518: Deconstructed iMac
19 Jan 2023The new MacBook Pro and Mac Mini look amazing, but who was expecting a surprise HomePod?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Marco’s window-washing woes
- Chicken hat
dregs
- ❗️ Imminent members-only special ❗️
- Follow-up:
- Getty Images suing creators of Stable Diffusion
- One more from CES: solid-state cooling
- Twitter kills (some) third-party clients
- Upgrade+ 442: Filing bug reports with Apple
- An entry from the we-have-the-best-listeners file
- Apple’s Week of Announcements
- Post-show: Casey got the Belkin Continuity Camera doodad
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code atp for 10% off your first order.
- Lunch Pail VC: A podcast about the nuts and bolts of venture capital.
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Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Sliders
- The chicken-hat dregs
- ATP Movie Club #4 imminent
- Getty suing Stable Diffusion
- CES: AirJet cooling module
- Sponsor: Sofa
- Twitter killed third-party apps
- Upgrade+: Filing bug reports
- Listeners in cool places
- Sponsor: Lunch Pail VC
- New Mac Minis, MacBook Pros
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- New HomePod
- Ending theme
- Belkin iPhone camera mount
Sliders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve come to accept that there are certain things in life that I am not very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at. And washing windows is now being added to that list.
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows on your car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Oh, I can’t wash any part of a car. That got added to the list long ago. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t confirm. Because that is a challenge that I’ve been tackling for many years and I still have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can confirm that Marco, for all of his many perks, is completely useless at washing a car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with my own eyes. good qualities, all of the great things about Marco, which there are many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that being able to wash a car is not on that list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not even a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what windows are you washing then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we have our main sliders to the deck. Normally in the summertime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can hire a window washer to come out whenever it gets really terrible and you can barely see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through it anymore, we can hire a window washer and they do a good job. They don’t work in the winter. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least here, because normally it’s freezing. So I have a few basic things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one of those big squeegee things with the brush on the other side of it, whatever those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the window washing brushes. Do you have one of those planks
⏹️ ▶️ John held up by pulleys on ropes and you lower yourself down from the roof?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, the good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is all just at floor level, so I can just walk up to it and
⏹️ ▶️ John And just to be clear, what are you washing off the windows? I’ve never lived at the beach. Do you actually get salt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, you know, rain and dirt and, you know, salty, grimy dirt from rain
⏹️ ▶️ John But is it mostly, I’m wondering, is it a different kind of grime than you get at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s very like, it’s like sticky. It’s not like dry dirt. It’s like constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damp, slightly sticky, salty, sandy dirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Sounds delicious. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, and you know, the rest of the house I don’t care about, but like these windows are, they face south, so they face where the sun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes in all day. So you’re really see when they’re dirty and like all right, I can either you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them be dirty for the next four months until the window washer can be here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know do it myself and yeah. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is this your car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah right, I cannot find a car wash like I that’s a whole other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You make Casey cry every time you take your car through a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car wash. You have no well, I know I would be happy if He even took it to a car wash! Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my gosh, I’m that desperate at this point. I just want Marco to look at me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I would take it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a car wash every time I left the island if there was one anywhere nearby where I go. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell, there isn’t one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised that John, you don’t have some hole in the wall from when you were a kid that you’re suggesting Marco go to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because that’s nowhere near where I usually go. I did not have a
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite car wash, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be fine to just go to one of those like, you know, just self-serve ones where just like the hose and the thing that takes quarters and you just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, dial in whatever. That’d be fine. I don’t need the perfect job. I just need to like blast all the sand and crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off my car, but nope. So… These are all areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not my expertise, but anyway, yeah. So I’ve watched so many YouTube videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the technique you’re supposed to use with a squeegee on a window. To try to have no lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left after you have squeegeed. I cannot for the life of me perform this action.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if I can use my knowledge of car window washing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco trouble with that. It’s not all the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, and it is in this sense, in that like, you know, obviously any washing any kind of window streaks are a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s your squeegee technique. I think you haven’t gotten all the crap off your window yet. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing you can do with the squeegee that’s not gonna leave streaks. You need to get the crap off your window. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the question is, can I get the remaining water off the window in such a way that I don’t get like a
⏹️ ▶️ John little line between, you know, so I think basically you’re not removing the bad stuff from the window sufficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John before you move, you wanna jump right to the step where you’re like, oh, I’m gonna use a little squeegee and it’ll be clean. No, you gotta actually get all
⏹️ ▶️ John the crap off first.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try that, yeah. Like, so like continue to wash, like wash, whatever it is, salt, dirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John sand, whatever it is, get it off your window and that may take many, several passes and then finally when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a clean window with just maybe a little bit of mildly dirty water on it, then your squeegee will work better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that’s my problem. Yeah, because like, you know, like when the window washers come, I mean, they do it in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three seconds and it’s perfect, but they’re experts. Like they really know what they’re doing. They’re very good at their jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, they do the whole house in like two hours. I don’t know how they do it. It took me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it took me a good two hours to do three sliders today. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John calling them sliders? Like little hamburgers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, yeah, they’re sliders. They’re sliding door window
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about sliding glass doors? Yes. You call them sliders? Everyone calls them sliders.
⏹️ ▶️ John This might be an Ohio thing. I’m going to look this up now. What would you call them? We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not calling them sliders. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call them? Sliding glass doors. It’s a bit long. Ow. Yeah, I mean, why use three syllables when 17 would do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you what they are. Sliders are tiny hamburgers. In the context of talking about windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, anyway, those are probably easier to clean. The
⏹️ ▶️ John hamburgers? Yeah. Clean them right off your plate. Yum, yum, yum.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do not clean your insides, that’s for sure. Well, you clean your own insides out after eating too many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of those. Gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen to this guy. That’s just White Castle. I haven’t had White Castle in probably five years. There’s none of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them anywhere near me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I did a Google search for it, and I came up with Slider Services, professional sliding door
⏹️ ▶️ John maintenance, right? But this is the Midwest’s most experienced specialty contractor. So I’m wondering if Sliders is a Midwestern
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I have to ask my wife about it when the show’s over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I only ever had one sliding glass door growing up and it was I was too young in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house to really Talk about it by by that name. So I don’t know what we said there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness. So out of curiosity, I thought to myself, you know I should look and see if there is a white castle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere near me and there isn’t but as I’m looking at the white castle Locator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says, you know, it’s no castles found and then there’s a checkbox that reads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only show castles accepting Valentine’s Day reservations. So when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, even I, I mean, I have the world’s worst taste in everything, allegedly,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s somebody’s favorite restaurant. Oh, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco judging. It’s just that’s so… Wow. I’m more surprised that they take reservations. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even for the people for whom that is their favorite restaurant, like, I would never think to even check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see if they take reservations. I don’t know. Do you need
⏹️ ▶️ John reservations at White Castle? You want to get the good seat by the dirty window? I don’t know. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they probably have professional window washers. That’s right. They don’t have Marco clean in their crap.
The chicken-hat dregs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you want to tell me about what you’ve put in the show notes as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chicken hat drags please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I kept I should have looked this up. I kept trying to think of the phrase that they say on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John earnings calls when they’re trying to say that there is sufficient supply to meet the demand,
⏹️ ▶️ John like supply and demand are in balance or something. There’s some there’s some like little phrase that they use
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time that I can’t remember. But anyway, I think that finally the chicken hat supply
⏹️ ▶️ John and demand are in balance. We got the final, final, final, final shipment
⏹️ ▶️ John of chicken hats like before the last episode, but I didn’t mention it on the show because I just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John them to sort of drain out of the system naturally. And they more or less have, we have a handful
⏹️ ▶️ John of them left. I think everybody who has any interest in a chicken hat now has one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John congratulations to everybody. But if you are super duper desperate, we do have a handful of them
⏹️ ▶️ John left. They’re probably just gonna honestly sit there for like the next year, kind of like the ATP pins, where everybody who wanted an
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP pin got one, and then we had like 50 pins in our stock inventory
⏹️ ▶️ John for like a year and a half. So that may happen with the chicken hats, which if it does, fine, but if not, just letting everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you want a chicken hat, go to atp.fm slash store, there is a handful left.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And frankly, I don’t know how this happened, that with all the ordering we were doing, that somehow we weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left with a thousand chicken hats. Like all of a sudden, oh, the demand stops and then we have a thousand left.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a little bit behind the scenes stuff. One of the orders that we, one of the many multiple orders that we made,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a box of hats got lost. And it can, I think it was a box of like 150 or 300, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was 150 hats or something. Like, oh, we were supposed to have a box of these and it went missing. And so the manufacturer just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John manufactured another box of 150 hats for free and then sent it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then they found the missing box. And so we had actually an extra 150
⏹️ ▶️ John hats on top of the amount that we wanted to have. And
⏹️ ▶️ John all that sort of fumbling around and multiple shipments put us in a position where we have
⏹️ ▶️ John a small number of hats left for anybody who wants them. I assume they’ll be gone by this time
⏹️ ▶️ John next year, but who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see if this section even makes it in the release show, because the bootleg people might get to it and decide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John oh, that’s. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has the bootleg has already got a hat if they want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we’ll see.
ATP Movie Club #4 imminent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of bootlegs and members, now would be a pretty good time, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t already gone to atp.fm.com to do so. We are writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wrong that we as a collective unit made. Or at least that’s the story I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sticking with. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just you. Was it just me? All right. I really was trying to pawn this off on all three of us. I thought we could take this fall together, but it seems not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will dive on my sword. I will commit seppuku. No, John was particularly embittered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my selection for the trilogy that we had done of movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviews or whatever you want to call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John them. ATP Movie Club, come on. Hey, thank you, ATP Movie Club.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP Movie Club is what I meant to say. John was very upset at me for my selection for ATP Movie Club,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though the rundown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was- For multiple reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The rundown is an unquestionably good movie, we all agreed, just listen to the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it made for a very good episode of our show. See, thank you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but none of us were culturally enriched by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh gosh, you know, can you just let me get through this one piece please and thank you? No. Apparently not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Have you heard the show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re gonna right my wrongs and we’re going to, tomorrow night is, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording this episode obviously right now, tonight, but tomorrow night as I sit here, which is Thursday night in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the One Shoe Time Zone, we are going to record an episode of ATP Movie Club about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Hunt for October, The Hunt for Red October, which I will spoil only to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it is one of my favorite films of all time. And John, I think, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll have not altogether negative things to say about it. And Marco, let’s verify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have not or had not seen it or have not seen it at the time we are recording right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to watch it tomorrow. So it’s fresh in my mind when we record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent, and I actually plan to do the same even though I think I could probably recite the entire movie by heart But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, we don’t know when this episode will be released. I would say sometime no later than the end of next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week It’s it’s up to whenever you know Marco has time to edit it, but in the next week or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we are gonna do a to be movie club the hunt for October and Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you go to ATP FM slash join then you can get not only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this forthcoming episode but also the three episodes prior and also the bootleg and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know discounts on our limited time store offerings So that’s not not available right now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be probably shortly before WWDC. So check it out I’m really really looking forward to recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this I am extremely excited to talk to these two fine gentlemen slash my mortal enemies about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of my favorite movies So so wish me luck and again, that’ll be out sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the next week week and a half for thereabouts
⏹️ ▶️ John And we do have some other ideas for members special content, but we couldn’t nail them down in time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanted to get some member special content out because we felt like it was due. So we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the easy one, which is fixing Casey’s earlier mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks, Dad. Yes, so and honestly, this is a little inside baseball, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have many, many, many ideas. We don’t have any particular timeline about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we’re going to execute on any of these ideas. We don’t know which one we’re going to do next. it may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be several months before we do more member exclusive stuff and we’re we’re going to continue to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do things that we don’t feel like would fit in the main show you know we don’t want to we don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John they’re not all gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah definitely but we don’t want to take away from things that we think we would feature in the main show and we’re just trying to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know scroll them off to the side and make you pay to get them you know where this is stuff that hey if you don’t listen that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’d prefer you did but if you don’t it’s not gonna hurt our feelings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday cooking with John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how we’re gonna do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John someday we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Cooking works so great in podcast form.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are there any cooking podcasts? I should look that up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just the sound of pots clanging around. It’s just a bunch of Foley artists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep. It would be amazing. I’m telling you. It would be phenomenal. What we should do is we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have like John watch as I describe to Marco how to cook or vice versa. Actually, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better vice versa. So John is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco watching… No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, you have to be the one trying to follow John’s directions. That’s really… Oh, gosh. That’s the formula
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. I don’t want the show to end. John writes down something that is like the perfect… His perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formula for sauce or whatever, and then you have to actually do it, and with him watching.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be like that episode where I had to describe a picture to Tiff and Julian,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the whole time you’re waiting to see what they’re doing at the end. It would be like that. So I’d be describing
⏹️ ▶️ John what Casey’s supposed to do and at the very end he would like put on his camera and show me what he’s done. That would just be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not what I described. I would like this show to continue. I don’t want this show to end. And so because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, I might veto this entire plan, even though it would be a very funny end to this program. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John chat room points out that Adam Ragusea has a cooking podcast. I watch his YouTube channel and
⏹️ ▶️ John he puts his podcast up on YouTube. Those are the videos that I never click through because I don’t want to watch a YouTube video of a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I guess it does exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually listened to the audio version of that podcast and I can tell you while it is a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a YouTube cooking person. He’s not cooking on the podcast. It’s not really a cooking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John If you think of… He’s just talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about food. Yeah, if you’re thinking about what a cooking podcast would be in the sense of like a cooking show, it’s not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not. It’s good though. I do enjoy it actually, but it’s not a cooking show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So one way or another, we’re going to work on member stuff, but again, no promises on timeline on content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what it is, et cetera. But we are promising that sometime in the next week and a half you will hear another member special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are a member about the hunt for Red October. Again, atp.fm. Join.
