517: A Tesla Full of Kindles
09 Jan 2023John’s live coverage from the CES show floor.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco still has his red hat cursed car
- Follow-up:
- Backing up iPhoto Libraries (via Jonas)
- Dell 5K monitor
- Dell 6K monitor
- Teaser video
- Dell resolution:
6144 × 3456 - XDR resolution:
6016 × 3384
- CES TV News
- Qi2 is MagSafe?
- Rewind.ai internals (via Kevin Chen)
#askatp:- What would be important in a “3rd alternative” desktop operating system? (via Stephan Jacobs)
- Do we use RSS? Which apps, if so? (via Andy Clarke)
- Post-show:
- 🗣️ BREAKING NEWS 🗣️ Tesla Steering Wheel Retrofit
- Mercedes EQS SUV brake pedal (via James Russell)
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Chapters
- Selling cars
- Follow-up: Photos + Time Machine
- Samsung 5K & Dell 6K monitors
- Sponsor: Sanity
- CES TV news
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Qi 2 is basically MagSafe
- Sponsor: Kolide
- How Rewind.ai works
- #askatp: Replacing macOS?
- #askatp: RSS readers
- Ending theme
- Neutral: EQS brake pedal
Selling cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you still have a Tesla?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do still have a Tesla. I was going to actually sell it over Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break, but because my son got the flu and that kind of delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, we had to move all of our timing of all of our travel and it made it so that there was no extra time that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to be spending around the Tesla to get it sold. So it didn’t happen yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are two more breaks coming later this winter. So we’ll see. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to sell it while it’s still worth anything because it’s certainly worth a lot less now than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last summer. It’s Elon’s final middle finger to me. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, you leave Twitter, I’m going to devalue your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is, if you’re willing to discuss, what is your sale strategy for this? Are you carvana-ing? Are you going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sell it privately? Because you’re not looking to buy something, so a trade-in doesn’t seem possible. Are you going to go to CarMax?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So none of these things will give me a real quote. So here’s, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was last home for, for like two days, I’m like, oh, let me try to sell the Tesla while I’m here. So I went, I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Carvana and everything and that, none of them, they were all like, well, because of this not being a common car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to schedule an appointment and bring it in to us, la la la. And I’m like, well, that’s not gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Christmas Eve or whatever, so like, all right, well, I guess I’ll do that some other time. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid, oh, I made a mistake. So I went to Kelley Blue Book to see what’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current, like, I figure, you’re right, I’m not buying anything new, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that weakens my position for sure. But I’m like, when you go to Kelley Blue Book, you get the three values. You get the dealer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-in at the lowest, then you get the private sale, which is the highest, and then I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the middle one is. I’ll take whatever, like the lowest value, the dealer trade-in, I would take that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fine, at least it would be out of my hands. I don’t wanna deal with the private sale, it’s a pain in the butt. And it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more time than, frankly, I ever have around. Like I’m never there for long enough to do a private sale. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve done that in the past, and you gotta, you list it somewhere, you got to wait maybe a week or two and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show different people the car, have them come around and kick the tires and go on a little test drive and then decide not to buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a huge time suck. That’s why I don’t do that anymore. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never had a good experience with a private sale, as a seller at least. As a buyer, I’ve had great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experiences, but as a seller, never had one. So I thought, okay, well, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever the dealer trade in price is, I’d be happy to take that. So I go on Kelly Blue Book and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal the dealer trade and price and then they offer at the bottom of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, get our like, you know, instant cash offer price now and we’ll, you know, we’ll buy the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from you without you buying a vehicle. You know, it’s so I thought, okay, let me see what they’ll offer for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s one of those stupid scams where they’re not really going to buy your car from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They give your information to like 14 dealers in the region.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in the region. Oh, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get spammed like crazy from these desperate vultures and they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offering like $15,000 below the dealer trade-in value. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well, like, first of all, this is literally the site that just told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me what my car was for. And this is way below that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And second of all, now I’m gonna get spammed forever from these rando desperate used car dealers. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. You know, so I can’t recommend Kelly Blue Book for anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this moment for either the valuation which seems to be wrong or for their stupid cash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m probably gonna go to Carvana or CarMax or whatever those things are and and take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they give me Which is probably gonna be very very low and I’m gonna really be grumbly about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for a while But at least I won’t have to you know deal with it anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ John well through the magic of YouTube advertising I’m going to recommend something to you that maybe Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John will be familiar with if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. No, cuz here’s the thing cars and I like browsing cars and bits to see like, you know What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the rivians costing these days, you know, but the reason I would not want to sell on a site like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a site that is browsed by car nerds I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to sell my car to a car nerd
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like eBay though like that you just put pictures and then a bunch of people bid and they’re probably gonna pay a lot because car nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re getting like They understand the nuances of why this is good, low mileage, good condition, one owner, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. And they understand this is the one before they ruined the steering wheel, so on and so forth. So you’ll get a lot of money for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you don’t have to deal with showing people the car and kicking the tires and if they like it. Someone’s gonna win the thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John then they’re gonna buy the car and they’re a car person. So they’ll probably understand what they’re buying
⏹️ ▶️ John and know how to go and get it from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, Cars and Biz is the kind of place where Casey should sell a car. Because Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been detailed and washed and kept in great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John condition. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John cars and biz doesn’t care that yours is a little scratched up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be fine. It’s not going to be no car nerds. They’re going to see things I’ve never seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re going to be the panel gap people. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, they also they’ll also appreciate why your car is desirable above and beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that, you know, because all the like Carvana or whatever, all they care is like make model year mileage
⏹️ ▶️ John condition as a as a one to five scale. Like they don’t understand the nuances of why this car is worth
⏹️ ▶️ John more than an uglier color or a model year that was worse. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John get way more money for there. And it should be just as little hassle because you don’t have to deal with showing people
⏹️ ▶️ John the car and all that stuff. It’s just, you put up the pictures, people bid, you get a decent price, you sell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I mean, the other thing too is like, I also have and would want to sell with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car a second set of rims that had snow tires on them. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t usable anymore, so I’ll probably have to dispose of those myself. But there’s a second set of Tesla rims
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably worth a thousand bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or whatever. Cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and bids people will also understand that those are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco valuable. That is true actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John And be willing to buy them from you because they’ll just resell them for more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so maybe. But then I gotta, first of all, I’ll have to do this not in the winter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’ll have to look nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, totally do it in the winter. I’m looking at a Ford Bronco right now, pictures of it in the snow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have to go get it detailed. It’s a much greater hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just gotta slum it on cars and bids. You’re like, look, I’ve got a car. I know you want this car. Here’s a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve got a car. You’ve got bids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Let’s make it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a desirable car in good condition with low mileage. Like, it’s a slam dunk. Do not let
⏹️ ▶️ John Carvana buy this car for you for like $10,000 less than it’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also think, I don’t know, I’ve really soured on DeMuro over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would also consider bring a trailer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not that different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John similar thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John eBay for cars is what we’re saying. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people looking at it. Let’s see, here’s pretty much exactly my car with three times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mileage that sold for $10,000 more than what they offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying. I’m coming around to John’s point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on this one. I hate to break it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s a substantial price difference. You’ve got,
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that your car has are intangibles. And those intangibles are only gonna be appreciated by car people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know what they’re getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What intangibles are you thinking of? Previously owned by Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John Arment? single owner, good condition, low mileage. And it’s the Model S before they screwed it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the last one with a goddamn sunroof. And a round
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a complete steering wheel. You get the entire steering wheel with this price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just driven by a little old man in Westchester to church every
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it was not flogged,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was not abused, he
⏹️ ▶️ John was not drag racing on the weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ John teenager ever drove it. It’s only accidents where like when it was parked unattended, like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good car. The battery has probably got tons of life left in it. Check the battery health thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The stock tires are not that well worn because I kept snow tires on it for like a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half straight.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at this point you can be pretty sure it isn’t one of those ones that’s assembled with roofing screws, right? Cause it
⏹️ ▶️ John would have fallen apart by now.
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever built this one was not like, you know, just slapping it together in a tent. I guess I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but how the, I mean, This, oh, this sold in Texas. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fuh. You don’t have to deal with that. They’ll come and get it just there. The people who want this car are gonna want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How does, so wait, how does it work? They literally just like send a trailer to come get it or what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, usually. I mean, whoever buys it is gonna do that. If they don’t, like it’s the buyer’s problem. You
⏹️ ▶️ John say where you are and it’s the buyer’s problem how they’re gonna get it, but it’s not your problem. You don’t have to ship it to them or something. Oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one has a bunch of paint chips. Mine’s in less crappy condition than this one. See?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if I just pay John like $5,000 to just come do this entire thing for me because I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John way more than that. Just use
⏹️ ▶️ John it as packing material for some other thing you’re gonna send me. I’ll take the Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll fill the Tesla with Kindles. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fill it with chocolate. As you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I enjoy stick shift cars, but if I’m gonna have one without a stick shift, it’ll be electric.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amen to that, brother. Amen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you know what’s better than manual transmission? No transmission.
⏹️ ▶️ John still a transmission.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not really. I mean, Tesla’s a single speed. I know, but it’s still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmission if it can’t change gears?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, because it changes the gear ratio. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just like one to one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think it’s, I don’t think it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because it transmits its power. It is a fixed ratio,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a gear ratio. There are different numbers of teeth on the gears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just called gears. There’s just a set
⏹️ ▶️ John of gears. Right, but they don’t all have the same number of teeth. The gear ratio is not one to one. No, but I don’t. Otherwise, your back
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels would be turning at 20,000 RPM. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but I don’t think like do Teslas have more than one gear besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward and reverse?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean like actual gears as in circular things with teeth that mesh with each other. Go look at exploded
⏹️ ▶️ John diagram of the Thing that powers your car you will see several gears that mesh with each other
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was different numbers, but doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a transmission require that to like change between ratios at some point
⏹️ ▶️ John No It just requires the the power to be transmitted through a series of gears with different numbers of
⏹️ ▶️ John teeth on them unless it’s just one one gear ratio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so then a watch is a transmission then? Because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gears that change. It’s not a car,
⏹️ ▶️ John so. Lots of things have gears that aren’t cars. This is like robot or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like is my hand mixer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my electric hand mixer upstairs, is that a transmission? Exactly, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what about my kitchen aid, does that have a transmission? Well, kind of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gosh, what have we done? I have regrets.
Follow-up: Photos + Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s let’s bring us back around. And let’s do some follow up. Jonas writes, I was a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worried about the time machine iCloud backup iCloud photo library thing. But it seems that it’s included
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in time machine backups. And so I guess Jonas or maybe john found a knowledge base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever article about this. So tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John At apple.com. So we can be pretty sure they know what they’re talking about. It says Apple says even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you use iCloud photos, it’s important to you always backup your library locally using one of the followed methods. And the two methods they list
⏹️ ▶️ John are use Time Machine, and it claims that will back everything up, or manually copy your library to external
⏹️ ▶️ John storage device. I think what I was misremembering last episode was, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is true, because all we have is this vague advice from Apple that says, hey, back it up, use Time Machine. So thumbs up
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. Maybe I was misremembering a thing where when you use Time Machine, it will not
⏹️ ▶️ John back up the SQLite metadata databases, but will only back up the photo files and the rest of the structure.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you use iCloud Photo Library, because it assumes it can always regenerate the SQLite databases from the iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John photo stuff. That’s the thing now, I don’t know if it’s true, but apparently you’re safe using Time Machine if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just wanna back up the actual photos. And it will back up the whole thing, the whole photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was just some big blow up a couple years ago of people being mad that a Time Machine wouldn’t back up
⏹️ ▶️ John some, what they considered to be an important part of the photo library. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t back it up is because if you use iCloud photos, that source of truth is in
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud anyway. So your local backup of it is just gonna get overridden with what’s in the cloud and that’s why I think they didn’t back it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe more follow up on this in the future, but for the main question of will it back up my photos? The answer is yes.
