different frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate or resolution or HDR, CR than the video. And it’s just maddening. It’s like impossible to use. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t keep match content on if you use YouTube TV or whatever to actually watch
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Because can you imagine every commercial break it blacked out? It’s ridiculous, right? And on
⏹️ ▶️ John that front, if you want to, if you just can’t run it because the blackouts are too much or because you have a kid who will not deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with the blackouts. And I mean, I don’t blame you like I put up with it because I want the best of the best I don’t want it to be clean straight through
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything match up. I can tolerate the black screen for two seconds I’m also not channel surfing or going from app
⏹️ ▶️ John to app. I’m watching one show like it’s fine most modern TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John Will actually undo the damage done by trying to watch 24 frames per second content
⏹️ ▶️ John in a 60 Hertz thing, right? so what happens is you you put your Apple TV and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever in 60 Hertz, right and And it’s just locked there all the time. And then even when you watch
⏹️ ▶️ John a movie, it sends 60 hertz signals to the television filled with
⏹️ ▶️ John janky 24 frames per second video where some frames are displayed longer than other frames.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it sends that gross signal to the television. And then the television says, well, I’ve got a 60
⏹️ ▶️ John hertz video signal talking to me, but it like looks at the image and says, yeah, this is 60
⏹️ ▶️ John hertz, but it looks kind of like, it seems kind of like it’s actually 24 frame per second content
⏹️ ▶️ John where some frames are being shown longer than others. So I’ll fix that for you. And basically it takes the incoming frames,
⏹️ ▶️ John batches them up into batches. Okay, so these three 60 hertz frames look like one frame because nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John changed. Then these two 60 hertz frames look like nothing changed, so these are a frame. And then it basically shows 24 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second by de-janking your content. It’s called judder,
⏹️ ▶️ John auto de-judder. So we’ll put a link into the RTINGS article where RTINGS, when they rate television, tells you whether
⏹️ ▶️ John your television can do this or not. Obviously me with my empathy for the machine thinks, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is awful. Why would I send a screwed up signal to my TV? And then on my TV use video processing
⏹️ ▶️ John to unscrew it up. Why don’t I just send the TV 24 frames every second? And that’s why I turn on match
⏹️ ▶️ John content and that’s why I recommend it. But if you really can’t stand the black screen, check out this RTINGS link, see
⏹️ ▶️ John if your television can de-jutter it. And if your television can’t, what you’ll see is like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a little hitch in the movement. You’ll see it mostly like in slow panning shots or whatever, but it shows certain frames for longer
⏹️ ▶️ John than other frames. And it’s, you know, if you’re not sensitive to it, maybe you’ll never notice, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John notice and I don’t like it. So, so there you have it. I still recommend the match content. John Syracuse’s story.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and also the, so I was gonna ask you Casey, but it seems like you can’t remember, and I haven’t looked at it recently. I think there are
⏹️ ▶️ John two settings. One is do you want me to match the frame rate? And the de-jutter thing will fix that
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. But the other one is, do you want me to match HDR versus SDR?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe you are correct. and I didn’t spend the time to piddle about and figure out which one was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the more offensive one, if one was the real
⏹️ ▶️ John issue. Well, I can tell you which one is definitely more offensive. So the frame rate thing, the TV can save you from,
⏹️ ▶️ John but HDR versus SDR, if you don’t have that turned on, then I think
⏹️ ▶️ John bad things will happen no matter what. Because if you have it just set to SDR and you try to watch a show that’s supposed to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR, best case, you’ll just miss out on the HDR, which is crappy. Like you pay for an HDR TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like never see HDR content because you have Apple TV stuck into SDR, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John worst case, it will try to show it in HDR or like the TV will think it’s getting an HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John signal, but like it could be really messed up and your picture will be all screwed up, right? So I think match HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John versus SDR, you kind of have to turn that on. And if you try to do the other way, like I’m gonna force
⏹️ ▶️ John everything into HDR, that will also screw up all your SDR content. So really, I think that one is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that no television, I don’t think there’s anything that the television can do to save you from it. You really need to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR content in HDR and watch SDR content in SDR. The frame rate, the television can try to save you from
⏹️ ▶️ John using image processing, but it’s kind of gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m talking straight out of my keister because I don’t have an Apple TV in the room I’m in and I don’t have a TV that I can see from where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you heard our show before, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair, fair. If you’re interested in talking out of our keisters, then let me tell you about Neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, my recollection is that I had everything off when I arrived
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the setting after we spoke last week. Again, I could be lying by accident, but I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything off. And I can tell you that all the video content that I have been watching on this Apple TV 4K for the last year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or so, it all looked correct. Now, maybe I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting HDR when I thought I was. As we all know, of the three of us, I have probably the least discerning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye for this sort of thing. But I can tell you that when I watched Dolby Vision content on my LG C9,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it shows a little Dolby Vision icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen for a couple seconds when it goes into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I presume to be the Dolby Vision mode. And when I watch something on like Disney Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, that I know should be Dolby Vision, it shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up as Dolby Vision on the television. And that’s not a Apple TV thing as far as I’m aware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the actual television showing that. So even if I’m in the fully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off match content mode, it appears that it is doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give me the Dolby Vision stuff that I’m asking for when I’m asking for it. Does that make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you look in the Apple TV interface, it has this weird, I don’t know if it’s an Apple TV distinction or something else,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not just the Apple TV, some televisions do this distinguishing between Dolby Vision and HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John which sounds dumb. You’re like, aren’t they both? Isn’t Dolby Vision just a kind of HDR? It is. The other standard,
⏹️ ▶️ John the competing standard is HDR 10 and there’s also HDR 10 plus, but very often Dolby Vision is
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it pronounced HDR X? Yeah, very often Dolby Vision is treated as a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So Dolby Vision may be excluded from the like match HDR versus SDR because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be like, well, forget about HDR and SDR. This is Dolby Vision and we’re always just gonna send this through. So I don’t know the details. And obviously it varies
⏹️ ▶️ John by television as well because different televisions, I mean, for example, my television doesn’t even support HDR 10 plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ll talk about later in the show, but does support Dolby Vision and Samsung televisions are basically the opposite. They don’t support
⏹️ ▶️ John Dolby Vision, but do support HDR 10 plus and lots of televisions support plain old HDR 10. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very complicated. So anyway, try these features out, see how they work for your actual programming.
⏹️ ▶️ John If match content just degrades your user experience to the point where you can’t handle it, then at
⏹️ ▶️ John least look up your TV on the D-Judder list and see if it can do the right thing with the frame rate. And then if you’re happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with how the colors look, then either you’re not getting HDR and don’t miss it, or you are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John it anyway, like Casey seems to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think. Who really knows? But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John There are things you could use to test this, but if your television says that it thinks it’s getting a double vision signal, it’s probably right. I mean, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John said, If it’s a television UI doing that, the Apple TV wouldn’t have any influence over that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, right, right.
Follow-up: eSIM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A very, very quick follow-up. When the iPhones, what are we on, 14 now? I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already lost track. When the iPhones 14 came out with only eSIMs in America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was grumbly a little bit because I had said, in years past with AT&T,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would take my SIM, my physical SIM, I would move it from one phone to the other and AT&T would be not, well, I mean, they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, but they would be none the wiser from a billing perspective. They would not bill me the $35 upgrade fee or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they want to do when you order an AT&T locked iPhone, or what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Well, this year I’m on Verizon. This is my first year using an eSIM, and I transferred my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physical SIM to an eSIM before I got my new phone, as we spoke about on the show. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the phone came, I did the eSIM transfer, and it has been a month and whatever, a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and change now. And to the best of my knowledge, I did not get charged a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade fee for upgrading my phone. That’s in part because I bought the phone outright. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the upgrade fee is often associated with when you’re financing the phone through the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey carrier. But I just wanted to follow up that, as far as I can tell, I did not get charged an upgrade fee when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a phone that I own and I switch from that to a new phone that I also own, which is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I’m excited about that. And I feel like I’ve heard AT&T people say the same thing, But don’t quote
Follow-out: Trackpad gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also have some follow-out for the most recent episode of Upgrade, number 429, Freedom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Doors, which Jason was very perturbed and lit me up in a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentle and polite way. Lit me up privately about the fact that we did not mention trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gestures during our disaster of a window management segment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to mention that for me, I really, really love hot corners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One for show desktop, One for expose where it shows all the open windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hot Corners sounds like some kind of like junk food that you would love and we’d make fun of you for. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Burn the roof of your mouth by eating your Hot Corners too fast. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I haven’t had a Hot Pocket in years and man did I love them back
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t say that. That’s their brand. Their brand is so strong that the
⏹️ ▶️ John plus burning your mouth immediately says,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh, Hot Pockets. Well, I feel like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the problem of like being a food designed for microwaves always means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re gonna have the edges be way too hot and it’ll be frozen. Yep. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with the hot pockets? I thought the problem was that they they are basically a what is it like a containment
⏹️ ▶️ John vessel? You know how you make a bomb by you put something with you put something with lots of energy inside a contained thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the hot pockets, the container is the pocket and the stuff that’s inside it
⏹️ ▶️ John is the lava like filling. And so it’s like a bomb waiting to go like a cherry tomato,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So when you bite into it, you burst the containment and then the hot lava squirts out against the roof of your
⏹️ ▶️ John mouth and burns the skin off. Like it’s a design, it’s part of the design. It’s the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. No, I can attest to this. But man, I should get some hot pockets. I haven’t had those in years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But anyways. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take much encouragement to have Casey eat junk food. Please stop. No. Have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey carrot. Anyway, the point is, so I like these hot corners that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I set to expose and show desktop and whatnot. And Jason was very, very perturbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me that I didn’t mention the gestures on the trackpad, because if you like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey splay four fingers out, that gives you expose. And if you do the same motion with five fingers, that gives you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show desktop. And then if you, you pinch all five fingers back in, that will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring you back from show desktop mode. And wow, this animation is just kind of disturbingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast. I don’t even know what to make of that. But anyways, that’s the thing that if you use trackpads, which I actually do, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have for a couple of few years now, that that’s something you can do. And I would like to perhaps excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least provide justification for why I didn’t mention them. So I was a devout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse, like actual mouse person, like John, for years. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until the last, I don’t know, two to four years, I just wouldn’t, and this is well after the trackpads were a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the desktop, I would not touch a trackpad on the desktop. Like it was not for me. Of course I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used it on the laptops, but I just did not care for it. And I don’t know what changed, to be honest with you, but all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, well, let me switch and see what I think. And then I never turned back. So when I was mousing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t have the gestures for show desktop and expose and stuff like that. So I had to use hot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corners. Then at this point, my muscle memory was established and I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeking a replacement for it. Right. Seeing that these gestures are a thing. Yes, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably what I should have brought up. And it is probably a better approach. I am issuing my formal apologies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Mr. Jason Snell for not saying anything about this. I am so sorry, Jason. I have failed you and I failed the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listeners, but it’s for a reason. It’s because I was a dumb mouse person and I didn’t know any better. I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to rescind Casey’s apology. We weren’t giving a comprehensive
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tour of every
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco feature of the Mac UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were just saying how we manage Windows. Obviously, it’s not going to be comprehensive. We also didn’t mention the bazillion third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that do stuff. We just talked about our own habits gave some suggestions of, you know, large categories
⏹️ ▶️ John of ways that people work. I suppose if we can be faulted, it’s because we didn’t list what we did. I think one of the major
⏹️ ▶️ John things was like trackpad gestures, right? But it was, it was thumbnail sketched by saying, Oh, use full screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and then swipe your fingers around the trackpad to switch apps. And there’s obviously more to it than that, because you can do more than just swipe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sideways to get from one space to the other. There’s all those other gestures. But anyway, yeah, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, the Mac has lots of features. And that’s even before you consider third party apps, of which there are many.