Getty suing Stable Diffusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for scraping its content. Ruh-roh Shaggy. What’s going on here, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly what you would think from the article. Getty Images said it believes that stability AI unlawfully copied and
⏹️ ▶️ John processed millions of images protected by copyright to train its software, and that Getty Images has commenced legal proceedings in the High
⏹️ ▶️ John Court of Justice of London. So, you know, we talked about this when we talked about AI stuff. There’s going to be court
⏹️ ▶️ John cases. There’s going to be lawsuits. They have begun. This seems like like a pretty big one. Getty Images is a, you know, we’re talking about like
⏹️ ▶️ John these cases, the outcome of these cases might be determined by how big the people involved are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Getty Images is pretty big. They have a lot of images. They were surely scraped. That’s what this lawsuit alleges.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a second one which is a little bit different. This is on behalf of a few
⏹️ ▶️ John artists. Sarah Anderson. I don’t know if you know Sarah Anderson from Sarah Scribbles. If you, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John click through on the URL that will be in the show notes. The URL is stabled if diffusion litigation
⏹️ ▶️ John dot com. Um, I think you can see some of Sarah Anderson’s work. You’ve probably seen
⏹️ ▶️ John her comics online. You’re like, oh yeah, that one. I’ve seen those. Anyway, she’s one of three
⏹️ ▶️ John litigants. Kelly McKiernan and Carla Ortiz have filed a class action lawsuit
⏹️ ▶️ John against stability, AI, deviant art and mid journey for the use of stable diffusion blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same type deal. This is, hey, you’re using our stuff without our permission and your things and you know, we’re suing
⏹️ ▶️ John you over it. So, I don’t think this is the best way to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a reasonable way to deal with this technology, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in practice, you know, it takes a long time for lawmakers to grapple with an issue. It takes
⏹️ ▶️ John less time for people to decide to sue. And very often the courts get the first crack at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Different jurisdictions, different courts, different cases, different results, which may be
⏹️ ▶️ John appealed to higher courts and so on and so forth. But just to let you all know, the ball is
⏹️ ▶️ John rolling. And I’m sure we are in for years and years of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John until and unless the various laws of the lands get a grip on us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s going to be a really kind of messy and ever-moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for probably the next decade, at least, just the legality around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using copyrighted material for training in AI And whether that counts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as violating those copyrights without permission, or whether it’s the same as a human just viewing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then being able to create things in that style, I, again, I kind of lean towards the latter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we’ll see how it all works out, both legally and culturally. Those are such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unknowns right now. And I think whatever we say now, again, I think we’re going to look back in five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 10 years and be like, wow, we were so wrong in either direction. And I can’t really say where
⏹️ ▶️ John The Getty image one was fun because one of the, one of the images related to it, I don’t know if it was in this article that we’ll link
⏹️ ▶️ John or elsewhere, but it was like a generated image from stable diffusion
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And it had the big Getty images. Oh, it’s in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It had the big Getty
⏹️ ▶️ John images, like watermark logo over the thing, of course slightly mangled or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s where you get into existing law, like, you know, trade dress and trademark. It’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t sell an image that says Getty Images on it, because, you know, we have a trademark on
⏹️ ▶️ John Getty Images and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so like, that’s, you know, we’ll see how these court cases end up going,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you get the right judge and they can say, well, I don’t need to make up any kind of new law or new decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Our existing laws already cover this. And the fact that this is even possible, even though it’s like, we didn’t do it on purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t mean for it to show Getty Images, it just did. We can’t control it. And the judge is gonna be like, no, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell things with the Disney logo on them. You can’t sell things that say Getty Images across them if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting images. But, you know, stranger things have happened in court cases, so we’ll see how this goes.
CES: AirJet cooling module
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you are coming to us again, live from the CES show floor with one last tidbit.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like the back room type thing. This was like a YouTube video that I saw of like
⏹️ ▶️ John something off to the side somewhere. I just thought it was fascinating and maybe it’s like an existing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that has just been around for years, but this is the first I had heard of it. Solid state cooling.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is relevant to our lives because we’re gonna talk about some products soon that have microprocessors
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff in them that produce heat and they’re very thin. Solid-state cooling, no, solid-state
⏹️ ▶️ John active cooling is exactly what it sounds like. Active cooling means instead of just having, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of metal stuck to something with fins on it or whatever, and you just like, allows the ambient air
⏹️ ▶️ John to cool it, active cooling means something is actively cooling it, usually by
⏹️ ▶️ John moving that air across those fins with the use of a fan or if it’s active water cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John by pumping water to and from it, that’s active cooling. It’s distinct from passive cooling. Solid-state
⏹️ ▶️ John active cooling is Active cooling with quote-unquote solid-state
⏹️ ▶️ John technology as in like microchips and stuff It’s like well, how do you how do you actively cool something
⏹️ ▶️ John with like silicon microchip technology? Well this company whose name I have difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John pronouncing it is for or systems FRO RE
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a YouTube video where you see somebody also try to pronounce the thing anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what it looks like. Picture an SSD. Only it’s not an SSD, but it’s maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John like 2.8 millimeters thick and the same dimensions as an SSD, and it’s hollow inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And inside are a bunch of these little tiny MEMS, micro electric
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanical systems, M-E-M-S. I’ll put a link to the Wikipedia page on that. Tiny little silicon-based
⏹️ ▶️ John microscopic machines that vibrate, shoving air downward
⏹️ ▶️ John at up to 120 miles an hour. And it’s like little, little tiny, it’s kind of like what
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking about, there’s 5,000 micro lenses on the micro lens that lay on each pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are tiny microscopic little moving things on a piece of silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John that shove air downward onto the surface of a thing they want to cool. And so it’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like an SSD, but when you plug it in and apply power to it, air comes rushing
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it. It moves air without fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, is it really solid-state if it has moving parts though?
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, it’s solid-state in the sense that it uses like silicon, you know, tech, you know, the same kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John technology used to print circuits or whatever, but they’re actual machines, actual physical moving machines. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just very, very, very tight. They’re microscopic. Yeah, so you can quibble with it, but it’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like the actual, like the real solid-state active cooler is a thermoelectric plate or that, you know, the Peltier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those I mean they’re they’re hilariously inefficient, but they do actively cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean you can even get like little tiny desk fridges to Kind of cool a few cans of soda
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on your desk with the one of those Because you know they they
⏹️ ▶️ John do work, but you’re not moving the air then you’re just moving the heat That’s more like a heat pipe kind of I know it’s not the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John as you’re applying electricity But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s it’s I think there’s no question that a thermoelectric plate is active cooling It’s just doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in a really kind of weird and hilariously inefficient way
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the the deal with these things and why we might care about them is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make these pretty darn thin Right because I’m like a fan that has to be a certain thickness to
⏹️ ▶️ John you know Hit the air and move it these little guys work, you know with very little room Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s less than three millimeters high Still probably kind of thick to put on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of an SOC But you what you can do what they recommended in the video the thing is the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John or founder of the company was saying You’d have a heat pipe going from your hot chip, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d put this solid state cooler on top of the heat pipe. So this thing would
⏹️ ▶️ John be alongside the thing you’re cooling and it would just be a thin heat pipe connecting the things, you know, vapor chamber or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The specs in it are interesting. It produces more, what they call back pressure, more of
⏹️ ▶️ John a vacuum than a fan of equivalent size. It’s not even close. It’s like it’s like ten times times
⏹️ ▶️ John more pressure than a fan that is much larger than this. Noise-wise, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I care about, they call it completely silent. And it’s like 21 decibels or something. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John silent, right? Quiet. It’s quiet. Well, it does move air, so
⏹️ ▶️ John if the air hits something and makes noise, that could happen, but it’s going to be more quiet than a fan for
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, just because of the nature of how it works, all those tiny little things instead of a thing that’s, you know, spinning and all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. They claim that it is able to move air so powerfully that,
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of their big product claims, that you can dust seal the laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t have to have completely open areas for air to get sucked in and air to get pushed out. You can actually
⏹️ ▶️ John have filters there. Normally you can’t do that because the fan isn’t powerful enough to shove
⏹️ ▶️ John air through the filter, and so you end up with dust getting inside your laptop and gumming up the fan and everything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Now obviously dust will-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how like we’ve tried this before in the PC building worlds. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer is like you can suck air in through filters, but then the filters just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get filled full of dust. Like dust has to go
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. You may be moving the problem from one place to the other, but it’s possible to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if it moves air forcefully enough, it’s possible to have dust filters that are not self cleaning,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that you can, you know, that they’re placed in such a way that you can keep
⏹️ ▶️ John them reasonably clear I mean, it’s not going to be like the lint filter on your dryer that you have to like scrape a bunch of stuff off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll last a pretty long time. And I have had computers in the past that have had dust filter things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they do get clogged. But I’ve had them. I’ve had dust filters on computers that I haven’t cleaned for the
⏹️ ▶️ John life of the computer. And just, you know, when I was done with it, I put it away into the attic and it served for five years and
⏹️ ▶️ John never got cleaned. If you have a cat in your house, maybe that doesn’t work. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that, you’re going to pull a whole cat off of that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, remind me at some point to tell you how I destroyed Tiff’s office with a hilarious shop vac problem but
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re directional you got to make sure you get switches in the right direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no that wasn’t the problem yeah the problem was at some point I emptied her shop vac and did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not put a new bag or filter in it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then she used it to suck up really fine glass grinding dust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filled her office very quickly with this cloud of of fine white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hazardous powder. It was horrendous. Anyway, I had to get her a new shop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back that day. It was so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was. You need one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake. What are they called? They’re called Airjet. Not a great name. Anyway, this company has
⏹️ ▶️ John partners that they would. There’s partners on the website that are listed Intel Qualcomm. I forget the other company,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re all mysterious about who the partners might be. I look at this and I really hope Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the partners, because this would be great in a thin laptop. Now, the only thing I have questions about that
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t addressed in the video that we’re gonna show is, obviously this thing, like a fan, it takes power to
⏹️ ▶️ John remove power. And so this thing can, you know, removes 10.5 watts of heat
⏹️ ▶️ John by taking a maximum of 1.75 watts of power. He never said how that compares to how much power a fan takes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what is the ratio of like, you give a fan this many watts and it removes this many watts of heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if this is less efficient than a fan in terms of power consumption. And I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John about longevity. Obviously, this is a brand new technology. Are these things going to get gummed up? Are they going
⏹️ ▶️ John to break after a while? You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a it’s an unknown to me, at least. Maybe this is the type of technology that’s been around for ages in some other industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just now coming to personal computers, in which case there’s some background on it. And somebody who works in the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John will undoubtedly tell us later. But I was excited by seeing this, this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of off to the side at CES, not a big booth, not a flashy company, a startup
⏹️ ▶️ John that will probably be bought by somebody if their product is any good anyway. But you know, me and
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of cooling things without noise. And in this case, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fanless, but it still makes airflow through it. I think that’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a really cool concept. I do have some doubts about its use in computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in particular, because if they’re only showing off this 10.5 watt heat removal capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this one, like that’s not a lot for a computer chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s for laptops. They were clear about that in the interview. Like the interviewer was like, what about doing GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? And the guy was like, no, we can’t, like that’s too much. Like these, they’re very, very thing. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John the one you see here is the big one. The smaller one only removes like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five watts. That’s the thing, but even a big one, like even if the big one is 10 watt
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, these are all for like laptops, very thin laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not even for most laptops. That’s like, it’s for like, you know, the old MacBook Adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s removing that many watts in heat. It’s not saying the SoC has to consume that
⏹️ ▶️ John many. So it’s basically if you take like the, for example, if you put
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the small one of these in a MacBook Air would never throttle, right? Because right now the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air is fanless and it throttles. put the smallest one of these in there, no more throttling there.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could also probably clock up the MacBook Pro a little bit higher if you put one of these on in
⏹️ ▶️ John place of the fan, because it would be quiet and you could run it and move more air across it and now you
⏹️ ▶️ John can clock the thing up and make it a little bit hotter. That’s the application of these. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very tiny. Honestly, I think even the M1 fan-based systems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the M2 now, maybe the base M2 you could, but even the M2 Pro is way above 10 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think you cross that threshold pretty soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John These, the small one of these cool, you know, moves 10 times as much air
⏹️ ▶️ John as the fan that’s in the 16 inch MacBook Pro, you know what I mean? Right, so you could replace both
⏹️ ▶️ John of the fans. No way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you, they’re like, the cooling capacity of the MacBook Pro’s cooling system is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more than even two of these, like 20 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You should look it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet the SOC in there is over 50 watts at full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John load. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s how many watts of power that the SOC takes. It’s not how many watts of power the cooling system
⏹️ ▶️ John removes from it. That’s what you’re seeing here, is a measurement of how many watts of heat are removed
⏹️ ▶️ John from the thing by the cooling system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, OK, I think those numbers are more closely related than you think, but that’s fine. You could be right, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at any rate, I think this is going to be for low power devices. This is not going to be for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even mid-range laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it could definitely help on a mid-range laptop, especially if you put more than one of these things. Again, the number we need to know
⏹️ ▶️ John is power consumption. Right? They told you how many Pascals of back pressure and you can probably get that number for
⏹️ ▶️ John fans. Like what is the back pressure of the fan system? But what we don’t know is how
⏹️ ▶️ John much power do the fans take? Do the fans take 0.1 watts? Do they take five watts? Like, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of the equation is how much power do I have to put into the cooling system to take heat out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the system. So anyway, they’re, you know, they don’t look like they’re particularly close to coming to market,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll see. I’m sure there’ll be in a PC first and let’s Apple buys them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it was a fascinating technology and, uh, you know, the, the PC world discussion was pretty good. And they have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of videos on their website that I thought were very interesting. And yeah, to say that they shoot out air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 120 miles an hour or whatever, it’s just bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t shoot it out of the side. They shoot it downward at the thing they’re cooling at 120, at which point
⏹️ ▶️ John into it, breaks through the boundary layer, and then just tumbles out at a leisurely pace. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s not it’s not you know a an air laser that’s going to cut your finger off, but it does shove the air
⏹️ ▶️ John downward in that tiny one millimeter cavity at the thing they’re cooling very quickly. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those Dyson hand blade things. It’s like the the most awkward to use hand dryer ever in a bathroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You’ve seen the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco germ spreaders. Yeah, like really you basically you almost have to it’s like playing operation. You almost have to touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything on the way up and down, but maybe if you get a few of these together, maybe it could be a really weird
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Twitter killed third-party apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter decided to kill off all of the good third party Twitter clients.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A few days ago, I don’t remember exactly when it was, but a few days ago, all of a sudden Tweetbot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was showing authentication errors, Twitterific was showing errors, at least on iOS, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the desktop, and a few other clients, I don’t remember which ones offhand, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seemed pretty clear pretty quickly that this was likely to be a deliberate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey act, but nobody really knew. And then, I think it was yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Twitter developer account tweeted the following, Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is enforcing its longstanding API rules that may result in some apps not working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, cool. Thanks. Thanks, guys. That’s real helpful. Awesome. Well done. I really appreciate your hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work on that, really clearing things up for us. But yeah, it seems like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly Space Karen has made the call on this, it seems like Twitter’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut off all the good third-party clients and pour one out for Twitter because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t plan to use the official client because I know there are fans, fans amongst people I know and respect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I find their first-party client to be friggin’ terrible. So yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sucks. This sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been a lot of podcasts that came out earlier in the week that have already covered this pretty well in certain angles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think I agree with some of the large themes. Like, you know, Ben Thompson has been on the record for years basically saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Twitter probably should have killed third-party clients a long time ago. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you could make a case for that. You can make a case for this being, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable decision to have been made.
