catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

520: Bananas Ingestion System

Foldable iPads, mixed-reality headsets, US health care, sensible iPad multitasking, and other figments of our imagination.

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. “New” music 🖼️
  2. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
  3. US health-“care” follow-up
  4. HomePod 1.5 press reviews
  5. USB-C charging follow-up
  6. Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp60)
  7. M2 Pro/Max MBP reviews
  8. iCloud Photos backup
  9. Apps for kids follow-up
  10. Rumor: foldable iPads
  11. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  12. AR/VR apps with Siri
  13. Anyway, VR headset
  14. Ending theme
  15. Post-show: iPad use

“New” music

Chapter "New" music image.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s two items and they’re both gigantic that I put the first one first, which is like headset.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the what is it good for?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely. Nothing. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, exactly So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey proud of us Marco let

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me ask you a genuine question What is an album that has come out in the last couple of years

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’ve really enjoyed that is not fish

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have really gotten into goose a lot recently me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The aforementioned goose. Yeah, isn’t that just fish by another name?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s a different band. I mean, look, it’s like is all music from a certain genre the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same band. No, like there are more than one. There’s more than one band in the in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the jam band genre.

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you do it? Can you do an analogy for us? Can you do like fish is to goose

⏹️ ▶️ John as you to is the Coldplay because Coldplay is very you to ish but not as good as you to

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I see. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John goose, very fish-ish, but not, it’s an, do you know how analogies work? This is what happens. You take the analogies out of the SATs,

⏹️ ▶️ John kids don’t understand them anymore. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what happens, people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, I mean, so yeah, it’s goose, it’s in the same genre as fish, I would say, but I wouldn’t say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worse. It’s definitely, it’s a little bit different. It’s like, you know, these aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally overlapping circles. They’re just heavily overlapping circles, but it’s not, you know, it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a clone. It isn’t doing the exact same style, you know. It’s, you know, in the same way, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have multiple rock bands that played rock music that are not the same band and don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the same sound.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Goose, there is a new album in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last several years that you’ve enjoyed, like an actual studio album?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a studio album. I have not heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So you’re just listening to live stuff, aren’t you? Yes. There it is. Okay, are there any studio albums

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have heard, discovered, heard, whatever, in the last handful of years, I’m not looking to be particularly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific about this, that you have enjoyed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, let me, give me a second, I’m going to look through my recently added section of my Apple Music to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like which of these are actually like albums. What is all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? Did I add some kind of playlist?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this, this drives me nuts about Apple Music. What is all this crap? So I am slowly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’ve said many times in the past, I’m slowly beating myself into submission about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music and still trying to divorce myself from Spotify. It’s not working. Where did all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my fish go? All right, so here’s the thing. When I transferred or whatever, I forget what service,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it was an app that I used, I forget which one it was now, but I used an app to suck the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey handful of playlists that I really, really love from Spotify and Apple Music, which did work and worked reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. But when you create a playlist in Apple Music, and this drives me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas, what it does is it adds all of the stuff in that playlist into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your library. Peer with all of the music you got when you were in college and Napster was a thing. Peer with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the music you’ve ripped from CDs. It’s all peer, it’s all the same. And I don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that at all. If I want to add something in my library, I’ll put it in my damn library. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want Apple Music to take a playlist and suck all that into my library. I do not want. do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow I, like in the last couple days, I went through and I deleted a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of old like playlists and smart playlists from iTunes slash music app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac that I just hadn’t use anymore because you know every time I wanted to like add a song to a playlist that list was so long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m like you know what let me just clean this up a little bit. And I guess somehow by doing that I somehow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco triggered the recently, everything on the recently added list, this is stuff I’ve mostly never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen before and I’ve never even heard of most of these bands. But somehow, I got a whole bunch of stuff added

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this list.