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John’s mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so John, tell me, you have some things going on with your mouse now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s just like my cheese graters, right? So we already
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey went through that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with my Microsoft Precision mouse and one of them went bad and I had to return and had to send a video and I bought the backup mouse and it was making
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember what episode that was in. We talked about it a while ago. Anyway, it’s about almost exactly a year anniversary
⏹️ ▶️ John of me doing that exchange. And guess what? One of my Mises is going bad again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same problem as before. At first I thought like, oh, is the trackpad, you know, is the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John pad like gummy or something? And I’m like, wait a second, no, it’s like, it’s like missing, you know, I’ll move the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John from left to right three inches and like a couple of random millimeters of that three inch movement are
⏹️ ▶️ John not sent to the computer. And so I took out my other backup mouse and plugged it in and sure enough, the backup mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John works fine. And you know, I can A, B test them. It’s not as bad as it was before. So now I’m like, do I try
⏹️ ▶️ John to RMA this thing again? Do I have to make a video again? Cause the video before it was super convincing because I had let it get
⏹️ ▶️ John so bad because I had misdiagnosed it so many times. Now I know it’s coming and it’s, it’s just a fatal
⏹️ ▶️ John flaw of this mouse, I guess, is that eventually a year later, it just stops working right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really disappointing. But if you remember, the reason I was using this mouse, and I can’t for the life
⏹️ ▶️ John of me remember if the one that has gone bad is the one that they sent me back
⏹️ ▶️ John as a refurbished thing, or if it’s the brand new backup one that I bought. I can’t, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know which is which, which is kind of, I’ll have to look up the serial numbers and see if I could figure it out, but they look identical
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, so I can’t tell. But the other mouse, the reason I was using the mouse I was using is because the
⏹️ ▶️ John other mouse was the one that made the noise when I typed. You remember that whole thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like it would type
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would shake and thing. But I can’t stand using, now that I know what the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s like, imagine if the mouse just like only translated 98% of your motion. It sounds like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that should be fine, you can use it. And you can, but it’s so annoying. For me, a devoted mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John user who hates trackpads with a fiery passion, I need to have a mouse that works.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was just making me so upset. So I took out the other mouse, but then of course you got the noise. And so there I am
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to figure out what the noise is again. It’s just so weird. It’s like, oh, the noise goes away when you unplug the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John cable. So maybe it’s something about the cable connector. Can you make the noise happen on its own? Why is it that it goes away?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think I found it. In fact, just earlier today, after days of like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John then I can’t stand the noise of this thing. I’m typing, I can’t stand the noise, but I can’t stand the mouse. I can’t, you know, I was just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was between a rock and a hard place, but today I think I figured it out. Tell me. The thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that was making the noise, if you, you should bring up a picture of this button, it’s the Microsoft Precision Mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that I think was making the noise was the very skinny three side
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons on the mouse. One of the reasons I like this mouse is I don’t use side buttons at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John and these side buttons are very, very thin. They’re just kind of, they’re kind of like wedged in the gap between the top
⏹️ ▶️ John surface of the mouse and the side surface of the mouse, three very skinny buttons. And
⏹️ ▶️ John one or more of them were rattling up and down within their sort of containment cage,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s what was making the noise. So I took a carefully cut piece of Post-it note,
⏹️ ▶️ John folded it up a few times, took a knife and wedged it in underneath those buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this the Surface Precision Mouse? Is that correct, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s just called Microsoft Precision Mouse. There is a Microsoft Surface mouse, but Microsoft Precision mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s black. It has three buttons on the side. I see, I see. A track, you know, a scroll wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a couple of products that look almost identical that aren’t exactly this thing. But yeah, that’s what was making the noise. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I have one working mouse that doesn’t make noise and one mouse that doesn’t make noise, but the tracking is going.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not sure what I’m gonna do about it. I’m kind of upset that the one mouse I really, really like has multiple problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because remember, the other problem is that where my thumb rests, it slowly wears away this off touch plastic and it gets kind of rumply and annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John and like eventually like you know so that still got that problem and then they go bad and tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John after about a year and then also this one had a rattle but at least I’ve solved the rattle so I’m not sure what I’m gonna do about
⏹️ ▶️ John this but my plan that just by like 50 of these like Marcos keyboards and have them in reserve is really
⏹️ ▶️ John like I stopped it too because they were going bad and the second one that I bought had a rattle
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe and I don’t want to spend like there’s an expensive mouse it’s like $99 retail maybe you can get it for 80 or
⏹️ ▶️ John 70 if you see it on sale. I don’t want to spend that every year on a mouse, but I don’t know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. Maybe it’s the type of thing when they stop making this mouse, I’ll be like, you know what, I would willingly pay $100 a year if I could get a new one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John mice every year. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ll tell you what, like I, for whatever it’s worth, you know, for the gaming PCs, we have the Razer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mice. Those are, I think like 70 or 80 bucks each for the ones we have. I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used Logitech mice before, not super heavily recently, But the Apple Stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Magic Mouse is still my favorite mouse in part because I just love the touch nature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And the touch scrolling and everything is just invaluable to me. That’s the biggest part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But just for whatever it’s worth, it lasts. Like I’ve never, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever had one of these die. Yeah, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John mice are good quality. I just don’t like the shape of that one. Like I’m not shunning it for any other reason. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, and you know, that’s basically it. If it was shaped like this one, I would get it. because it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some dedication to the scroll wheel versus touch, I just don’t like how that shaped.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel like it’s almost a different kind of device than like if you’re expecting, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sour beer. Like if you say give me a beer and somebody gives you a sour, it’s like, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People like this, but if you’re asking for a beer and you get a sour, you’re gonna be very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably in a negative way. So I feel like it needs, it’s almost like a separate thing, right? See also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chicago pizza. So I feel like the Magic Mouse is like, If you’re expecting a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouse, this isn’t that. This is a different thing that you might really like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you have to go into it knowing, like, okay, you’re going to have to get used to holding this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differently, moving it differently. Your whole grip is going to be different with this than it is with a mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like if you are open to that, then it’s wonderful. And that’s where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco landed. I love this mouse, and I’ve forsaken all other mice since discovering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one because it’s it’s just that good and none of the other ones have the touch scrolling integration with Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So to me, there is no other mouse basically. Anyway, I’ll just say when I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Razer ones for the gaming PCs, we have three Razer PCs with three mice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ve had to replace four of them in the last two years. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, they’re terrible. Like, they’re just bad. And I probably should switch to Logitech or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s kind of what I’m used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to. Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ John has better reliability. If I liked how the MX Master 3 or whatever fancy one I have, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John that mouse, it’s just not quite the right shape. I’m shopping almost entirely by shape. And then within shapes that I
⏹️ ▶️ John find acceptable, obviously I want expensive feeling and good, and this Microsoft was a nice, had all those best
⏹️ ▶️ John attributes. But the Logic ones, we’ve had serious Logic mice and they’ve never gone
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. It’s just a question of whether I like the shape or not. And the Apple one is super high quality, it’s just like an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thing, it’s got dumb charging, but other than that, it’s real nice, I just wish it was shaped the way I want it to be, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like a low profile piece of sushi. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, that is very true. I will put links in the show notes. I’m not sure which episode is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one in question, but ATP number 449, which was in late
⏹️ ▶️ Casey September of last year and unclean mouse, which I think was more about your track, your mouse pad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it was your mouse itself. But maybe that was
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, cause I thought it was the mouse pad. Yeah, I did the return on September 9th, 2021. Okay, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. And then also, ATP episode number 361, a button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the thumb shelf, which I presume is also about your mouse. Yeah. All right. Where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were we? My goodness.
Speaker adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you have had some speaker adventures or problems or things. What’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s related to your discussion last week about setting up your new Sonos thing and the surround speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John and calibrating them and all that stuff. Of course, I talked about that when I got all my new TV set up, how I’d use that Dirac
⏹️ ▶️ John Live app that you run on your Mac and that it connects to your receiver. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a microphone that you move to 17 different spots in the room to calibrate things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I did that calibration. And then shortly after that, when the family started
⏹️ ▶️ John watching the fans on UTV, it was a persistent complaint from everybody, including me, but especially my wife,
⏹️ ▶️ John that she couldn’t understand people’s dialogue. And I’m like, oh, that’s a problem I can solve because I can adjust the channels individually.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, my receiver even has like a quick way to adjust, like just crank up the center channel. Because if you have surround
⏹️ ▶️ John sound, the dialogue pretty much always comes through the center channel. So it’s really easy to just make the dialogue louder and leave everything
⏹️ ▶️ John the same volume. And I would do that, but that setting wouldn’t stick because the Dirac settings would always take over. and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just need to readjust this with D-RAC. But eventually it was just like, you know, she refused
⏹️ ▶️ John to even let me use the external speakers because the dialogue sounded terrible. And I’m like, you know, it does sound pretty bad. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John was listening to things on, I’m like, why is the dialogue, why can none of us hear the dialogue, right? So I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John finally got a chance, like, you know, because I would have done this a long time ago, but to do the D-RAC calibration,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need quiet. The app yells at you if you try to do anything, like it’ll be in the middle of doing some calibration thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll just stop and pop up a dialogue and I’ll be like, I’m sorry, something made a noise. So that means kids
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be home, wife can’t be home, dog can’t be home, construction cannot be happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John which by the way, they’ve been ripping up the gas mains of my street this entire summer, so no construction can be happening outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s just, it actually needs to be quiet. So I finally found a time when everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gone and my dog is at the, you know, her doggy play date, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just in the house by myself and I do the calibration. And the Dierock app is really fancy I got okay
⏹️ ▶️ John using it the first time I did the calibrations But I got to go through so many more times that I’m much better at using it
⏹️ ▶️ John now And it’s kind of it’s not a it’s not a native Mac out first of all second of all it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird It reminds me of like a Unix app. It’s like something from Linux not even from Windows. It’s really weird looking
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe Java anyway One of the things you do is after you do the volume adjustment
⏹️ ▶️ John Which I you know I didn’t even know how to use the first few times that I kind of figured that out Another one is where
⏹️ ▶️ John it does, I don’t know what you’d call them, like frequency response graphs. You see this for speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, but you know what, you put the microphone somewhere in a room, and then it plays tones through all the speakers, and you can you’ll see a graph
⏹️ ▶️ John with one line for each speaker saying, basically, amplitude is the y-axis, I guess it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John how loud it was, and then the x-axis, horizontally, is frequency range. So low frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ John on the left and high frequencies on the right. And what you want to kind of see for a linear response is pretty much a plateau, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaker doesn’t reproduce any, you know, frequencies below whatever Hertz. And then for most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John range of human hearing, you want to see a nice long steady plateau with some wiggles saying here, you know, look at the speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s able to reproduce all these different frequencies at more or less the same amplitude, right? Obviously, no ideal speaker is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a perfect plateau, they’re going to wiggle around and everything. And that’s what DRAC is adjusting for different locations in the room to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to level that out with DSP, right? But what I noticed when I looked at these graphs is you got
⏹️ ▶️ John all you know, my 5.1 speakers, one of the lines was not with the other lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John It took a nosedive like three quarters of the way through the graph. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John my center channel had no high frequencies, right? And my center channel speaker has like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a big cone and driver, and then it’s got a little, one of those little tiny metal looking tweeter-y
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers. Tweeters, yes. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John so I took off the little, the mesh, whatever, what is that thing called? The grill? Yeah, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I took that off, and I’m trying to figure out, does this tweeter work? So I’m playing some dialogue and I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, putting your ear next to the speaker is weird and you can’t, so I’m just, I’m gonna touch it with my finger because if a speaker is working,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll be able to feel some kind of vibration. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true of tweeters, but I basically
⏹️ ▶️ John determined that my tweeter was blown on my center channel. And I couldn’t figure out because I don’t have like
⏹️ ▶️ John ears that are used to picking this out. I couldn’t figure it out from listening. I just said that the dialogue sounds weird. Like it’s not clear
⏹️ ▶️ John and we can’t hear it. But when I saw the graph that was like, No high frequencies, tweeter broken,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I guess I’m a visual learner, as they say. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my center channel was bad. I was pretty sure it was bad based on the graph. That was pretty incontrovertible reference. So I needed to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a new center channel speaker. But of course, the surround speakers I got are just some cheapo surround speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John setup I got years ago. Like it just came in all in one package. You get all the speakers on the subwoofer that comes together
⏹️ ▶️ John in a package deal. And this one was pretty well rated for, you know, the price and the quality or whatever. And importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the speakers are very small was I have to tuck them into weird places in my room. I don’t have room for real speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So you can’t buy the Just the Center channel.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can only buy the full set against that. I had to go up on eBay and find people selling Just the Center channel,
⏹️ ▶️ John find the one that I thought was the least gross looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They sent it to me
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was only slightly broken when I got it in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John grill was snapped off and it was all kind of, but whatever. I swapped it out for the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John and lo and behold, the graph leveled out And you can understand dialogue again. So yay
⏹️ ▶️ John for applications that show you a visual representation of how your speakers are performing. And by the way, I recalibrated everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and put in an inherent like four or five decibel bump to the center channel above everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now everyone in the family is much happier with the audio. Coup de funk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So I’m sorry, not that I’m really looking to defend Marco on this issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you’re beating the snot out of Marco last week for having a two channel setup. yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of your channels was effectively broken, and by your own admission, all of your speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are straight up trash.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not trash, they’re just not really good. I mean, I would have bought better speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John if they would have fit, but the places where I have to physically put them are not big enough to put like
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers that sound better than these. But, and you know, you say, oh, it was broken. When the tweeter
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work, I mean, I’m sure someone who’s more versed listening to, you know, that speaker has a blown tweeter,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the frequencies of speech are not up in the super high or super low end,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it’s reproducing most of them, but missing out on the few things that do go into the highs
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the dialogue like a little bit muddier, right? Like, I wish I had saved,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really wish I had taken a screenshot because I would have put it for like a chapter art. Like if you look at the graph, it
⏹️ ▶️ John falls off earlier than all the other ones, but if you look at the actual Hertz number or whatever, because that’s what I was going like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John center channels are supposed to do that. What is the usual frequency range of speech? And I looked at the frequency range of
⏹️ ▶️ John speech, and I’m like, yeah, the frequency range of human speech is right in the plateau part, so maybe that’s not, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just broken. Yeah, you can, at any part, a speaker can, if a speaker fail
⏹️ ▶️ John in any system, then you have to fix it. So if one of the tweeters fails on one of Marco Sturger’s speakers, he would have to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John that out somehow and replace the speaker as well. It’s not a side effect of
⏹️ ▶️ John surround. But yeah, my speakers are not particularly fancy. but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like five or $600 for the system when I bought it a few years ago. And for a complete surround system that is very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very small, it works well. And as far as like Sonos and stuff, when you were talking about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the features I need for my setup is I need them to be small speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ John are connected with speaker wire because I have no place to plug in anything. So they’d either have to be battery-powered
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless surrounds, which I don’t wanna deal with charging them up or anything like that, or
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers connected with speaker wire that are small enough to fit in the places I squirrel them away.