⏹️ ▶️ John the topic before you move on, I don’t actually agree with that. Like the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good to cut off third party clients, it makes sense only at the first level of
⏹️ ▶️ John logic and thinking about it. And the idea there is once Apple, once Twitter decided to go to an
⏹️ ▶️ John ad based model, since third party apps didn’t show ads and since Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John never added apps, added ads to the third party API, which they could have done by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, we need to control the client because if we’re gonna have an ad based business, people can skip ads if they can do third party clients whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like, Oh, well, see what once they chose that as their business model, it makes perfect sense to get rid of third party clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only if you think the only two factors here are third party clients don’t show ads,
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to show ads, therefore bad third party clients, but third party clients as they existed on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s more to them than just their clients that you people use, and they don’t see ads,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? First of all, so few people in terms of like percentage wise
⏹️ ▶️ John of Twitter’s customers, use third party clients, right? And you could say, well, that’s because they killed the
⏹️ ▶️ John API or whatever, but either way, even in their heyday, I feel like the first party client was massively
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant. So the third party client Twitter users, I mean, just, you know, for the people listening to this show,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet, like how many people use third party Twitter clients? We have probably one of the nerdier audience and I’m sure most people
⏹️ ▶️ John use the official client. There’s such a small number that they’re not really hurting your ad sales
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. And the people who are using those third party clients are probably more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the most engaged Twitter users. Maybe they produce the most content or whatever. Now I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this for a fact, but it is potentially the case that the people who are using the
⏹️ ▶️ John third party clients provide more value than they’re removing by not seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John ads because they’re already opting out of it. They weren’t gonna click on your ads anyway. And they may be
⏹️ ▶️ John providing value to the platform by adding content. That’s why I think that just the blanket idea that they
⏹️ ▶️ John should have killed them because they’re going ad based, doesn’t take into account that this was a tiny minority that was
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. It was a weird minority. And I said, like I said, I don’t know for a fact that they are weird, weird minority
⏹️ ▶️ John that is particularly lucrative or not, but it’s possible. And obviously only Twitter would
⏹️ ▶️ John know or Twitter back when they were competent and actually understood anything about their business and could look this up. When was that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ve been in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past. They had people when they had employees. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but when did they ever understand their business? I mean, that’s that’s I think asking a lot of the previous administration.
⏹️ ▶️ John like like because the third party things are just such a sideshow. Like it’s taken this long for Twitter to even bother doing
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about them. They’re just such a tiny sliver. But that tiny sliver had
⏹️ ▶️ John attributes about it. Like it had a history behind it. They were enthusiastic users. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John people who were doing complicated things with Twitter. Maybe they produce more content, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And and as Ben Thompson has also pointed out in his trajectory, They were also the tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John sliver that was probably the easiest to monetize because they were the most sent back in the day They were the most invested in the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John So you could have started charging them money and made the API good and charge for API usage and Georgia didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any of that but you know setting that aside I just feel like I The the accepted wisdom that they
⏹️ ▶️ John should have just got rid of all third-party clients when they went to advertising I don’t think it’s entirely a slam-dunk. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more nuance to it than that and only the The past, more competent Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John knows the answer to that because we don’t get to see the information on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I think you could make a case. I mean, look, I run a web service that has a private API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my app uses to talk to the web service. I frequently get requests from people who are like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when are you going to make an overcast API? I want to play with it or make my own alternative stuff or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my answer is, sorry, no, I’m not doing that. Like, I want to control what this does. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could see the argument for that. And you could also, you know, look, you could also say lots of other things like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how about leaving the third party API where it was, but just making it only available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to paid subscription members. Like, so if I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John use a Twitter app. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say, like, to monetize the API, they’re the easiest to monetize because they’re already invested.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, like I would have gladly, you know, assuming I was still using Twitter, you know, for other reasons, I would have gladly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid the 10 or 20 bucks a month per account to access it via API.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s like, you have to worry about like, the development costs to develop the functionality,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re never gonna make tons of money off them because they’re such a small sliver, but it also means that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John zero them out. Like whatever harm you think they’re doing to your ad business, you can cancel that out pretty easily
⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of different techniques to just say, well, these users were taking 1% of our
⏹️ ▶️ John ad revenue away. Can we get that back? Yeah, I can get 1.2% of the ad revenue they would have made back
⏹️ ▶️ John by charging for API. And now they’re just off to the side and that sits there. And even if you just ignore them and neglect them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not hurting your balance sheet anymore and you could allow it to exist. And it would
⏹️ ▶️ John produce goodwill and it’s all the historical baggage of API use of Twitter. Cause it’s not just arbitrary like, hey, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want an overcast API. Twitter grew up with the API. That API and those apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are an important part of Twitter’s history and the development of the platform. And the people who are using
⏹️ ▶️ John it are the most enthusiastic and engaged users because of that history. So it’s not in a vacuum
⏹️ ▶️ John like a business case, should we have an API, should we charge for it? In the specific case of Twitter, the API
⏹️ ▶️ John and the apps built around it really helped build the platform. I’m not saying they’re owed anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying it is the historical baggage of that means that those API
⏹️ ▶️ John users are not the same as the regular Twitter users. You know, in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John influence, engagement, ability to be monetized, they are kind of a special case. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways right for them to be treated as a special case for a long time. It’s just that they were treated as a special case of
⏹️ ▶️ John neglect. And now they’re treated as a special case of getting f**ked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over. Yeah. And wow, did they. I mean, talk about mishandling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a situation. I mean, this is, again, classic Elon Musk.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco toddler, let’s say. Because I can’t think of another.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you think of like a, try to think of it like an indie business, like a one person app, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John literal one person app, who has handled something this badly, like who
⏹️ ▶️ John has cut off some service that people were using for a decade
⏹️ ▶️ John with zero notice and zero communication. I can’t think of one. Zero notice, I could probably
⏹️ ▶️ John think of like, oh, some person got into a car accident, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John had to stop developing an app, and they just cut it off, and said, yeah, I’m sorry. You’re not getting your money back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t develop this app anymore. Sorry, I’m a one-person thing. Tough luck. But they would
⏹️ ▶️ John still communicate that. they would write a post on their blog and say, sorry, I can’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John on my cool app anymore. I also can’t give you the money back because I needed to pay my rent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, right? No, and this is like, this is- This is
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than that. Yeah. This is a multi-billion dollar company where they literally didn’t say anything. They didn’t even send
⏹️ ▶️ John a form email that said, yeah, we’re cutting off your app. Just literally nothing until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a week. At least like when the app store did you over, they tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they send you a form email that says, section 3.1.2 you’re violating blah blah blah. No, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John explain, but like you get something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even when it’s total BS, yeah, cause like, you know, no one knew for those first, you know, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of days, no one really knew whether the API just had like some downtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, cause that’s also plausible. But how many, you know, Twitter has been breaking in weird, subtle ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like, you know, it could have been just like, oh, something was messed up and no one knew. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, the way they did this, like I like how Jason Snell put it. Like he said, like it was, you know, not only was it like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, badly done, but it was also just cowardly. Like- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John dishonorable, cowardly, just terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, you know, just from my point of view as a user, Twitter to me has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always been the third party app I’m using. You know, for a while, I used Twitterific for a while, I used Tweety
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, and for most of the recent, last few years, I’ve been using Tweetbot. Like to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter is Tweetbot. If I would ever have to use the website, it almost felt like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was using a whole different, like foreign thing, cause it was so different. And so on some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level, I can kind of see if Twitter wants to have, you know, ultimate control over what their product is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can kind of see, well, if they look at an app, that’s a pretty different experience. I’ve never seen a Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad ever. All the new products they would launch and things they would try, all the trends and the followed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the hot hashtags or whatever. I never saw any of that crap. I had a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience of Twitter as a service. My experience of Twitter was TweetBot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so as a user, to have all of us who were having that experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or all the people who were using Twitterific, or whatever, any other apps that were cut off, to have us all of a sudden just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, you know what, screw that, now just use the Twitter app, like, to me, I mean, I was already gone, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if I wasn’t already gone, that would have been the last straw. I’m sorry, like, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna just jump from this nice experience that I’ve been having for like a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of a sudden jump into this total crap show of whatever their first party stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, which is so radically different. And so, again, not only was this poorly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, not only was this like the most cowardly chicken poop way to do this, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, you know, talk about like the quality of person you’re dealing with here. I mean, this shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst character.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like it’s like a little kid when they when they when they do something and don’t want to talk about it. Why would you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever, why would anybody ever build anything against Twitter again? Why would anybody ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invest in Twitter again? Hell, why would anybody ever advertise on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again? Like, you’re seeing the character of the person who now runs it. Every week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes by, he’s revealing himself to be a worse and worse person. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Trump was president, and you know, you know, we knew it was gonna be bad even at the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it just It seemed like every single day there was some new scandal and some new lows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we were reaching every day. And it was like, I can’t even believe how bad it- you know, every day you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can’t possibly be- get worse than yesterday. And then something would happen and it would get worse. That’s what-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what he is. Like, that- what- now that we have an Elon Twitter, he is revealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco himself to be that same level of terrible, incompetent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rash, cowardly, chicken-sh** person. He is so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some common moves, like there was a story a couple weeks ago of
⏹️ ▶️ John just like Trump didn’t like to pay his bills, Elon’s way of saving money is we’re just not gonna pay rent and we’re not gonna pay bills
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Aside from firing everybody and doing all that stuff, he’s just like, well, let’s just not pay rent because it’s gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ John a while for, it’s a calculation, it’s gonna take a while for this stuff to wind its way through the
⏹️ ▶️ John court and we’ll battle them and blah, blah, blah, we can save a lot of money right now by just not paying bills.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trump has famously would just not pay vendors for things. and say, oh, if you don’t like it, come sue me. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s so terrible. Like it’s, that’s why I keep trying to compare it to like the
⏹️ ▶️ John smallest possible thing. Forget about a multi-billion dollar company. Has any individual human, maybe that’s not fair because individual humans
⏹️ ▶️ John might feel like shame or guilt or something, but like even like a medium business, like just no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, you know, how bad somebody handles something, at least they own,
⏹️ ▶️ John like at least they communicate the fact that they’re doing something. This is, this is like, because we, to this day, we still
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually have any clear communication to any of these individual developers that the thing that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to them was intentional because that tweet doesn’t reference anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically. Oh, and that tweet also mischaracterizes it. Like they actually, like the tweet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, yeah, it said something along the lines of like, Oh, we’re, we’re, we’re enforcing our rules. Some, some apps might not work. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John first of all, like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t name any apps and it doesn’t say what rules. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also they weren’t breaking any rules. Like Twitter was, Twitter has changed the API rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years and the, and you know, these high quality apps that were using them had, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relationships with people in Twitter and they would go back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John forth. And they were all fired. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but they would make sure they were following whatever the rule as the rules would change. These apps would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work with Twitter and follow them. They were following all the rules. They were not breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any rules. So not only was this like poorly communicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, the current management, the current employees of Twitter probably don’t know what the rules are. That is one that was one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible theories is that like many of these apps had specific special deals because of the again
⏹️ ▶️ John the history that I was talking about before and the people who knew about those deals or knew where they were written down have
⏹️ ▶️ John long since been fired. But but again so pretend all that’s true and it’s just a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of new employees who don’t know any of this information like oh this rule says you’re only supposed to have 10 of these and you have 20
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to cut off your app. Okay then do that and be incompetent and then send out a
⏹️ ▶️ John form email that says we cut off your app because you had 10 of these 20 of these things and you’re you’re supposed to have 10, like communicate,
⏹️ ▶️ John tell people what you’re doing. Don’t just like secretly turn off the light, switch and run out of the room, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then put your fingers in your ears and go, la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la la la. Like we literally don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about this other than this one tweet that doesn’t address any individual app. So we just all have to assume
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a bunch of jerks, you’re too scared to say
⏹️ ▶️ John to the people that you did a thing and you’re just hoping it will go away. It’s like ghosting someone
⏹️ ▶️ John on text. It’s the closest thing I can come up with this is like I don’t want to deal with you anymore I’m just never going to respond to
⏹️ ▶️ John your text. I’m gonna block your number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it’s but with some implied slander as well
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it’s and it’s your fault because you did something wrong, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Yeah, not only am I not gonna talk to you But I’m gonna say in public that you broke the rules like that Yeah, but without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without naming you they could sue like I mean, they’re not going to of course But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you can’t the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John god like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are like he’s such a terrible person like I it just it just keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digging and digging like my god I I just I can’t believe how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is gonna go down I mean look couldn’t happen to a worse person right I mean maybe maybe he and Zuckerberg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get coffee sometime but like I I am so happy to see how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much not only how much money he’s losing but how much his reputation is just going down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the toilet Reputation
⏹️ ▶️ John is going up with sociopaths though. Yeah. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love him. I, and I say this as previously a very big Tesla fan, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see him fail. And you know, normally I’m not that much of a vindictive person, but he’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a sh**head. And he just keeps showing it more and more and more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will enjoy continuing to see him fail. And I feel bad for the people who were affected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along the way, but he deserves this. like Zuck, the amount of value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he has either lost, destroyed, or both, depending on how you characterize it, in such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a short time is astounding. And if he goes down in history as the person who lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most money the fastest, oh, that would be such sweet revenge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think probably he