Samsung 5K & Dell 6K monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there are some new monitors that we need to talk about. We talked about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung 5K last week, and actually we have some updates on that. And then there’s a Dell we need to talk about. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me, we have a little more information about the Samsung, I guess?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about the camera last time. We’re like, oh, it’s a 4K camera. It’s a good camera, not like that crappy one on the Apple Studio Display.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, 4K camera is about 8.3 megapixel, and the Studio Display has a 12 megapixel
⏹️ ▶️ John camera. I still think the one on the Samsung is probably better because
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know what the crop factor is on that 4K camera, right? Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John super ultra wide camera that it uses on the studio display tracks you through a wide range of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can move all over the place, right? I would imagine Samsung is going to take a less
⏹️ ▶️ John extreme approach with its 4K camera. And when it says that it tracks you, I bet it crops out a portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 4K frame, but not as tiny a portion as the studio display does. We’ll see when the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John ships, but that’s a software question more than a hardware one. But just wanted to clarify 4k is about
⏹️ ▶️ John eight megapixels and a studio display is a 12 megapixel camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Dell has a new 6k monitor that makes your XDR look like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pile of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not, but it exists as a 6k monitor. So here’s what’s important about it. It is a 32
⏹️ ▶️ John inch 6k monitor, which is the same as the XDR. It has more pixels than the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR is also 32 inches, but the the Dell 6k monitor is 6144 by 3456
⏹️ ▶️ John and the XDR is 60 16 by 33 84 Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John for reading those numbers that way but that’s the way my brain works sometimes. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John Dell monitor has 875 thousand five hundred and twenty more pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John The PPI is very similar on the Dell. It’s 223 and on the XDR. It’s 215 So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Mac appropriate monitor with more pixels than the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is looking pretty good here You know same size more pixels. It looks pretty good until you
⏹️ ▶️ John see it We’ll get there. We’ll get there It is it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a fancy display like the XDR though. It is as an LG IPS
⏹️ ▶️ John Monitor it, you know, it’s covers p3, but that’s about it It does 600 nits max,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not anything close to the XDR 1600 nits max It has
⏹️ ▶️ John the good old familiar from last episode display HDR 600 certification But according to
⏹️ ▶️ John Ars Technica, it does have local dimming. It has 12 zones
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not good. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would just turn it off at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the peak brightness is less than half of the XDR and the XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John has 576 dimming zones and even that is paltry compared to modern mini LED monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John that have way more dimming zones 12 dimming zones is not good But it does claim that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has a good IPS display or whatever. Anyway High adjustable stand included of course
⏹️ ▶️ John with rotation because why wouldn’t you have that on such an expensive monitor? That would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy Wait, it’s not $1,000? Yeah, we’d all
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing. I mean this is CS This is coming from CS so we don’t know the pricing of this So we can’t make fun
⏹️ ▶️ John of how badly priced Apple things are because we don’t technically know about the price, but I’m gonna say it’s gonna undercut Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has a 4K dual gain HDR webcam that uses quote unquote AI
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep you in the frame. You know, sounds familiar, huh? This is apparently a dual gain HDR CMOS
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor with multi-element lens. The webcam has independent hardware tilt.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though the camera is built into the monitor, you can apparently tilt it with your hand. It uses Dell Express
⏹️ ▶️ John sign-in technology to detect your presence when you’re nearby and logs you in automatically, locking your PC when you walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I want Face ID on the Mac and I would love it if it locked the screen when I walked away because it knew I did that because of
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera, but I’m sure this is all like a Windows feature and not a monitor thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it works as well as the Windows face recognition thing to log in, you’re not missing much.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, that’s better than nothing, I feel like, but we’ll see. It’s not. No. It’s worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than nothing. Well, if it worked as well as Face ID on my iPad and my iPhone, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be happy. So, and I feel like Apple could make that happen, someday maybe. It has a mute and camera
⏹️ ▶️ John disabled touch sensors, accessible on the front of the monitor, because it’s nice to be able to do those things quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John 14 watt stereo speakers, auto KVM built in, lets you control two PC sources with
⏹️ ▶️ John a single mouse and keyboard, viewing content from two computers with picture in picture, and picture by picture modes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can put the two monitors like side by side, like two images on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Connectivity, of course it has tons of ports, why wouldn’t it? Such an expensive large monitor, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI, DisplayPort 2.1, Thunderbolt 4, RS calls this Thunderbolt 4 downstream. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming that means that’s how you connect your computer to it, I’m not sure. USB-C upstream,
⏹️ ▶️ John four USB-A ports, 2.5 gigabit ethernet port, and a
⏹️ ▶️ John front panel with two USB-C ports at 10 gigabits with 15 watt power delivery, and one USB-A port with 10
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabits, and BC 1.2 power charging, which is apparently an abbreviation for USB
⏹️ ▶️ John battery charging revision 1.2, up to 140 watts of power delivery.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not the same specs as the XDR. It’s kind of an XDR for people who don’t need 1,600
⏹️ ▶️ John nits, great color fidelity, so on and so forth, but just want a big
⏹️ ▶️ John single monitor with tons of ports and lots of features and all that good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, as Marco alluded to before, it’s ugly as sin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so ugly. It’s so ugly. Let me paint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, let me paint you a word picture. So imagine like a standard computer monitor with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a ugly plastic base, you know, or stand on it. But as you look up, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice that there’s a forehead that must be a couple of inches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tall and that is way out of line with the bezel on the rest of the sides of the display.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as big as the forehead is, is it so big because it contains the camera? No, it does not contain the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, John, I’m glad you asked. Only half of the circular camera is within the forehead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Half of the huge camera, like huge. Just like the size of a golf ball.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and then the other half of this golf ball-sized camera is above the top bezel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the top of the monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco looks like an enemy
⏹️ ▶️ John from Half-Life. It’s like so ungainly looking. Like anything where the bezel is bigger on the
⏹️ ▶️ John top than the bottom always kind of looks like the monitor is upside down and then it’s got the big thing. But if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the videos of this thing, the stand is tilt adjustable, height adjustable, rotates,
⏹️ ▶️ John so many ports on this thing, so many features. It’s got all the stuff that you can want, and I bet the price is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. And I don’t think there’s really any other game in town for, hey, I want an XDR, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need 1,600 nits. Now, as I said, when we talked about this in kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ John few months after I got it, whatever, I really do, I didn’t think I would care about the HDR, but I really do appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John it because my phone, my family’s phones take HDR video and photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John and when I view them on the big screen where I do my photo editing, they look HDR. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually use those 1600 nits and so do Apple’s pro laptops now. So I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of at the point where I, you know, if you had asked me before about the XDR, I’d be like, oh, I just love something
⏹️ ▶️ John like the XDR that just doesn’t have that HDR stuff that I don’t care about, but now I’m kind of over the line where I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t ever want to buy a monitor that doesn’t do HDR for my quote unquote good monitor. So in that respect,
⏹️ ▶️ John this one is not to my liking, but I think having a 6K monitor for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t care about HDR that has all the features and connects to all the things and
⏹️ ▶️ John has a good camera built in and everything, like if this thing is priced reasonably,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just super glad this exists because now we have an alternative to the, you know, another alternative to the Apple 5K.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now finally we have something I never thought we’d have, an alternative to the XDR that, again, assuming it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not more expensive, is great to just have in the market for people who want a big
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor but don’t wanna pay six grand once you add the stand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m guessing this is probably, I mean, not knowing anything about what these components cost these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s at six grand from a monitor that’s now a few years old that has higher specs in certain areas and of course higher design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. I’m gonna say this is probably gonna be under four grand for the Dell one. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m right about that, even if it’s four grand, it’s probably even gonna be less than that. that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a great deal. Like for what you’re getting compared to what else is in the market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is gonna be well under the XDR’s price. Maybe even half, you know, it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be 3,000, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s probably gonna be a really compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price. And the money you’re saving, you couldn’t buy anything that will make you not see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this looks. Maybe like one of those, if you look through like one of those cartoon ninja masks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’re looking through a slit, if you can just cut off the top and bottom and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see anything beyond that, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I do think is kind of cool? It’s really ugly, but I like the principle of it. So they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some, I guess, capacitive buttons on the bottom left-hand side of the screen. Not in love with that, but at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have a button. Imagine how cool it would be if your studio display had a power button. That would be amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you know what? I love hearing about everyone’s studio display bugs because you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many times I’ve had to unplug my XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna guess none.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, correct, none. Oh wait, once I rewired my desk. But
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these monitors should have power buttons. Like even the XDR, which I’ve also had no problems with,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should still have a power button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. No, it’s an Apple device, it’s not gonna have a power button. Their headphones don’t even have a power button. Not a chance the monitor will. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John We got them to add back the good keyboards, SD card slot, HDMI to the laptops. I think we can
⏹️ ▶️ John convince them that power buttons are a thing that electronic devices should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I tell you, I actually, for interesting reasons, I use someone else’s 12 inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. And it’s the first time I’d seen one of those in a long time. And of course, the space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar is broken. But it did feel really small. Damn, I wish this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size still existed, but wow, I’m glad this keyboard doesn’t still exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Anyway, next to these capacitive buttons, there’s a little like MacBook Air, original MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air style door that drops, or not door, but like, I don’t know, like column that drops down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hub is what it is basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so it has two USB-C ports on it and a USB-A port on it. And then you can shimmy it back up within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the contents of the inside of the monitor and confines of the monitor. That’s what I was looking for. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slide it back up inside the monitor and it disappears. And I think I’m supposed to hate this, but I think I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John front-facing ports, useful thing to have. So you don’t have to constantly reach around behind the monitor. Like this is exactly what PC
⏹️ ▶️ John makers will do. It’s like, oh, let’s just add all the features that we think will be useful. Sometimes in elegantly and sometimes they go overboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s such a nice, that’s why you need, Apple needs competition and you need contrast. The Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John overly simplified thing is contrasted with this thing that has every feature anyone could ever think of. Somewhere in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably where we wanna be, but it’s good to have the two things balancing each other. So if you don’t like what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has done, you have an alternative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Do you think as you type on your desk that this stand will wiggle the whole monitor?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Dell usually has pretty good stands and this one looks pretty sturdy. It’s LG that can’t make a stand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, well, but I haven’t seen, I haven’t, I used to love Dell monitors. Like back in the pre-retina days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had two Dell 24 inches and they were fantastic. And I mean, you know, at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when those came out in 2006 or whatever, those were really great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very competitively priced, very well performing monitors and they were great, but that was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time ago. And I, you know, I wouldn’t make any assumptions unless I’ve heard from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, that they would still be even, you know, the same company let alone making the same quality stuff.
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CES TV news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you need Marco and me for the next like 20, 30 minutes or can we just take
⏹️ ▶️ John nap? You can, you’ll have to be my camera crew as I report from the CES show floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John My annual trip to CES that I don’t actually take. This is it. So CES is going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never actually been to CES, but I will be virtually reporting from there on the tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of things that I actually care about at CES and those are having to do with televisions. going on in the world TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a quick overview here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, hold on. I’m curious before we begin. I know from being on the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer side of things that CES does not have a strong correlation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what actually comes out in the market. Is that better for TVs? Like do TVs have a better track record of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s shown at CES actually then gets delivered to the market?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. So for television, it has simply become the thing where like everybody, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like an annual crop of televisions. and everybody just shows with the asterisk that I’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ John in a second, shows their TVs at CES. They also show stuff that isn’t a TV. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something we’re thinking of. Here’s something stupid like the concept car equivalent. That crap is, you know, whatever. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the TVs they show, they ship them later that year. Unless something catastrophic happens, they
⏹️ ▶️ John ship them pretty reliably. So there’s it’s annoying that CES comes and you don’t get prices and availability.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you basically know, look, this happens every single year. They show them in January. They’re not yet ready to ship sometime during
⏹️ ▶️ John the year. We’re probably around the middle. They’re gonna ship them. We’re gonna find out the pricing and availability, and then we do it all
⏹️ ▶️ John over the next year. So that is very reliable. So it’s not like, you know, they give you the names, the model numbers and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so these are real products, not, you know, ignore the concept car stuff. Although I’ll talk a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John about the concept car stuff here too. So this year, the starting news is
⏹️ ▶️ John you can finally get Quantum Dot QD OLED screens in larger than 65 inch sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the fancy TV people who have bigger houses than me wanted to buy my recommended TV last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Sony A95K, but like, oh, it only goes in 65 inch. That’s the biggest size you can get, which is fine for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John My last TV was 55 inches and I upgraded to 65 and that’s about as big as I can fit, but there was nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger. So this year, finally, you can get a 77 inch size. Samsung Display makes QD OLED screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are the only manufacturer that does. Every television that has a QD OLED screen comes from Samsung.