⏹️ ▶️ John My room is not designed for television, I’m doing what I can here, right? But yeah, they’re pretty good for what they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John And most importantly, they’re way better than the speaker that’s built into the television. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John our television has a feature where it can use the TV itself as the center channel, and that really lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John A-B test exactly how much better even this sort of cheap center channel speaker is
⏹️ ▶️ John than the television speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just, I think it’s funny that here you are telling Marco that he’s a monster for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using only two channels, yet I bet his two speakers that he’s using are pretty, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice. And it sounds like, I’m not sure I could say the same for yours. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I wouldn’t want to watch a movie on his two speakers versus my five, that’s for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does the movie contain any music?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it does, but surround sound, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John It surrounds you. In case you got all done talking about it, it is an
⏹️ ▶️ John that cannot be duplicated by two speakers sitting in front of you.
Apple Watch Ultra, one week in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Marco, tell me about the Apple Watch Ultra screen size, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as I mentioned last week, as part of the reason I got the Ultra, one of the big reasons I got the Ultra was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said the screen is so much bigger, it makes everything feel different. Like apps feel different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layouts need to be different. And a few people pointed out the screen is actually not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much bigger as I thought than the 45mm Series 7 and 8 screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year with the Series 7 when the screens got bigger, you got a lot more screen space with that move than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had before. And I’ve been using the 40 and 41 size recently and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was used to the smaller size. So when you actually look at the pixel differences, the Ultra is bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the 45, but it’s not… it’s a smaller step than going from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 41 to the 45. And so anyway, now that I’ve been using the Ultra most of the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, where I think it’s still very different, is the shape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the screen in addition to the size. So I still am very happy I have it and I’m not gonna return it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is still very different not having those curved corners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way that the regular Apple Watch is, the crystal is this big kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rounded plateau shape. The Apple Watch Ultra is just a single piece of flat sapphire and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it is still different enough that I think if you design an Apple Watch app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should probably have one. That being said, if you’re only gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one Apple Watch size that you’re gonna design for, the 44 or 45 is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at my own stats to compare. The 44 slash 45, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I treat that as one size, which arguably they might not need to be, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you treat the 44 and 45 as the same size, 60% of my Apple Watch users use that size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 30% use 40 or 41. 6% use the, roughly 6% use the old sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the series zero through three sizes still. And already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 5% of my Apple Watch users have the Ultra. Which is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressive for a model that’s only been out for a couple of weeks and is still in very short supply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is the highest end on the price scale. Well, excluding like Hermes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So I think this is going to sell like crazy, especially throughout the holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season, especially as supply increases. So I think, again, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design an Apple Watch app, I think you should probably have an Ultra, if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, it’s a luxury, but if somebody on Twitter was like, they were feeling bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me that I’m buying an Ultra for almost no users, and it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t pay off for me to have this. When I tell you that, I think, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me see, I have something like 20% or so, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my active users have the Apple Watch app installed. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a small number of people. That’s like, that’s way more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that I’ve spent a lot more time on. So trust me, it matters. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should probably have every Apple Watch size. I don’t, I probably should. Like that’s how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it matters. And then secondly, as you know, wearing the Ultra, a few more impressions after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week of wearing it most of the time. It is really big, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s looking less ridiculous on me as I’m used to it. It’s funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took my Tide G-Shock watch out of my car to compare, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first got the Tide watch, I tried it on just to see what it was like to wear a G-Shock, and I never had before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seemed ridiculous. And I’m like, I could never wear this. Well, when I put it on tonight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after wearing the Ultra for a week, the G-Shock is about the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a million times lighter. So it’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, for the Ultra, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight of it, I think, is the biggest challenge because it is such a large watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, they did a good job making it light for its size, However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so big that it needs like a pretty strong strap and I’ve been kind of going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and forth between different straps. I haven’t loved any strap option I found for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. I have the the orange alpine loop that’s the one that came with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part because that’s what was in stock but also in part because I think it probably looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best out of all the straps that are that are officially for the Ultra. I think it really it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs the orange to be used in the straps. And I got separately from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, because I really, in my lifestyle, as I mentioned before, things are wet all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around here, so I really like rubber straps. So the rubber strap that it has offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not have an orange option. It only has blue, white, and yellow. I saw them all in the store, played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them all, didn’t really love any of them, but I decided to go with the blue to try that strap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, just because I have white for all my other rubber bands. it’s like something different for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultra and I didn’t think the white looked amazing with the orange accent of the watch whereas the blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought kind of played with that contrast a little bit better and so anyway I tried the tried the blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ocean Strap it’s okay I still like the Sportbands better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Main reason I like the Sportbands better is that the tail tucks in on the Sportband
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on the Ocean Strap the tail sticks up the way you know all other watch straps tend to work and I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they do that it’s more secure the way they do it. And the keeper, which is the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal loop that you tuck the tail under after you attach the main buckle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like excess strap, you tuck it under this little loop, it’s called a keeper. On the Ocean Strap, I initially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it was going to be bad for me because when I tried it on in the store, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had too much excess. And I was like, I don’t want this excess tail snagging on things as I walk past things. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out you you put the keeper wherever you want you know the ocean strap it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a bunch of holes all on the whole strap and the keeper comes out and you stick it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever hole you want to be in so you can stick it like near the top and so you so you tuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost the entire tail and just a little bit of it sticking out past the keeper so that I thought was a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little detail there that being said I haven’t quite found a comfortable fit on that strap yet and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit on the ultra is really important because it’s so big and kind of heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t have a nice snug fit, it scoots around your wrist a lot. Like it flops back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you move your wrist. The bigger and heavier a watch is, the more they do that. And I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that problem a lot with the Ultra where I haven’t yet nailed the fit of a strap. What has fit the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far is I just put the regular sport band on it. And I don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any 44 or 45 millimeter sport bands so I just put on the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 40mm ones that I have that you know they don’t fill the whole slot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they go in but it actually looks reasonably okay and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a perfect fit. The way those straps kind of curve out from the watch body
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks kind of stupid on me but it does hold it better against my wrist than the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones have so far. So I’m still kind of dealing with that. company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nomad Goods has this orange sport strap for pre-sale right now it looks pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good so I ordered one of those to try. I wish they had more orange straps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m pretty sure the reason they don’t is because of the Apple Watch Hermes deal. Hermes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you know orange is like their color and they’re probably protective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that and I’m guessing they probably have some deal with Apple with the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch Hermes where maybe Apple’s not allowed to use orange in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that many other watch products, but somehow they negotiated the Alpine loop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t know how, but anyway, what the Ultra really needs is a really good orange
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport band. The problem is that already exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Apple Watch Hermes, because what I didn’t know until I researched it last year is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Hermes edition watches, whatever strap you get with them, like the $500 leather straps, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also come with sport bands that are the Hermes orange. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally sold orange bands before, but they’re never really orange. They’re like salmon, or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like pinkish orange or yellowish. They’re not really bold orange. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Hermes ones, though, they’re only sold with the Hermes watches. So I got one on eBay last summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t find much use for it as much as I wanted to with my regular Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it looks really good with the Ultra. So right now I’m just using an eBay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Mez one. Ultimately, I think what the Ultra, I think what I hope they make for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the orange, what is it called? The ocean band. Like the, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rubber one that’s made for it with all the circles in it. I hope they make an orange version of that. I think that would look really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has these wonderful orange accents on the watch and you have to really play with those and work with those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it look good. Like I don’t think the yellow strap looks good because it kind of clashes with it. What you want with orange
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you want navy or dark gray or white, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of where you want to be to pair well with orange. So I’m happy with my orange strap for now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m gonna keep looking for other strap options. Hopefully that Nomad Goods one ends up being good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if so, if that ends up being a good strap, then that’s it, that’s what I want. But it’s not out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, so we’ll see how that goes. Anyway, Ultra Life, other than that, is pretty good. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed, I don’t know if this is simply because of differences in fit. During my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workout, the Ultra is able to seemingly keep a much better lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on monitoring my heart rate. My Series 7, and I think all watches before it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll look down during a workout to check my heart rate, and a lot of times it’ll be like the grayed out numbers where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really measuring yet, you know, and you gotta kinda wait and keep checking it over the next few seconds and it’ll eventually pop in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Ultra seems better at locking it in and just having it always be monitored. I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing that actually has changed with any of the hardware or whether that’s just, I happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a better fit on that for the whole and the sport band I’m using or whatever, who knows. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is something I’ve noticed. And if that actually is a thing, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a valuable difference to me. But anyway, I still, during the few times that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have in the past week put back on, my regular, you know, series seven titanium 41.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a dream to put that back on. I like, after wearing this thing, and then to put that on, it’s like, I feel like I’m wearing nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And I’m like going under sleeves, no problem. It’s not chunky. Like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still very much love the regular Apple Watch. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a wonderful thing to play around with, to get a feel for and design my app for. But I don’t think I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be sticking with it long-term, especially as we head, you know, solidly into long sleeve season.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s good news for your Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ John new watch coming its way
Sponsor: Linode
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New iPad, iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should probably get to the elephant in the room, and that is Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released a bunch of new stuff, and they did it via press release, as the German gods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey foretold. We’ve got, very, very briefly, we’ve got a new regular iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve got a new iPad Pro, and semi-surprisingly, we’ve got a new Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess we can start with the regular iPad. This is the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10th generation. Short short version. It’s using an A14, which is from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late 2020, the iPhone 12. Flat sides, no home button, touch ID on the power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock, whatever you call it, button. Blue, pink, yellow, and silver. And isn’t there like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gray as well? Yeah, I believe gray as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, they called it the top button in the presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My mistake. 10.9 inch screen. There’s USB-C, Wi-Fi 6, 5G.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It offers both physical and eSIM. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a, the front-facing camera is on the side, the way we think of it as a side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or on the top when you’re in landscape, which here, here, I’m definitely enjoying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then it does not support Stage Manager and it starts a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, $450 for the Wi-Fi version, $600 for the Wi-Fi plus cellular version, which is about $120 more than last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year’s model, and that’s 64 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, it uses the original Apple Pencil, which we have plenty to say about and talk about in just a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I want to gloss over that for just a moment. And then it also has a new Magic Keyboard Folio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is, I don’t know what Microsoft calls their Surface keyboard, but it is basically that. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some thoughts on that as well. But that is the nickel tour of the iPad. Where would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we like to start with this?