⏹️ ▶️ John still has too much money to face any consequences for his actions, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the kind of place we live.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Tesla’s other shareholders might have different opinions on that, but we’ll see. We’ll see. person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, part of Tesla’s fall over the last few months has been because of other factors, you know, global factors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry factors and everything. But there’s also no doubt that a large part of it has been him and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he personally has done and the reputation that he personally is destroying of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco himself and his brand. And like, so, you know, there is no doubt that a large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the decline is his fault. And, you know, it sucks for the other Tesla investors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, there are very few people in the world who deserve to lose as much as he does right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m looking forward to his continuing unnecessary proving to the world that he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a terrible person, and also that he is super incompetent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll keep watching, but I’m watching from increasing distance. And yeah, I’m totally gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I don’t plan on looking at Twitter unless for some—I have a compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason to do so. I used to pop open TweetBot from time to time, just to make sure nothing was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on, and now, if I open a link to Twitter on my phone, and thus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the official app opens, then maybe I’ll pop into my notifications or something, but I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to Twitter actively at all anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I deleted it the other day, because I’m like, you know, I’m never gonna follow, who cares, if it opens up the webpage, fine, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s not a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, anyway, but what I’m saying, but because of what I was saying earlier about how my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience of Twitter the service has always really been tweet bot the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I switched over to Ivory, yes, I’m bragging about being in the Ivory beta and oh God, I’m dying for a Mac version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But- I’ll tell you what, I have tried every Mac client that everyone says is like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good Mac master on app. And I have yet to find one where that’s the case. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a separate day. If anybody has any recommendations that for some reason I haven’t tried yet, please let me know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to be able to manage multiple accounts and have a tab that can show mentions and not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combined mention and notifications. And it seems like none of the apps are really good at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or offer it at all. Some of them don’t offer it at all. Anyway, because my experience of Twitter was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TweetBot, really, once I got onto Ivory, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just TweetBot for Mastodon, basically, it was like a drop-in replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because almost everyone who I followed on Twitter was over on Mastodon already. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seriously, for me, it’s like a very large percentage of the people I followed on Twitter, like using a tool like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Movedodon, a very large percentage of them, I was able to just find and follow Mastodon very, very easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it was just a drop in replacement. And so it doesn’t actually feel any different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me now that I’m using Mastodon instead of Twitter. I was able to replace it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easily. And you know, this is part of the reason why companies like Twitter don’t like having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party clients because they don’t want someone else to be able to build an alternative network and have everyone just kind of scoot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right over there super easily. You know, they want to build more of a moat or whatever. But because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really wasn’t using Twitter the client, I was using Twitter the back end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was able to just move over and it’s fine. And the only hole in my formerly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter occupied user life is the Mac app. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving me nuts though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s bad, yeah. Like I’m just not even checking it until I’m on my phone at night or whatever. Which is great, it’s being,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly it’s being great for my productivity. Like I’ve been getting so much work done on my computer because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not constantly browsing Twitter on the side. But yeah, it’s, I am,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once we have a decent Mac Mastodon app I won’t feel like I’m missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. Like I’m already not missing Twitter itself. Like I’m kind of just missing the way things were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But once you have your app situation settled out, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t miss it at all and that’s where I am now. I don’t miss Twitter at all. And you know we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what happens whenever there’s like the next big world news event that’s breaking and you know you want to get up to date now now now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know that it might be a little bit different then and again and we don’t know how Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to scale you know community wise and you know certain things. certain things, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain challenges and potential pitfalls there. But as of now, it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the community I want to follow is already on Mastodon and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to me, I’m just like, all right, you know, peace out Twitter. I, you know, I, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need Twitter for anything anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John So part of this non non action, non announced BS,
⏹️ ▶️ John passive aggressive grade school nonsense that’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fact that not all third party Twitter clients were killed. Just some
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. It seems like it was probably the most popular, but who can say when the company
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t say a damn word about it. But anyway, what this means is that for me, because I still
⏹️ ▶️ John do use Twitter, because not everyone I follow is over on Macedon. I tried using the first party client. I
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I can’t do it. It’s, it’s, it’s terrible. It’s too bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, I can’t do it. So I just, there’s a bunch of other third party clients that are smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John third party clients that now I’m using them instead. And then, you know, we mentioned, alluded to this
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier, Twitter’s been not down, but differently
⏹️ ▶️ John functional, let’s say. Over the past several weeks. Gruber mentioned this. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just me until he mentioned it as well. Like, I look at my mentions, right? I’m a Twitter completionist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter doesn’t seem to be showing me my mentions anymore. forget about the official client, forget about the website,
⏹️ ▶️ John third party clients that don’t do any algorithmic anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, when I look at my mentions, there’s like nothing there. Gruber was getting in the situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John he was seeing like five mentions in the official first party app and 200
⏹️ ▶️ John in a third party app and 100 in a different third party app. It’s like broken. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, there’s no place you can go anymore to, if you, and obviously it’s just me, who cares,
⏹️ ▶️ John but my weird Twitter completionist things. If I wanna know that I’m seeing all the tweets in my timeline, it’s just literally not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible anymore because of Twitter’s semi-brokenness. But to the extent that I’m looking at Twitter at all, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it through different third-party applications. And the final F-you thing on this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter third-party app is, aside from, you know, destroying the livelihood of all these developers who have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John popular third-party Twitter applications there is an aspect to it that may actually end up costing them money
⏹️ ▶️ John because a lot of these applications are subscription type thing and you pay like an annual or monthly subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, if if someone paid for a subscription to that for a year and then two days
⏹️ ▶️ John later, the app was killed by an API change, they’re probably going to ask for a refund. And so now the
⏹️ ▶️ John developers have to give back the money that they thought they had because their app was killed by Twitter. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, to if it’s like an individual developer or a small group of developers, that can be a big financial
⏹️ ▶️ John hit. Hey, I thought I had all this money, but guess what? You got to give back, you know, this much of the revenue that you already
⏹️ ▶️ John thought you got, because Twitter killed your app and all the users who are using it now can’t who paid for a year of your
⏹️ ▶️ John service can’t get it. So they want their money back, or they want half their money back or something. That just it just sucks all
⏹️ ▶️ John around. So it’s not you know, this is not a victimless crime. It’s like, Oh, boo, you can’t use a Twitter client you like, the developers
⏹️ ▶️ John have their business killed, and the developers may owe money have to have to return money they
⏹️ ▶️ John thought they had as income. And it’s not like these are these developers are rolling around with, you know, Bugattis
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, they’re getting by selling a third party Twitter app, which is not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the big bucks. It’s not, you know, Candy Crush or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s the thing is like, is like, this is one of the reasons why the way they did it was so crappy, because like, in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular operating environment with a business run by adults and decent people, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give people warning and and you know, it’s something as major as we’re going to kill the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis for which your app is allowed to exist, you might give them a warning of like a year. You might say, all right, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this date next year, the API is turning off for apps like yours. Sorry, that’s it. Because what they were doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco despite the horrible, passive-aggressive message on the Twitter dev account, what these apps were doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was totally allowed. It was within the rules. It was permitted. It was explicitly permitted by Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were totally allowed to do what they were doing and monetize it and everything. So they were doing nothing wrong or unexpected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Twitter company.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had this really complicated system from back from the last time Twitter screwed with the API where they’re only allowed to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a maximum number of X customers, after that they can’t have any more. It was like this very draconian system
⏹️ ▶️ John that they had to work within where they would dole out a fixed number of tokens that you could sell. So it’s not even like it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John free-for-all like it was back in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old days. That’s why app.net launched. It was in response to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whole thing. Is that what it was? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John The last time Twitter tried to screw over third-party developers, it did it in a less crappy way than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And yeah, and remember like the four quadrant thing? It was a whole thing and it was a big scandal back then, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they at least, even then, even when they were being crappy back then, they did it in a much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable way. They gave dates, they
⏹️ ▶️ John They communicated their crappiness. Yeah, exactly. You didn’t have to guess. They didn’t just break one day and then they just said, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying anything. Nope, we don’t have a communications department. Don’t bother asking us any questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I’m glad we have happier news to talk about this week because I, yeah, the Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but again, I can’t urge this enough. Switch to Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, if you’re on Twitter, get off of it. I know there are certain communities and certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who haven’t moved off of it yet. You all, first of all, I’ll ask our audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two things on this topic. Number one, please move off of Twitter. Like, this is not a company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanna support. And especially, oh God, this person running it. Okay, and number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two, I would ask you, please, if you have a subscription to TweetBot or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitterific or any other Twitter apps that were just killed. Please don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask Apple for a refund on it. Look, these are small developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one could have foreseen this really. So, I mean, yeah, obviously cancel your subscription,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but don’t ask for a refund for the unused portion that now can’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s gonna really possibly hurt. And consider it your risk that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was taken also. and hopefully we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move on to better pastures.
Upgrade+: Filing bug reports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have one more piece of slightly unhappy follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I will end on a happy piece of follow-up. The unhappy-ish follow-up is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually follow-out to this week’s upgrade, actually specifically upgrade plus, episode 442,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zombie Arms and Toaster Fridge. In the very, very end in the members-only portion, Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Mike went on a tear about filing a feedback and oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baby, I was here for it. Oh, it was good. It was great. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to get myself riled up about this. I’m just going to move right along. But if you want to hear the two of them just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go off on how awful filing a feedback is, how obnoxious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is to hear that from Apple, and how it’s kind of victim blaming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it was so good. It was so good. So incredibly good. Upgrade Plus, which is the members only stuff, 442
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arms and toaster fridge, please. And thank you, and thank you, Mike and Jason for your service.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean that non-sarcastically. The only thing that bothers me is that Apple’s never going to hear this because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if any of Apple people are members of Upgrade. I hope they are. They should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. They really should be because it’s such a great program. But anyways, check it out.
Listeners in cool places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, the happy news from the listener Cool Places file, we got this, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if it was intended to be anonymous or not, but I will just assume it was intended to be anonymous. We got the following letter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I deployed last year aboard America’s fastest, deepest diving submarine and before leaving the pier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downloaded some older episodes to listen to offline underwater. Now that I’m back, I’m happy to say that ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has now been played some unspecified deep depth somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Most of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening time was spent as I exercised between the main steam piping just behind the reactor compartment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is heavily shielded from radiation, so no health worries there. When I return to shore, it was good to catch up on the episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I missed, since there’s zero connectivity with the outside world on a deployment. I just think this is so freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, and very timely, since we’re talking about Hunt for October, again, hp.fm.com. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you listen to the show in a weird, odd, unusual, or cool place, I feel like I’m channeling a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of hello, Internet, here, but I don’t care, let us know. I’d love to hear it. And I appreciate this anonymous listener
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if hello internet wants to stop us they can come back on the air
Sponsor: Lunch Pail VC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by the Lunch Pail VC Podcast.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Founders Fund and Semmel Shaw of Haystack approach decision making? The Lunch Pail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VC Podcast is a no BS look at the inner workings of the venture capital ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hosts Paul Martino of Bullpen Capital and Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins interview today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaders in VC about topics fundamental to any venture capitalist’s job. Learn about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything from how to leverage your network and source deals to how your fund size affects your strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Each week you can hear from top VCs like Anne Mirico of Floodgate, an investor in companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Lyft and Refinery29, and Matt Ocko of DCVC, whose prior investments include
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zoom, Uber, and AngelList. If you want to know more about who invests in the companies that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing our world and how deals are made. The LunchPail VC podcast is for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. That’s the LunchPail VC podcast. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Lunchpale VC podcast for sponsoring our show.
New Mac Minis, MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Apple has announced the new M2 Pro and M2 Max, MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, and then even before that the new M2 Pro, and I don’t, is there a Max? I don’t even remember. I don’t think there is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, no Max sadly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a new M2 Pro and M2 Mac Mini. So all sorts of new treats for everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we can start with the Mac Mini. It is a little bit bigger than the old one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, and it’s silver only, no space gray.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you say a little bit, you mean a little bit. I didn’t look up these numbers. I’m just trusting Dan Moore and his six
⏹️ ▶️ John colors, but 7.75 inches instead of 7.7? So weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John 1.41 inches high instead of 1.4? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought these Mac minis had been the same size for years now. It’s like, oh, the Intel one, then they switched to the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was the same case and blah, blah, blah. And then they make a new case and it’s slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you’re like making some really tightly fitting Mac mini jeans, like I don’t think you’re gonna notice this
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the rack mount people, but like it’s, the reason it’s weird is because it’s not like it was cramped
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. Like the M1 Mac mini was hilariously spacious. Like you’d open it up and it was just this little
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny motherboard and this giant cooler and power supply and it was just, and the M2 one is a little bit less
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, but it’s not like it was tight in there. I would love to know what in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world happened to this computer that it needed to get 0.01 inches bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John on a side. Like what? I can’t wait to see the teardown. Like did they,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, did they buy a third party thing that needed that extra 0.01 inch? So weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it looks the same on the outside. Just this, I mean, and these products are pretty straightforward, but of all the things,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the one that baffles me the most. The Mac mini changing size in a tiny, tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoiler alert, but the same thing happened to the HomePod for what it’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, the Humpod’s a totally new design. And the laptops, when they get a little bit thicker, like, you know, I understand that. Like, things are
⏹️ ▶️ John so tight in a laptop. Like, every little fraction of a millimeter counts or whatever. But the Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the Mac Pro getting.01 inches bigger or something, like in the current case. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what did you not have room for in there? It’s just a little, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, regardless. So silver only, no space gray. There is an optional 10 gig ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for 100 bucks. Yeah, that’s not new. I thought it was new, but apparently that was already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. I was gonna say that’s not the new, but it is the same. The M2 starts at 600 bones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight gigs RAM, 256 gig SSD. And that’s $100 less than before, right? For the