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung announced a 77 inch television. Their naming scheme is not as good as LG’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last year was the S95B that came in 55 and 65. Now you can get the S95C.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get it, you’re incrementing the number. What is the S? What is the 95? I don’t get it. Now there’s also the S90C
⏹️ ▶️ John series, which is sort of their lower end model. So they’ve bifurcated their entire line. The
⏹️ ▶️ John S95C comes with what Samsung calls a One Connect box that they’ve had on their TVs for many years. Do you have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, Marco? Is that where, so the frame has, you run one skinny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable to the TV and it goes down into this giant box that has all the other ports on it that you hide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your entertainment center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it’s- That
⏹️ ▶️ John is the One Connect box. And
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the idea to just sort of, it makes it easier to mount the TV or you don’t have to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s actually a fiber optic on the modern ones. One little skinny cable goes to the TV and there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John breakout box with everything else in it. The power plug, the HDMI port, it’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Samsung puts it on their fancy TV. So the S95C has the One Connect box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t know how good, Mine’s buggy as hell. We have two frame TVs, they’re both buggy as hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never in a million years buy another one. And I don’t know if it’s because of the electronics being separated, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. It’s probably just because Samsung sucks, but man is it buggy as hell. I would never do this again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can’t speak to the reliability of the One Connect box because obviously that’s some proprietary thing that they’re doing with the fiber optic cable,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But in theory, the electronics that are in that box is the same as they would stick on the back of the TV. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if they suck, they would probably also suck on the back of the TV. Anyway, their fancy line, S95C, has
⏹️ ▶️ John the One Connect box. And it also has bigger and better speakers in the TV because now there’s room for them. They
⏹️ ▶️ John basically have speakers taking up the whole back of the TV with openings on the back and everything for better bass and, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know. So that’s the S95C. And the S90C doesn’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ John One Connect box and it’s more of the lower end model. So they’ve split up their QD OLED line
⏹️ ▶️ John into the good ones that have features you might not want, like the One Connect, and that’s a good one. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of One Connect box, LG has a product they call the Signature Series
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED TVs. It’s just a WRGB OLED, not a QD OLED. And theirs are wireless.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a power plug that goes to the back of the television and then there’s a breakout box, but the breakout box
⏹️ ▶️ John communicates wirelessly. They call theirs a Zero Connect box. Isn’t that clever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it still has power. I mean, so what’s the point?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the point is it’s a lot easier to sort of mount the TV. Like if you have to like be like Casey and mounted way
⏹️ ▶️ John too high over your fireplace or whatever You just have to have power You don’t have to fish it fish HDMI cables through
⏹️ ▶️ John or like lots of television have lots of ports in the back of them You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might know I can but I’m saying like like when you have the one cable that goes to the breakout box the way my Stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy Samsung ones do what’s the difference if you have to run a power cable to the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this cable to the TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Well lots of people have a power plug near their television or behind where they’re gonna wall mount it
⏹️ ▶️ John But not a lot of people have the special one connect fiber optic cables fished through their wall to
⏹️ ▶️ John the box that they’re gonna buy With TV not a lot of people have HDMI or if they do have HDMI, it’s not the right standard
⏹️ ▶️ John for HDMI 2.1 and whatever This is a silly rich person TV, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a serious TV, but it is a real product. It’s 97 inches It’s probably horrendously expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John I just think it’s interesting because they’re sending real full-fledged not compressed
⏹️ ▶️ John like full fidelity 4k 120 Hertz a video signal
⏹️ ▶️ John to the television wirelessly up to 30 feet away. I don’t recommend this television. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point where they can do that on a silly rich person TV for
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at the pictures, see how it’s like the television itself is on one of those awkward stands that no normal person would
⏹️ ▶️ John have in their house, right? It’s just kind of like freestanding and alone. That was to make fun of the fact that they never show any
⏹️ ▶️ John power cables or anything else. Well, you can see the cable in this picture. It’s just the power cable. It goes down one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John legs and that’s the only cable you need to attach. So finally, it’s a realistic picture and you just gotta find some
⏹️ ▶️ John place to hide this box. So there’s that, I just thought it was silly. It’s like the TVs, they have like a TV
⏹️ ▶️ John that rolls up and all the silly rich people TVs are just fun to look at, but they are real products, they do sell
⏹️ ▶️ John to real silly rich people. More seriously from LG, their
⏹️ ▶️ John competition for QD OLED, cause they kinda got trounced last year by having, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a QD OLED TV, they still don’t have a QD OLED TV. but what they have now is the micro
⏹️ ▶️ John lens array. They took their WRGB OLEDs, which are OLED TVs that have
⏹️ ▶️ John a red, a green, and a blue sub-pixel, and then also a big honk and a white sub-pixel next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They took that TV and on top of each pixel, they put tiny little microscopic
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses. So on a 77 inch TV, every pixel has 5,117 lenses on top of it. Every single pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every single pixel. There’s a lot of pixels on a 4K TV. What? Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re micro lenses. It’s a junior mint.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s refreshing.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, you can look at some of the pictures. So what’s the point of these little lenses? The point of the lenses is to
⏹️ ▶️ John take a light that would otherwise be lost to internal reflection as light passes through the various glass
⏹️ ▶️ John layers. Cause when you send light through, you know, anything there you lose some of it due to internal reflections
⏹️ ▶️ John of light that doesn’t make it out to people’s eyeballs. The micro lens array makes more of the light make it
⏹️ ▶️ John through without losing less of it internal reflection. So you don’t need to run your backlight, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John or not backlight, you don’t need to run your pixels brighter, you just get more of the light that you’re producing out
⏹️ ▶️ John to people’s eyeballs. And that is their competition for QD OLED. You also get better viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John angles because again more light is leaving the display going to eyeballs and less of it is getting stuck inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the display. Less off-axis, you know, color tinting, all the things that were problems with
⏹️ ▶️ John WRGB OLEDs that weren’t problems with QD OLEDs, they’re They’re combating that with the micro lens array.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is brighter. The estimates are it’ll be about 1500 nits, 1500 calibrated nits on a 10% window. When we say that we mean
⏹️ ▶️ John make a 16 by nine box that is 10% the size of the TV. That can be probably around 1500 nits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Full screen, 200 nits. This is what TVs have been like for years, by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, if you don’t know. Like if you make the entire screen white, you get 200 nits, right? If you make a 10% window white, 1500 nits.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is relying on the fact that most real television content is not like 100% white,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that scene in the matrix is pretty close. So just keep that in mind. This is an increase from last year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John model. Last year’s best LG model was a 933 nits on a 10% window and 172 full field. So this is a big jump in brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ John thanks to all those little tiny lenses. Obviously you’ll have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John reviewers to get these TVs to compare them. Samsung’s QD OLEDs are also
⏹️ ▶️ John brighter this year. So it’ll be quite a competition. Obviously the things
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLED still have going for them is they don’t need a bunch of little micro lenses because they’re just naturally better
⏹️ ▶️ John at putting out light because they have fewer layers to go through and the part that produces the light is closer to the,
⏹️ ▶️ John literally physically closer to the surface. They have naturally good viewing angles and their brightness doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John rely on the white subpixels. So while you can get some, you know, a 10% window at 1500 nits that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pure white, you cannot get a 10% window at 1500 nits that’s pure red because that white sub-pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing a huge amount of the work. If you add up the brightness of the R, G, and B sub-pixels in a QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED, you get the white, the full brightness. If you add up the R, the G, and the B sub-pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John on a WRGB OLED, you get like 10% of the brightness. Most of it is that white sub-pixel, which tends to
⏹️ ▶️ John wash out colors. So I still feel like QD OLED is the future and is the better technology, but
⏹️ ▶️ John kudos to LG for finding a way to get way more brightness out of their
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs and come up with a technology It should make, I feel like their top end
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs competitive with Q2 OLEDs this year. We’ll see. Second to last, Samsung’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say like silly concept car thing because these are real products, but they’re real products for fabulously
⏹️ ▶️ John rich people. Micro LED. Every year you see micro LED at CES because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the best technology. This is non-organic LEDs. Every single pixel has a
⏹️ ▶️ John little red LED, a little white LED, and a little green, not red, red, green,
⏹️ ▶️ John and blue, right? RGB. Which is unlike the current ones, which just use
⏹️ ▶️ John a single LED that they pass through either color filters or quantum dots or whatever. No
⏹️ ▶️ John burn-in problems, instant response, no white sub-pixel, amazing viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John angles. This is the promised land of television technology. It
⏹️ ▶️ John also costs like 30 grand, right? And the big problem with micro LED TVs has been,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t make the little LEDs micro enough. So you see them in stadiums all the time. Like those big screens that like
⏹️ ▶️ John a basketball game. Those are not really particularly micro, but those are LED screens. They have red,
⏹️ ▶️ John green, and blue LEDs for each pixel. Making them small is really, really hard because
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t make, we can’t economically make a bunch of tiny little LEDs. So the way manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John have been making these for years and years is they make sort of like a sub board
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a micro LED thing with a certain number of pixels. And then they checkerboard those things together to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a complete TV, right? because they can’t make one board the size of a TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could just make a bunch of sub boards and put them together so you can’t see the seams, right? And the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John has been the smallest one you get is 300 inches. And then the next year, the smallest one you get was 200 inches. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the next year, the smallest one you get was 100 inches. And by the way, they always cost like 10 grand, 30 grand or whatever, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John you just couldn’t make them small enough. Well, this year, Samsung was showing micro LED TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John in sizes from 50 inches up to 140 inches. Those are real TV sizes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John from a tech perspective, we can now make micro LED TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John in the sizes humans can fit in their homes. Just not at the prices humans can afford to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy them. I don’t even think there are prices attached to these. You know, it’s one of those kind of, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sizes that come in are weird. It’s 50, 63, 76, 89, 101, 114, and 140 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those sizes are a result of basically the size of the little unit, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the little checkerboard thing. When you stick a bunch of those together to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16 by nine display, these are the inch sizes you end up with. But they’re 240 Hertz, they’re low power, they have amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John color, phenomenal brightness, no image retention ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t wait for this technology to arrive. Hopefully we will have affordable micro LED TVs before my
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes get so bad that I can’t appreciate them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, wasn’t there a rumor just a few days ago that the next, or that an upcoming Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch will probably use micro LED.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s been micro LED Apple Watch rumors for about five years. Micro LED, I mean, it’s not like all the technology is
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna come, because every year at CES, the micro LED TVs get better and better. But yeah, the rumor that Apple’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John use them in some device someday, they will eventually, but they don’t even have OLEDs on their laptops yet. So let’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, wasn’t the factory that they did the, like they bought a factory in Arizona,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the whole deal fell apart. And so wasn’t that for micro LED?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there was one of those was for quarts for something, like the display quarts or whatever, but they did
⏹️ ▶️ John make a big investment in micro. Everyone’s investing in micro LED. Everyone knows this is the next step. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like all the different things that I talk about of these TVs doing stuff so they don’t suck as much.
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLED was the most recent big step. Look at all the crap we don’t have to do. No white sub pixel. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lose light by connecting through color filters. Amazing viewing angle, low power, thin, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you still have image retention and you can’t get as bright as an LED backlight, right? So there’s always caveats.
⏹️ ▶️ John Micro LED, the only caveats were, we have to make a bunch of small ones and stick them together so
⏹️ ▶️ John you might see the seams and we can’t make them that small. And they’re working on those. So the size, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got it. 50 inch micro LED 4K televisions at 240 hertz. It’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, maybe in the next five years. Stay tuned. And the final item that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John was interesting, a second to last actually, Roku is making TVs. Roku makes those little set-top boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have a TCL TV, it probably has Roku built in. you got a little Roku remote. Roku
⏹️ ▶️ John is making TVs, but the TVs will be manufactured by TCL. But currently, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of the TVs that TCL makes that have Roku built into them are designed by
⏹️ ▶️ John Roku and Roku just basically hands TCL a design for a TV and then TCL makes it. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John Roku is making its own TVs, which have Roku built in, but they’re being manufactured by TCL. It’s confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, it’s kind of like if Netflix started making TVs, well, maybe not Netflix,
⏹️ ▶️ John is our streaming service, But Roku is one of the few sort of competitors remaining standing in the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, software that runs your TV. You’ve got WebOS, Google TV, Apple TV, Roku. What
⏹️ ▶️ John am I missing? Amazon. Fire TV, yeah. But Amazon is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of losing steam. And then I think, didn’t Amazon also make a TV, like an Alexa TV type
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing? I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right. I recently bought a new tailgate TV. So this is a TV that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to be not impressive. It just needs to be relatively light and cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be, by the way, the most southern thing you’ve ever said. I just bought a tailgate TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mischo, I’m flummoxed because I don’t have a good retort for this, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you’re probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the one we bought, I think it was like $110. It’s like a 32 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember if it’s 720 or 1080, because again, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to be looking at it outdoors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, it’s a Amazon Fire TV. I think it was, it’s whatever the insignia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe which is I think the Best Buy store brand and the only reason I went to Best Buy was because it was dirt cheap. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, so that one is an Amazon Fire TV and it is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like Amazon is kind of losing the interest in that market
⏹️ ▶️ John and Amazon’s kind of consolidating a lot of stuff. So I’m not sure how long they’re going to be there, but they do have a TVOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John So and the final thing is Sony. Sony is at CES, but they’re mostly showing like PlayStation and stuff and their stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John car that we’ll talk about someday and are on the show, because it’s been in the show notes forever. They weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John showing TVs. I will put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video from someone who tries to explain why this
⏹️ ▶️ John is. They have new TVs that are coming. The theory of this person is,
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably an informed theory is, they just didn’t feel like talking about them at CES because
⏹️ ▶️ John they fancy themselves being in the Apple position. Apple famously does not go to CES, hasn’t for
⏹️ ▶️ John decades at this point, because Apple doesn’t have to. Apple doesn’t need to be at a place where
⏹️ ▶️ John media attention is focused. They just make their own events and tell people to show up and that’s all. Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently doesn’t feel like they have to show their televisions here because they’ll just show them in a couple weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when that happens, they’ll be the only story. Instead of just being slotted in with 50 other stories about what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on at CES, it’ll be the, oh, the new Sony TVs are out now. I think this is the first year Sony has tried
⏹️ ▶️ John that move. So we’ll see how it works out. The bad news is that I don’t get to know what new TV Sony has, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John good news is that, you know, they don’t make their own panels. They sell QD OLED TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re gonna have one of the new QD OLED panels. Panasonic already has TVs announced with the new QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED panels and people are testing those and Sony’s gonna get the same exact panels. It’s such a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John that Panasonic doesn’t sell TVs in the US anymore, because they make such good TVs. I might’ve bought a Panasonic if they still sold
⏹️ ▶️ John here because their tastes tend to align with mine. But yeah, Sony is just
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to, you know, be its own story
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point in a few weeks rather than announcing at the show, which is kind of weird. And it’s also weird that
⏹️ ▶️ John they showed a car, but again, we’ll talk about that in a future program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So does this make you regret your semi-recent TV purchase? Is there something that you see here that you think you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could feasibly, that you would feasibly purchase if it was available today?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it actually makes me glad because in particular, Samsung splitting its line into
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the best stuff is only on the thing with the One Connect box, with the weird, you know, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like that they split the line like that. Cause last year, the TVs, the best
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs were just like normal person TVs. No weird breakout box, no weird super thin design, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, not the one that’s sold without a stand, right? They were just regular TVs with regular TV features.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this year, Samsung splitting the line would make it hard for me to choose among them. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony will do the same thing. Whereas last year it was easy. Sony 895K, if you have my set
⏹️ ▶️ John of values what you want out of TV, that was the one to get. I’m sure when Sony comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out with new TVs, they’ll have one that is better than my TV, but not enough for me to want to upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’ll, you know, considering how long I get my plasma, I’m gonna be riding this A95K probably
⏹️ ▶️ John until something goes terribly wrong with it. And then maybe I’ll replace it with a micro LED, but no, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in the market because display technology is super important and it will affect all of our devices eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just feel like Apple is, not that they’re lagging behind because the displays on the laptops in particular are
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenal. Like those mini LED screens have amazing specs and look great. And I think are the
⏹️ ▶️ John right choice. Especially for a computer screen where I just think OLED, you know, OLED is not
⏹️ ▶️ John great because you got image retention. And in particular, QD OLED with its, the sub pixels are arranged
⏹️ ▶️ John in a triangle. It screws with like text display, even if you don’t do sub pixel idealizing, which Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t, it just doesn’t quite look right on a computer display. It looks a little bit weird. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the answer is, but all of this television technology will eventually affect all of our devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Already we’ve got OLED screens on our phones, and that’s been pretty great, I think. I want an OLED screen on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. Someday we’ll have micro LED screens on all our Apple devices. The TV world is kind of a preview
⏹️ ▶️ John of that in terms of manufacturability, pricing, and what they can do. So even though I’m not in the market
⏹️ ▶️ John for a TV, and none of these TVs particularly tempt me, I do like keeping up on it.