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple of items that you bounced over that I think are worth adding, especially as it relates to the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John The screen is not P3. The Bluetooth is 5.2,
⏹️ ▶️ John which may not mean anything to you, but it’ll be interesting to see from the hodgepodge of products they announced, what Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John standards do other products get?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and very quickly, I looked into this briefly this morning. It doesn’t seem to me, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t seem to me that 5.1 adds a whole lot over 5.0, but 5.2 adds low energy audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I presume is something that Apple is interested in, unless they’re already doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that with AirPods, which I didn’t think they were. So 5.2 adding low energy auto, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on this iPad, that might be a big deal in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John This does have a SIM slot, so it’s got an eSIM as well, but it also supports nano SIM,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s got a slot on it, so they didn’t do what they did with the phones there. It’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John for both the speakers and the camera, like you noted the camera is
⏹️ ▶️ John not along the short edge, it is along the long edge. They call it the landscape camera, the landscape 12
⏹️ ▶️ John megapixel ultra wide camera, right? And the speakers they call landscape stereo speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know where the speakers were on previous models, but I’m assuming this is saying that the speakers are on the short
⏹️ ▶️ John edges, but they call them landscape stereo speakers because they’re stereo when you’re holding it in landscape mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, their naming is weird, but the camera being moved. Everything about this iPad is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, the first one I saw that they had moved the landscape camera. Everyone’s like, oh, that’s good because when you do FaceTime, it’ll look more normal
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you’ve never done FaceTime in landscape mode on an existing iPad, you’re always not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite looking. It’s like sideways to you. It’s to your left or to your right, so it looks kind of weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John When it’s above, it looks more like you’re doing FaceTime from a Mac, so the camera looks at you a little bit from above, but at least your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes are aligned left, right-wise to be straight at the screen. But when I saw that, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, that’s great. That means when I’m unlocking it, my hand won’t block the face ID thing and it won’t have that arrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it doesn’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John face ID, nevermind. So the exciting thing about this product, the reason, oh, one more, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery, exactly the same size as the iPad Air, 28.6 watt hours, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s what’s interesting about this product before we even get into the pencil thing is, how is this not a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, an iPad Air? Because I look at this, I’m like, isn’t that the iPad Air? And the answer is no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the iPad Air. It’s close. So
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the differences between this and the iPad Air. So obviously the iPad Air has the M1 and this doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that also means this gets Stage Manager, despite the fact that they just announced that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John extending Stage Manager down the line to I think A12-based devices. And this has an A14 but
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t get Stage Manager, but whatever, iPad Air, M1, Stage Manager. So better system ownership and Stage Manager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A12X and Z get it, but the base A12 does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, okay. The iPad Air obviously uses the second gen Apple Pencil, we’ll talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ John in a bit. The iPad Air is older, so it has Bluetooth 5.0, not 5.2. The iPad Air has P3 color
⏹️ ▶️ John and a fully laminated display with 1.8% reflectivity. Basically, the screen’s a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad Air. I think the cameras are the same. External display support is
⏹️ ▶️ John quite different. The iPad Air supports up to a single display with 6K resolution. I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John one only does 4K. What are the stats? Oh, it does 4K at like 30 Hertz or something. I thought I had that,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Supports one external display at 4K and 30 Hertz or 1080p at 60. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Air does have a leg up on this in many stat categories. But if you saw them both
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting on the table, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is an iPad Air unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you use the Apple Pencil with it. And that I think is, of all the things we listed, the most baffling
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about this product. They changed the cheap low-end iPad to have flat sides in the modern design. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a home button, in case that doesn’t go without saying. It’s got the touch ID button on the top. It’s got all flat
⏹️ ▶️ John sides and everything. But it doesn’t use the pencil that sticks to the flat-sided
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads. It uses the pencil that’s completely round, the first generation Apple pencil, which does not
⏹️ ▶️ John stick to this in any way, shape, or form, nor does it plug into this in any way, shape, or form.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have a little adapter that allows you to connect to the USB-C port at the bottom. By the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, this doesn’t have lightning, right? This is USB-C. It’s like the iPad AirForm Factor, but it does not support the flat Apple Pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you buy a new first generation Apple Pencil today, which they’re still selling, it will come with
⏹️ ▶️ John this little adapter that lets you plug it into a USB-C iPad. And why would you need to plug
⏹️ ▶️ John it in? Like, why do you care? Can’t you just charge it someplace else? You plug it in to basically pair it. Like that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Pencils that plug in work. You plug it in to pair it with the You need to be able to actually physically stick
⏹️ ▶️ John it into the iPad. It’s not just a matter of charging it It’s a matter of pairing it with the iPad and it also charges
⏹️ ▶️ John it through that If you have an old Apple pencil out the first generation Apple pencil, you can buy the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John little dongle thingy for $9, right? This is disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John Like not super disappointing like what if you already have a first gen Apple pencil, that’s great I get to reuse my pencil. I’ll buy a $9
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter. I keep using my pencil, but it’s flat-sided man Like, you want to stick
⏹️ ▶️ John a pencil on there, but you can’t. It doesn’t work with the Apple Pencil 2. It’s not that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is one of the questions some people were asking, can I use an Apple Pencil 2 with it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, is there any crossover between a device that’s supposed to work with Apple Pencil 1 and Apple Pencil 2? And as far
⏹️ ▶️ John no. There’s not, like, they use a different way of, like, you can’t, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you have an Apple Pencil 2, it’s useless with this device. It won’t stick to the sides. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t pair it with it, and you can’t draw on the screen with it. Only the first generation round Apple pencil, which
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is the thing that Steve Jobs used to do because he had a bee in his butt about
⏹️ ▶️ John this. When the new better thing comes out, wipe the table clean of all that old junk because why would you ever want the old junk?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s do the new. And that is not how Apple has operated since he’s been gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John For better or for worse. Very often for better in terms of having cheaper products, it’s, you know, stay in the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ John longer so people can buy them, right? But for worse, this stupid first generation Apple Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not a bad product, but Apple did Apple Pencil second generation and everyone agrees,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, that’s much better. You fixed all the problems with the first one. Like get rid of the first generation
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Pencil, stop making it, and more importantly, stop making new products that require that pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John because the second generation one is just plain better. It’s better that it magnetically attaches to the
⏹️ ▶️ John side. It’s better that it doesn’t roll off the table. It’s better that there’s no little cap that you’re inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna lose. It’s better that you don’t stick it into the side of the thing to pair it, so it’s precariously sticking out the end and
⏹️ ▶️ John just waiting for someone to snap it off. Apple Pencil 2 is better. Get rid of Apple Pencil, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Watch Series 3 all over again. We’ve moved on, the world has moved on. You yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John made a better pencil product. Just, ugh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so frustrating. Yeah, and just to point out, the Apple Pencil 2 came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four years ago. This is not like a cutting edge thing. That’s pretty old in computer terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s a four year old change and it was badly needed, you know, for all the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you mentioned. And like, I mean, when I saw that picture on Twitter, they were like doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show notes that showed like, you know, the old, you know, teenage boy charging method, and then the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cable plus dongle, like I thought, I’m like, there’s no way this is true. I had to verify like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surely this can’t be real, right? And no, it’s real. That is how, like, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re basically saying is, or what I will say is, If you want to use an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple pencil, just don’t get this model of iPad. Just don’t. Like, it is not, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hassle is not worth it. Or, if you insist on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the Logitech Crayon instead. Which is, this is a thing, not a lot of people know about this. Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been selling a pencil-like stylus called the Logitech Crayon for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of years now, through Apple, like it’s with their cooperation. It works basically the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a pencil. It lacks some of the power usery things, I believe it doesn’t have pressure sensitivity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re just using it for like, you know, drawing and stuff where you don’t really need pressure sensitivity, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. It is a little more friendly in certain ways. Like it has just like a charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hole on it. There’s now a USB-C one. I believe the new Legit Crayon works with both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old style and new style iPads, I believe. And it is cheaper also.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you don’t need like the pressure or the tilt, you know, some of that like advanced drawing stuff, That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an option. I bought one a while ago. It was pretty good. Oh, it has an off switch too, which is nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. So anyway, that’s an option that people don’t often know exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, going back to like, this product, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very strange product to me. The rumors had been for a while that Apple was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do exactly what they did today, which is a new iPad Pro and a new low-end iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that used USB-C. And while we got both of those things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there are so many little asterisks on them that no one was expecting. And by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, I don’t think anybody had the Apple TV on their bingo card, we’ll get to that later. But this is such a weird product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll start with this, because it’s a little more interesting than the Pro. This makes me wonder, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different COVID and supply chain related problems is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the result of? There is no way they planned for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not so sure about that. Like I don’t see anything here that says supply chain. It’s an awkward product, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an awkward product that they chose to make. Like as people are pointing in the chat room, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Pencil 2 not magnetically attaching to the side and charging there. One explanation could be that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where the camera is. And they could have decided, well, okay, we can’t figure out for this cheap iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John how to have the lens quote unquote landscape camera and also the pencil. So which one do we think is more important?