⏹️ ▶️ John What is the recently added? Are you looking at this on your phone or on your Mac? That’s the first question.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both. So on the phone music app, if you scroll down on the library tab and you get the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently added, that’s usually how I listen to all my Fish and Goose and stuff because usually I’m listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to recent concerts that have been released. That’s like my main home listening. And now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all these things from bands like, I don’t know who Bill Withers is. Oh my god.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume this is not pronounced management, MGMT. Is that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what Tyco is, but it’s not, none of these are in my library before. And now I have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant list of all this stuff of bands I’ve never added to my library.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you don’t know how that happened?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no idea. I’ll see what happens if I delete it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just look at that section on my phone and I recognize all the things that it shows that are recently added, because they’re things that are recently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco added. Yep, same. Like these aren’t stations I’ve played on the HomePod or anything?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like it’s Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John music and Mac music has it too I see the same thing and underneath the library recently added okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there it is all right I deleted all that crap and I got my own reasons back so now I can tell you let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see fish fish fish goose goose goose fish fish

⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna make I was gonna make a duck duck goose joke earlier but I think you kind of beat me to it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thriller that’s a while ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s an old album but it’s a great album

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is yeah it’s a while ago distant Thunderstorms. Yeah, I’m not finding… this is all, you know, top four stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what… so the problem is that the style of music that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually like, first of all, is jam band music that is mostly concert-based. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they do tend to release albums periodically, they tend not to be what I’m looking for,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash, the best of that band.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a Dave Matthews Band fan, I know what you’re saying. I understand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so anyway, so that and that’s most of my music listening is jam bands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then secondly from that there are other bands and genres I like but they tend to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands that are from like the 90s or early 2000s and some of them are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still making albums most of them are not or if they do make a new album it’s not recent. So like for instance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Stroke 9 is one of my favorite bands I love Stroke 9. They are still making music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not super frequently and usually released as just like singles on Bandcamp instead of a full album. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did make a full album a couple years ago and I do like it. I mean that might even be too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old now for it to qualify. I forget when that came out but um but so that’s one example is the new stroke

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new slash asterisk new Stroke 9 album um but again that’s that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I don’t care if it’s an old band as long as they’re releasing new music and it sounds like Stroke 9

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the only one you can come up with which that’s fine. I mean you like what you like?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there are lots of those bands that released albums well into the modern

⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, or at least the mid-2000s. The Spin Doctors released an album in 2008 or 2010 or something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not bad. The Meat Puppets, I think, are still releasing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco albums on a regular basis. There’s lots of those bands. I mean, Weezer can’t stop crapping out mediocre

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please email Marco. Not the show, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, some of the modern Weezer albums are decent, like the one with the monster on the front. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually not a particularly big Weezer fan at all, to be honest with you, but I’m not spitting out hot takes, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey until just now. Real-time follow-up while I have the floor. Yodological says

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can disable this feature that I dislike so, at least on the Mac music

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, you go into settings, hit the advanced tab, and there’s a checkbox, add songs to library when adding to playlists.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had already had that unchecked, but a lot of these playlists were created, like I said, using some app on my iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know what the situation is there, but that is good to know. And I will keep an eye on that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked up the one we dropped my son that was recent and good. It’s called everything will be all right. In the end, it’s eight years old.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feels great. Um, I like, I love the Avid brothers. That was like a fairly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern fine, but even that’s like, you know, 2008, You know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re still making music, but I like their older stuff better. You know, there’s all sorts of bands like that. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do listen to other stuff, but not a ton of it, and not super recently. And part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that also is because the type of music that I like outside of jam bands is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really made anymore by very many bands. Like, I like rock music.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rock does not really exist anymore the way we knew it, you know, 20, 30 years ago. There

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still some bands making some music that kind of sounds like rock, but they’re few and far between,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what is now popular, all the genres now that are popular, really are pretty far from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of sound. So what I’m looking for, as everyone, is the music that was the style

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was a teenager-slash-young adult, and that’s pretty hard to come by.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, are there any albums that you’ve discovered recently that are of the last few years that you would like to pitch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or plug?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John hearing Marco talk about all these bands, uh, these, these old bands that are still around and making music,

⏹️ ▶️ John meat puppets. Anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey figured it was

⏹️ ▶️ John my turn to try to make you two feel old. If you would like to look in the slack at the picture I posted there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea who this man is. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John looking at it like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a

⏹️ ▶️ John high school principal.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a mostly bald man. He has like the captain Picard, you know, rim around the back of the head with a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very serious almost Walrus level mustache. And he’s looking to the right hand side of the photograph