⏹️ ▶️ John old M1 one. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an M1 one, but I don’t remember what I paid. And I think I got it refurbed anyway. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, the M2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro in the Mac mini, which is exciting, $1,300. You get a 10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM, 512 gig SSD. You can upgrade it from 10 to 12 core CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 300 bucks. You get anywhere between six and eight performance cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four efficiency cores, anywhere between 16 and 19 GPU cores, the 16-core neural engine, 200 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second memory bandwidth versus 100 gigs a second in the regular M2. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get 16 or 32 gigs RAM. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M1 Pro by comparison was same amount of performance cores and efficiency cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same cores on the neural engine, but 14 to 16 GPU cores instead of 16 to 19, same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM profile. And again, in this case, you get four Thunderbolt 4 ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is exciting and perhaps more interesting than anything else, no more Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini, which is very, very exciting as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is great. This is like the one, you know, when people would look at the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon transition, everyone knows we haven’t done the Mac Pro yet, but most people quickly forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there was actually still an Intel Mac Mini also in the lineup because the Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it covered it from the 2018 update. It went from being a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an only low end product prior to that, to in 2018, becoming a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product that had some low end options, but also went pretty, pretty solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the mid range performance territory and had some really great higher-end chip options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. And that was not replaced when the M1 Mac Mini came out. They only had the lower-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuration with the M1. And it took until now, now that we have, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 generation, now that we have the M2 Pro variant, that was the first time they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really replaced what was still the only Intel one in the lineup, which was kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher-end CPU options and more ports and more Thunderbolt bandwidth and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we have that role filled, leaving only the Mac Pro unfilled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is great. I mean, when they first made the Mac Mini, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of mid-range performance level in 2018, that was a pretty big move. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really gave that product a lot of life and really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was able to be a lot of people’s desktops and servers and accessory roles, things like that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a great product. And so to have that finally be like really fulfilled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Apple Silicon era is really nice. So I’m really happy to see this. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at, what would it take, suppose you wanted to have a bunch of Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compute power in a data center or a server situation or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the Mac Studio, you look at the other Mac minis, this is actually a pretty great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal for the amount of processing and GPU power that you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per dollar in that kind of environment. So it looks great. The bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version with the Pro has four USB-C, Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have more bandwidth, more ports, higher RAM ceiling, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more processor power. Thermals are gonna be a question mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until we actually get these devices. I do worry maybe it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be loud with the fan Or maybe it will throttle, I don’t know. It probably won’t throttle, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be loud under heavy load like the Mac Studio. I don’t know, but we’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have high hopes, and I’m really happy to see the Mac Mini and where it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what they’ve been able to do with Apple Silicon. I’m very, very happy with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John To be clear, the M2 Pro is not on a new process size. It’s the same as the M2 as far as we
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell. It’s five nanometer. I know they have variants of the 5 nanometer processor or whatever, but it’s not 3 nanometers what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting at. So the power consumption would be what you would expect from an M2 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has more of the M2 stuff in it, more cores, more GPU cores, so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the thermal conditions inside of MacMini are too rough, unless they totally screwed up the
⏹️ ▶️ John cooler like they did on the MacStudio, it should be fine probably. These are good machines, they’re straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the fact that it’s an M2 Pro. I guess they didn’t put an M2 Max in there, maybe because of cooling, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’d start sort of going into the Mac Studio territory, and you just wanna separate the lines a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is fine. The price drop on the low-end M2 one is nice, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with these Mac minis is, as always, like I feel like this, I don’t know why I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ John more on the Mac mini than other things, maybe because they don’t come with a screen, or a keyboard, or anything else, like it’s just the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it always highlights to me just how disconnected from
⏹️ ▶️ John cost of materials the upgrades on these are, right? So if you don’t want a base config,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything you can add to this costs money that, it’s just all pure profit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you want to go from eight gigabytes of memory to 24, it’s an extra $400, what planet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s special memories on the SOC, so whatever. If you want to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to add 256 gigabytes of storage, so it comes with 256, but if you wanna go to 512, the additional 256 gigs of SSD storage is 200 bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not how these things, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John profit, it’s what the market will bear, I understand that, but speccing one of these up to the way you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John want it, especially when it comes to storage, like oh, you want a two terabyte drive? Add $800 to the price. A
⏹️ ▶️ John two terabyte SSD does not cost $800. It’s actually a 1.75 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD because the 256 comes for free. This is $800 above, it’s just, the pricing is brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we just like suck it up because it’s like, hey, it’s a cool computer, it’s a Mac mini, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how much they cost or whatever. But I do feel like on the Mac mini, because there is nothing else in the
⏹️ ▶️ John equation and it’s just a box that you’re not going to touch or manipulate, it’s just like an elemental
⏹️ ▶️ John slab, a container for Apple’s like 75% margins on its upgrades. Right? Which is
⏹️ ▶️ John just brutal, right? And that’s not the fault of this generation or this chip. It’s just the way
⏹️ ▶️ John things are on the Mac and it kind of burns me up a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel? I know I’m excited about this. I have an M1 Mac mini that’s running Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and channels and in some of my Docker containers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am excited that this exists. I have been extremely satisfied with my M1 Mac mini which is a 2020
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model that I bought, what is it, mid to late last year. I am not presently looking to upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you have any M1 or any Mac minis of any sort actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have any, I’ve never had a reason to use a Mac mini. I think they’re cool machines. And, you know, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with the arm ones being so fast and, you know, so quiet and cool, like they’re, it’s a great machine if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John had a use of one. I suppose maybe if I didn’t have a Synology, but I had like rolled my own Synology type
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I would probably have a Mac mini hooked up to a bunch of something, but I do have a Synology. So no, no Mac minis in my
⏹️ ▶️ John life. Or maybe if there was no Apple TV, I’d have one hooked up to my TV at this point, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Marco, I don’t recall, do you have one still? I know you have and then have and then have and have and have memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco What is your current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still technically own the one that was being the iSCSI host to my Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many, many years. I have since retired that role. But it’s still just like sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my TV cabinet in Westchester. You know, it’s like the old, I think it’s like a 2015 or 2016 model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s quite old by today’s standards and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, runs a very ancient version of Mac OS. And then I did briefly use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M1 Mac Mini as my desktop for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey during that transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was great. And then it lived in the water closet and then I traded it into Apple. Nice, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the other role this fulfills. Like now that there is an M2 Pro, one of these, but there’s still no big,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast iMac. And in fact, the iMac is still on the M1, let alone any variant of the M2. You get an M2 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these, and you hook it up to an Apple Studio display and you have a, you know, a, what do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Deconstructed iMac, essentially. For probably a little bit more money because, you know, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac mini is pretty expensive once you spec it up and that monitor is not cheap, but you get a full, well, not a full Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John system. You still have to buy a mouse and a keyboard, I suppose. But anyway, that’s a pretty good system because an M2 Pro Mac mini is
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be no slouch. The Apple Studio Display is nice if you ignore the camera and it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stuff. And so they, I feel like they’re filling, this is, you know, the hole in the market that we were talking about back
⏹️ ▶️ John when they didn’t have the big iMac. now they have something there. The M2 Pro Mini fills that pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ John until they can get off their butt and deal with the iMac. Which it seems like they’re, you know, is the iMac gonna skip a generation and
⏹️ ▶️ John the next iMac we’re gonna see has an M3 in it? Maybe, but like the, you know, and those iMacs are
⏹️ ▶️ John great. I see them in the Apple store all the time and the M1 is no slouch. Like it’s not a bad computer by any stretch, but
⏹️ ▶️ John as the rest of the line sort of leaves it behind, be nice if they looked back at that iMac line and came
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Because when that line came out, it was like, wow, these are great machines. like for the price and the features and the size,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s, you know, no complaints about them, but as they age and of course stay the same price
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the Apple way, they’re starting to get left behind now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and frankly, I mean, I think the studio display, I think is too expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have studio display and Mac mini be an iMac replacement for a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna replace the 24 inch for sure, but like the 27, like a 5K iMac, spec’d out
⏹️ ▶️ John 5k. Let’s do the math. So like if you get a decent M2 Pro Mac mini with like a one terabyte SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John and like 32 gigs of RAM, that’s $2,200 and $1,600. That’s about the
⏹️ ▶️ John territory. It’s a little bit more maybe than like a good 5k iMac with similar specs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John plus you have two separate boxes, right? So it’s not horrendous, but it’s it’s the people who are buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a 24 inch iMac are not in the market for a $3,700 computer or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, Mac Mini, thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco also not ordering anything at this time. I’m sorry, with regard to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini, I know you’re ordering some stuff, but with regard to the Mac Mini, no orders at this time. I did not order a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini. Okay. All right, now let’s talk laptops. The time has finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come. You know, I had ordered the laptop that I’m using to speak to you fine gentlemen right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d ordered this laptop, you know, whenever it was announced in like October, November of 2021, is that right? Yes, 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it has been probably the best Mac I’ve ever used ever since.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had been living well over a year in bliss with nothing better on, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had come out and made this thing look like a piece of garbage. Until today, it is now a piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not really. But this is the replacement for my M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max, 14-inch MacBook Pro. We have the 14, 16 inch M1, or excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pros. The 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch MacBook Pro is a touch thinner at 0.06 inches instead of 0.061 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the 14 inch M2 Max adds 0.1 pounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interestingly, and I really want to find an excuse to spend the money on these, even though it’s completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasteful because I don’t need it. But interestingly, they have color-matched MagSafe charging cables now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really awesome. And that is not something that I should be bothered by. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say I’m bothered by the fact that I don’t have a color-matched MagSafe cable, but I would have preferred a color-matched
⏹️ ▶️ John they metal-matched as well? By color-matched, I mean like the braided cable itself is colored to match your
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But the other complaint was that the metal part of the MagSafe connector was always silver, even if you got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gray one. Ah, that’s true. Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I believe they fixed that after the Airs launched, because when the new Airs launched,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they finally made color matched MagSafe cables for the different metal colors. And then they swapped those for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. I believe, and I don’t know if they even did it for the old Pros, but because these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros came out after those cables began to exist, that’s why the new Pros have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So in any case, the M2 Max, eight performance cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John is a weird thing about this. The M1 Max had eight performance cores and
⏹️ ▶️ John two efficiency cores. And the M2 Max has more stuff than the, obviously the cores are
⏹️ ▶️ John different, it’s got the M2 cores or whatever, right? But it has two more efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. Instead of adding power cores, like this is the Max chip, it’s like for performance
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, they had more transistors to spend. And the way they decided to spend them
⏹️ ▶️ John was keep the number of performance cores the same, but add two more efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly, this, again, John, you don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting right here, there’s a Mac studio right there. I know all about efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m gonna be saying like- But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t know for two reasons. Number one, you’re still using a Mac Pro. Number two, you don’t run iStat menus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you don’t know. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know that on Apple Silicon Macs, a lot of tasks are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delegated to those efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what the efficiency cores do, but I’m saying it’s on the M2 Macs when you’ve got transistors to
⏹️ ▶️ John spend. Like, was it hurting for efficiency cores? Did it need more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s a battery saving thing because like, oh, I don’t want anything to be running on the power cores unless I’m doing serious work, so I need more
⏹️ ▶️ John efficiency cores. Makes some vague sense, but the reason I’m saying this is because that
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Max, I look at it and I don’t see just the chip that’s gonna be in this laptop, but I also see the
⏹️ ▶️ John chip that’s gonna eventually be shoved head to head with another M2 Max to make the M2 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John in the studio and whatever the hell they’re gonna do in the Mac Pro. And then I think you’re gonna be over subscribed
⏹️ ▶️ John on efficiency cores as you start tacking these things together. So maybe for a laptop makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s an interesting choice. One of the theories I’d heard about this that makes some sense is I think every,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the M chips entirely with the exception of the, maybe all the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, I think they’re all gonna have four efficiency cores per unit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that makes it easier in terms of scheduling to just say, oh, we’re always gonna have four efficiency cores and the whole M2
⏹️ ▶️ John things, you know, for each building block, there’s four efficiency cores. Shouldn’t make that much of a difference,
⏹️ ▶️ John the scheduler will work it out as it is, but it’s an interesting choice, and it really, I feel like, shows
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple is thinking about its silicon. They’re not thinking about the Mac Studio, they’re certainly not thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro, because that’s just too many damn efficiency cores. Like, if they ever did make that quad thing that we just
⏹️ ▶️ John said in a past show that they basically, the rumor was they canceled it, you know how many friggin’ efficiency cores there were?
⏹️ ▶️ John There would just be too many. You’d have to just be running background jobs to occupy them, right? Because when you do any serious
⏹️ ▶️ John work, it’s gonna wander around them on the power cores and there’s gonna be like, you know, 30 of those or whatever, however
⏹️ ▶️ John many there are gonna be, but you’d have all these efficiency cores just milling around, looking at each other, twirling their thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John going, you got anything to do? No, I’m just doing nothing. Maybe a cron job will run sometime, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like me and 15 of my friends here. And it’s because, like we talked before, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a cookie cutter thing. You get each building block has X performance cores and why efficiency cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just a lot of damn efficiency cores. And to be clear, the efficiency cores are good. They’re not crappy. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really amazing. They’re also really very efficient, but at a certain point, you just get too many of them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I thought that was interesting, an interesting choice with the M2 Max. We’ll have to wait until people
⏹️ ▶️ John do the benchmarking and everything, because like they showed in the little diagram, the M2 Max is bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than the M1 Max, but not horrendously bigger. It’s the same process. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more stuff in it. The M2 core performance cores are a little bit bigger than the M1 performance cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a little bit more stuff. I think they cut back on the, I didn’t write this down in the notes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they, for the video processing, it doesn’t have, like the M1 Max had like
⏹️ ▶️ John double the number of video encode decode things, and the M2 Max doesn’t have double, it just has one
⏹️ ▶️ John of each, but I think the one of each that it has are better. I’m sure this will all shake out in the benchmark.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s just interesting to see how they shuffle the, shuffle the blocks on the floor plan to be, to
⏹️ ▶️ John make slightly different choices than the M1 Max. Presumably, these choices were made informed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the M1 Max and the experience with that, but it’s a really nice apples to apples comparison because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same process. So the only thing that they had in mind is, let’s take another bite
⏹️ ▶️ John of that apple. We have a similar footprint and a similar power envelope to try to make a better
⏹️ ▶️ John chip than the M1 Max. And what they chose to do was add efficiency cores, make all
⏹️ ▶️ John their cores a little bit better. I think this does not, Remember the rumor, I don’t know if we talked about it on
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, of like, there was supposed to be a new GPU architecture for the A16 that got canned, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like a rare miss for the Apple Silicon team. Like it was gonna have this all new GPU cores, they were gonna be amazing, and they just couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do it because it was taking too much power, so the A16 just got the regular GPU cores. As far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John these M2 Macs and Pro also don’t have any radical new GPU cores, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really straightforward apples to apples. let’s just massage
⏹️ ▶️ John the very similar guts to the M1 Max to try to make a better chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s claims are all in the ballpark of like, 20% faster at this, you know, 30% faster is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll wait until people start getting these and start doing the hardcore benchmarks to see, like in real world applications, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what you’re doing, how much better is the M2 Max than the M1 Max? And how does
⏹️ ▶️ John it do on battery life? And that’s, did we mention that already? I forget where the Apple made the claim, but for one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John machines, Apple made the claim that it was like the longest battery life of any Mac they’d ever made. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco remember which one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these ones it was? Yeah, that was for the 16 inch. And it’s basically, it went from like 21 hours of whatever test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re basing this on to 22. So it’s a little bit longer than the one I have, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Max or Pro, whatever. The M1 16 inch, it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And they didn’t make that battery bigger because they can’t, it’s as big.