⏹️ ▶️ John And someone decided, ah, if people want the good pencil, they should buy the expensive one. let’s do the landscape camera. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you could argue that’s the right call, but a series of decisions like that leads to this product that
⏹️ ▶️ John is just kind of awkwardly in the middle. I mean, not awkwardly, it is in the middle. Like there’s a reason I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the iPad Air is, first of all, they’re still selling the previous one. Like they didn’t discontinue
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button one. Yeah, that’s the weird thing. That’s one of the weird things. Right, so, but if you look at the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ John and you see it go from later in the document, you can see it goes from, you know, the iPad, the old iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ninth generation iPad, the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. The prices spread those things
⏹️ ▶️ John out and the features spread those things out. It’s just that trying to spread the features
⏹️ ▶️ John over four iPads leaves you with some iPads that have some
⏹️ ▶️ John features that you like and some features that you don’t. And because the flat sides was so defined by the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, when we see a flat sided one, you’re like, okay, well we get all the flat sided stuff, right? And I was like, no, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. You get flat sides, but you don’t get the other stuff. You get USB-C, but you don’t get the pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Do you get quad stereo speakers? No, but you get two of them, but they’re in a different position. It’s just, is the smart connector
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back or is it on the side? Well, it’s on the side of this one and we’ll get to the magic keyboard folio in a little bit. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this does fit in the slot, in the lineup between those two things, but to get something to
⏹️ ▶️ John fit there, there’s not a clean feature set where you’re like, this is one set of features that
⏹️ ▶️ John work in harmony. And this is a second set of features that work in harmony. Like it’s, it’s features
⏹️ ▶️ John that work in harmony from the neighbors, a bunch of them pulled into this product and then
⏹️ ▶️ John working together, not quite in harmony. So all the way down to the, you know, the system on a chip and just
⏹️ ▶️ John everything about it is a little bit weird. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s better than the one with the home button, but it’s not as good as the Air, but it’s also $120 cheaper. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, but the Apple phone, so like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels not like an insult, but it feels like this product is telling you if you’re really into the pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s, I mean, there’s, and this is such, they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lineup now that covers most prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the range, but with the exception of covering prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no other part of this line, it makes a lot of sense. Almost every model that they sell, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every model, there are questions about it, well, it’s like, wait a minute, why don’t you just get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the one above it or the one below it? Or why does, why is this model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have something nicer than the thing above it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because they’re not, they haven’t refreshed them all at once. This always happens when they do like, you know, piecemeal
⏹️ ▶️ John refreshes, because the newest one has some of the newer stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then the older ones have some better stuff, but they don’t have the newer stuff. So example of a newer stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John a newer stuff Apple seems to have finally decided, I guess people use their things in landscape, so the camera should go on the landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John edge, right? That’s a new decision they’ve made. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, by the way, that’s great. I fully support that. In practice, the iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually a landscape device for every person I’ve ever seen using one, including everyone in my household, for sure. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah, optimize it for landscape. It’s obvious, like, yeah, leave the ability to rotate like it’s always had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it should be a landscape-first design. And that’s, so it makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move the camera to the top. And when, you know, for the Face ID models in particular, like the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, I think it’s just the iPad Pro. When I first, when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first moved to that in 2018, four years ago, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was one of the biggest annoyances of like, oh, I’m accidentally covering up the camera because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my hand goes there on the left side and I’m covering up the camera and so I can’t unlock it yet. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it took them four years to have the first model that ever moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera over to the landscape, but then if it’s gonna come with all these trade-offs, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it really have to be centered? Does it have to only be one camera?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we don’t even know if that’s a trade-off, but the point is that is a new feature, not necessarily an
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive feature in terms of just moving the camera, right? But then when you see the models that didn’t get as heavily revised,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Pros that we’ll get to in a little bit, they don’t get that new feature. Even though they were supposedly updated at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time, it’s clear that they have just, you know, like spec bump update, whereas this is an all new design
⏹️ ▶️ John for this product, like the low-end iPad has never had the flat sides, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this isn’t even the low-end iPad. It’s called iPad, but instead of being the low-end iPad, it’s $100
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem with Tim Cook’s thing is like, the fact that it’s called iPad, I think it is the low-end iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he’ll keep around products that like, well, people still want them. And I think that’s the right move here to keep around
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button because it is significantly cheaper. And maybe you don’t care about the stupid flat sides and you want the cheaper one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t make a new name for this slot. Like iPad Air was a new name to say, there’s a place between the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the regular iPad. This is just called iPad. It’s called iPad 10th generation, and you can also
⏹️ ▶️ John still buy the iPad 9th generation. So they clearly both think they are filling the iPad low-end role.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that, hey, now we have an extra one from last year that we can keep there for an even lower price. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s an okay move, but, you know, eventually when that one goes away, this one
⏹️ ▶️ John will be the only low-end. Maybe something will slot above it. Like, why aren’t there two? Are we gonna get two generations of iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Air? Or do they only do the low end like is this the iPad SE? Like the ninth generation becomes the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John SE or something Like what we would like to see if we had our way and have less confusing lineup
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the iPads have flat sides There’s a coherent scale down of features from top
⏹️ ▶️ John to bottom and whatever good ideas that they have about iPad design whether it’s the landscape camera or the folio
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever that they either all have that or all don’t like because because they all do have cameras and If
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has decided the best place for the cameras on the landscape edge then it should be there in all of them. But if you don’t update them all
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time, you can’t do that. Or if you don’t update them all like to the same degree at the same time,
⏹️ ▶️ John where one is all new design and the second one is just an internal revision, right? Then you end up
⏹️ ▶️ John with this kind of lumpy lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, geez, there’s so much about the iPad that’s, you know, lumpy. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think time will tell, like does this get resolved as we slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull our way out of this weird supply chain, you know, thing that the world’s been going through? because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s so hard to tell with Tim Cook, like whether this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco planned to be this weird and such a like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had to be planned, because what supply are they missing that would have made them make a different choice?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this brings us right to the iPad Pro. If you look at the iPad Pro and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates it got versus the rumors we’ve had for like two years, I think it slipped. I think what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the iPad Pro that was supposed to be for this generation, I think a lot of stuff had to be delayed until,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some future version. Again, like the world’s been going through so much stuff with supply chain and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. And Apple, again, they’ve been doing a really good job of insulating us from it, from their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products. Like their products have mostly not appeared to have any problems to the outside world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I bet internally, they’ve had all sorts of struggles and all sorts of things. Oh, we can’t get this part in enough volume, or this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have to wait until the next version. I’m sure that happens to a lot of their stuff. You can’t just say like, oh, this isn’t from COVID. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is definitely Tim Cook’s weirdness. Tim Cook has no shortage of product fit weirdness and shame,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no shame about charging high prices and keeping old things around. That’s of course, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all Tim Cook. That’s just him. But we can’t brush off the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that this is probably also the result of what’s been happening in the world. Whether they say so or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll never say so. But like what
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically about this product makes you think that? I think they chose this feature set for this product. Maybe the ship
⏹️ ▶️ John date changed based on supply constraints or whatever, but I think somebody sat down and like the product, the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John product designers, which don’t involve Tim Cook at all, decided this was the feature set. This is the right
⏹️ ▶️ John feature set for the new low-end iPad. This set of compromises.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’ve seen over the last couple of years, Apple has been more willing than before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to introduce new things at higher price points and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep the old ones around and not lower their prices. So this happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Apple Watch situation. This happened with some of the phone stuff. It certainly happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Macs, some of the Macs. It happened with the new MacBook Air. And now it’s happening with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-end iPad. The low-end iPad, the iPad with no name, just iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been around for a number of years now and has gotten very regular updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the price has stayed very regular. And they sell a ton of those things. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulk buys for schools and stuff like that. They sell a ton of those things. to now get this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new update that is substantially more money for a product whose entire existence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to be inexpensive and to say, all right, we’re gonna keep the old one around and not even discount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Just, okay, now we have this new one that’s allegedly gonna replace it. Yeah, just again, see also the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air. Like, this is supposed to replace this, but we’re gonna keep selling both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the old one doesn’t get cheaper. That’s Tim Cook right there. But I do think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like, who knows? maybe there were certain features that they wanted to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that they couldn’t for supply reasons. Maybe it is something like the Apple Pencil magnetic mounting stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, maybe they couldn’t get that cheap enough or they couldn’t redesign it fast enough because they were at reduced capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last couple of years. Who knows what it was, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product lineup looks very confused, even more so than you’d expect from Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. And so I think stuff happened that we don’t know about that is keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things from coming out normally.
⏹️ ▶️ John One interesting supply chain thing may be that it has an A14, which you may think, oh, it’s a low-end iPad, whatever, it’s got the A14.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as we’ll see in a little bit, the Apple TV got the A15, and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John gets the A14? I mean, it’s a little bit weird. And another thing, they did bump the RAM. It used to
⏹️ ▶️ John have three gigs. The old iPad had three gigs, the new one has four, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wanted to briefly talk about the keyboard folio, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Magic Keyboard Folio. So the iPad itself starts at $600.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Magic Keyboard Folio is $250, almost half the cost of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire iPad. And the Magic Keyboard by comparison is $300. The Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Folio only comes in white, so white, ladies and gents and peoples, can just happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you, it really can. The way this works is it’s got a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a case on the back of the iPad that has a kickstand and then a detachable keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, if you’ve seen the Microsoft Surface, it’s very, very similar to that. What’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me about this though, it has a function key row, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an escape key. Two things that I would kill for on the floaty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hinge magic keyboard that we know and love. I suspect the reason it has all this is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s more space, because we think of the way the magic keyboard the iPad pro works, the very, very back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the keyboard, there’s like two to three to four inches of just empty space, because that’s where the bottom of the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of hinges or hangs over it, particularly when you tilt it. So it’s pointed upwards. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a bunch of dead space there. Whereas here there is no dead space. The entirety of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that pain, that, that surface is available for keys and trackpad and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m guessing that’s why, but I want, I want this, I want function keys. in high,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I don’t necessarily want to give up the hinge, the floaty hinge thing, the cantilevered whatever hinge thing, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really, really like that a lot. But I want a function row key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I want an escape key, please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John A function row might even come in handy with stage manager, oh, nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ John kidding. Another interesting thing about this when I was looking at Apple’s page for this is one of their snippets of marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John text was no pairing or charging required, which is true. Like this is one that
⏹️ ▶️ John uses a smart connector, doesn’t have batteries, but that felt like like a subtle dig at all the third party iPad keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John products that either have their own battery or have to be charged separately. You have to pair during
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth. It’s like, yeah, it’s nice. It’s nice when you make the hardware, isn’t it Apple? You can just have the keyboard that snaps right onto the brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new product. And yeah, I mean, this is interesting. I’m not sure, unlike the
⏹️ ▶️ John landscape camera, which seems like something that we all wish was here, like this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the kickstand and the floppy detachable keyboard, it has, you know, advantages, hey, you can detach
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard, some people like kickstands, it also has disadvantages. It’s not quite as sturdy and laptop-like as
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing. And by the way, speaking of the other thing, Zach Hall had a good tweet here. I’m not sure if this is
⏹️ ▶️ John exhaustive, but he says, “‘Apple now makes smart cover, smart keyboard, smart keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John folio, smart folio, magic keyboard, and magic keyboard folio for iPad.’” Wow. Is there
⏹️ ▶️ John any wonder we can’t keep track of what these frigging products are? Smart and magic and
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards and folios. And anyway, they make a lot of floppy things that snap onto your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and make it try to be a laptop. But this is an interesting and new set of compromises. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a good set of compromises for the low-end iPad. Hey, you get a keyboard and a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get the function keys, which seems to be like what you said about the space case. It makes a lot of sense. But also
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that Apple has heard the cries of the people who want that row of keys and said, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John find a way to provide them. This is a slightly less expensive product.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s $250, like half the price of the iPad, but still, lightweight, small-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ John not as fancy as whatever the one that’s called that’s like a, you know, that stiff little robo hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So I think it’s the right accessory for
⏹️ ▶️ John this, and it is another example of a new thing, new thinking Apple has about accessories, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John mainly the function row, and also the idea that a keyboard without a trackpad for the iPad in this day
⏹️ ▶️ John and age is not as useful because their cursor support is so great, it should have the trackpad, and so it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to call a quick mention to Dan Morin’s take on Six Colors, which talks about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the iPad lineup, and we’re gonna talk about the iPad Pro right now, but I wanted to make mention that that article was really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and worth reading as well. So let’s talk about the iPad Pro. It gets the M2, as we would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It now says iPad Pro on the back, which is new. It has Wi-Fi 6E, which is allegedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to 2.4 gigabits per second. Also the cellular models get 5G and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my beloved millimeter wave on my, don’t call it a park bench picnic table. It gets a Bluetooth 5.3,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I looked into the difference between 0.2, which is on the iPad and 0.3, which is on the iPad pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t see anything special. Again, maybe I missed something. Uh, it gets a hover with the Apple pencil. We’ll come back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in just a moment. Price is unchanged and. Otherwise it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it’s basically the same stuff. So the hover with Apple pencil, this is what the same second generation Apple pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading a quote here from the Newsroom article that Apple put out. Apple Pencils now detected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to 12 millimeters above the display, allowing users to see a preview of their mark before they make it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This also allows users to sketch and illustrate with even greater precision and makes everything users do with Apple Pencil even more effortless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For example, with Scribble, text fields automatically expand when the pencil gets near the screen, and handwriting converts to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey text even faster. Third-party apps can also take advantage of this new feature to enable entirely new marking and drawing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experiences. They showed an example of this in their like 10 minute marketing video. I forget what app it was, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hovering. It was, it was appropriate. Okay. Thank you. They were, they were hovering their pencil over the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen and then using their left hand, this was in their right hand, using their left hand to like pinch and zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I believe that was adjusting the size of the mark that they were using with their, they were about to make with the pencil. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can see like a little shadow of what that mark, where that mark would be and how, how big it would be on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the pencil actually contacts the screen, which is pretty cool. And we’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link in the show notes to a video of this happening, which is pretty slick. So yeah, the prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the same between 128 gigs and 2 terabytes starting at $800 for the 11-inch Wi-Fi, $1,000 for the 11-inch Wi-Fi starting from $1,100 on the 12.9 for Wi-Fi, $1,300 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These go all the way up to twenty four hundred dollars for a twelve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point nine inch two terabyte with cellular
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so we can start talking about all the things that this thing didn’t get No landscape camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John No keyboard with any function keys on it You know no detachable keyboard thing
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it doesn’t the 11-inch does not get a mini LED screen is still only
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 12.9 inch None of them get OLED screens or anything. So it’s kind of just like an internal refresh. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John they kept, in Mac parlance, they kept the case the same. It’s got the same features, the same ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, not that there are many ports to be got, but it’s the same stuff on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on the inside, just swap out the M1 for the M2, which makes sense. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 does have the ProRes encoders. Like this is not new to the iPad, it’s just part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M2, but it allows it to do things that the M1 just couldn’t do in terms of like this is from Apple’s marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John copy, allows user to capture ProRes video for the first time and transcode ProRes footage up to three times faster. That
⏹️ ▶️ John means content creators can capture, edit, and publish cinema grade video from a single device out in the field. As
⏹️ ▶️ John long as you consider the iPad camera, which is unchanged, to be cinema
⏹️ ▶️ John grade video. But the editing part is totally cinema grade. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s, you know, in isolation. Oh, hey, they updated the iPad Pro and now it’s got the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John and the specs are a little bit better. Like for example, the Wi-Fi 6E, that’s twice as fast as the previous Wi-Fi in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a little bit over two gigabits instead of one gigabit, right? This is a good spec
⏹️ ▶️ John bump upgrade to the iPad Pro and you know, Bluetooth 5.3, whatever. The problem is you got the other iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John over there saying, hey, you got a spec bump, but I got some new ideas about
⏹️ ▶️ John what makes an iPad. Like the landscape camera and the detachable keyboard and you didn’t get any of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, and by the way, you didn’t even, I’m kind of catching up to you in some ways, like your cameras aren’t massively improved
⏹️ ▶️ John over what they were before. And I have some pretty good cameras now too. So what do you think of that? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the hover Apple pencil thing, the one of the most clever things about that is it doesn’t require a new pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have an Apple pencil second gen that you bought four years ago or however old the thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use it with this new iPad and it does the hover thing, right? And that’s, I’ve used that, most people won’t be familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with that feature from tablets, from my Wacom tablets or Wacom or however you’re supposed to say it.