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Qi 2 is basically MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, there’s been some new news over the last few days that apparently Qi 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is being worked on, and I guess it’s just MagSafe. That’s what everyone seems to be saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from an article from The Verge. With the blessing of competitors, Apple is about to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Qi wireless standard itself. It’s contributing a new version of Qi that works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much like MagSafe, magnets, authentication, and all. And yes, it effectively means that MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is coming to Android for better or for worse. Samsung and Apple are both expected to put Qi2 certified products on the market, Wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Power Consortium spokesperson Paul Golden tells The Verge. And he says there’s no reason to think future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Qi2 certified chargers wouldn’t work with both. There’s also no reason to think a future Qi2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charger wouldn’t work seamlessly and identically with both Android and iPhones, he says, when I ask.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s because Apple, a WPC, quote, steering member, quote, and a chair of the board of of directors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is contributing essentially the same magnetic power profile as MagSafe to the new Qi 2 standard. I also read somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in here though, that the magnets, apparently the arrangement is ever so slightly different. I don’t have a pull quote for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you right off the top of my head but I guess the magnet array is, or arrangement is slightly different on Qi 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which makes me and the Verge wonder, does that mean it won’t be compatible with the iPhone that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today? Like, how is that gonna work? Nobody knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John but- I think it just might be an improvement, like a 2.0. Like if you look at, one of the points that is made in this article
⏹️ ▶️ John is that kind of unlike, well, maybe it’s not unlike, you know, the made for iPhone thing where you’d have a lightning connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff where you had to like do it the right way. You had to sort of get the lightning connectors through Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John or certified by Apple or whatever. But you could also say, eh, we don’t care about that. We can figure it out. Let’s just make
⏹️ ▶️ John something that works in the lightning port, right? Here we’re making a charger. We don’t wanna pay whatever Apple is charging to use
⏹️ ▶️ John the official lightning thing. With MagSafe, that has happened
⏹️ ▶️ John even more. It’s a ring of magnets. cheap case manufacturer like look, I don’t whatever you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John to like certify that you’re MagSafe compatible and use the like Let’s not do any of those. Just put a ring of magnets
⏹️ ▶️ John and It you can find it. Does it work? It more or less works like the car mount that I have I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s MagSafe certified. It was like a $20 car mount It’s a circle with magnets in it That’s roughly
⏹️ ▶️ John the size that it has to be like I think if they make changes to the magnet arrangement It’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be like that where yeah, it is different but it’s close enough and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John work and your thing will stick to it, right? And we know from like the battery packs and stuff that you buy for phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them attach more strongly than others because they use maybe bigger magnets, thicker magnets, stronger magnets, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Additional magnets, layers of magnets. It’s not the type of thing where, you know, like a wire
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol where either it works or it doesn’t. You just kind of have to have the magnets in the
⏹️ ▶️ John neighborhood. So I think whatever Qi 2 ends up being, I would expect it to
⏹️ ▶️ John work well enough with all of our existing MagSafe stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean it can’t be that much worse than Qi 1, right? I mean, I think this is good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news in the sense that MagSafe really was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is an improvement over Qi. Now Qi charging has a lot of upsides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has a couple of really big annoyances. Number one is that it’s super slow, and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one be that it’s also super inefficient, which maybe should be a number two. This is why we’ve run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a show called Top Four that never has four entries. So anyway, yeah, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super slow, it’s super inefficient, and we’ve all had that experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having like a Qi charging mat next to our bed or something and thinking our phone is charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it overnight and you wake up and you realize, oh, it wasn’t quite aligned right and my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone didn’t charge overnight. And MagSafe improves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It improves it by a decent amount. All of those problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still there though. It is still slow, MagSafe just makes it less slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of the reason it makes it less slow is that the magnets align it correctly much more of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it has that kind of communication mechanism where it can verify like, like I know, you know, we’ve also maybe had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if you ever had the experience of, um, placing a metal object on a Chi-Mat accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming back a little while later and it’s maybe a little warmer than you would like for comfort. I have. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not fun. And MagSafe, you know, I think part of the reason why it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliver its 15 watts of max power to everything is that there is some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco authentication mechanism where it communicates and make sure that what’s on the other end of that thing is a device and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like a Yeti cup. So I speak from experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, although they are cup warmers. If your cup is a Yeti cup, not recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ John cup on your induction stove either. This is all the same thing. Yes, electricity and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco magnetism, right? Yeah. Anyway, so, you know, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this having MagSafe be incorporated into the Qi Shan. We know we already know what this does. The the automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alignment of the magnets does enable more efficient charging because you don’t have to worry like well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can still send power to this even though it’s only, you know 70% in the target zone will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of fudge it with induction and will lose more to heat and it will charge more slowly but oh well. MagSafe takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care of that to a degree. It also by having the alignment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduces the error rate of I think my phone charged overnight and then it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t. Now it doesn’t actually eliminate that error rate. I know this from using a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glued to my end table or you know double-sided taped to my end table every night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last like three years, I know that I still occasionally have times where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I feel it clip on, but then I wake up the next morning and oh it was actually not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way on and it didn’t charge. But it happens way less often with MagSafe than it did with the like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat Qi thing I had before. So MagSafe is better than Qi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it does make sense to modify Qi to incorporate magnets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in basically the same way. And this is not the only time this has ever happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C itself was heavily contributed to by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the PC world, we see what they do when they make a port without Apple’s input.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how you get the USB 3 micro B plug.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or USB-A, the connector everyone loves to hate. Externally
⏹️ ▶️ John symmetrical, internally asymmetrical. It’s like a a cruel joke. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so this is a good thing. And you’re right that it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively kind of formalize what the industry was already unofficially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing. There’s so many third party things that are like, it’s magnetic charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, they don’t say MagSafe, it’s magnetic charging compatible with your iPhone, but it’ll only be 7.5 watts or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, you know, those are all just, you know, imitation MagSafe things. So it make sense to have this be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the ecosystem. The only thing that I would that I would pour a little bit of water on is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not this is still not going to be better than wired charging in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. You know we we know first of all wire charging can still be higher power, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more efficient, and it’s still you know in some ways safer. It still allows data transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that which this doesn’t really. So you know wired charging is still going to exist and still be popular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also cheaper. So, you know, it’s still gonna exist for a while. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a good thing to formalize and unify what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a fairly obvious improvement to the Qi standard and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unify iOS and Android devices into using the same thing and all the benefits that brings.
⏹️ ▶️ John And look, it happened without a government intervention. And I say that both to blame the government and to
⏹️ ▶️ John blame Apple. because see Apple, if you just get off your butt and do what’s good for the industry, you avoid government
⏹️ ▶️ John regulation, I would say, and see government eventually, even pig-headed companies like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will see the light and unify on a standard. And on the USBC front, like as you said, this doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, is
⏹️ ▶️ John this how Apple’s gonna comply with USBC? They’re just gonna do MagSafe or whatever? They could, but they would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to add substantial data transfer to MagSafe probably, or have some other way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do data transfer wirelessly. It would be a big complication if they went totally portless. I mean, there’s been rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of that for ages. I don’t think Chi-Chi factors into it any more so than
⏹️ ▶️ John just to say that Apple is clearly very dedicated to the MagSafe connector and it will continue to exist on phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe even other devices in the future because it’s not going anywhere. But yeah, standardizing
⏹️ ▶️ John on it for everybody. It already was standardized. Like USB-C was
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere except Apple. It’s kind of like electric car connectors. It’s standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere except Tesla. and kind of Nissan still, but, but you know, it’s like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re so close, like, and so that’s why all these laws are essentially Apple laws, or if there’s ever a law about it for chargers
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US, it’ll be the Tesla law, right? Because we don’t need any law to force standardization. It happened
⏹️ ▶️ John on its own, except for one pretty darn important player, whether that be Apple or Tesla. So
⏹️ ▶️ John at least on the wireless charging front, we didn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for that. Apparently everyone got their acts together. And it’s kind of a shame, like I said, Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily involved in USB-C, it’s just they did lightning first. And I think they should have done lightning first.
⏹️ ▶️ John We enjoyed the benefits of lightning for years before the rest of the industry went USB-C, but now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing about Qi 2 too, is Qi 2 also, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it presents the possibility, although they’re vague on the details, and of course Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not saying anything, that maybe in the future, the Apple Watch and other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smartwatches that have non-flat or smaller contact areas than what we currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use for Qi could possibly be charged by some kind of part of the Qi 2 standard. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope that plays out because right now, like, you know, the ideal case would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re traveling or something, you could have basically one type of charger with you. Again, you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USB-C versus lighting debate for years. Ideally, you have one type of charger and you can use as many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices with it as possible. Smartwatches throw a whole wrench in that because they don’t have any ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re so small, whether it’s an Apple Watch or the other ones, they all have these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually they have custom induction-based charger techniques or something, or maybe little pins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the side. You have a little flat custom plug that mag safes onto them or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s all these different charging techniques for these super small devices that are too small to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Qi or even oftentimes USB. So if Qi 2 has good provisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it to allow smaller devices to maybe unify in something, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or Garmin things or whatever else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be fantastic. I really, really hope that’s part of it and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope Apple’s on board with that and moves in that direction. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know better than to get my hopes up too far on that.
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How Rewind.ai works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we got email a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few days back, maybe a week or two back, I forget exactly when this was, from Kevin Chen, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has spent some time looking at how rewind.ai works. To remind you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rewind.ai is John’s favorite thing. Lifestream! And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that will record everything that happens on your Mac, and it will let you search for it, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth. So Kevin spent some time going through and figuring out how it works. Now, I can’t confirm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or deny anything that Kevin said, but it rings true to me based on what I know about these sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sounds like this is accurate. So we’re not going to read Kevin’s post. It is worth reading, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the record, but I’m just going to quickly hit the highlights. What ends up happening is Rewind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses accessibility APIs to identify the frontmost window, and it stores the timestamps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, I guess, when the window changes in a SQLite database in the user’s library folder. I wonder if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Blackbird. You never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I doubt it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It takes a screenshot of the screen that contains the frontmost window. And if there are multiple screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only the currently focused screen will be captured. A new screenshot is created every two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds. And then it uses screen capture kit, which we’ll put a link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hide disallowed windows, including private browser windows and a user-defined exclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list. Then it will OCR the screenshot on device using Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Framework, the same pipeline that powers live text and mass grade as well. And then it’ll store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the inference results to a SQLite database. It then periodically compresses the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screenshot sequence into an H.264 video with what gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ John They have incredibly, well, I’m gonna say incredibly inefficient. Yeah, FFmpeg. And I was surprised to see that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has tons of libraries to compress video. Maybe they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have ones that take images as input. There was a question, I think, the blog post from some people. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John does FFmpeg use the H.264 hardware in all of Apple’s computers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thought it did. I’m not certain about that, but I thought it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I probably, I think it probably does too, or at the very least it has an option that you don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, there are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are various like modules and options. I mean, cause FFmpeg is not just one set of things. It’s like, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of different optional things that can be bundled into it or whatever else. And some of those things do use the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the more I mean, this is the you know, it’s not an MVP, but this is the first version of a product
⏹️ ▶️ John and using I mean, I don’t I don’t know how else you do it. It just seems like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using screen capture kit and Apple’s vision framework. I would have expected to see them using whatever, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the appropriate was at AV foundation, whatever the appropriate Apple library is to do this work rather than FFMPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ John But either way, they’re probably it’s probably pretty efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And then additionally, if the user joins a zoom call, and enables transcription through Rewind,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will transcribe the audio on device using the OpenAI Whisper model, then it stores the transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and speaker information into a SQLite database. And so then Kevin did some benchmarks and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So CPU usage when recording on his 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro processor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rewind uses about 20% of the CPU continuously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rewind Helper, which is I think the thing that does the transcoding or manages the the transcoding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot, spikes over 200% CPU every time the temporary PNG images are compressed into an H.264
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video. That’s really not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now wait, hold on. Do we know whether that’s efficiency cores or the high power cores?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s an interesting question and I don’t think we know.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the problem with CPU percentages because remember, 100% CPU is not all
⏹️ ▶️ John of your CPU. It’s all of one core according to the way that Apple’s Activity Monitor does stuff. So 20% sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, but on a laptop, Like you don’t, you really, you want it when it’s idle, you want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be idle. And if it’s using 20% of even just one core continuously, that’s not great for battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life. But again, you know, what are you getting for it? You’re getting live streams, right? So I think it is being as efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John as it can be. Modulo, a few things like it later in the article, Kevin
⏹️ ▶️ John goes into some suggestions for how this could be improved, like not writing out pings, but instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John going straight to the H264, or I would say like if they’re shelling out the FFmpeg versus
⏹️ ▶️ John stack with the library, that would be something to look into. But again, it’s version one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say too though, I mean, just for CPU load wise, like when you’re running an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or M2 based Mac, if you run something like iStatMenus, like Casey and I, and definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not John do, you will see like your efficiency cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are running at what on Intel machines would be kind of an alarmingly high percentage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like mine right now, they’re hovering, efficiency cores are hovering around looks like about 75%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and that’s kind of constant and one of those things is zoom but oh well um the other thing is just windows server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though which again zoom um but like it’s it’s fairly common for me in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly idle use to look up at my menu and see my two efficiency cores being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used very heavily by kind of just regular system activity or background things like photo indexing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and from what i understand and and I think this matches my anecdotal experience so far, from what I understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of real noticeable battery life cost to one of the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores being maxed out is basically nothing. You know, it’s very different from the high power cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re maxing out your high power cores, that’s a different scenario. But the efficiency cores, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a battery the size of a modern laptop battery, I get the impression that you’re basically using those for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. Continuing on with the Rewind stuff from Kevin Chen, the storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage. So the screen recordings are chunks of about 180 megs an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The metadata OCR results and call transcripts, which are, again, the SQLite database, are about 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megs an hour. Console logs, about 4 megs an hour. With regard to security, Rewind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently doesn’t encrypt data at rest. Any app with full disk access and any attacker who encounters an unlocked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer has the ability to read recordings from all time, soft deleted clips. That’s also not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupendous. And then other notable things, resources slash favicons. There’s a directory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 912 favicons, or favicons, I don’t know how you’re supposed to pronounce that, for popular websites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stored as PNG images. Examples include Amazon, Dropbox, YouTube, et cetera. These are used in the timeline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey view when the front most app is a web browser instead of showing the browser’s app icon, which is kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John a 1.0 thing. It’s like, we just need to ship this. Don’t worry about it. what do we do about the
⏹️ ▶️ John icons for the things? Just we’ll just ship a thousand of them. Like, I mean, obviously you would think, why don’t you just go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the web and get them? Oh, then you gotta make a network request and it’s all complicated. They love that they just, just
⏹️ ▶️ John ship them all. Like just our app, our app bundle will be bigger. Marco would never do this. We’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John ship 912 of what we think are the most popular websites, PNG images of all their, I would say fav icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought just that was funny. Yeah, so it’s implemented in a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward way in an explicable way with a lot of 1.0 stuff. The data
⏹️ ▶️ John not being encrypted at rest is not great because it’s bad enough when someone gets access to your computer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a treasure trove. Like it’s already OCRed text and you’ve got all the screen images and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is the problem of like, well, if it never leaves my device and it’s not using cloud transcription and so on and so forth everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John done locally, it’s nice and secure. It’s like, yeah, but now you’ve just made, I don’t know, like the equivalent of like
⏹️ ▶️ John collecting evidence against yourself and putting it in a little box and wrapping it up with a bow, not that you’re doing any bad things, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of privacy, you probably don’t want anyone getting at that cause they could just sort of go through that and see
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ve done for the past day, two days, week, month, year. It’s up to you
⏹️ ▶️ John to kind of be studious about like, well, I want to exclude, you know, private windows. Don’t show it when I go to my bank website,
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever you want to do, but you know, with great power comes great responsibility. But anyway, it’s implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John in what I think is a fairly straightforward way. And I thought this was a really interesting examination of how
⏹️ ▶️ John it works and what it takes. And your point, Marco, about the efficiency course is important because that’s kind of what they’re there for.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like when you write a program, you can, well, you can specifically target things, but there’s scheduling on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is really weird, but there are, suffice to say, there are APIs when you run code in a Mac application
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can tell the OS and the, you know, the threading job
⏹️ ▶️ John service that you’re using through whatever API you’re using, what priority you want. And if you say something
⏹️ ▶️ John like low background, like all different words for the priorities, you’ll end up running on the efficiency course pretty much exclusively.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also some other details about core affinity of whether your job stays in the same core, bounces
⏹️ ▶️ John around and how that impacts cache or whatever. But I think everything this is doing is sort of below
⏹️ ▶️ John the level of notice of a modern M class processor, because it’s not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the stuff that it’s doing that’s complicated, like the text kit thing, the vision framework for parsing
⏹️ ▶️ John text, that’s gotta be optimized to hell and back. Like the Apple did that work for you already. That’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient. It’s already gonna be fast. you don’t need the results in real time, right? So it can be, it’s asynchronous
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background and you’re not in a big hurry. So I bet that it does pretty well. Screen capture kit,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, Apple optimized that to be able to capture your screen without destroying your Mac and making it slow and unresponsive,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s great. FFmpeg, I feel like is a weak point here because as optimized as it may be, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that any Apple framework would be even more optimized. Even if the FFmpeg thing is just calling into the Apple framework,
⏹️ ▶️ John it still seems like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that is exactly what it’s doing. if you configure it properly, like Marco was saying. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video toolbox is the, I don’t know why it’s called video toolbox. Maybe that’s an Apple thing. Maybe it’s an FFmpeg thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what FFmpeg calls the like, front end to Apple APIs. And I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did, just for grins and giggles, look through the video toolbox code, like a year or two back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it looks like if memory serves, and again, this was a year or two ago, I’m pretty sure it’s just calling in Davey Foundation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I don’t think it’s doing anything you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, but I understand like the sort of, you know, the marshaling of the jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John however it’s dealing with threading or background tasks or whatever, in an Apple framework,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could give it a batch of work and let it do that in a way that is most efficient on your M whatever processor, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John at FFmpeg, you’re kind of doing that manually, deciding how many jobs you want to run, how many cores you want them to
⏹️ ▶️ John use, even if each individual one is just using AV foundation behind the scenes. Same thing with like
⏹️ ▶️ John for the open AI thing. I don’t know if Apple has a solution to that of the transcribing
⏹️ ▶️ John speech into text. I think there’s an Apple solution, but OpenAI is a popular open
⏹️ ▶️ John source one. I think when someone was digging into this, they found the OpenAI, maybe it was Kevin, found the OpenAI model
⏹️ ▶️ John file in the executable one, like the model, the speech model file there. I’m not sure if they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John the OpenAI library, which I think is written in C++ to do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as the advertising material said, this is actually a good demonstration of leveraging
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s platform APIs to build an application that you otherwise would not be able to build without Apple’s help.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or other, you know, these libraries that you’re using make the application, right? If you had to write all these
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries yourself from scratch, it would take you many more years and many more millions of dollars. But because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple offers these frameworks, a company can make this product
⏹️ ▶️ John in way less time with far fewer people, and I think that’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Video Toolbox is apparently an Apple thing, a real-time follow-up, and we’ll put a link to it in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John People will be familiar with it because you see it in the menu at handbrake and you know it as the thing that makes my encode deal faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gosh, I haven’t used handbrake in forever, but you are not wrong.