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to his left and his His mouth is agape and it looks like he’s in the midst of talking perhaps.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s hard for me to gauge for people who are born when you two were born if this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the correct timing to make you feel old. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John last chance. Any guesses? Who is this? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no earthly

⏹️ ▶️ John idea. Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that like some formerly cool young musician who’s now not cool and old?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, who is it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man. Is that like the lead singer of Me Puppets or something?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, here you go. Here you go. It’s got on the right and if you don’t know who these people

⏹️ ▶️ John is so help me Marco, I will reach through this like a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mother of God. Are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you serious? I don’t know his name, but I know that this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a don’t give it Marco. Do you know what is pictured in the bottom photo?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I’m going to take a wild guess. I don’t know for sure. I’m going to guess is this Oasis.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh no, it’s not. I guess I got that one wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, no, no, Oh, Marco, Marco, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know in Marco’s defense, I cannot, I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey state this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fellow’s name. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I paused there is like, you never, you never know with Marco. It’s always worth asking.

⏹️ ▶️ John Always. I’m going to put in a photo of the, of the, the statue of liberty and be like, Marco, do you know what this is? And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, is that Oasis? Uh, listeners, maybe Marco will put it in the show notes. Uh, Casey, what

⏹️ ▶️ John if I paste it into the chat room? What, what have I pasted here?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, the first picture was the old high school principal, bald mustache, baldness mustache.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The bottom picture is the band Nirvana with Dave

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Grohl. You may be familiar with

⏹️ ▶️ John them, but they’re obscure. You might not have heard of them. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never knew Kurt Cobain’s hair was that short at any point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re leaving like an RV or a trailer or whatnot. It’s Dave Grohl on the left, Kurt Cobain in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John center. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John never noticed Dave Grohl. You like the Foo Fighters.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, he’s like 10. Also his

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hair is too short. None of these, The one guy in the picture with long hair is the guy you’re asking about who I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain always had much longer hair than that when I like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the part that I knew of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Listen,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a photo of the entire band Nirvana when they were popular and you thought it was Oasis So you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not coming back from this. I’m sorry just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Time period almost right

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But anyway, does

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that make

⏹️ ▶️ John you feel old? I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not, because you don’t even know as heck

⏹️ ▶️ John they

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes me feel really fricking old, my goodness.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you which of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs are Me Puppet songs. Oh my gosh. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my gosh. Can we also agree, this is tangentially related, that Dave Grohl is possibly the coolest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and most awesome human that has ever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco existed,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ever? He seems fine. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love Dave Grohl, he makes me so happy. Like, as far as, okay, so first of all, with the disclaimer, as far as we know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s not like a jerk in any major ways, so that helps a lot but like he is he just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco puts out so much good music and so much good energy into the music world like he just seems like he’s what he seemed like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s one of those pure musicians who just wants to rock all the time and not to mention the fact that he is incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talented at doing so so yeah I have a lot of respect for him

⏹️ ▶️ John today that I photograph them playing at WWDC I’m imagining that it was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a big plate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that no Foo Fighters never played when we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there who played it who

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey played

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John wwc

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey weezer played

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of ours it was it It was a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John terrible gig.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing against them. They haven’t ever been known for putting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a great show, but this was also the world’s most horrible gig

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a band to play. You’re playing with the backs of a bunch of nerds who were trying to stay as far away from you as possible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they could talk to each other. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have too many WWDC pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, just to stall for time, I really enjoyed the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new-ish Muse album. Speaking of rock music, Will of the People, Silver Sun Pickups just came

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out with a new-ish album, Physical Thrills, which is very good. I also have really enjoyed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly the first few songs of Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very, very good album. Really enjoyed all those. And those are all in the last year or two, if I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just put a picture in the chat room.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s what he’s wearing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The giant W symbol kind of gives that one away. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I thought it was the Foo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Fighters.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC 2019. That was a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was the last time we were all together, wasn’t it? Oh, sad.