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots of other companies have had the hover pencil, pen thing for a while. It’s interesting that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, the Apple Pencil does not have a button on it, right? Lots of tablets, third-party tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John for Mac have had a button on them. And one of the things you can do with that is kind of use it as a hovering cursor and then click
⏹️ ▶️ John with the mouse button, with the button that’s on the stylus. On the Apple Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe you can tap the pencil and the accelerometer as well register that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like double tap the side. Yeah. in my experience, fairly unreliable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to get right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not quite the same as a button,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but it’s like-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be way better if it was a button, because it would be so much less likely to have accidental input
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s an interesting way to, if you ever tried to use, I mean, it’s mostly a Mac, if you ever tried to use a Mac, by
⏹️ ▶️ John hovering a stylus over a tablet and using the button to click, it can be done
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s kind of interesting. But Apple’s not quite ready to go there and I kind of don’t blame them, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John much simpler to have it about the thing and 12 millimeters is not that big of a range either.
⏹️ ▶️ John This feature, the hover thing, like obviously the pencil always had whatever it took to support this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was just a matter of having, you know, the OS integration and maybe some additional hardware. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s just one or both of those things. But importantly, cursor support,
⏹️ ▶️ John because cursor support was acquired in iPad OS to even have the concept of
⏹️ ▶️ John a place on the screen where there is like something hovering, you know what I mean? But not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John clicking because your fingers don’t work with hover, right? At least as far as I know, they’re not gonna enable
⏹️ ▶️ John our fingers to work with hover. They could do that with a future iPad, I suppose. But right now they don’t, right? You’re either touching the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John or you’re not touching the screen. But hover basically gives you a cursor and you can move that cursor around
⏹️ ▶️ John just like you would by using a trackpad, but you’re not clicking anything yet until you do a click motion, which could be in some applications
⏹️ ▶️ John whacking the pencil or whatever. So I think that’s great. And I think that would get a lot of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John oohs and ahs if people weren’t saying, oh man, my hand’s still gonna cover the FaceTime camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s up with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so a couple of really good tweets or excerpts from articles. Federico
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vaticci says, the base model iPad gets a landscape camera, yes, and a brand new Magic Keyboard Folio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, with a detachable keyboard. In Kickstand, yes, and function keys, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the iPad Pro gets none of this. Which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why, again, you look at what’s been rumored for the last couple of years, you know, wireless charging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John magsafe, OLED,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s so much, and this got none of it? That’s why I have to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not planned to be this small of an update originally and things had to change for whatever reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they shipped what they could and sometime in the future we’ll get, you know, the better one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that I think that prevented them from doing the thing is I think supply, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if COVID had never happened, I don’t think that there are screens ready that
⏹️ ▶️ John meet their require, OLED screens ready that meet their requirements in this application. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think mini LED seems like a supply chain thing because obviously they do have mini LEDs that fit their specs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s still only on the 12.9. Why didn’t you get 11 inch ones of those? That seems like a supply chain thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think just, just fits, like I don’t think anybody makes an OLED that meets
⏹️ ▶️ John their requirement. They’re not using OLEDs in any of those. They’re not using it in their laptops, they’re not using it anywhere. But again, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the laptops. It’s clear that in a laptop application and in an iPad application, many LED screens exist
⏹️ ▶️ John that are phenomenal. It’s just that, does the iPad 11 inch Pro 11 inch get one? No, it just doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the second year in a row, it just doesn’t. 12.9 gets it, the laptops get it, but the poor 11 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad just doesn’t get it. And that just smells like a supply chain or pricing thing. But OLED,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to wait until, When OLED is ready to be
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the mini LEDs in these applications, some product will get it, whether it’s a laptop or the iPads, and then it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John roll out. So I’m just waiting for that because I watch a tremendous amount of TV on my iPad, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’ll really be an upgrade to the picture quality. But yeah, having
⏹️ ▶️ John this be just a spec bump update, I don’t think is bad in the grand scheme of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPad Pro is a good design. It’s just having its little brother have some new thinking about iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes you go, aw, I’d like the new thinking over here too. That’s what you get for updating a line not in
⏹️ ▶️ John sync with each other in terms of the TikTok thing of like, when do we do a whole new case design and when do we do a
⏹️ ▶️ John spec bump? Next year, the regular iPad 10th gen is gonna get a spec bump, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe the Pro will get the big redesign because the Pro did get the big redesign and the non-Pro was
⏹️ ▶️ John looking pretty, you know, cruddy next to it for many years because the Pro got the flat sides, new pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the features, And it took a while for those to roll out. I mean, the mini, the front of the mini
⏹️ ▶️ John has the magnetic pencil. I was reminded of this when I was at Apple Store recently. The pencil fills the whole side of the mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s got the good pencil. The new iPad does not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a little bit wild. And I don’t know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this obviously, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any good answers and I’m not plugged in enough to get good answers. But the only conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can come to is, you know, there’s only, and we say this a lot about Apple, but there’s only so many people that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can work on all these things. And if you’re going to work on something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume the most lucrative, or God help me, you know, the best return on investment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to work on the thing that the most people are going to buy. And that’s gotta be the regular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plain old iPad. And yeah, you’re making it more expensive, which might ruin my whole train of thought here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel like if they’re going to choose one iPad to work on, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work on the one that’s selling the best. and that’s probably the now 10th generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. But it still bums me out, and it’s still incongruous that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the allegedly cheap one, again, leaving aside the ninth gen iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cheap one is the one that has all the new hotness, and the pro one, the one that’s for your most ardent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and loyal fans, eh, shrug, you’ll get there eventually. And I don’t know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it, but I can’t help but it bumming me out a little bit. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m jumping ahead slightly, but I was going to ask you too, if you bought anything, but I’ll tell you that I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy a half terabyte, 11 inch cellular iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. And most of the reason I did that was because my current iPad Pro is a 2018 model. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the original OG Face ID iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think I’m not going to cancel this order. The more I think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John what upgrade between those two models we were looking for? Because it’s same form factor, same features,
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID, good Apple Pencil, blah, blah, blah. Obviously this one is tremendously faster, but does that manifest? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this one has more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you my M1, one for a good price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s the thing, is that part of the reason I told myself I was gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new iPad this year, because it’s been four years, and I feel like four years is a pretty decent longevity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an iPad. Like, I mean, hell, four years for a computer for Marco, That’s like 15 computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And about a third of a computer for John. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like four years for an iPad, that’s not unreasonable. And it just felt like time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spoke to a couple of friends who also are on 11 inch 2018 iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pros. And I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I would like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna keep this one that I’m gonna be picking up at the store on Wednesday or whatever day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to answer your question, John, I don’t have a great answer for that question. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do want 5G because, again, I like having a cellular iPad. I would like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a little bit speedier when I’m not connected to Wi-Fi. I’d like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster processor, but I don’t often feel like I’m hamstrung by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever processor’s in this one. I don’t even remember anymore. A12X. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I think you’re right, actually. And then I’d like to be able to use Stage Manager because I feel like that’s relevant for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my job, you know, as in to talk to you guys about it, because I guess I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it on the one that I have now, but it’s slightly hamstrung if I remember correctly, who even really knows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco work out. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use everything except external screens, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, there you go. But I mean, I’d like to try with an external screen, not because I think I’ll do that often, but because I’d like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about it. But more than anything else, the thing I think I’m most looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my current iPad, it’s just showing age. The screen looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like garbage in no small part because my kids use a lot. The battery is okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not trash, but it’s not great. I mean, it’s four years on. So I think just having like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fresh start would be nice. But your point, your implied point, John, is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good that I’m not sure I’m getting that much in terms of like what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would do day to day. I’m not saying the math is the same for anyone else, But for me, I’m not getting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. I’m probably gonna attempt to just keep the same keyboard because I really don’t wanna buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another one even though my smart keyboard is showing its age and it’s kinda peeling away at the edges a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’d rather not spend $300 on a new keyboard that does the exact same thing. I don’t plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on getting a new Apple Pencil. So if I can skirt by just spending $1,300 or whatever it was on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, I think that’s reasonable. It’s a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to do after four years. But the couple of friends that I spoke to, they were like, yeah, I think I’ll pass. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna do it. And I’m not sure that I’m right and they’re wrong. They might be right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and if they, you know, if in a year and a half or so, we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what this was maybe supposed to be, like if we get one that’s like a little bit more redesigned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has maybe, you know, with some of the, maybe it moves the camera, maybe it has a different keyboard that detaches and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has an escape key and a function where
⏹️ ▶️ John mini LED screen on the 11 inch improved cameras, moved cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if that comes out next, which is probably gonna be roughly 12 to 18 months from now, are you gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish you would have waited for that rather than getting something that, I think in day-to-day usage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be surprised if you even noticed the difference going from the one you have to this one. It’s possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible. And I’m glad you phrased it that way, like would I regret not having waited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so, because it is going to be at least a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, unless Apple changes its cadence, which is possible, but if history tells us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, it’ll be at least a year to your point, maybe a year and a half before we get a new iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like in a year to a year and a half, I can get some pretty good use out of this one that I’m picking up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wednesday, hypothetically. And I could always trade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in or resell it a year, year and a half on, And I wouldn’t make all of my money back, but I’d presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make at least half of my money back, especially for a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabyte and for a cellular model. I got to imagine I would be able to get a few hundred bucks for that. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I would regret it, but here again, I take your point that in day-to-day use,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the exception of cellular, I really think the cellular upgrade might be a somewhat big deal, because I do use the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on cellular semi-often, but other than that, I’m not sure day-to-day would make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much of a difference. But sitting here now, I think I am going to stick with the order that is forthcoming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, but who knows, maybe I’ll decide to save my shackles and wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Cellular is great. I mean that, and it’s so like the reason, I mean, it’s almost the whole reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently have an iPad is because I needed something that was separate from my other devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and had cellular and it’s great for that. Um, but Oh my God, it drives me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I hate, I just, I just hate iPad iOS. Like it’s just not for everyone. It’s for I’m happy for you. It’s not for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Like it, every time I use it, I wish it was a Mac. Like if there was just a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air with cellular, like I would throw this out the window.