#askatp: Replacing macOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. We got a really fascinating one from Stefan Jacobs about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month ago, I’d say. It’s been a while, but we were trying to find some room to fit it in because this might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only Ask ATP we do for the day. So Stefan writes, during the recent discussion about Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you briefly discussed the analogy of leaving Apple platforms if someone at Apple made decisions of a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nature to those being made at Twitter. The options are obviously not great. Neither
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows nor any of the various Linux distros offer anywhere near the attention to detail and polish that Apple’s put into its platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the years. So here’s my question. If someone were to build a third alternative mainstream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS that could host a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees, what are the key things they would need to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? PS, optional clarifying parameters if needed, and since I’m talking to John Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure they are. Let’s assume that Apple has a less stark advantage in processor hardware by the time this happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to begin with, the OS would probably need to be able to run on third-party hardware, although tight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration, alas, System76, would presumably be possible over time. John, tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me about System76. What’s the context here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what that is. I just clicked on the link.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, right. Good. I’ve seen it before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s a Linux laptop vendor. I see. OK. So it’s Linux laptops that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed to be like MacBooks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like every other laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So here’s my question. I’m repeating. Stefan writes, here’s my question. If someone were to build a third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternative mainstream OS a hypothetical wave of Apple refugees. What are the key things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would need to get right? Does anyone, would anyone like to start?
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing I want to say right off the bat about this is because Twitter is the context of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John A key factor in this hypothetical is that if Apple ever went the way of Twitter, and there
⏹️ ▶️ John are many things preventing that, not the least of which is that it is not a private company owned and controlled by a single person,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple did go in that direction, the self-destruction, the implosion of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple makes it possible for there to be an alternative. Like I think Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, getting so much more activity and becoming more popular
⏹️ ▶️ John happens because Twitter is self-destructing, right? And so if you look at this question, every time we talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, it’s like, yeah, but like it’s basically impossible to make a competing
⏹️ ▶️ John phone platform, desktop operating system, what, you know, tablet, whatever you want to say. It’s basically impossible, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John but if Apple self-destructed, that’s a power vacuum. Something would fill that vacuum.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think it’s entirely ridiculous to think if Apple did implode and just sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if Apple pulled Twitter, let’s say, it would make an opportunity for someone
⏹️ ▶️ John to fill that void. And I think that someone, if someone did succeed to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John that void, they would probably be vaguely Apple-ish. Kind of like Mastodon is vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter-ish, but also learning from the mistakes of Twitter. but kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to appeal in the same way to sort of a small group of early adopters like Mastodon did or like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did, right? So, usually I complain that people’s hypothetical is not realistic. I have to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John the implosion of Apple itself makes this somewhat more realistic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what’s important?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think number one would be, we know there are some similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges as with social networks of chicken and egg problems or getting network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects going. And in an operating system, one of the biggest challenges is software compatibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what’s gonna run on this? And so I think the best way to bootstrap this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would either be to base a new operating system on Linux or on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android. And I don’t love either of those options for lots of reasons, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we see with the Macedon explosion, as John was saying, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wake of the Twitter implosion, Part of the reason why Mastodon is so much more appealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to many of us nerds who care about these kind of distinctions compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to something like Hive or Post or whatever is, as I was saying a few episodes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like now that we’ve been burned by the big closed ecosystem of Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of something being open and protocol based and not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hands of just one big company, it’s like, okay, well, Now we learned that lesson, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one centralized big company is bad, so we’re gonna now apply that lesson and not let that same mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen again. Well, we have that same problem with Apple. They’ve just been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good enough steward most of the time that we haven’t jumped ship. But if Apple did go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad and cause us all to jump ship in some way, I would want to then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure that same mistake of that big centralization couldn’t happen again, And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather set up shop on Linux than on Windows. Also, I mean, it helps also, I might have said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows a couple years ago, but in that intervening time, I’ve had more experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ve used Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have had more experience with Linux and that might change your mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough, but, Linux is, as I said many years ago, it’s almost like going to live in the woods. But I think I’d rather go start my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco civilization in the woods based on the foundation of Linux than to live in the hellhole that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows any more than I have to. And over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the years, whenever we’d insult Windows on the show, we’d hear from people who were like, you know, it’s better now, you should try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They’ve really made it a lot better now. And I was starting to believe these people. But now I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually used it firsthand, modern versions on modern hardware, and I can say without a doubt, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much better. It is a little bit better, it’s not that much better. And it is not something I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use still. So I whatever the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS would be that I would want to invest my time and resources in would hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a Linux based thing. Android would be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better in the sense that Android would provide that app compatibility, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like it would provide crappy app compatibility and not to say that Android apps are crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are but for this for this point, you know, it’s more about it’s like the cross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform nature of Android apps, of running on a general PC operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it a pretty crappy experience. If anyone’s ever used, there are already ways to run Android apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on PC operating systems, and they’re terrible. They’re very clunky. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heck, look at Catalyst on macOS. It isn’t that much better. It’s not a great experience. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux, I think, would be the best long-term place to invest. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think what a third-party alternative OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to be, I think, would just be a really good Linux distribution that invests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily in the desktop and laptop user experience. Which we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller efforts of this over time with Linux. None of them have ever really gone anywhere, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s what it would have to be. And if there really was a big Apple implosion and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were all these talented, opinionated people who wanted somewhere to go, that I think would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more likely to succeed than either Windows becoming appealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this crowd, which it never will because, I mean, God, just try it, trust me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either that, that’s not gonna happen, or a whole new OS starting from scratch that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be able to run any of the software from any of the other OSs we have now, I think That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a no go because software compatibility is just too important. And the fact is, Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually has pretty decent software compatibility with a lot of stuff that a lot of people want to use these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. It’s not amazing. It’s not as much as Windows or Mac or Android, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not as bad as you would think if you haven’t tried it recently. So that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s where I would go with it is like, start with Linux and just make a really good distribution that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a really significantly improved experience around key areas for desktop and laptop use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve, I think you’re majoring on the implementation details, and I don’t think that’s the spirit of what Stefan was asking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what Stefan was asking is, what would you look for in an operating system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would make it feel like home or like somewhere you could pitch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your tent, so to speak? And so when I read this question, what I was thinking of is like, what would appeal to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me? What are some of the core things about macOS that I wouldn’t want to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up? So some of that is kind of hand-wavy things, like, well, attention to detail,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which it’s hard to get specific about that unless you’re talking about something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a micro level, but in general, a good attention to detail, a good visual design. But then I started thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, well, what about one of the things that I love about macOS that I never really experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Windows, and maybe that’s because I never took the time to learn, but macOS has incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey robust keyboard shortcuts and keyboard support throughout out the entire operating system and every app within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. You can do so much with the keyboard, particularly when you’re using the keyboard in combination with a mouse. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think robust keyboard shortcuts and keyboard support is also important to me. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if now I’m starting to get into the implementation details like you were Marco, but I think a good developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story is powerful. I would argue that part of the reason that Macs got so darn popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the early to mid-aughts was because the developer story was so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was a Linux computer, not too dissimilar than a lot of the web servers that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were all writing code for, but it was a Linux computer right there on your desk. And you didn’t have to do a VM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything, it was right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That you- What are you
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about as a Linux computer? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, Unix, sorry, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John excuse me. That saved
⏹️ ▶️ John you a lot of feedback. You said it twice and it wasn’t just a speak-o. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a Linux computer. You’re right, you’re right. I’m already getting blown up in the chat room too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, so, you’re right, it was a Unix computer. It’s a Unix system, I know this. It’s a Unix computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right? Wait, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BSD like, there’s going to be somebody who writes in and is like, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, didn’t you remember this was before your time. Apple got real official
⏹️ ▶️ John all caps Unix certification for Mac OS X. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a great, there’s a great story on
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet about the person, the person who led that effort. I’ll see if I can find it for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now. Oh, I remember that. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a good story. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it, but that was a very good story. But anyway, but to, to finish kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thoughts I had, um, you know, having a good developer story, I think is important,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although maybe I’m too much indexing on what’s important to me and not what’s generically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important. But speaking of generically important, I think what’s pretty great about macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that say, Swift wants to be, but kind of isn’t, is that macOS does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a pretty good job with progressive disclosure. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do do basic stuff is fairly straightforward. To do intermediate level stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of hard, but not terribly hard. And to do hard stuff is hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s possible. And that’s, I think, a really important thing that I would want to see in whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this new operating system I would potentially be using. So I don’t know if you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have anything along those lines or if you’d rather go back into the nerdy stuff, that’s fine too. But that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of thing that I was thinking about when I was reading Stefan’s question.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re kind of, kind of connected when Margaret was talking about bootstrapping and how like you’ve got like the problem of like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for a platform, you need people to make apps or and everything. I thought where you were going in case you kind of glanced off
⏹️ ▶️ John this as well is, um, the developer story, not in terms of what does
⏹️ ▶️ John the platform offer for developers, but in terms of what developers are drawn to this platform. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason the Mac even still exists is because Apple bought next.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of that was the developers who had been developing for next an obscure platform that
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody cared about that sold computers to colleges, right, for $10,000 each, was
⏹️ ▶️ John because those those developers, they, you know, they came with the platform is like, where the hell is like, I’m gonna go, you’re gonna write objectives
⏹️ ▶️ John for somebody else, right? They came with a platform. And those are the ones that made the great Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that defined the Mac for the new generation. There was
⏹️ ▶️ John also the classic Mac OS apps that were great. I mean some of them are still around and then we bring like Microsoft Office
⏹️ ▶️ John and Photoshop for sure but sort of the you know, the renaissance of the Mac in the early days of Mac OS X was
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple had essentially purchased a developer community filled with
⏹️ ▶️ John Really good interesting developers that share values that we have so for
⏹️ ▶️ John a platform that’s going to appeal to us I think it would have to Come with
⏹️ ▶️ John or be attractive to the kinds of developers who make the apps that appeal to us us.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we got the next and the app get the objective C developers before, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was some other platform would have to be like, well, what is the platform that those type of developers
⏹️ ▶️ John even lit either literally those people because those some of those people have been moved from platform to platform again, because they’re not writing next
⏹️ ▶️ John apps anymore, right? Or people like that, whatever the current equivalent of that is, if they’re attracted
⏹️ ▶️ John to the platform, and they want to make apps for it, we would be attracted there as users and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, in some respects as developers, because that’s those are the type of people and the apps don’t come from nowhere. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you just have, you know, a platform and it should have good apps. Where do they come from? People make them. The kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who made classic Mac apps when no one had heard of the Mac and they were really expensive. The kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who are making next apps when nobody heard about next like the things that appealed about next
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Mac. And it’s not just that Steve Jobs, you know, involved making both of them. Those qualities,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they were so very different Next, BSD Unix-based system for schools, no
⏹️ ▶️ John color, grayscale screens initially, right? Objective-C, weird programming language.