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US health-“care” follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably do a show for anyone that’s actually still listening. I think we might have driven,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this might be the time, this might be the episode that we’ve driven everyone off. So for the three of you that are still

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, thank you for hanging out with us. Let’s drive you off too and talk about healthcare in the United States.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Woo! So a handful of people pointed us to, I feel like I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard of this fellow, although I don’t know any of his work and I’m not trying to be funny, I’m really serious. Brian

⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Gilbert, who apparently is pretty popular on YouTube, did an overview of US healthcare

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terminology, which covers a lot, a lot, a lot of terminology.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because it’s the US government, a lot of acronyms. This was very interesting. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had pieced together over time almost everything that he talked about, so I was pretty proud of myself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there’s definitely stuff in this that I didn’t know. And if you live in a civilized

⏹️ ▶️ Casey country and want to see how barbaric and ridiculous our Our setup is, this is the video for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, because, hoo boy, it is entertaining, but it is, not the video, but our

⏹️ ▶️ Casey healthcare system is a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not aimed at explaining the healthcare system. It’s aimed at, because he made a video, he’s making lemons

⏹️ ▶️ John on lemonade. He either lost his job or left his job, and he was out on his own and needed to deal with healthcare,

⏹️ ▶️ John not through his employer or continuing his healthcare from his employer. And so he had to do

⏹️ ▶️ John a crash course, and I’ve never had to do this before. I’ve got to learn about it. And so as part of the process of learning about it, he

⏹️ ▶️ John made a video because that’s what you do if you’re a YouTuber, you know, and it makes perfect sense. And so that’s what it’s about.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, it’s kind of like if you’re just leaving school or just going off your parents’ health care and you don’t know how the system

⏹️ ▶️ John works in the US, this, this video is for you. But he also put in a little section. I mean, you do

⏹️ ▶️ John learn a lot about the US health care section. He put a little, uh, a little bit in the beginning

⏹️ ▶️ John that says, and I’m quoting from the video. And for those of you non-Americans watching this video thinking, I don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John to watch this video. consider it a cautionary tale because there are definitely people in your country

⏹️ ▶️ John that want to privatize health care and you can’t let them do that and then he emphasizes you can’t let them

⏹️ ▶️ John do that because it’s terrible and you’d become like us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best part of this by the way was that he was wearing a or he had kind of like dubbed if you will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t ruin the joke all right people watch it it’s humor well

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should you should watch it for the visual gag as well but yeah it’s it’s terrible here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorite term by the way is co-insurance It’s one of those things where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like a good thing. Oh, I get 80% coinsurance? What’s that? And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you learn, oh, depending on what side of the line it’s on, it’s like, oh, that means I pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either 20% or 80% of the entire cost of whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey operation I would get in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that scenario or whatever. It’s like, oh, that’s not super useful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after all. We have all sorts of fun stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also my favorite feedback from people on our healthcare thing was, why don’t you just move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, insert better country here? It’s like, well, that’s easier said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than done for most people. Like I think most people, the suggestion of, why don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just move across the world to a different country, might not be super helpful.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, especially when it’s phrased that way, I feel like that’s the type of thing where if I was in a snarky move, I would

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, what’s your best guess? You know, which is my, here’s my answer is like, why don’t you just move

⏹️ ▶️ John to a different country? It’s like, I don’t know. Like, what, what do you think? What, what are, what are possible answers

⏹️ ▶️ John to that question? Why someone wouldn’t want to move to another country? Let’s write them on the board class.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, cost logistics, family jobs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I bet, I

⏹️ ▶️ John bet if we put our heads together, we can come up with some kind of, why would someone not want to leave the country?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Citizenship. They wouldn’t let us. It turns out you can’t easily move to whatever country

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, first of all, other countries aren’t all necessarily saying, sure, come live here. You can live here permanently

⏹️ ▶️ John forever, really easily. I mean, granted, not all of them are as bad as the US in that regard, but some of them are, you know, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But, yeah, but all the other stuff like our families here, it’s expensive. We have a house, kids are in school, like all the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John you would expect. So to answer that question, but that’s not really what they’re asking. What they’re really saying is, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John we have a better here and you, if you came here, you’d be happier and they’re probably right, but it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John a big ask, as they say.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least like it might be better in that way, but there also might be other changes that we would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not view as better.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John not being able to speak the language would be difficult for a lot of the countries.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh right, I forgot about language. For the countries that