⏹️ ▶️ John I literally use mine as a small television. Like I think I do at least half of my television watching that. I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it as a small television with a, with an iPhone attached to it. Because when I’m watching shows that don’t require
⏹️ ▶️ John full attention, I can pull Twitter in slide over or slack and slide over while
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m watching the show and the rest of the screen. It’s basically a two screen experience on one screen. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my main, and then you can see why I’m very interested in OLED screen, because if you use your iPad primarily as a television,
⏹️ ▶️ John like television tech is what I want out of my iPad. I do other things with it too, but like if you looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ John hours, just the television hours are just so monstrous. And you know, the fact that it runs all the streaming apps, right? So, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s not like I’m just watching Netflix. It’s all the various things that I subscribe to. Plus I can use
⏹️ ▶️ John my TiVo app and watch my, you know, television shows, whatever. So that’s what I’m using it for. So I tend
⏹️ ▶️ John not to get into the frustrations of iPadOS, but I will give Stage Manager
⏹️ ▶️ John another try in the official release. I just, I tried it in the betas and pretty much ran away screaming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I tried actually doing my work in Stage Manager, like for this little iPad. And it’s simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like mail and notes and the browser going back between those three mainly. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I hated every second of it. And I tried, I’m like, let me give this a good honest try. Similar to how I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing the Ultra, even though I didn’t think it would fit me. but you’re like, oh, let me give this a good, you know, a good honest try. So I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on the iPad, you know, in those like in stage manager for, I think two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this summer. And it just, it just fought me at every turn and nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever worked the way I thought it would. It was, oh God, it was awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wanted so badly to like it. That’s the biggest reason I upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this iPad in the first place is because I couldn’t quote, couldn’t run stage manager on my old one, which of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was later modified to have stage manager support. Thanks for that, Apple. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s cool. It was the right move. I’m glad they did it, even though it screwed me a little bit, but it’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll forgive you for making Swift Async so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I tried it. The entire way people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on iPads is I think incompatible with both the things I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do and just the way I like to work. And it’s a shame because the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though we just said how much it didn’t change, but the hardware, I really like a lot about the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wish the Mac would get some of the niceties that the iPad has, especially in regards to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular. That’s like the number one thing I want to see on the MacBook Air. But even again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to have a MacBook Air that’s a little bit closer to the size of the 11 inch, so maybe a 12 inch MacBook Air. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to see that with cellular. Oh my God, take my money. But in the absence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, like I wanted to really make this work and I just couldn’t. But you know, but look, if you’re an iPad power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user out there and you’re excited about all this stuff, great. All this is to say I didn’t buy anything today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was on Clockwise earlier today and I had asked on Clockwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, do you buy cellular iPads and why or why not? And bonus question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, would you buy a cellular MacBook? And as I told the three co-hosts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was Dan Morin, Jason Snell, and Kathy Campbell, all of whom I consider very good friends. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kill all three of them, and the two of you, by the way, to get a cellular MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I would kill for one. I would love it so much. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my gosh, I am holding out hope that now that Apple is in the modem business, that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will be a thing one day, because I would love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything else on iPad? We still have to talk Apple TV. John, did you buy an iPad today?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not, I’ve got an M1 and you know, there’s nothing for me in this upgrade. Watching my
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming apps would not be improved by an M2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, I don’t think we need to believe it anymore, but, and we also talked about this on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Clockwise today, but the middle section of the iPad lineup, the Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad 10th gen and the iPad 9th gen, it’s just, it’s weird. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like there’s any clear answers And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, I guess, but I don’t know. I feel like in an effort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have an iPad at every price point, we’ve ended up with an iPad at every dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey value between whatever the iPad mini starts at and the $2,400 or whatever I said it was for the 13-inch iPad Pro. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot there. They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t bump the RAM, right? It’s still, the specs for the new iPad Pro was eight gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John on the models with up to 512 gigs storage, and 16 gigs of RAM on the one
⏹️ ▶️ John and two terabyte. And I think that’s the same as it was. It is kind of weird that the RAM is tied to the storage in that way, because hey, what
⏹️ ▶️ John if you need a lot of RAM, but not a lot of storage? Well, tough luck. But that’s a healthy amount of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get an iPad with an M2 and 16 gigs of RAM, but you can’t have more than four windows in
⏹️ ▶️ John Stage Manager. Goddamnit!!
New Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the Apple TV. We’re running a little bit long. So maybe there won’t be much to say about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are two models. There’s 64 gig, which is Wi-Fi only. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s, what is it, 128 gig, which is Wi-Fi and Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thread radio, because the 64 gig does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet and it does not have a thread radio, which, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a little interesting to me, but I’ll go with it. It has an A15, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from late 2021. This is the iPhone 13’s chip. It did have an A12 in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s from late 2018, which is the iPhone XS. To put things in perspective, Mikayla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was born in 2018, just throwing that out there. And apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I knew this and I forgot, but I don’t know if I knew this. Apparently the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to have a fan, and now because of how efficient the A15 is, does not anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I believe ever since the 4K, I mean, first of all, the very, very original one did, the one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like basically an Xbox inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But- It was a Mac mini. Yeah, right. Not really, but it looked like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it was kind of like an Xbox, so you look at the processor. Anyway, it was like a, wasn’t it like a 700 megahertz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Celeron? It’s like, that’s kind of very similar to what the Xbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not, I gotta look up what the, what the hell was in the original? It was more like a Mac. It ran
⏹️ ▶️ John basically a variant of Mac OS inside. Anyway, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John far away. In the era of the black puck Apple TVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe they were fanless and then they got a fan. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, here’s the important thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe the 4K ones went to fans. When the 4K came out, I believe that added the fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the important thing about the fan of the Apple TV is it is literally inaudible. Like you cannot,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, like of all the things, I applaud removal of fans everywhere, But
⏹️ ▶️ John this and the Airport Extreme that Marco gave me, the like the Tower Airport Extreme,
⏹️ ▶️ John both of those things had fans and both of those fans were completely inaudible to my
⏹️ ▶️ John middle-aged adult ears from like any distance. Like I would shove my ear up to the thing. You could,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just so, but hey, kudos for getting rid of the fan because that’s one less thing that can go wrong, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m trying to figure out what the original Apple TV was running. And the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some variant of a Pentium M processor and apparently ran a variant of Mac OS X Tiger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I go to Wikipedia and I go to Apple TV. Apple TV, this article is about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware media player. For the streaming service, see Apple TV Plus. For the media player app from Apple, see Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV app. For other uses, see Apple TV. What a frigging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mess this is. Oh my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Related to that, the new puck, all right, So it’s got the A15, it’s got no fan in it. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller than the previous Puck. It is, you know, it is shorter, so it’s not as high.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it also dimensionally, this little square, the edges of the square are smaller. The old one was 3.9 inches, this is 3.66 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ John The old one was 1.4 inches tall, this is 1.2 inches tall and no fan. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the other one said on top of it, Apple TV, but it didn’t say the word Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had the Apple logo and then a lowercase T and then a lowercase V. The new one just has
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple logo dead center. So it is smaller, quieter in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had amazing hearing. And selling one without ethernet, that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only weirdos have ethernet by their TV. Everybody should, whatever. Selling without the Thread Radio,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV is the ideal home kit hub because it’s plugged in all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, it’s probably in a central location. That’s a great thing to be your home kit hub. Why wouldn’t it support
⏹️ ▶️ John Thread Radio? But part of the explanation of this is if you go down to the pricing, these are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper than the previous horrendously overpriced Apple TVs. So these are less horrendously
⏹️ ▶️ John overpriced. The old one was you’d get for 180 bucks, you get a 32 gig one, and for $200, you get a 64 gig one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you can get a 64 gig one for $130. So $70 price reduction
⏹️ ▶️ John for basically the same amount of storage, but of course you get no ethernet and thread radio. The other didn’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John either. And then 128 for 150 bucks. So there is no more $200 Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and the storage sizes have doubled on both of the things. So they’re going in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. It would have been better if the low-end one had a thread radio and was $99, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, baby steps, we’ll get there. So I ordered this immediately. Of course I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ordered every Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John I ordered the big one with the ethernet port. And it’s a good thing too, is I was like, ah,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I get the one with the big storage and then, because I was ordering so fast, and I just took a glance out of the corner of my eye, Like, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John why does that say Ethernet? So I’m glad I didn’t accidentally order the bad one. Oh, you forgot to mention
⏹️ ▶️ John the, they now support HDR 10 plus, that is the television related feature that they’ve added.
⏹️ ▶️ John They, I think they cranked up the wireless to 802.11ax
⏹️ ▶️ John with 2X2 MIMO and, you know, HDR 10 plus support.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, an A15, which is, you know, a significantly better processor. So this is all around a better Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John than the old one. I don’t think there’s any other big TV related stuff. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming those changes are just related to TVOS, but this is, oh, and it has Bluetooth 5.0, not 5.2 and
⏹️ ▶️ John not 5.3, just plain old 5.0. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the, we’ve buried the lead because the most interesting thing about this, that everyone is cheering,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think I am too, the Siri remote, which looks identical at a glance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now charges via USB-C. And it also weighs one 10th of an ounce or three grams more, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is interesting, but USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John Insert it’s happening GIF here. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s finally happening. It’s happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, it’s happening. We’re going to USB-C slowly, where it’s gonna take a long time, but we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and actually just very briefly to go back to the iPad Pro, you know what I really, really wanted on the iPad Pro, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t expect to get, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I really wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another USB-C port? Well, maybe, but no, actually, what I really wanted was MagSafe. Like the same MagSafe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have for my laptop, I wish was on the iPad. And I can think of 1,010 reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why that wouldn’t be there, but I wanted it, you guys, and I didn’t get it, and that makes me sad. But anyway, I am happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Siri remote is USB-C. What is it, the canary in the coal mine has croaked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so things are indeed happening. It’s happening, DuckGIF, like you said.
⏹️ ▶️ John and the reason we’re saying this, if you’re not steeped in the lore of Apple stuff, is lots of Apple peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ John and devices have lightning connectors, just as sort of their way of charging. So my keyboard is
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, the Apple mouse is like that, the Apple track pads are like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the AirPods, the remote
⏹️ ▶️ John was like that. It was kind of the default, this doesn’t have any kind of data connection, but we need some way
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge it. It’s got a rechargeable battery. So how about use a slim connector for that? Let’s just use lightning, right? That’s been Apple’s default
⏹️ ▶️ John for years and years. Now in a sane world, you would say, well, that shouldn’t be lightning anymore. That should all be USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is the first product that has been revised with the new thinking that we assume
⏹️ ▶️ John is, okay, every single one of those products I just listed, if and when they eventually revise those, they
⏹️ ▶️ John will come with USB-C. And of course, culminating or perhaps leading to the big one which
⏹️ ▶️ John is we’ve talked about a million times, the iPhone going to USB-C. So that’s why when we see this remote and it’s got a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John connection, why do we care about that? Why are we excited about it? Who cares? It shows that Apple understands the time
⏹️ ▶️ John of lightning as the default Apple, oh, I just need a charging port on this thing, is coming to an end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I’m very, very happy about this. I insta-ordered this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also not great reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s so cheap, I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny you say that because it, first of all, it does feel a lot cheaper, even though it is still expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to its peers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or compared to not buying anything because all these apps are built into your smart TV. Also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. But what I’ve decided to do is I’ve wanted, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was waiting for this to launch whenever it may be, be it this year or next year, and it turns out it was yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record. I wanted to take the Apple TV 4K that’s currently in my living room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to bump that back to our bedroom, even though we very rarely use the bedroom TV, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we do, it’s usually for exercising, but nevertheless, like, you know, doing a Fitness Plus video or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Well, anyways, we have a 4K TV in the bedroom, a very unremarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K TV in the bedroom, but we have the Apple TV, whatever it’s called, the 1080 Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that still supports apps. I forget, what is it, the HD or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, thank you, which is now dead by the way. But anyways, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the bedroom TV. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even lower than the Apple Pencil One, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re probably right. And so the one that is currently on the bedroom TV will get demoted to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-time travel appliance because when we go anywhere for more than just a couple of days, I like to bring an Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can think I’m nuts for that, and that’s totally fine, but that’s what I like. I like to do that. So that’ll be the travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV until it doesn’t work anymore. The current Apple TV 4K will then get bumped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to the bedroom and then this guy will go down in the living room and be connected to our nice LG C9.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m looking forward to it, even though, again, I have no particular problems with my current Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV. I’m excited to have this. I did get the Ethernet model because there is Ethernet back there and I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be on Ethernet, especially when air playing. Maybe this will get better when I eventually move to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi 6E or whatever it’s called. But I really find that the airplay experience is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better when at least one of the things air playing is on Ethernet, even better when both are. So your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mileage may vary, but that’s what I like. And so yeah, that’ll be coming, when is it coming, November or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that? Yeah, in a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks. I’m doing exactly the same bump up. That’s always been my strategy. Every time I get a new one, it goes on the good TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one that was on the good TV goes in the bedroom. The one that was in the bedroom becomes the travel, Apple TV, that’s just, that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I buy them every time a new one comes out. Cause I always want whatever new things they have. And I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John Thread Radio, another forward looking thing, like what is the iPod, the HomePod mini has
⏹️ ▶️ John a Thread Radio. Now, one of the Apple TVs has it. But the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John generation, they both had it. I just feel like they were trying to hit a price with the cheap one, and the price
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t even $99, which is what it needs to be. And I think a lot of that is, it’s A15, right? I think A15
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like a little bit overkill for this, but maybe their gaming angle is like it makes game development
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple TV easier, as if the problem was the SoC. But anyway, like it’s great that it has
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you could have made it $99 with a Threadradio with an A14, that would have been a better product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think I agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that being said, with the exception of the small one lacking the thread,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall, this looks like an even better update than the iPad update today, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in terms of like- No, it’s absolutely,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, if you ignore the low-end Apple TV and just look at the high-end one, it is just a pure