⏹️ ▶️ John as big, I believe it is right up against the 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like 99.5 watt hours, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the chip is the same process, a five nanometer, again, maybe a tweaked version of it. So any savings
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re getting, any power savings that they’re getting with this setup, it’s not by removing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, because the M2 Max has more stuff in it. It has more transistors, it has more cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has mostly more stuff in it than the M1 Max. It’s all just about efficiency gains of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the cores are a little bit more efficient, maybe the video encode decode blocks are a little bit more power efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John at doing the same job as the old ones are. It’s just, you know, so the claim’s like, wow, amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life. It probably is better than the old one, but don’t expect it to be radically different. The other one was already
⏹️ ▶️ John great. This one is also great. I feel like they just, you know, added 0.05% to the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the new champion, right? But it’s not anything, it’s not like a, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge leap like the M1 was over the Intel things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So just real quick, the M2 Max, like we were starting to say, four efficiency cores instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of two, 30 to 38 GPU cores instead of the M1 Max’s 24 to 32.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think perhaps most interestingly on these machines other than the standard spec bumps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it now has, John, help me out. It’s like HDMI 2.1, do I have that right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John skipped over one other important thing, 96 gigs of RAM. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I totally missed that. On the 16
⏹️ ▶️ John inch only, the 16 inch, but I’m sure they could have, whatever, they’re segmented in a line. The 16
⏹️ ▶️ John inch, you can get 96 gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, not on the 14.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not on the 14 as far as I could tell. And which is kind of weird, whatever. And I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John all just done through increasing the density of the chips. Like it’s not like it has additional RAM chips. If you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the SoC with the little RAM chips around the side, like little ears, it’s just higher density RAM chips, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the speeds are the same, there’s just more of it, right? And again, looking at this and thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offers it by the way, 14 has 96 as well. You need the M2 Max, but- Oh, there you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John go, maybe I just picked the wrong-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s also true on the 16. All right, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so 96 is your RAM. look at this and you think, well, this is what the M2, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the max RAM on the M2 Ultra gonna be, right, what is it gonna be on the Mac Pro? The 96 gig sort of telegraphs
⏹️ ▶️ John where things are going that direction. And it’s a nice, I was happy about that. Like I didn’t mention on the Mac mini as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the M2, well, the M2 already had 24 gigs RAM, so that’s not big, but like bumping up the RAM ceilings,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though these are otherwise quote unquote, boring upgrades, oh, you have slightly better cores and
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more of them, whatever. But bumping up the RAM ceiling, I think is important because it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not gonna say, oh, 16 gigs will be enough for anybody forever, and the Pro machines can have 64, no one wants
⏹️ ▶️ John more than that. It’s like, no, please, more, give more. And so the M2 Macs, on their top-end laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get 96 gigs, I give that a huge thumbs up. Despite the fact that I’m now afraid to go to the configurator and see how much
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna cost, it’s probably ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, but it’s just, again, this is just one more continuation of these, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Pro and Mac versions of these that came out, whatever it was, 18 months ago, whatever that was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing that not only is this computer amazing, but that the 14-inch and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 16-inch have the same options and the same performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 16-inch, and the only differences are bigger screen, bigger battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bigger cooling capacity of the 16-inch. And so, but you can get, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the size of a 14-inch MacBook Pro and that machine is available with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest CPU, 96 gigs of RAM, eight terabytes storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s, that’s incredible. And, and, you know, and I’ll tell you, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had both of these laptops now for whatever it’s been. When did these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out? 18 months ago, whatever it was. These are incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines. I am so happy with them. Oh, the 16 inch also has a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better acoustics, just cause of the larger speakers. But it’s, even the 14 inch speakers pretty incredible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what for what size they are. Like these are these are incredible machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have been so happy. I still am incredibly happy with my 16 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as my desktop laptop and then when I you know when I travel I usually do bring it so I can have you know all my work stuff with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this computer so much. I’ve still now you know even now almost a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year and a half in I’ve still never heard a peep from the fan except for that one time I was training an ML model. Other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’ve never heard the fan in any other usage. It is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine. It’s been rock solid for me, living most of its life in clamshell mode. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has just been an incredible machine. I am, I, I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco envy of the Mac studio. I don’t have any envy of anything else in the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Like, and so what they have done is taken these two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing computers and now made them a little bit better. And so the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s still amazing. They did a speed bump update. That’s all we’ve asked them to do for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, for most of their products. They did an amazing, you know, an amazing job with these machines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the first place, you know, a year and a half ago, and now they’re a little bit better with, you know, improvements with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. That’s great. I am just, I’m so, so happy that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing such an amazing job at what I think is probably their most important Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because this is their highest end, you know, laptop product, like I said, in the Mac mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John these, you know, the upgrade prices feel more egregious, but you know, they’ve got the 96
⏹️ ▶️ John gig RAM option. That is, to be clear, it is adding 64 gigs of RAM. And if you want an additional 64
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM, that’s $800 extra. I know it’s special RAM, but on no planet does 64 gigs of RAM cost $800. Similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the eight terabyte SSD is, please add $2,200. Big Martians.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco full complete machine. That used to be a lot more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. This is the full complete machine. And also, despite the fact that Marco uses it in clamshell, these screens are pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing on these laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Up to 1,600 nits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just totally tiny, thin little things that have amazing color and amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR. It helps that they’re small so they can do the brightness across the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. But they’re very impressive. And like, we’ll have to see how the heat
⏹️ ▶️ John goes on these because the MacBook Airs with the M2 were a little bit sweatier than the M1 ones, but we’ll wait to see
⏹️ ▶️ John people exercise these. I think they’ll be similar, because again, if you look at the, how big is the M2 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M2 Pro compared to the M1 counterparts, they’re similar in size. I don’t think it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John radically different. I do think that if they are a little bit hotter,
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of adds value to Marco’s computer and Casey’s, because like the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1s are, that’s not gonna happen anytime soon again, with that kind of leap from the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John to the M1. And because the M1 was so amazing, and because they were so low power, and because they were
⏹️ ▶️ John put into enclosures that were so overmatched for the amount of heat they produced, it was just ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas now I think, over time, I feel like Apple is going to start creeping back up to the idea of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have so much thermal headroom, can we push performance a little bit more? Which I think is appropriate on the highest end laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like, you know, on the M4 16 inch MacBook Pro, you may be able to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the fans audible more than Marco Cannon and his M1, you know, MacBook Pro right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you though, I mean, there’s so much headroom in this design that I already have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the new one- For the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 though. I know, but like I’m saying, there’s so much headroom. Because like now that I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was doing the ML training, like now that I know what it takes to get the fan to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audible, like it took me maxing out the CPU and GPU for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four hours before I could hear the fan. Like it takes a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even make, and it wasn’t loud, it just became audible at that point. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of headroom in this design. So even if the M2 version runs like 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hotter, like that’s not gonna be enough to make it that different, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so John, tell me about the HDMI differences in these machines.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so confusing. I was trying to figure out like, Do they upgrade HDMI 2.1? I don’t see that term used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thought, but maybe I’m making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that up. Yeah, I don’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as we discussed on past shows, HDMI 2.1, whatever consortium defines
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing, recently changed it so that you can essentially claim HDMI 2.1 compliance, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you only use the HDMI 2.0 subset of the features. Like HDMI 2.1 is like a cafeteria thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you wanna support this? Everything is optional. Support that, that, that. So you can’t just look at something and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.1, I know what that is. You have to look at all the fine print and see all the different things. Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even seem to claim HDMI 2.1, but what they do say in extremely confusingly worded passages
⏹️ ▶️ John on their webpages, which I will now read, that if you get an M2 Pro in your MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can power, quote, up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60
⏹️ ▶️ John hertz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144 hertz over HDMI. So again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they’re giving these combinations is like it’s just one SoC with a bunch of video stuff in there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to basically decide how many things do you plug into your Mac and through what connectors and then
⏹️ ▶️ John what can their maximum resolutions be. It can also drive one external display at 8K
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution at 60 hertz or one external display at 4K resolution at 240 hertz over HDMI. 240 hertz over HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John is not part of the HDMI 2.0 spec, I believe, but they don’t claim HDMI 2.1.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, these are the specs, right? So the point is, you couldn’t, I don’t think you could drive
⏹️ ▶️ John 8K at all before, and now you can drive 4K at really high refresh rates. Apple doesn’t sell a 240 Hertz monitor, but other
⏹️ ▶️ John people do. So, you know, if you want to buy that and run the three games that run on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, run well on the Mac, you could do that. And then on the M2 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do up to four external displays, up to three external displays with 6K resolution at 60 Hertz over
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt, and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144 Hertz over HDMI,
⏹️ ▶️ John or up to three external displays, up to two external displays, six cameras, 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John and one external display with up to 8K resolution at 60 Hertz, or one external display at
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K resolution at 240 Hertz over HDMI. We need parentheses. Clear as day. We need
⏹️ ▶️ John parentheses to disambiguate because the precedence rules of English are not that clear, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not entirely clear. Anyway, the whole point is, all these machines can power monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John at higher resolutions, at higher refresh rates than the past. So another good thing to see, because like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the guts of this is not a radically new GPU or anything like that, but they can do more better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the M1 variants when it comes to video driving. So I’m glad to see like the specs
⏹️ ▶️ John are being pushed at in all directions, because they didn’t have to change like how many
⏹️ ▶️ John displays they could drive. It’s not like the past one was like, oh, I can’t drive enough displays for my 16 inch MacBook Pro. It was fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was fine for a laptop. Like you’re not expecting 12 displays out of it or whatever. but they pushed it, 8K, higher
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh rates. Again, even though Apple does not sell any monitors, they do that, yet, please,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Pretty impressive update all around. The only question mark
⏹️ ▶️ John on these entire machines is, what are the thermals and noise like compared to the M1 ones
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have some big shoes to fill. But the performance, it looks like it’s going to be a nice speed bump and a nice spec bump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. So I have not ordered one. Sitting here now, I don’t plan to. I know a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times I say that, it’s very unusual that I decide to change my mind on a $5,000 computer. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to sit this one out, but Marco, what’s your intention?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they said in the video, they specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called it Xcode and they said up to 25% faster than the previous ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, my productivity is limited by my brain not compiles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. And, you know, there are different times in my developer life where that that factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those factors are different but yeah right now 25% is a decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount but there’s an up to before it and it’s for large projects and you know my project I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know building Photoshop or anything so I’m gonna sit this one out but it’s only because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am just so damn happy with my m1 max 16-inch MacBook Pro that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I you know the difference going from the m1 to the m2 is not significant enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my I need to justify all that expense and hassle and everything. But if for some reason I needed a new desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop today, I would a hundred percent jump on this. But yeah, I just, what I have now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so close and so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that. I feel like the M1 line of computers is going to go down in history as like, those are the good ones. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think, you know, not only the leap from the previous generation, but just because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so sort of like overpowered for the electricity they consume.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do believe that Apple will start pushing the envelope with the M2, M3, M4 and on upwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John that holding onto an M1 may be a good idea if you don’t desperately need the
⏹️ ▶️ John performance bump. And in terms of, you know, like compiling 25% faster or whatever, if you’re not a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might think, oh, Marco says he has a small program, so he doesn’t care about that a little extra time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you may not really appreciate the scale, like how big do programs get and how
⏹️ ▶️ John long do they take to compile? Marco’s thing takes a minute or two to compile. Who cares if I shave 25% off
⏹️ ▶️ John that? Maybe a big program will take five minutes, right? No, big programs don’t take five minutes as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to one minute. Big programs take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. Yeah. For a clean
⏹️ ▶️ John build, right? When you start giving numbers like that, and if your build takes a half an hour and we
⏹️ ▶️ John say we can save you 25%, yeah. You’re upgrading from the M1 to the M2 to get that. Because 25% of a
⏹️ ▶️ John half an hour, we’re starting to talk about real time, right? and
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t doing clean builds, obviously doing incremental builds, but the range of how
⏹️ ▶️ John long it might take to do a task has wide, it’s bigger than you think it is, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s orders of magnitude, not just compiling, but whatever your task is, encoding video or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doing small things can be done in a minute or two, and those percentages seem meaningless. But once you get into taking,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, half an hour, two hours, multiple hours, even a 1% gain is worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what the high-end market is like. people who are willing to replace, not throw
⏹️ ▶️ John out, but trade in a perfectly good computer for one that is a few percent faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will do that if that few percent literally saves you hours a day.
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New HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I know why, Marco, you haven’t bought any of these machines, and it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s finally happened. You finally run out of money because how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of the new HomePod have you bought? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are there any left for any of
⏹️ ▶️ John us? You’re going to stockpile them in the basement like cheese graters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I was I was patting myself on the back for not buying a MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought did you buy a Baker’s dozen a half dozen? How many home pods? Have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you first of all, can we just pause for a minute? Can you believe this happened? Can you believe we got our new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size home phone
⏹️ ▶️ John because we talked about the rumor on a past episode?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but look, there’s rumors about a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t actually come out.