⏹️ ▶️ John The user interface didn’t really look anything like the Mac, but the sort of, the things that appealed to
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit developers are the same type of things that appealed to Mac developers, and it was kind of a natural
⏹️ ▶️ John marriage of those things for the current Mac platform. So I think any platform that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John go to after the Mac, I would basically be following that muse. Where
⏹️ ▶️ John are those people going? Where are people like that? Where do they want to be developing stuff? Because that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to live because they’re going to make that a nice place for me to live. In terms of like the Twitter mastodon, like
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t go to a place owned and controlled by one company, blah, blah, blah. Don’t think we have a viable model for that
⏹️ ▶️ John for computing platforms that involve hardware. Obviously there’s the web, the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John no one owns. And I think the web is awesome. I spent my entire career programming for the web. I think it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the web relies on the existence of devices that you use to
⏹️ ▶️ John view the web, whether that’s your
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop, whatever, your television. Those hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John devices are made by companies that probably also have some kind of platform thing going on there.
⏹️ ▶️ John The web does not provide a solution to that. And talking about the qualities of the platform I would like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that always attracted me to Apple is the marriage of hardware and software. The
⏹️ ▶️ John same company controls both of those things enough to make them marry together to make a single
⏹️ ▶️ John device that is pleasing. So even if we’re just talking about like, oh, you know, let’s just say it’s the web, the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John no gnomes, even, you know, you’re just gonna have a Chromebook equivalent type of thing. All it does is browse the web.
⏹️ ▶️ John That solves the platform problem. You don’t need to have an API, it’s all web apps, whatever. Someone still needs to make that
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. Someone still needs to deal with power management and little the neural engine and live
⏹️ ▶️ John text on the web, like everything that Apple does now, you need some company to do that. And that company
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be one single private company. I don’t think there is a model for, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a federation of small, equally competitive companies working on an open
⏹️ ▶️ John platform. Someone’s got to own and control it enough to be able to make hardware that appeals
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. So it would have to be a single company, right? And they could
⏹️ ▶️ John build on an open source, you know, Mac OS X is built on BSD, you know, which Darwin open
⏹️ ▶️ John source, like this open source stuff underneath all this, right? We’re all standing on the shoulders of all the giants that came
⏹️ ▶️ John before. But in the end, the Mac operating system, iOS, iPadOS, those are
⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary operating systems made and controlled by a single company that marries them directly to hardware that it
⏹️ ▶️ John also controls and with chips that it designs and all the way up the stack. So that is a quality of
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that I would go to that I think it has to exist. Microsoft is out, not because I dislike Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John or think everything is bad, but they just have so much legacy burden, they will never get out from
⏹️ ▶️ John under that unless they literally burn to the ground, right? So they’re held back by their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco legacy, which is also the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that makes them billions of dollars. And in some respects, that’s true of Apple as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Microsoft would ever make something great. They don’t have it in them. They don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the right priorities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean operating system wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, Xbox has an operating system. It does, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s debatable, right? There’s been some great things out, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey everything in Microsoft is held back.
⏹️ ▶️ John The strategy tax at Microsoft is off the charts, even under new leadership. And nowadays, Microsoft is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s just the best place to run Linux because the Windows operating system has a Linux subsystem. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t count Microsoft out and they’re doing much better, but the legacy, like the thing that makes them money, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that runs that company will always necessarily make that operating system not appeal
⏹️ ▶️ John to me because they can’t just say, we don’t care about our existing customers. New thing. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple couldn’t do that. Even Apple had to do carbon. It’s just that Apple was starting from a place I like better. So that’s why I’m counting on Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, hmm. Google’s good at the web. Google’s not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John great. I mean, they make good phones, like the Pixel phones do a pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Chromebooks is not a great laptop as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea, the implementation is not great. So I don’t think there’s an existing company. I think it would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be a new company filling that power vacuum, attracting
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the modern equivalent of the Mac or Next developer community, or maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ John the BOS development community is kind of similar, although in hindsight, the Next developer community
⏹️ ▶️ John had more forward thinking technical ideas, right? You know, doing everything C++
⏹️ ▶️ John was cool and fast in the 90s, whatever the hell B was, but boy, am I
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re not all living on a platform that was built on a foundation of C++ at this point. Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John was in hindsight, a way better choice. And then Swift, hopefully even better going forward, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the pieces are there for someone to pick up those pieces and build an operating system that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John like. And I think that’s how it would have to be. It would have to be marriage of hardware and software, the kinds of developers
⏹️ ▶️ John that made the Mac what it is and all the errors of the Mac being attracted to that platform, only
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled by a single company with leadership that has taste. That’s the final thing I would throw in there. And when we say has
⏹️ ▶️ John taste, we mean has the same taste as us. That’s why we like Apple things. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we like all the things we like. There is a particular, that’s why the developers are drawn to there. Like why were developers
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in writing Mac software? A lot of them wanted to write it because the screen looked really nice and
⏹️ ▶️ John you had proportional fonts and a bitmap display with tiny little pixels. Who cares how big the pixels are?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I cared. I cared how big the pixels were. I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t even know how to program. But even other Apple platforms, like look, the Apple IIgs has a
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse. I’m like, the pixels are the size of boulders. Oh, but it’s got color. Have you seen the size of the pixels?
⏹️ ▶️ John I cared so much about that, and I couldn’t understand why everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else would look at like a CGA screen and they’d be so excited because theirs had color and mine didn’t. I was like, I’ll look at Dark
⏹️ ▶️ John Castle all day long before I look at your CGI game, even though your game is quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote in color. Are you kidding? That’s the type of values and quote unquote taste
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m bringing with me, And I’m going to go where those developers with that same taste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a pretty good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thoughts? No, he’s frustratingly correct as usual.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, a story of the last 10 years, am I right? All right, let’s see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how many more we can squeeze in real quick.
#askatp: RSS readers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick. Andy Clark writes, there seems to have been a lot more talk about RSS recently, probably given Twitter’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey troubles. Do you use RSS and which reader apps do you use for iOS and or Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS? For me, I stopped using RSS a few years ago, which just kind of faded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of my life. And I was using Twitter both in terms of what are people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about and a list I specifically had for news. And I was using Twitter for that. Now I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling a little bit of a void in that department. So on my to-do list of something I want to explore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, you know, rebuilding an RSS list and start using RSS apps, reader apps again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really enjoyed the app Reeder, R-E-E-D-E-R. Last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was an RSS person, which was again a long time ago. But I think I would probably start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with NetNewsWire, to be honest with you, which is written by a few friends of ours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I haven’t used it in years and years and years and years. But I see some chatter about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they’re working on in a Slack that the three of us are in. And it sounds like it’s pretty slick these days. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d probably take a look at either of those. Marco, are you using RSS? I never stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m not just in the technical sense of like, well, you know, podcaster Bruce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and I was like, no, that’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you’re right. That’s It’s correct, but that’s not what anybody means when they say this. But yeah, no, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always… I’ve never stopped using an RSS reader. For the sync backend, I like using…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the hamburger one? Is it Feedbin? Yeah, hamburger. Hamburger icon. Yeah. So Feedbin is my sync backend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can use any of a whole huge list of clients with some of these sync backends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the iPhone, I use an app called Unread, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey one of those… Oh, I used that years ago, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of like, if you ever use the Clear app for your to-dos or shopping lists, where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very opinionated, very limited, and very gesture based, it’s kind of like that for RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco readers. And I like that a lot on the phone. I have a lot of muscle memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and I enjoy the design of it quite a bit. On the Mac side of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve bounced around a lot. NetNewswire is what I should be using. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently still so for a while before NetNewsWire was back, I use an app called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ReadKit, which is very much in the spirit of old NetNewsWire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ReadKit, they had a new version come out that I think is now based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Catalyst or something, and it doesn’t fit me as well. The new version doesn’t. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still on the old version on my Macs for now. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point, I have a to do list item to move to net news wire. Because net news wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the one that is, I think by far under the most active development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac. They also I’m pretty sure they they have also an iOS version. Now, I haven’t looked at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it yet. I’m so happy on iOS with on read. But certainly I would I would if you know, if you’re starting fresh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would start on it newswire and you know, only branch out if you really have to from there because that that’s the one getting the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco active development. As for RSS content itself, I continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give the same advice I’ve given for 15 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t just go and subscribe to the giant high volume feeds from whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big blogs are. I used to say Engadget and stuff, but most of those don’t even exist anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t go add the New York Times front page, the Verge front page, don’t just add a whole bunch of high volume stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RSS is ideal in the standard RSS reader paradigm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are lots of ways to consume it. You don’t have to do it this way, but the way most of them work as kind of like this big kind of inbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style thing, it is ideal for subscribing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any number you want of infrequently updated things like John’s blog or my blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Casey’s blog. You know all of us, I mean Casey updates more than John and I combined by a good margin, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really good at that because there’s no cost to following an infrequently posted blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all the blogs people have that have been kind of mostly abandoned or become low volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last decade, go subscribe to all of those from anybody that you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when it comes to the high volume stuff, subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a very small number of those because you what you don’t want to happen is the artist reader
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all of a sudden be this thing where there’s thousands of items piling up unread and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re just not seeing them I mean and you could if you wanted to you could switch to like the river approach where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t even try to like quote keep up and you just dip in whenever you want and just browse what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top and then you know come back some of its come back later to see more that method
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really work for me for me I do like the inbox keeping up model but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shrink everything down. So for instance, I don’t subscribe to my RSS reader to nine to five Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, Bloomberg and all this stuff. Instead, I subscribe to Mac rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac rumors will link out to anything in that broader ecosystem that I really need to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and then otherwise it’s smaller volume sites like of course, daring fireball,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, uh, Michael size blog, which is awesome. Pixel NV six colors, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five, 12 pixels. Like that’s, that’s the stuff I read like in the Mac world, my RSS reader. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all fantastic stuff. And then a whole bunch of small blogs and stuff. But it’s great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you need any help finding feeds, I know NetNewsWire actually comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a stock default set that you can adopt if you want to. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good place to start.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not in the default set though, a little sore about that. I need to leverage my
⏹️ ▶️ John personal connections to get that in there. So I’m a NetNewsWire user from way back.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first time I saw NetNewsWire, I took to it like a duck to water because it used
⏹️ ▶️ John the same key bindings as Tin, T-I-N, which was my preferred
⏹️ ▶️ John Usenet reader when I was in college. Wow. And it looked kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Tin in terms of the arrangement because Tin was a character-based application that
⏹️ ▶️ John you used in a terminal window, use curses, right? So it’s not, it wasn’t a GUI app, right? Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John had the same type of thing where you’d go through the groups and then you see the message list and then you see a detail pane with the message you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at and NetNewswire use the same key bindings. And they’re like VI key bindings where you just literally
⏹️ ▶️ John hit a key and T space bar, like, you know, no command strokes because it was like, yeah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I was like, wow, here’s this, you know, shiny Aqua Mac OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John application for reading RSS feeds which are becoming really popular and all the key bindings are like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s awesome. And I use that for so long until it kind of got bought out and found new ownership or whatever. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John this new thing is kind of like when a Twitter for the Mac went away and then had a resurgence as the Phoenix project,
⏹️ ▶️ John NetNewsWire, the original author of NetNewsWire, our friend, Brett Simmons, eventually got back
⏹️ ▶️ John the rights to NetNewsWire and rewrote NetNewsWire. Like it rose again
⏹️ ▶️ John from the ashes. Here is NetNewsWire written again in a modern language with modern APIs by the original
⏹️ ▶️ John author after many years in the wilderness. And it is a phenomenal newsreader for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a phenomenal Mac applications. If you use Mac applications and, well, I’m gonna say if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use Mac applications and they feel sluggish, they don’t feel sluggish because you don’t know any better. Until you launch and use NetNewswire and you realize, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John so this is how fast a Mac application could be if it wasn’t written using WebKit or whatever, you know, Electron.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything is so fast and responsive. It is simple, straightforward. It is very understandable to me, at least, because I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ John NetNewswire forever. It still kinda has 10 key bindings, but they’ve changed the UI to be less 10-like
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But anyway, I use that on the desktop. I used to use Feedbin for years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was using various different readers and syncing services, so I’d be all in sync. But since NetNewswire
⏹️ ▶️ John has iCloud support, I finally stopped paying for a feedbin. I think I still paid for this year. Maybe it actually just expired,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. But NetNewswire will use your iCloud account, with CloudKit,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m assuming.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t have iCloud drive disabled, so it works
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t pay for a feedbin anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back when I paid for a feedbin, I also use Reeder, R-E-E-D-E-R, like you mentioned before, on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s also NetNewswire for the phone. In general, on the phone, I don’t use RSS. It’s more of a desktop experience
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. I used to use Reader on my iPad a lot, but I don’t know, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter has, again, Twitter has not replaced RSS for me. Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John supplanted as the majority stream that I use to consume stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I’m not all on Mastodon, I’m like half on Twitter. I’m both on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John and Mastodon. So the combination at this point of Twitter and Mastodon is still ahead of RSS in terms of prioritization
⏹️ ▶️ John of where I find things, but NetNewsWire is my preferred RSS reader on the Macware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m kind of a completionist, but not really. I subscribed,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco wouldn’t like it. I subscribe to tons of things that I know have too much volume, and sometimes I just, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John a completionist. I just mark them all as read. I say, well, I’m too behind on that, I don’t care. The way I would organize my feeds,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have tons of feeds, I used to have folders for things, like I had a folder called Infrequent, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was things like, this is a folder full of things that I do actually wanna keep up with because it’s blogs
⏹️ ▶️ John that post twice a year, right? So I’m never gonna just mark all them as read, whereas these other sites that post 50
⏹️ ▶️ John things a day, ah, just mark them all as read, and they’re in subfolders, and you can mark an entire folder as read with a single keystroke,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it happens instantly. So I kind of, you know, I use RSS like that, where
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t go through the river of stuff. I just look at things that might be interesting, and then there are certain feeds that
⏹️ ▶️ John I read literally every single thing that comes out of them, because they’re so infrequent, or because I care about them so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Sanity. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental, tech podcasts so long.