⏹️ ▶️ John win. Everything about it is better than the old one. Significantly better SoC, no fan, smaller, lighter,
⏹️ ▶️ John less power, some new features like HDR10, better WiFi. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ John spec bump and also a form factor slight revision. Again, form factor doesn’t really matter for something that sits on your TV and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John touch it or whatever, but in the aspects that do matter, size, heat, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they improved on all of that. So good job, Apple TV. Another pretty good revision that suckers like me will
⏹️ ▶️ John just continue to buy until you stop making it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep. I agree. I really, really like my Apple TV. And now that I’m all in on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV by way of not having really any other thing connected to the TV other than the Switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and did we talk about actually dug out the Wii recently? I don’t remember if we talked about that, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only thing that we do for TV watching is the Apple TV. And I can totally make arguments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s overkill, it’s silly, it’s expensive, et cetera, but I really like it. I really do think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TVOS has its problems, but all in all, I really, really like it. It’s really nice to have our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable television coming through the Apple TV. John, I’m not asking you to agree. I know that you love your TiVo. That’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine. But for me, I really, really like the combination of channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for live stuff and DVR, for Plex for anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we wanna watch that’s kind of like our long-term storage, and then stuff like Disney Plus or whatever else. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV apps for all these things tend to be very, very good. And I just really, really like having this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as my TV setup. And basically, any TV that has an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet, like any television that has an internet connection or that has an Apple TV with an internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection connected to it, it’s no different than being at home, which is so awesome. You know, I can watch my cable TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere. I can watch my Plex anywhere. I can watch Disney Plus anywhere. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so nice. It’s such a small little box and it’s an internal power supply. You don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a stupid brick or anything. I really, really love it. And that’s why I take it traveling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because it is so nice, not only for times when the kids wanna watch a little TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can do it themselves. But then when I wanna watch a little TV at the end of the day, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all my stuff right there. So I really love the Apple TV a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Insta bought one of these just because why wouldn’t I? Marco, did you say, I’m sorry, did I miss it? Did you say if you bought one of these?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not, but it’s only because I think all the Apple TVs that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regularly use are currently like the last 4K model that was just replaced. And so they’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, whenever they stop working, then I’ll replace them with this. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have any immediate needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, if it wasn’t for me wanting to do the trickle down, like John and I were both talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that I would have bought it, but because I had a quote unquote need to trickle down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why I did it, but I’m totally with you. I’m not sure that there’s that much to gain.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you have Samsung TVs, aren’t you? Do you have any Samsung TVs that support HDR10+, maybe yours
⏹️ ▶️ John are all too old for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My, well, it doesn’t, I mean, they’re just the frame TVs, and therefore I don’t even think, I don’t even think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel is capable of high dynamic range anything. Like, they’re terrible panels, they’re terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Nobody should buy them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need this Apple TV then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, on the OLED I have back in Westchester that’s burned in with the Minecraft HUD. That, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could probably use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that support, but I think it might support Dolby Vision though.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It is, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already had HDR through the Apple TV through that. Yeah, all right. Cool, well, that was a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Collide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For members, this episode was six minutes shorter. You could have saved six minutes. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you so much, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John 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-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
Casey got scammed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s have a quick story. It’s a little bit of a sad story, I guess, to offset my delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story from last week about my Sonos stuff. I got ripped off on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon. This is such an odd story. Maybe this is something that everyone knew about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but me. So I have for a long time been looking at, and I think it was Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that brought this to my attention, the Lenovo ThinkVision M14. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so it’s a little—I mean, I’ve never actually seen one in person, to jump in when you’re ready, Marco, but it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1080p 14-inch monitor that you can power and give data to just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over USB-C. Is that a fair summary?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is correct. And it’s great for portable things. It’s really what it’s made for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We use it as a monitor so that Tiff and Adam can see what I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. So it just mirrors my laptop screen during our streaming so they can see see themselves in the webcams and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chat and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have had my eye on this for a while. It currently is on Amazon for $260. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to say that’s an unreasonable price for this thing, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to pay that much. So I think I had on CamelCamelCamel a price watch for it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it dropped to something like $200. I could look it up, but it doesn’t really matter. It dropped enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was Oh, oh, OK, now’s the time. Again, it’s happening, DuckGIF. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went ahead and bought it. And this was like a month ago now, but we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it. So I bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I bought it. It was one of those third-party sellers that’s selling on Amazon or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I bought it, and that was that. And they sent me a tracking number, and that was all well and good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I watched it march across the country from California to my town.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I don’t actually live in Richmond proper. I live in one of the suburbs, so the town name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little different. But we’ll just say it was Richmond for the sake of this discussion. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching it march from California to Richmond. And then one day, the day it was due to be delivered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had, I think, Parcel, which is my preferred delivery tracking app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had Parcel open. And it did its periodic check to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, what’s new? What’s updated? and it said, oh, it’s been delivered. That’s odd, because I knew it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was coming via the post office. And my office in my house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a view of the front of the house, and I can very clearly see the road, and I can see our mailbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had been in the office for the last several hours, and I hadn’t seen the mail truck go through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So OK. And I thought, well, my father-in-law was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey postal carrier for a long, long, long time, and I’ve talked to him about things like this. said that other postal carriers will sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scan things before they’ve actually been delivered or whatever. So they’re, okay, well, I’ll just wait and surely it’ll show up in just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few minutes. And sure enough, like half an hour later, the postal worker came by and dropped off our mail. So I went running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstairs to collect my treat. And there was nothing there. So that’s weird. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I reached out to the post office and was, oh, no, I’m sorry, I waited a day because a lot of times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, things will just get a little gunked up, especially in these unprecedented times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco especially with the post office. They play a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little fast and loose with the shipping statuses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and tracking statuses. Do you guys have that feature
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can see a photo of your mail before it’s delivered to your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’ve not heard of this? What is it? Shoot. It’s informed delivery, I think. You should definitely do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s an American.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have mail delivery to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John my house. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably send you the picture a day after you get the mail where you live. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably true. Yeah, right. But anyway, so I don’t recall. That’s a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall if it had anything in form delivery. I don’t think it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I knew from parcel, or parcels, or whatever it’s called, I’ll put a link in the show notes, that it was due to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivered that day. So I wait, I see the truck pass by, it’s not there. I wait another day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collect the mail, nothing there. So I’m like, OK. I reach out to the post office, and I fill out a little form,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I expect that form to go to Dev Null. But I say, oh, this thing says it’s delivered, here’s the tracking number, it never showed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Do you happen to know what’s going on? Sure enough, I got a call like pretty early the next morning, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunned by, and I’m very thankful for. And, uh, I forget exactly how the conversation went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against again. This is like a month ago, but I got on the phone and say, Hey, you know, this is the situation. Yeah. I totally hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, we delivered something, but it wasn’t to you. Sorry, what? What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We delivered something here in Richmond, but it definitely wasn’t to your address
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it matches that tracking number. What? What did you like buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something on Amazon or something like that? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, you totally got scammed. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so hold on. You’re saying something got delivered to Richmond, but not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Yeah, this happens all the time. This is not unusual. It totally was delivered to somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. Wait, but what? And I basically like blue screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Okay, so hold on. on how much did this thing weigh that got delivered? Can you tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me that? Like I know you probably can’t tell me where it went or whatever, that’s fine. But can you tell me how much it weighed? Oh, let me look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10 ounces. I have not held one of these monitors, Marco, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to assume that it weighs at least a pound. And a pound, last I looked, is 16 ounces. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure whatever was delivered was not one of these Lenovo ThinkVision M14s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is pretty lightweight, but it’s not that lightweight. And also it had, if I recall, had a good deal of packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It comes with a sleeve. It comes with a whole bunch of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So apparently it was delivered somewhere. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, I’m like, okay, that’s really fishy. So I go back to Amazon and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at, okay, who the F sold this to me? And it was sold by Alexmart LLC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which, okay, I’ve never heard of it, but that’s fine. And I will put a link to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AlexMart LLC in the show notes on Amazon. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure enough, as I’m looking through the feedback for AlexMart LLC, it says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey package never delivered, one star. I never got it, one star. This is a scam, one star. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is BS, one star. And this goes for like two, three, four pages. I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at it, I’m looking at it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, right at this very moment. 0% positive reviews in the last 12 months, 115 ratings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. Cool. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently this is a thing where they take your money. They ship something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to somewhere in your town so that as far as you’re concerned, oh, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the post office screwed up, they must, it must be the post office because something went from California or wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Richmond, but it just didn’t show up in my doorstep. It must have been the post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey office. Well, that’s BS because the post office, and I mean, maybe the post office was lying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, but I really don’t think so, especially when she said 10 ounces. And at this point, I don’t believe I disclosed what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just asked how heavy was the thing? She said 10 ounces. And I was like, well, there’s no way a computer monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was 10 ounces. So I got on the horn with Amazon via their chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was like, Hey, this never got delivered. Oh, well you have to wait until the end of your delivery window,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was in like like three, it was probably like now, even though this was a month ago. And at that point you can request
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a refund. And I’m like, no, no, no. This clearly, I mean, I’ve spoken to the post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey office. They said it was a scam. This is not going to work for me. Okay, fine. Here’s what we can do. We’ll refund you now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you do get that monitor, we expect you to send it back. Okay, sure. Fine. I, if I somehow by miracle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get this thing, I promise I pinky swear, I will send it back and sure enough, Amazon refunded my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money and as far as I’m concerned. Everything is fine now. But never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the almost 20 years at this point that I’ve been using Amazon have I ever had to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work like you’ve had to worry about buying counterfeit like apples like, you know power supplies You know what I’m saying? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power bricks and things like that Like that was known to be ripe for gross, you know white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labeled stuff or I’m sorry That’s probably not kosher But you know, whatever it is where they rebrand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they make some garbage and they make it look like an apple thing And then you get it and you’re like, oh, this is totally not an out first party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing Well, I’ve known to look at that. I’ve never known that these sellers would swoop in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create what appeared to be a valid listing, send garbage to your own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey town, and then take away your money. Like, this is, again, maybe this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that I should have known about, but I was not aware of this at all. Have you guys heard of this, or am I the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that’s in the dark?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t heard of this particular scam, but Amazon is indeed filled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with scam attempts. I think we’ve been lucky that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of stuff that I order from Amazon, I’ve been lucky that I haven’t really been scammed as far as I know, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least I can remember in any major way. They make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easy for people to register as sellers. They make it very easy to blend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your listings in with everyone else’s listings. They make it very difficult when you’re buying to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who you’re buying from unless you look really carefully. And it’s really easy to not look at the tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text that says who it’s sold from and just assume when you’re buying a major brand product from a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website that it’s going to come from that website or whatever. Amazon’s design is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intentionally, I think, set to blur everything together into one giant soup and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it very difficult to be very diligent about who you’re buying from
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds like an improvement on the old scam where they would like ship you a brick or something because now they don’t even ship you
⏹️ ▶️ John the brick. Right? It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey true. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that 10 ounce thing that they’re sending is like a bunch of tissue paper that they send to
⏹️ ▶️ John like a random PO box or something like it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever got it is either you know just someone it’s some sort of non thing just to show a package
⏹️ ▶️ John transfer but 10 ounces that’s like just all packaging right there’s nothing actually in that. And then you don’t have anything on
⏹️ ▶️ John your end. GT in the chat room was talking about a scam they experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John where ordered, you know, expensive four four terabyte SSDs and got an empty box with
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing in it. Just like, you know, no signs of tampering, just an empty box. And so complain to Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they said, Oh, there’s nothing we can do about it. You need to file a claim. So this person filed a claim and the claim got rejected. So then
⏹️ ▶️ John this person did what most people do is just tell the credit card company to reverse the charges, right? Because credit cards are usually good
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, not paying when you feel like you got scammed. and Amazon responding by locking this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John So the account they’ve had for 20 plus years, they lost access to all of their Kindle and audio books and music
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, because Amazon gets angry when you reverse the charges on an expensive purchase apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I feel like if you order something and you get an empty box and it’s, you know, it’s completely sealed, empty box,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I go, sorry, I don’t know what we can do about it. Like, I mean, this AlexMart page that you were gonna put the link
⏹️ ▶️ John into, although you should check that you were wrong because I was getting a weird error when I was trying to open it. Anyway, it says, about the
⏹️ ▶️ John seller. AlexSmart LLC is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, it is 99% negative ratings, 1% neutral.