⏹️ ▶️ John once you talk about them in this show, they’re going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, is that how it is? Once
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors bubble up to the point where we’re willing to talk about it on this show, it’s probably going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to happen. All right, so let’s pause. The dirty secret
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everybody. So there is a new HomePod, a big HomePod. It’s $300, which is $50 cheaper. It’s still a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, to be clear, the old big HomePod, while it was officially $350, for most of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life was kind of backdoor discounted to $300 through Best Buy and other retailers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work closely with Apple. So it was, the old one was basically 300 for most of its life. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this new one, 2mm shorter, 2mm wider, 2 tenths of a kilogram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lighter, but more interestingly, it has 5 tweeters instead of 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has 4 microphones instead of 6. The I.O., the, the, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 802.11n, I can’t even keep up with what’s most modern these days. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason for that. Oh, okay. So, yeah, everyone’s complaining that it doesn’t have like 802.11ac at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least or whatever, you you know, AX or Wi-Fi 6, 6E, 6X, whatever, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason for this is because the old HomePod was based on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A8 processor from, I mean, what the hell is that, the iPhone 3GS? Like, it’s some ancient,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s not that, but it’s, you know, some like ancient phone model, and it was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow. And for a device that has no screen, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is, you know, some deal of GPU power that’s being wasted there. The CPUs are super old and slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when the HomePod Mini came out, the HomePod Mini used an Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SoC. It uses, I believe, I believe the Mini uses the S5 or S6 SoC. I think the S5. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which makes a lot more sense because you figure like, okay, it’s a kind of higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spec processor, smaller, cheaper, and less GPU power than a phone chip would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you don’t need those things in a speaker chip, but you do need something like a little bit more modern,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a little bit faster cores, a little bit more like, you know, Siri compatible, you know, processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. And so, they, with the HomePod Mini, they moved the watch to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they moved the HomePod to the watch’s tech stack on the hardware end, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re continuing this now with the new big HomePod. It’s very similar in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those, like, tech spec capabilities to the HomePod Mini. And that’s a very good thing, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The old HomePod had horrendously slow processor performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this because I still use them every day. I’ve gone through a few, you know, since they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep flaking out and dying, but I still use them every day in my kitchen. I use a stereo pair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the bugginess is just comical. The performance is just comical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, they’re so slow to respond to anything. They’re so buggy. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so unreliable. And a lot of that is just because, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old, buggy hardware. The old HomePods had a few physical design flaws, like there was a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacitor, or something like that. People who know more than I do about electronics have spotted, like there’s a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware flaws that slowly killed them over time. But the biggest thing for me as a HomePod user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been, they’re just ungodly slow. Also Siri sucks, but that’s a separate discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, they’re just so slow. And I also have some HomePod minis in the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rooms of my house, and the HomePod minis are way more responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not even close. It’s night and day difference. Like, they sound way worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re much smaller. They only have, you know, one speaker in them basically, and it’s a much simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper device. But you deal with the HomePod mini, and you deal with the big HomePod, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference in responsiveness is night and day. So, no question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch SoCs for this use are way faster than using a really old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone chip. And so, the new HomePod, the new big HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually faster. It uses… So, in the Watch SoC land, the S6, 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 8 are all basically the same processor. The HomePod Mini uses the S5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right before those, and the S6 is faster than the S7, and this new HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses the S7. So, it’s basically one processor step faster than the HomePod Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason it only has 802.11 WiFi is that the Apple Watch only has 802.11 WiFi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of them, even the currently, even the nicest Apple Watches today only have 802.11N WiFi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because 802.11ac I think requires like larger antennas and has higher power and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything and everything about the Apple Watch is all about saving power. And the Apple Watch hardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever uses its Wi-Fi capability. Which by the way, it’s so funny, literally 48
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours ago, I was drafting a blog post. I was going to make my first post on my blog in, you know, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been a year, I don’t know. And what it was going to be about is like a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small software changes that I wish Apple would make to some of its product lines to make them dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And one of them was about the Apple Watch. I was about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, I wish they would give a preference or a setting somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple Watch where you could say, prefer Wi-Fi over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth to my phone for internet connectivity. Because if you’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used an Apple Watch when it could not reach its phone via Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was still on Wi-Fi, it’s a radically different experience. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way faster to do anything over the network. But Apple Watches, because they’re so power constrained,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so radically so, everything with the Apple Watch design is all about saving power, because of that, the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch still to this day, it makes a network request. If your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is within Bluetooth range, it will communicate the network request through your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via Bluetooth and have your phone use its Wi-Fi with its bigger battery to actually go to the network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Bluetooth is way slower than Wi-Fi. And in my experience with the Apple Watch, way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less reliable as well. And so that’s why things like syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music or podcasts directly to your Apple Watch, if you wanna listen to them away from your phone, syncing them over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes forever unless you turn off Bluetooth on your phone. And then the transfers go way faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the watch is then forced to use Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth. Anyway, the other day, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was doing some Siri stuff on my watch, I was setting some timers, and my phone was way out of range, I forget why, I think it was rebooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a software update or something, but my phone was unavailable, and Siri on the watch was remarkably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast when it was using Wi-Fi. So, the watch has the processing power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it when it’s using Wi-Fi, but the watch usually does not use Wi-Fi to conserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery power. Anyway, this new HomePod, which is restricted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only to 802.11n because it only has the watch hardware, it will be plugged into the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will always have power, and it, as far as I know, doesn’t have Bluetooth, or at least won’t be using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that part of the chip if for some reason it’s built into the SoC or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John does have Bluetooth. It has Bluetooth 5.0. Oh, crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, but it’s plugged into the wall, so presumably it will be always connected to Wi-Fi and will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always use that for network requests. And so if you’ve ever used an Apple Watch that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is using the WiFi for the network, you can see like, wow, for Siri, it actually is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsive. So that’s why this device only has 802.11n, I think, is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s using the watch hardware. It’s also, look, for this kind of device, like, the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in bandwidth and things between 802.11n and 802.11ac or later, I don’t think you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna notice this difference in most situations in most people’s homes. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s a thing that matters, really.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the only thing that’s ever gonna have to be due is streaming music, which is never gonna take up, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a finite amount of bandwidth, even at lossless. You can do the math and say maximum, even
⏹️ ▶️ John the silly audio file, highest bit rate, lossless, you know, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s the worst case scenario. And then downloading software updates, which is, you know, asynchronous, and
⏹️ ▶️ John no one is ever waiting for it, right? That’s it. It’s not like the Apple TV, which, you know, people who don’t have ethernet to their
⏹️ ▶️ John TV are relying on that to stream video, and the quality of video is just going up over time
⏹️ ▶️ John as services get more and more daring in terms of the highest bitrate they’re willing to vend. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wanting your HomePod to have the best wifi, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John standard doesn’t make any sense unless there’s something your HomePod is doing that requires more
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth or lower latency or both than 802.11n and I can’t think of a single thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so yeah, so that’s, you know, that’s the thing people are picking on about the specs but that doesn’t matter at all in practice for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of product. It’ll be fine. But anyway, what I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most excited about is that faster chip. And for two reasons. Number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just because it’s way, way faster. And that’s the biggest thing. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what we are most likely to notice most often. Because again, trying to do anything with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old first-gen HomePod is so slow. Not even just Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even dealing with AirPlay. Like, when you’re trying to send music to it, oh my god, it’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be 15 seconds before you get anything to play, and even then it might fail. Like, it just… it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow to do anything. It does hear you remarkably well, and then takes forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to execute the command that you told it to do, and… and fails a lot, you know. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s… that’s gonna be the number one thing that I’m looking forward to, is the speed. Um, I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly concerned about the decontenting of the audio gear inside. You know, it has fewer tweeters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer microphones. That being said, the old one was, I think, overspec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those areas. And given what Apple was able to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio quality and microphone quality wise with the HomePod mini, which has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less hardware inside of it. I’m confident that they’re proud. They probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a pretty good job with this. Um, the woofer looks like it’s probably the same. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, they don’t come out and say that it’s the same, but it It looks like it’s like the same size. It’s the same placement inside. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at like the PR photo of like the X-ray view of the guts inside of it, how things are laid out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can look at that same view from the previous HomePod from like old blog posts and everything. And it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very similar internal structure, very similar layout, just a few fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts inside, like a couple fewer tweeters and things like that. So it’s probably gonna sound really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably gonna be way more responsive. And the second reason I’m excited about it basically being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a juiced up HomePod Mini, is that the HomePod Mini kind of runs a different software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack too. Like when the first HomePod came out, I believe internally it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was running something called Audio OS or Audio OS or something like that. And I think when the HomePod Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, it was actually running different software. And then I think over time, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly merged a little bit, but the HomePod Mini always had better and more reliable features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and implementations the big home pod did. Now this will unify them, they now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be running basically the same guts and have basically the same hardware capabilities and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things you know like there’s a there the thread rate or excuse me matter radio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the you know the temperature sensor like it’s it’s going to be running all the same stuff and so that’s more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also to make the software more reliable over time you know Apple is only going to have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware platform to target here, running similar processor, otherwise same hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s more likely to be more reliable over time. Because the other problem with the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it’s not an area of significant focus for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re going to neglect it. They’re going to put the B team on parts of it. It’s going to be a low priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to have a lot of bugs that don’t get fixed for a long time. And so the less work you give them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better. So to have a unified hardware ecosystem and software ecosystem around this product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they did a pretty bad job managing the first HomePod’s software ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The HomePod Mini, they’ve been doing a better job. So this will be lumped in with the HomePod Mini in terms of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will take Apple to maintain it and keep it updated over time. And so that is more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to result in good outcomes for owners. And again, and you know, look, I wish their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware lasted longer. I wish the first generation one didn’t have as many problems as it did. I wish they didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this premium priced product that they put a slow processor in, even at the time it was slow. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but hey, they, the first gen HomePod is in many ways like the first gen Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it proved to have some good ideas, but you saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some significant benefits from the first couple of hardware revisions after it. Right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully this is gonna be really good. It remains to be seen, you know, whether it still sounds as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the fewer speakers or whatever, I think it’s gonna be pretty good. So I ordered a pair of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco White, of course, white is clearly the better color. I will take,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I will hear no- Oh, is it, Marco? I will hear no alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No dissenting opinions on that because if you think black HomePods are better, you’re just wrong. The white ones are so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so I got a pair of white ones and if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, you know, maybe I’ll replace one more pair that I have still in operation, that’s barely working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I started started with one pair, we’ll see how it goes. But I’m, I’m so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this product is being updated. When the first HomePod launched at 350.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We all made fun of a few pretty big flaws about it, you know, number one, it was it was too expensive for the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And number two, it didn’t have a line in and you know, it lacked a lot of, you know, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of enthusiast features. Siri was super slow and and unreliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stupid compared to Alexa or Google Assistant. And you look at the competitive market today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they brought the price down a little, but what makes the price easier to take is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s the HomePod mini, and it’s doing fine. It’s a hundred bucks. It’s, I think, one of the best values
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple’s lineup. It’s a pretty good small speaker. It sounds way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any other small speakers from all the other companies. Like, you know, the other companies have better sounding bigger speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but their small ones, they don’t even come close. And I think the HomePod mini, I think is a success.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s not taking over the world, but I think it’s an overall successful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product that they’re doing a pretty good job with. Comes in a bunch of fun colors, good for them, you know. Now that the HomePod mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists and is doing fine, I think the pricing pressure for the bigger one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is greatly relieved because it is not the only option. So they can actually make it a premium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And in that premium market, not only is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little competition, but the competition that’s there is more expensive by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good amount. You know, like if you actually want something that is like smallish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tastefully designed, but has the audio performance of this big HomePod, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna find much. And the little that you will find is gonna be, you know, from like the boutique brands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like B&O or is it name, Naeem, I don’t know how it’s pronounced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re all way more expensive. So what they deliver here, assuming that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good as the first one in terms of audio quality, and assuming that it has the performance of the HomePod mini, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its responsiveness, should be a pretty great product. It’s not gonna be for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone, because not everybody wants a $300 smart speaker, let alone a stereo pair of them, which I think is still gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prove to be awesome. But again, I would challenge you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend $600 for the stereo pair of this. Try to spend anywhere near that money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on anything that sounds better at this size, you won’t find it. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly at any size. Like, they’re that good if you’re in that market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still retain the capabilities of being used as speakers for Apple TVs. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried that, but I know people have, and it seems to work well for people from what I’ve heard. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we talk a little bit more about that? I did not realize, apparently I was supposed to know, maybe we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it on this very program and I forgot, But apparently even the HomePod mini, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original HomePods could work in concert with an Apple TV to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, and to receive eARC from the TV and then broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to the HomePod. So let me translate that into English. You could be watching or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing a video game, like playing your PlayStation on your TV or watching your table box on your TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if your TV supports eARC, it would send the audio to the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you’re not doing anything else with the Apple TV, the Apple TV is otherwise idle. It will send the audio to the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the Apple TV will rebroadcast to your HomePods such that your HomePods can be your TV speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew that you could have the Apple TV for Apple TV stuff broadcast everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the HomePods. I had no idea that you could do this in the same style that my Sonos setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does where whatever it is you’re watching on the TV will be broadcast to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePods. and I was talking about this on Mastodon today, and as with all things, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half the feedback I got was yes, it works pretty consistently, but not perfectly, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latency is great, and half the feedback I got was, yes, this is something you can do, but the latency is awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, in this scenario, your Apple TV is acting as like a little software-powered
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey essentially. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Right, but unlike an actual receiver, Apple does not have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird controls for messing with the delay and everything, And you know, yes, we talked, as we talked about in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing we were talking about syncing stuff up, the HDMI spec itself has some synchronization stuff in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but setups can be wonky. And so I feel like the people, the reason you get that disparity is sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John the automatic synchronization, latency, blah, blah, blah, HDMI stuff works fine with people’s setup. And other
⏹️ ▶️ John times it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, Apple has not yet added all the little picky features
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix it and go through that whole thing that I described on a past episode. So I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John understand that. And I think the reason you don’t remember it is because we just talked about it in the context of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just gonna use my, like when Apple, the HomePod first came out, I’m just gonna use my HomePods as
⏹️ ▶️ John my TV speakers. And you didn’t think about what that meant, but what that meant was like, no, whatever I
⏹️ ▶️ John watch on my TV, the sound comes out of the HomePods. And the only way that that work is with that feature that they introduced like a
⏹️ ▶️ John year or so ago that basically uses your Apple TV as a little miniature software powered receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John to do ERC, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah. Yeah, yeah, that’s why Casey, this is why you didn’t know about this feature because it wasn’t there at launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the previous ones. It was added later in software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gotcha. We should also mention very quickly that these things support spatial audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They also added sound recognition for smoke alarms or carbon monoxide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alarms, and it can send a notification to your devices, which is pretty cool, although that’s coming apparently in the spring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a great feature if it works well, but again, it isn’t out yet, so we won’t know yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s coming out in the spring. Stereo pairs require the same generation of HomePod. you can’t take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an old one and a new one and pair them, which I mean, that’s not surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’ve just got the old one and I might even consider a new one if I could pair them, but I can’t and now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, you know. And I understand why, I mean, there’s software reasons why, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also hardware reasons if you’re gonna have a pair of speakers if one of them has different number of drivers and the other it’s a little bit weird, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’d like I get it, but it’s kind of a shame. You know, looking at this product, the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that strikes me about it is how Apple has not really rethought
⏹️ ▶️ John the HomePod. Not at all. Like, it’s kind of like you mentioned the Series Zero watch. Imagine if the
⏹️ ▶️ John follow-up to the Series Zero watch came like years later. Like they just didn’t do anything. People wondered if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ever gonna make another watch again, and they came out with a new one, and it looked like the Series One, or what was the one after the
⏹️ ▶️ John Series Zero? It was just called Series One, or was it called Series Two?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this confused everybody. There was the Apple watch with no name, with no number, which we called the Series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zero. Then the next year they released two models called Series 1 and Series 2, which had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same processor as each other. But so there’s one called the Series 1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was really part of the second generation family of Apple Watch. Like it’s like Xbox naming, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John But similarly, like when those watches came out, they didn’t rethink the Apple Watch. They were very much like the Series 0,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is the same way. This product is not like the current generation of