Neutral: EQS brake pedal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, you’ve been wanting to talk about Mercedes brake pedals for a while, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the EQS, which apparently can be either the sedan or the SUV. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me tell you, the Mercedes electric sedans, the EQE sedan, EQS sedan, not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why are there so few good looking electric cars? Like this should be
⏹️ ▶️ John easier, shouldn’t it? Everybody wants to, you know, look futuristic and that leads them
⏹️ ▶️ John in interesting directions. that of course the BMWs don’t look weird. They look like normal BMWs, but the normal BMWs
⏹️ ▶️ John now look ugly. So I was going to say, if you want an electric car that doesn’t look odd, BMW just takes
⏹️ ▶️ John their regular cars and makes them electric because they built a platform that they can do that with, but they look like BMWs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh wait, timeout, breaking news, breaking news from all in the chat room. Model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S slash X steering wheel retrofit, $700 available March, 2023. Travel in luxury, enjoy the warmth of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a heated wheel in the touch of a premium vegan leather in a traditional form factor. No stalks or shifters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retrofit is only compatible with Model S and Model X vehicles configured with a yoke steering wheel. Purchase price includes installation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through Tesla service.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine if they just put those on the car when they sold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Imagine that. Wouldn’t that be novel? Flat bottom. Oh, it is a very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very slightly flat bottom. You’re right. You cannot have a round steering wheel anymore and I hate it so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, quit your whining. Flat bottom’s not that big a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s huge. so you’ll be able to order the full steering wheel again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it says March 2023, so probably in 2025 you’ll be able to get it. Yeah, never trust a date from Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John them your money now probably though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I bet you can. Well, no, it says email me when the item’s available to order. Wow, that’s-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s comforting about this is that the fact that they have to offer this option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows that just no one liked it. And like enough people didn’t like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they actually were forced to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sell. Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ John having demand problems, as they say. They’re not selling as many cars
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John in the discussion of how can we sell more cars, one of the items that had to come up is, I do hear a lot of people saying
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t like the yoke steering wheel. Imagine that. And we already did design a steering wheel for this
⏹️ ▶️ John because I remember the pictures of it, before the yoke came out, there were official images from
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla that showed a round steering wheel. That’s why everyone thought it would be an option. But then, you know, Elon decided,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s the yoke for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it wasn’t weren’t there some regions where the yoke was totally illegal and so they had to sell it like this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but just because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John illegal doesn’t mean there Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what the laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now? Honestly, like I I’m actually not tempted at all by the new Tesla’s input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part because of you know Elon Musk being a jerk, but also in part because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that I’ve had a car for the last few months that is designed to be used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead of a car that’s designed to look good, I’m actually kind of spoiled by a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility of it. You’re spoiled by buttons. And like, there’s buttons, there’s handles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s compartments everywhere, the cup holders have little rubber inserts so stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t slide around. Like there’s just, oh my god, it’s just so designed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be used by humans. And, I mean, of course as an off-roader, the Defender’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very well designed for that. that. But, but just like there’s just stuff everywhere that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps me use it as a, as a vehicle. And, and this is why like I’m actually not super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tempted by the Rivians right now because Rivians are also designed kind of with the Tesla mindset of like, let’s make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most minimal interior possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re in the same mindset. They’re, they’re more electronic than you might
⏹️ ▶️ John think, but I think they do have a different vibe than Tesla. You should go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sit in one. The, I think the overall features of the car do, but the actual like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dashboard and controls are very, very Tesla like.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’ve got stocks and stuff. Not, not many. Just try it out. Go, go, go to dealership and look at one and sit in
⏹️ ▶️ John it and you’ll see it. It’s not as far from a real car. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are no dealerships. Yeah. There’s a dealership in Richmond for God’s sakes. If Richmond has one, then almost every other city should.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. All right. Let’s go back to this Mercedes stuff. Sorry for interrupting, but I think this is hilarious. Uh, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yeah, it’s imagine people want an actual frigging steering wheel, but no, Elon’s a genius. Elon knows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best. Anyway, Mercedes EQS SUV brake pedals. Tell me about this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is related to when we were talking about how any control
⏹️ ▶️ John in a car or any other thing that is manipulated through a touchscreen or other electronic means,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult to also have a physical control for it because then the physical control can get out of sync with
⏹️ ▶️ John the electronic control and you have to figure out how to deal with that. And we started talking about how, you know, like the faders
⏹️ ▶️ John on a audio board, sometimes the faders are hardware things that slide up and down, but they will move on their own. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John change a level through a software interface to make sure that the hardware always matches the software,
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware will literally move. And there was also some car that did that where if you turn the volume up on the steering wheel control,
⏹️ ▶️ John the volume dial would turn or whatever. And we talked about dials that have lights around them, you know, dials
⏹️ ▶️ John just spin forever, but they also have lights around them to indicate the position and all sorts of this, you know, how
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have physical controls, but also software controls, Or even just how do you have a control that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can control in more than one place with physical controls while trying to keep them in sync? How do you deal with that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So Mercedes had an interesting solution here on their EQS SUV,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’ve got, like many cars, they have a regenerative braking function, which basically means
⏹️ ▶️ John to slow the car down rather than squeezing discs inside the wheel wells to make
⏹️ ▶️ John heat and friction and slow the car down. Instead, they use electricity and magnetism to essentially charge the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. You use the momentum of the car to charge the battery by regenerating energy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as you charge the battery, that will slow the car down because the energy to charge the battery has to come from somewhere. It’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from your kinetic energy of the car moving. That’s called regenerative braking. Cars have
⏹️ ▶️ John ways to adjust that. How much regenerative braking do you want? And you would think, well, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want all the regenerative braking, but what they mean is how much regenerative braking do you want when you lift
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the gas pedal? So in a regular car, I don’t know, in an internal combustion car,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you lift up on the gas pedal, the only thing slowing you down is wind resistance, rolling resistance,
⏹️ ▶️ John friction, right? The car doesn’t start, it doesn’t, you know, slow down due to the brakes,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? With regenerative braking on its maximum setting on Teslas and other cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you lift up on the brake pedal, it starts regenerative braking. So it doesn’t just like
⏹️ ▶️ John give less power to the wheels, it actually starts robbing the kinetic energy of the car I’m using it to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery. So your car slows down. I think maybe the thing people might be familiar with like this is maybe the golf carts
⏹️ ▶️ John work this way. I think, I don’t golf, so I don’t know. But I think like there are some other electric vehicles you
⏹️ ▶️ John might be familiar with. It may be like, maybe bumper cars where they work the same way. That as you lift up on the go pedal,
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes the slow pedal, right? Regenerative braking off means, oh, it works like an internal
⏹️ ▶️ John combustion car. You lifting up on the gas pedal does not slow the car in any way. The only thing slowing the car,
⏹️ ▶️ John friction and wind, right? And so if you’re used to an internal combustion engine, you might want regenerative braking totally
⏹️ ▶️ John off. But if you’re used to what they call one pedal driving, you can just drive mostly with
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely with the gas pedal because as you lift up on the gas pedal, it essentially applies the brakes, the
⏹️ ▶️ John regenerative brakes, in proportion to how much you’re lifting up the gas pedal. Now, Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ John has the same settings. Do you want super duper regenerative braking for one pedal driving where you basically never need
⏹️ ▶️ John to touch the brake pedal unless you’re doing emergency braking or something? or do you want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John behave like an internal combustion engine? But what Mercedes has decided to do is
⏹️ ▶️ John reflect the braking state in the brake pedal. So in normal regenerative
⏹️ ▶️ John braking, as you lift up on the gas pedal and it applies the regenerative brakes, the brake
⏹️ ▶️ John pedal doesn’t do anything. Now, your car is braking, but the brake pedal is in its fully up
⏹️ ▶️ John position. So Mercedes says, well, if we’re applying the brakes at all, we should move the brake
⏹️ ▶️ John pedal down to reflect the amount of braking that we’re applying. so that if you were to take your foot off of
⏹️ ▶️ John the gas pedal and put it onto the brake, it would reflect the fact that, hey, you know what? The brakes
⏹️ ▶️ John are actually applied like 50% already because of how you let up on the gas pedal. So the brake
⏹️ ▶️ John pedal will be 50% depressed when you put your foot over there. Now I’ve never driven one of these cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can’t say, but this, you know, MKBHD did a review of it and he found it extremely disconcerting to
⏹️ ▶️ John take his foot off of the gas, the accelerator, and reach for the brake pedal with
⏹️ ▶️ John that same foot and not quite know where that brake pedal might be. Because how
⏹️ ▶️ John low will it be? Like there’s even like this intelligent braking thing where it will apply regenerative brakes
⏹️ ▶️ John based on like how far the car is in front of you or how fast you’re going and what the conditions are. And in turn reflect
⏹️ ▶️ John that in the brake pedal, which may be in any position between completely up and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not completely down, but halfway down. And I think this attempt to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the physical control reflect what the car is doing, I understand the motivation, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking the muscle memory of always being able to find the brake pedal, especially in an emergency situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where you take your foot off the gas accelerator real quick and go for the brake
⏹️ ▶️ John pedal. I want that brake pedal to be in the same expected spot every single time. And I don’t mind that the
⏹️ ▶️ John first two inches of travel doesn’t do anything because that much braking was already being applied, because in that situation
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re probably slamming on the brakes anyway. So I think this is a pretty bad idea. I give
⏹️ ▶️ John them points for trying to do it and it’s relevant to our past discussion, But I think the muscle memory of being able to always
⏹️ ▶️ John find the brake pedal is so much more important than correctly reflecting What the car is doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah before I address that real-time follow-up new model s’s and x’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Give you the option to order the steering wheel or the yoke no cost difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So before everybody writes it, but yeah, I think I don’t know Do you do you ever have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one one of the old cars that had? had early versions of cruise control where it would do this with the gas pedal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah. I’ve driven a U-Haul moving van that did that. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’d hit that you’d hit the governor had like a governor like 55 miles an hour and when you hit 55 the gas pedal would push
⏹️ ▶️ John back on your foot. There’s something that Marquez said on the video about this to the brake pedal will sometimes push
⏹️ ▶️ John back on you in this automated weird mode to do not like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it made a little bit of sense or rather It wasn’t too disruptive on the gas pedal on those old cruise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control vehicles because That that was kind of fixed in place. It wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamically responding thing and I feel like the gas pedal It’s okay to not quite be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you expect it to be because you know You just lift your foot off or whatever, you know, it’s less damaging. Whereas like the brake pedal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like there should never be any moments even a split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second of Oh my god Where’s the pedal on the brake pedal like it should always be where you expect it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be? It should always feel how you expect it to feel. There should never be any variation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any doubt in your mind that the brake pedal is where it’s supposed to be and about to do what you need it to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that kind of plays with it and makes it dynamic is just ultimately a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is one of those things that when I read about it or listen to someone talk about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think to myself, okay, yeah, that makes sense. I can get behind that. But I suspect that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I got behind the wheel and experienced it, that I would quickly sour on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sour on it real, real hard. So I don’t know. I’d be curious to try this for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, sitting here now, like, yeah, that makes sense. Why not reflect the state of the world? But golly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a feeling that not knowing exactly where the brake pedal is, which is the thing I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey urgently, like you both were saying, that I need urgently, I need it immediately, and I cannot be surprised by where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s really gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Yeah, and I think when you’re going for the brake pedal, what you want is to get in contact with that control
⏹️ ▶️ John ASAP, because until your foot is touching it, you can’t do anything braking wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you have to get in contact with it. So that argues for both it always being in the same place
⏹️ ▶️ John and also for it being at the top of its travel before you activate it, because that’s the closest to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And you always just wanna, that sort of, oh, I’m gonna go to the brakes. You want that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna get in that contact as fast as possible. if it is in some position other than all the way up,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, it’s gonna be farther away, and B, you’ve got to like start hunting for it. And depending on how you move your
⏹️ ▶️ John foot, you could miss it entirely. Like if it was depressed three quarters of the way and your heel was like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of person who goes to the brake without like moving your heel that much because your car is set up that way, and you just press
⏹️ ▶️ John your foot down with your heel hinging in a certain spot and your toe goes all the way to the floor because you like missed it entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s potentially not a great situation. Now, this discussion brought up,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was Quinn Nelson said somewhere that he was, he’s like, I hate the people who buy electric cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t put regenerative braking on max. Tesla’s one pedal driving is the only way you should do it. You should always
⏹️ ▶️ John have, you should always be one pedal driving. The old way is for internal combustion. The only reason we’re used to
⏹️ ▶️ John it is because that’s how cars used to work. Everyone should one pedal drive, regen should be on max. And he said,
⏹️ ▶️ John also you’re just wasting energy if you don’t do that, because if you’re not one pedal driving, you’re being less efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was gonna reply to him, but I’m like, first I said, is there something I don’t understand about,
⏹️ ▶️ John cause it doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m like, how, how would it be any less efficient? The way I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it worked, and apparently I was wrong about this in Tesla’s anyway, is like, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you are applying braking power by lifting up on the gas pedal or applying braking pedal by pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the gas, the brake thing, you’re applying braking, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t make a difference. It’s not as if in a non-regen mode, applying the braking
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do regen, that would be ridiculous. So I was like, maybe he means that when people drive the
⏹️ ▶️ John old way, they’re more likely to dip into the friction brakes. And what I mean by that is
⏹️ ▶️ John most electric cars, you know, when you press the brake pedal, it will do regen, but regen can’t stop the car
⏹️ ▶️ John as quickly as friction brakes. When we say friction brakes, we mean the little thing squeezing the discs or pressing against the
⏹️ ▶️ John drums in your wheel wells. So they have to blend regenerative braking with the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John old-fashioned hydraulic brake fluid powered brakes, right? And I was thinking, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John he means when people don’t do one pedal driving, they tend to push the brake pedal and they get past
⏹️ ▶️ John the regen part where they push the brake pedal far enough where the car says, okay, I’ve given you all the regen you
⏹️ ▶️ John want and you still want more braking. Now I have to start pinching the friction brakes. And anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John you use the friction brakes, you are burning energy. Cause that’s not, that’s just going off as heat. You’re losing that. It’s not going back
⏹️ ▶️ John into your battery at all, right? So maybe he was saying like, you should use one pedal driving because with
⏹️ ▶️ John one pedal driving, you will never engage the friction brakes because that’s the different pedal over there. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who don’t do that dip into the friction brakes too much. But what it turns out that apparently he was talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about is that in Teslas, now you can correct me if I’m wrong, but this is my understanding from reading the thread. In Teslas,