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros, where they’re like, We screwed up we’re gonna put a good keyboard and an SD card slot an HDMI port
⏹️ ▶️ John No, this thing does not have audio input. You cannot use these as speaker. The power cord is not removable
⏹️ ▶️ John Like none of that stuff. They didn’t do any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is removable. I thought we
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s remote. Alright, so on the original generation home pod, the power cord is also removable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just hard Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really supposed to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it Yeah, cuz I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John used a standard plug you would have to pass the you know UL labs whatever in the United States to like it
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they didn’t do that So it’s not user removable and then they had that allows them to sidestep having to put an ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John like standards compliance safety compliant plug Right, so that’s why it’s technically But anyway The point is like
⏹️ ▶️ John this product is not does not have a bunch of ports on the back People aren’t going to buy this to just use
⏹️ ▶️ John it to Marco’s point like what if I just want a really good sounding spear? Can I use these as just good sounding speakers? No, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you need there’s a software component. It needs to be airplay needs to go through your Apple TV blah blah blah They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not just stereo components. They’re not so they didn’t rethink that the other way They didn’t rethink it although
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re kind of leaning in that direction is they didn’t do the thing that we’ve always wanted the different Just is like
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, can you make something? It’s like my whole home hub make it my Wi-Fi hub make it my home
⏹️ ▶️ John kit thing Make it my Siri thing make it play music blah blah blah. They didn’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they kind of like, okay Well, what if we put temperature and humidity sensors on there? No, it’s not a home
⏹️ ▶️ John device it’s still just a speaker, but they’re small, we can put them in there. And then if you hear your smoke
⏹️ ▶️ John detector go off, it’ll do something. And it is plugged in all the time, so it probably will be your HomeKit hub unless the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV steals it from it. Like, they’re not ready to say, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John new hub for your house. Because first of all, as we all know, if it was gonna be the hub for your house, it would have to be a Wi-Fi mesh network
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Apple left that space a long time ago and seems not interested in going back into it. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John do still do a HomeKit thing. And this is looking slightly more home kitty,
⏹️ ▶️ John thread radio, temperature sensor. You can talk to it to control stuff in your home,
⏹️ ▶️ John but predominantly it is still the product it was, which is basically a wireless speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John that integrates with Apple stuff. That sounds really good, but I feel like they’re leaving money on the
⏹️ ▶️ John table by not doing a little bit to make this a potential purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who aren’t super duper bought into the Apple ecosystem, but just want a good speaker, and also to give it longevity,
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming this thing doesn’t burn out like that one does with the bad, you know, whatever. I was like a bad diode,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bad amplifier.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s some like fatal flaw, some weird uncharacteristic from Apple fatal flaw in the
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePods that makes them the original generation of HomePods. So hopefully this one is better there. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is the rate of development of the HomePod, it’s going to be a long time before this thing goes in any direction. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s leaning in one direction or the other, it is not leaning in the direction of, This is a good speaker for people to buy who are into
⏹️ ▶️ John audio, like in terms of like outside the Apple ecosystem, but it is leaning a little bit into this is like your home
⏹️ ▶️ John hub, which I think it’s fine. Like I don’t expect this thing to sprout a screen anytime soon or anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is plugged in all the time and it’s probably in a nice location in your home and it’s just sitting there. And so why
⏹️ ▶️ John not have it keep track of temperature and humidity, right? Why not have it, you know, speak to it to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John the lights on and off or whatever. I know Marco, you’re excited that the S7
⏹️ ▶️ John is way faster than the old chip. But I look at this and I say, it’s $300 and the best we
⏹️ ▶️ John could get was a watch chip. I’m sure it’ll be great. I’m sure it’ll be fine. But if this thing is going to sort of grow into being
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual home hub, when the Apple TV, what does the Apple TV have now? A15 or something in it? The Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV is like so massively overpowered compared to this thing. And it’s so tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I think if you had to elect something in your house to be your home hub, which I don’t actually know if you can do that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it just picks on its own or there’s some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, as far as I can tell, you have no control over that. Like it’ll tell you which device is the current Home Hub,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can’t pick it as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I had to elect one, I’d elect the thing with an A15 in it, but it would be kind of cool if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple eventually figured out what the HomePod’s gonna be when it grows up. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John now, what it is is the second generation of the exact product that they made before. It’s just, they
⏹️ ▶️ John took a long vacation in between to like, I don’t know, think about stuff for a while. And because if
⏹️ ▶️ John this had come out like a year after the HomePod, we’d be like, oh, the next HomePod out and it’s better than the first one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco probably wouldn’t have even had time to have all of his fail because he just would have replaced him with the new one anyway. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then we would move on. But there was this weird time in the wilderness where they didn’t know what they were gonna do. And they came out of the wilderness
⏹️ ▶️ John and they said, let’s just do what we did before. And so there you have it. They did what they did before, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better. And I’m kind of disappointed in the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that they didn’t sort of take the lessons of the pre other than the reliability ones we hope to, you know, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way that the laptops with the lessons of the previous line of laptops that people had complaints about. I mean, one of the lessons
⏹️ ▶️ John says you said Marco’s like, maybe the lesson was we should have a cheap one and they do now. So great, like, you know, and then we don’t have to worry so much about the
⏹️ ▶️ John price. But then they decontented this one to save 50 bucks. You know, if it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John just as good, then good, you know, you made it cheaper and it sounds just as good, you know, so that’s fine. But we’ll see. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t feel like they, they took there are lots of lessons they could have taken from the original HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of, again, picking two directions, to go more into the generic audio device direction
⏹️ ▶️ John or to go more in the Home Hub direction. And it seems like they leaned a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit in the Home Hub direction but then just stopped and said, it’s just another HomePod, it’s a big one, and it replaces
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous big one. And presumably because of the synergies of the platform with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini, they’re more committed to this big one than they were to the other one. Like this may be the new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John mini in terms of like the product that never gets updated setting aside the Mac Pro. The Mac mini used to be like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the product that was like, oh, we got a new Mac mini, probably won’t be another more three years. Maybe that’s the HomePod now, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, at this point, like, I’m just happy that they are still continuing this product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. You know, I, yes, my
⏹️ ▶️ John Resumed, I wouldn’t say they’re continuing it, they resumed it. They stopped, I feel like they stopped
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they resumed, right? It’s not, there’s definitely a gap there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, and we don’t necessarily know the reasons why they stopped it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re all breaking, that might have something to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and they also stopped it in kind of early COVID days. And so it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have had to do with supply chain, you know, because maybe some, maybe the A8 they were manufacturing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they couldn’t get any more of those made. You know, if you look at what chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple ships in their current product line, over the last 18 months or so, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have dramatically eliminated products that were using older chips. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of their product line now is using a is using the same very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of very modern chips. You know, different levels of them for sure. But if you look around like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the old stuff that was using like, you know, old A12s or whatever, those are all gone from the lineup. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have systematically replaced all of that old stuff over the last, you know, 18 months or so. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it could have had to do do with chip supply issues, it could have had to do with the hardware failures, whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was. I don’t necessarily, like we can’t really necessarily know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they killed the old HomePod that they were saying, well that didn’t work. You know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was really just like we can’t replace this yet, but we can’t keep selling this one because of reason XYZ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’ll just, you know, go without it for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even before they killed it, they weren’t updating it. Like it just kind of sat there. sat
⏹️ ▶️ John there long enough for the ones in the field to start to fail due to like heat issues or components
⏹️ ▶️ John burning out, right? And then they stopped selling it. And so it was just, it definitely doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like even when they came out with the Mini, they weren’t, you know, they didn’t have a new version of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Ready Then, like it wasn’t, it obviously wasn’t part of their grand plan for
⏹️ ▶️ John this product line until, I feel like the Mini was like, look, if the Mini doesn’t go anywhere, then we’re just bailing
⏹️ ▶️ John on this whole thing. But I guess the Mini was successful enough. They said, ah, we should probably do the big one. It’s so hard to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John from the outside with the timelines and these things, but it definitely doesn’t look like a coordinated effort to say, we did the big one, we learned
⏹️ ▶️ John some lessons, now we’re gonna try again. And what they tried again was with the mini. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like that was enough for them to go for the big one again. But there was definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John a period of time where they were not committed to the idea that the big HomePod would remain a product
⏹️ ▶️ John in a lineup and get updates on some regular interval. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John glad they have come back to it, but like I said, I’m a little bit disappointed they’ve come back to it with basically the same thinking as before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but again, I think, you know, looking again, this is not a high priority product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line for Apple. So, you know, we don’t want them to be too ambitious if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can’t keep up. You know, and again, this is, this is setting the bar pretty low, you know, this is going in with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty low expectations, but it’s also realistic. Apple is not very good at multitasking, even as the company has gotten so much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last decade, they’re they’re still not good at multitasking and managing, you know, many different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product lines sufficiently. So, if this is what they can give us, I’ll take this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over abandonment. You know, this is much better. And yeah, down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are still some pretty significant holes in the HomePod lineup. What I would most like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, some kind of like HomePod port or HomePod amp kind of thing, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could have the HomePod functionality with maybe like a microphone unit, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of line output to be able to drive any speakers you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a HomePod-like functionality leading the way. That would be great. And then secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love some kind of portable battery-powered HomePod. You could bring it out onto your deck or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be great too. Or, you know, and I understand, you know, those are relatively specialized use cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, you know, already, like products exist to kind of hack that on now.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you need to get a Rivian. It comes with one of those. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. No, but like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently have. Like there’s some $30 Amazon battery base thing from some no-name company. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco party speakers, someone on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking about party speakers. That’s a whole thing now. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not like the RGB festooned gaming PCs, but it’s a similar vibe where they just
⏹️ ▶️ John take basically a big battery-powered speaker, but they make it look ridiculous with like chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John and shiny things and colors and vents and wings. It’s just, it’s a party speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is actually a surprisingly big market, and I think Sony’s doing really well there. Anyway, but like, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the Amazon Echo series of products, they learned pretty early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that this was a thing people do. And so like the Echo that I bought two years ago, the little like ball one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which otherwise has been total garbage, and like they kept failing, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a totally garbage product. But that product comes with on the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it a little tripod screw mount hole, and little pogo pins. And other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies can make battery, and they have, made battery bases for it. The product directly supports it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no hacks. It literally screws into the tripod mount so it mounts itself to the bottom, it powers it through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those pogo pins. Like, Amazon designed the Echo with this use case in mind for people to make these accessories.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a similar thing for the HomePod Mini. You know, the HomePod Mini makes no effort to enable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, And so you have to like, run the cable of the HomePod out the back into this thing, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loop it around, bunch it all up, because it’s like this fixed-length cable, and then you have- and then like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to like wrap around the HomePod Mini with these big plastic, like, clamp things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it dramatically reduces the sound quality, because some part of how it’s designed to resonate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work well with this, and so like, it makes it sound like garbage, but it does work. And actually, the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini is way better at this than the Amazon Alexa thing, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Alexa thing, when you pick it up and move it, it does not do well with transitioning to a different Wi-Fi node,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a multi-point Wi-Fi setup. The Echo just drops it and fails. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as soon as you bring it outside, if it switches to a new AP, you gotta reboot the Echo for it to work. Whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod works perfectly. It transitions between the Wi-Fi access points perfectly. It’s fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s responsive. Like the HomePod Mini, I’m saying. So the HomePod Mini is a great product for this, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just makes no effort to enable it whatsoever. So like this is the kind of thing like if Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep making the HomePod product line, keep developing it further, I would again, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to have those two products. A battery-powered portable option that you could bring out onto your deck or whatever, your front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are, whatever it is, and also some kind of like HomePod with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line out that you can connect your own speakers to because that way, you know, if you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have speakers that are good, use them. Or if Apple’s, you know, if Apple starts to make speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck, or if they have some part of their product line that they’re not filling very well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that product helps fill those gaps. Kind of like the Mac mini. It’s like you can fill in the gaps that you’re not thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of because they’re not mass market enough, but everyone has something like that. So I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to see those down the road, but for now, I am very, very happy that we have a new HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, and I can’t wait to get it. I’m not getting it until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first deliveries are February 3rd, so I’m not getting it for a few weeks, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh man, I’m looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this doesn’t matter to you, but is the Echo actually waterproof? Doesn’t matter to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t use it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the rain. No, what I’m saying, for outdoor, those party speakers, not that all the party speakers are
⏹️ ▶️ John waterproof, but I feel like a battery-powered portable thing would probably have to be significantly
⏹️ ▶️ John more water-resistant, let’s say, than any of the HomePods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, I’ll tell you, I’ve been using the HomePod Mini that way for maybe half a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John year. See, I told
⏹️ ▶️ John you it didn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so right. I don’t leave it out all the time. Like it’s different from, you know, a camera’s out there all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A HomePod Mini, I bring it out if we’re like gonna be hanging out there and then I bring it inside afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, it’s the HomePod, and I’m telling you, the HomePod Mini, in its stupid little battery thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so, even in this terrible contraption from this cheapo Amazon brand that actually makes it sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse than when it’s not in it, it still sounds better than every portable Sonos thing. I’ve trust, trust me, I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all. Sounds better than all of those. It sounds better than every JBL thing I’ve seen. sounds better than that little B&O thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like the little leather handle on top. Like I’ve heard all these things. The HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini can beat them all if Apple chooses to address this market. They can literally just make a HomePod mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a battery base and they would destroy this market. But I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna do it. That’s not really their style of thing to do, but I wish they would. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I’m happy with what I have so far. I hope they continue to expand this line. And ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really, really hope that this new HomePod is as much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsive with Siri as I think it’ll be with this new chip. And look, and we can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into Siri another day. Siri is still comically bad compared to its competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s a whole different thing, but that’s probably a whole different part of the company as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll pick on them some other day. But for now, super happy with the HomePod update. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it yet, but I don’t think it’s gonna be bad in person. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’m gonna be really happy with it when I get it. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sofa, and the Lunch Pail VC podcast. And thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join at adp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
Belkin iPhone camera mount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, just very quickly, I wanted to give an update for something that I don’t think anyone even realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don’t think I talked about it. But I ordered one of those Belkin—I don’t even know the name of this thing, and I’m going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig up the name and the link for the show notes, but suffice to say, the Belkin doodad that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put on top of your studio display so the camera isn’t garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that you like—your phone sticks to it and you can use your phone. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that’s exactly right. And I would do a demo—I have all the lights off because it’s been forbidden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to have the ceiling fan on while we record and I’m too lazy to do the little yanking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the chain thing to turn the fan off and the light on. So the lights are off. So otherwise, I would give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two a demo of what I look like with the fancy new continuity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera setup. But this Belkin thing was like 30 or 40 bucks from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. There is a version for notebooks. That’s not the one I’m talking about. The one I’m talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the version that goes on displays. The version for notebooks is $30.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have the link in front of me for the full version, but I think it was $40, which is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of ridiculous. MARK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MIRCHANDANI Yeah, it’s $40. Yeah, it’s at the bottom in the you might also like thing on that page. STEVEN SCOTT Oh, thank you. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. So yeah, it’s okay. The instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it came with were kind of useless, and when I plopped it on top of my display, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just wanted to fall over as soon as I put any weight on it, like have the phone on it. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was able to deduce what they wanted me to do, but it’s not one of those things where it like clamps to the top of the display,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which kind of makes sense, right? Because you don’t want a lot of pressure up there, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately obvious to me what it is I was supposed to do to get this thing to not, you know, flop around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was able to figure it out. And I now am using my studio display as a hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insofar as I have my last year’s iPhone 13 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up there and then it’s connected via, you know, lightning to USB-C to the back of the studio display,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really just for the purpose of power, because I think the video is transmitted over Wi-Fi or whatever anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But coincidentally over the last 48 hours, I had a FaceTime call this morning with, in front of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey James Thompson and yesterday with Underscore and I used the Continuity camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this Belkin doodad both times. And when you put it in normal mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works really, really well. So like not center stage, not any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the portrait background blurring, the studio light or whatever they call it, that actually works pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I will say, as soon as you put on center stage, which I am a center stage apologist, I really like the feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in general. But the second you put on center stage, even with a one-year-old top-of-the-line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, the image quality goes to garbage. It’s just awful. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you leave it on, you know, the standard version, then it really does look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite good and way better than the studio display camera. Way, way, way better, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know surprises nobody, but this is your apology camera, just like there was an apology mouse way back when.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do like it. It kind of sucks that I have, you know, this one-year-old, probably worth $800 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone up there that’s now just going to live up there. and I had to buy this $40 doodad to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it does work out really well. The only problem I do have, and maybe this is user error, but I very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly tried to turn on desk view, and it was easily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like eight inches above the surface of my desk. Now, as you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have a glass-topped desk, which I know everyone thinks is very weird, and honestly, I’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a new desk at some point, but for whatever it is, for whatever difference that may or may not make.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it wasn’t detecting the desk surface because it’s glass, I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think it was that smart, but one way or another, I tried to use desk mode and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was basically, you know, the area in front of my chest mode instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than the desktop. But in general, I do like it. I would say if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a need for this sort of thing, which if you’re a studio display owner, you probably do, I give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it one thumb up. It’s not great, it’s a little too expensive, but it’s better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing, and it works. So there you go. A glowing review. A