⏹️ ▶️ John the brake pedals only do the friction brakes? That can’t possibly be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? I always got the impression driving it that when you push the brake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pedal, you are controlling the friction brakes period and that the car would decide when to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regen if you’re like decelerating but you don’t actually push the brake yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s when I think it’s actually using the regen but you know, you can turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down in the settings. Now, I prefer it all the way up. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I do, you know, the thing is like in the context of when Teslas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, like when they were designing these cars, when they were making all these options. They put in options, there’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creep mode, where, you know, with an automatic transmission, when you take your foot off the brake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a stop, the car starts slowly creeping forward. Electric cars have no reason to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So electric cars, when you take your foot off the brake by default, nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, I mean, you might start falling down a hill or something, but, you know, if your hill hold’s not on, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, electric cars, there is no automatic creeping forward when you stop braking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Tesla, when they first released the Model S and trying to get people to drive electric cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they added this option called creep mode or something, which sounds hilarious and fits Elon well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, and they added this mode to basically emulate how automatic transmissions drive so that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be less disoriented when they first tried an electric car. And I think having the regen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option be adjustable is that same kind of thing of like, okay, we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of bringing people along from the gas world to the electric world. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need affordances for people to be comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the transition. And so turning down regen as an option is one of those affordances.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not the affordance we’re talking about here though. The affordances, people don’t understand one pedal driving. So we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it that when you lift off the gas, the car doesn’t start decelerating due to any kind of braking, right? That’s the affordance to
⏹️ ▶️ John make people comfortable with it. But the thing we’re talking about is here is, Okay, but what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, what decelerates the car? And in a Tesla, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do reach, if you turn regen on max and you lift up on the gas pedal, we
⏹️ ▶️ John will use regen to slow the car. And if you press the brake pedal, we use friction brakes to
⏹️ ▶️ John slow the car. And what they could have done and what every other car manufacturer has done, and what I assume Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John was doing, but apparently they’re not, is how about for the affordance mode, you make the gas pedal to work just like it does in a
⏹️ ▶️ John regular car where you lift up and the car just coasts, right? You know, it slows down due to friction and air, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no braking is being applied. And then you make the brake pedal do a combination of regenerative
⏹️ ▶️ John and friction braking according to whatever weird-ass algorithm you have to do, like the beginning of the brake pedal is all regen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then as you keep pressing it and it needs more and more braking power, it starts to add the friction brakes. That would be
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly, like, understandable to internal combustion engine driver. They don’t have to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what portion of the braking that is being put in response to the brake pedal action is regen and what proportionist friction
⏹️ ▶️ John and any decent car will blend those two together so you don’t notice. The first round of electric
⏹️ ▶️ John cars from new manufacturers is like, oh, I can feel when it goes from regen to friction, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the more modern ones make that mostly transparent, probably because they’re brake-by-wire at this point anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s how I just assumed they all worked. But a car that only applies the friction brakes with the
⏹️ ▶️ John brake pedal is forcing you to do one pedal driving if you care at all about your battery life or your range,
⏹️ ▶️ John as they call it in in cars rather than laptops. Because you want to do regen. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John every ounce of that electricity that you use to make this multi-thousand pound car start rolling down
⏹️ ▶️ John the road. As you brake, you want that energy back as much as you can possibly get. Friction brakes
⏹️ ▶️ John throw that energy away as heat, right? Regen braking gives you some of it back. So it is insane
⏹️ ▶️ John to me that when you press the gas pedal on a Tesla, it does not do regen braking. It should, and presumably it
⏹️ ▶️ John will eventually. You said gas pedal, and I think you mean brake pedal. I keep saying gas pedal, just substitute accelerator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pedal. Well, no, no, no. In this case, I think you mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it doesn’t break pedal. It doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this Mastodon thread, which is, I think, what John was referring to, Quinn had some interesting thoughts. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then Technology Connections entered the chat. And that’s our YouTuber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we all really enjoy, that does really genuinely fascinating and excellent YouTube videos about all manner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of interesting engineering stuff. So Technology Connections, whose name I honestly don’t know, wrote, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Uterum. Alec, OK, thank you. Alec writes, I think you need to remember that this only makes sense in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey context of Teslas, which don’t do blended braking. Most other EVs will still regenerate more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you use the brake pedal. No matter what the lift-off regen is set to, Tesla’s not doing that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, bonkers. I agree. Also, when the conditions are appropriate to coast, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more efficient because you avoid the losses from charging and discharging. Alec continues, like it truly boggles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mind that Tesla decided, no, the brake pedal only does the friction brakes, and you need to get used to what regen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like. and people actually defend this position. Hybrids have had blended braking since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always, allowing people to coast when they want, regen when they need to slow down, and thus maximize efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without even thinking about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming he’s right because he usually knows what he’s talking about. But
⏹️ ▶️ John he was my only source for this reality. And I just still find it hard to believe because it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John so bad, so inefficient. And now here, let me make my pitch for why one pedal driving is bad. I know people love it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fun and it’s more relaxing than I have to go between gas and brake. These are the same people who think you shouldn’t have a third pedal, because how annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John is that? You got to cut
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey presses. You know what I mean? Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all right. So I get the appeal of one pedal driving, right? I think it is worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, moving on to my little safety, I think it’s worse and also slightly less safe, because here’s the deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Regen braking, like, forget about regen braking. The gas pedal
⏹️ ▶️ John that could actually apply all of the braking that your car is able to apply
⏹️ ▶️ John would be too annoying for anybody to use. What I’m basically saying is you’re pressing the gas pedal, when you lift up on the gas pedal, it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were standing on the brakes. You can’t drive that car. That’s too much, right? That’s not how any car works.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one wants it to work the way I imagine. You sneeze and your foot lifts off the gas pedal for a second, and it’s as if you are applying
⏹️ ▶️ John maximum braking, you’d be causing accidents left and right. So what actually happens in these one pedal
⏹️ ▶️ John driving, when it’s set to one pedal driving, is when you lift up on the gas pedal, it applies regen braking
⏹️ ▶️ John to a point. Even if it applies 100% of its possible regen braking, it doesn’t apply
⏹️ ▶️ John the maximum braking that the car is capable of applying. And again, if there’s some fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario where a car was able to do its full braking fully through regen, it doesn’t matter for the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of the story. But I think right now, cars that do regen braking, it’s not the full braking of the
⏹️ ▶️ John car, right? So inevitably, there will be situations where you
⏹️ ▶️ John need more braking than you can get by lifting up on the gas pedal. You’ve lifted all the way
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the gas pedal. You’re not even pressing the gas pedal anymore. You still need more braking.
⏹️ ▶️ John At that point, you need to A, realize this has happened, and B, switch over to the brake pedal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the idea that I’m doing one pedal driving and I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ John traffic and I’m coming up on a car and I feel like I’m gonna be able to come to a stop behind that car by lifting up
⏹️ ▶️ John on the gas pedal and it will be fine. I lift up on the gas pedal and I just realize when I hit the end of the traffic that that’s actually not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John braking. At that point, at the last second I need to go to the brake pedal and apply a little bit more braking, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John feel much better about knowing I’m going to need to come to a stop here. Let me stop
⏹️ ▶️ John being in the accelerator mode and put my foot over on the brake pedal, and modulate the brake pedal to come to a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John stop. Where I intend, or slow to the degree that I intend. I don’t like the idea that…
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole idea of like one pedal driving. You can’t drive with one pedal because sometimes you always need more
⏹️ ▶️ John braking, and in fact the times when you might need more braking are the most biggest emergency situations, And if you get in the
⏹️ ▶️ John mindset that I just drive with my right foot on the one pedal, it’s one pedal driving. You have to snap out
⏹️ ▶️ John of that at the right moment to go over to the brake pedal. It seems to me it’d be a more dangerous and more
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated situation than the much simpler one of when I’m in go mode, I use the go pedal. And when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John in no go mode, I use the no go pedal. It’s very clear what mode you’re in, and especially in situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like, I’ve been decelerating for hundreds of feet the whole time my foot has been on
⏹️ ▶️ John the brake pedal, pressing it to varying degrees. I’m already in no-go mode. I’m in the slowing down
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. And if something unexpected happens during the slowing down thing, your foot’s already in the right spot, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like having driven an electric car with the behavior you think is the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many, many years now. It’s not the worst. I just think it’s slightly less safe. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you that, and so obviously like I had a bit of context in the sense that the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had before the Model S was the M5. and the M5, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had little flappy paddle shifters, and I would, being a stick driver before, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downshift a lot to slow down. That was my main method of slowing down, was downshifting. And it had that giant engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it had a lot of engine suction also whenever you decelerate. And so it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, it felt not that different going from that with all that engine suction and all the downshifting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Tesla with its aggressive regen. It actually felt very similar. And so-
⏹️ ▶️ John But were you using your engine as your main braking thing so you could do one pedal driving in the M5? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John know we’ve talked about this in the past, but I would suggest that in most cars, maybe not in the M5, but in most cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John brake pads are cheaper than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clutches. Not when you’re leasing. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good point. No, I am an engine braking apologist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do engine braking too, but I would never use it as a way to do one pedal driving so I don’t have to use the brakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, regardless, so I’m saying like, when I came to the Tesla, like, it just, it felt natural to have aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regen. And I just got, it got used to it very, very quickly. And I never- The getting
⏹️ ▶️ John it is the dangerous part though, because you get into the mode where like, I just need this one pedal to drive the car. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but I think the, your concern that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would rely a hundred percent on the gas pedal is, I think, unfounded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was never a time when I felt like was using the gas pedal exclusively because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the engine braking or rather the regen provided by the by the gas pedal by letting off of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would usually not be enough to bring the car to a complete stop in most circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sometimes you could
⏹️ ▶️ John not even talk about the last last two seconds of the complete stop I’m like in your right that like I said I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John characterize what the region is like what percentage of the full power of the breaking is available to region but my assumption
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the percentage of braking power that a car possesses that will be possible, our regen
⏹️ ▶️ John will just increase with time. Because for efficiency purposes, because you want actually the most, you want regen
⏹️ ▶️ John to be extremely powerful. You want that energy back. So the fact that you can’t come to a complete stop
⏹️ ▶️ John or that it’s only, you know, 20% of the full braking power of the car, that may be
⏹️ ▶️ John an accident of history today. I feel like in a golf cart, for example, you can come to complete stop because they go five miles an hour or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the other trick, though, that that’s that might keep this from ever becoming too much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stronger than it is today, is that you can’t always take the regen power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if the batteries are too full, for instance, like if you actually, if you’re about to go on a really long trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you charge to 100%, you don’t have regen for the first few miles of the trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just put that power right back on the grid and the other cars get it. You watch, your
⏹️ ▶️ John odometer goes backwards when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do that. Yeah, and there’s also like different thermal conditions of the battery might be and
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s lots of physics-based reasons why regen is not 100% of the power of the car. I just said
⏹️ ▶️ John the trend is going to be the more regen power possible. And this whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of the variability of sometimes you can’t take it and so forth argues even more for there should be a go pedal and a stop
⏹️ ▶️ John pedal. And what the hell that stop pedal is doing depends on all sorts of variables that you don’t care about. How much power can
⏹️ ▶️ John I regen? How much power am I able to regen? How charged is my battery? What temperature is it? But you don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s entirely seamless of the stop pedal does some
⏹️ ▶️ John combination of crap to slow your car down in a way that responds linearly to your pressing it. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s a braking curve and the brake pedal implements that. And there’s a going curve and the go pedal implements
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And it’s simple and they have their jobs and the car manufacturers are free to vary all that within.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas with quote unquote one pedal driving, I feel like you’re building bad habits
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just gonna change too much from car to car based on all the regen stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’re gonna start adding friction brakes as you lift up the gas pedal, which I suppose they could, but like I said, I don’t think that’s viable
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t think you want 100% braking when you lift off the gas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I have not spent a lot of time in Teslas, but I’ve spent a fair bit, especially as someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who’s never owned one. And I think there’s aspects of what both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you are saying that are true. In my experience, I don’t personally see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why one pedal driving is so amazing as so many EV drivers seem to think, but maybe that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own ignorance talking. But I pretty reasonably quickly acclimated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to regenerative braking and kind of got used to basically one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pedal driving. And I don’t think it’s too different than like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going between a car, a three pedal car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the clutch catches really low. And then immediately after driving that, jumping into a three pedal car where the clutch catches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really high. And so you just have to reacclimate yourself. And within the span of a few driving miles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually you’ve got yourself reacclimated and it’s fine. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my experience with one pedal driving was basically like that. Now I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your argument, John, that maybe it’s, you could make an argument that it’s not as safe, but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anyone that’s been driving for any amount of time, unless you’ve learned to drive on a one pedal car, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that time is happening and will happen, unless you’re learning to drive on a car like that, your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey natural reaction from the past 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years of driving is to reach for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that brake when there’s an emergency. You’re not even going to think about it. And so I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re reprogramming our brains for emergency evasion. Now we are maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reprogramming our brains for traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not so much the programming as that your foot would already be on the brakes. You don’t pay the travel
⏹️ ▶️ John cost, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John non-one-pedal driving, you’d already be riding the brake to some degree at the point when the emergency occurs,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas with one pedal driving, you’re not even on the brake yet because you’re doing the one pedal drive thing and the emergency occurs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to pay the cost to switch. There’s always gonna be situations where you’d be surprised and you have to hit the brake, right? But there’s so many situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where normally you would be on the brake. I think this whole thing of like getting used to it and not being a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ John relies on the current strength of regen braking, which is again, some small portion of
⏹️ ▶️ John the total braking power of the car. If regen gets more powerful and more of the full braking
⏹️ ▶️ John power of the car done by regen and that you know accumulates to the one pedal
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be because I think in this situation you’re saying like it’s Your one pedal driving, but really
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re one pedal drive for a little bit, but you always have to eventually go on to the brake So it’s really you just like a slight delay
⏹️ ▶️ John and what would have normally been a switch to the brake But if the regen becomes more powerful More and more situations
⏹️ ▶️ John you never need to leave the gas and that’s where I feel like you’re building You’re building the habit that you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I can drive this entire car with the gas Which is not true, although you’re building that habit like imagine if you didn’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the the brake pedal except in emergencies Which is not true in any regen braking car now But if that if
⏹️ ▶️ John that was true people learned on that They wouldn’t have the habit to go over to the brake in an emergency and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be much less safe, right? And then you know with the current cars where you’re leaving and going over
⏹️ ▶️ John to the brake a little bit later than you would you’re probably Fine, it’s probably not that big of a deal, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John just I feel like I you know, the benefit is there I see it which is the same benefit is not having a third pedal
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to keep moving my foot back and forth. It’s annoying and stop and go traffic. That’s annoying to do that It’s like it’s more comfortable and
⏹️ ▶️ John stop and go traffic not have to move my foot back and forth, right? That’s the argument That’s why people find that appealing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just feel like you know, a brake pedal and gas pedal is not too much to ask until we get self-driving.