⏹️ ▶️ John do speak English, pretty much everything is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Like Australian? Man, I had no chance understanding anything they say.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if you’re kidding, but I’m not when I say I think you’re right, because Australians abbreviate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’d be fine and

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be fun.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is Australian internet access still terrible? Is it still really slow?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think it’s gotten better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s at least mediocre, but it’s way, way, way cheaper, which is an improvement.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a couple of Canadians write us, and here’s the thing. I like seasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like to have a season other than winter, please and thank you. So hard pass.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and if I’m only going to have one season, that’s the last one I would pick. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now this is when you’re all firing up your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco emails. I know there are other seasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m kidding, mostly. I just like Fahrenheit too much, and that’s why I won’t move.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing about Canadian emails are they show up as only about 90% the size of ours. Oh, gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about this Ars Technica article, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Just one more link for the people who want to learn more about it. The headline is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d write this article every year for the past 100 years, it would probably be true. US still has

⏹️ ▶️ John the worst, most expensive health care of any high income country. As a country, the US spends more in health care

⏹️ ▶️ John than any other high income country in the world of both per person costs and share of gross domestic product

⏹️ ▶️ John compared with other high income peers, the US has the shortest life expectancy at birth, the highest rate of avoidable

⏹️ ▶️ John deaths, the highest rate of newborn deaths, the highest rate of maternal deaths, the highest rate of adults with chronic conditions.

⏹️ ▶️ John We pay the most, we get the worst. We’re number one, woo, US

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey healthcare. USA,

⏹️ ▶️ John USA. And again, this is not a new thing. This has been true for our entire lives. The system sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re trying to change it. We are stopped by many powerful forces and stupidity. Hahaha

HomePod 1.5 press reviews

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, it wouldn’t be a new Apple product if we didn’t have some sort of drama around it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking about SSDs last week. Well, new HomePod review units are out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and guess what, baby? On the plus side, it does have a removable power cable. In fact, it comes removed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the box apparently. But the white ring on wood tables, I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what to call this, but the ring on tables thing is still a thing, apparently, at least at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the beginning. MKBHD has a video which we’ll link in the show notes where he discusses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how the new HomePod does still indeed leave a different and lighter ring on wood surfaces, particularly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the white one. But then I just saw a follow up, maybe it was a reel on Instagram, I don’t remember where I saw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, so I probably won’t link it for the show notes, but he had said after the first like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two placements, you know, he put it down on a table and then moved it once, then moved it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by like the third or fourth time, he said the ring doesn’t seem to be coming back anymore. So his suggestion,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure how you would do this, but his suggestion was clean the bottom of your HomePod and see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that makes a difference before you stick it on untreated wooden tables.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this, we had this discussion when the very first big HomePod came out.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in practice, it is the type of thing that basically resolved itself because either because people

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care that it was doing that or they found a place to put it where this wasn’t an issue or it did it once it went away.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not like, the story here is not so much that this problem

⏹️ ▶️ John remains or something. The story is that the new HomePod is so unchanged from the old one, despite

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially having every single part be new as far as I know. Like it’s not the same size, not the same shape. The foot on

⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom is not the same. The screen on the top is not the same. The insides aren’t the same. It’s like an all new HomePod.

⏹️ ▶️ John But as I talked about last time when we discussed the new HomePod, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John really rethink this product down to this little weird annoyance that

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t a very big issue, but hey, if you’re coming up with the new HomePod, shouldn’t everything be on the table?

⏹️ ▶️ John We could do better the second time around? I guess it makes a lighter ring the second time around?

⏹️ ▶️ John The foot is differently shaped, but they didn’t even reconsider, like, is there another way we can…

⏹️ ▶️ John Could the bottom of the HomePod be different in some way to totally avoid this issue? And they did not address

⏹️ ▶️ John that. They did not rethink that. They just basically did a slightly updated version of the same rubber foot

⏹️ ▶️ John they had before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now only five tweeters are pushing down to make the ring. Yeah. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as the HomePod, I don’t have mine yet. I think I’m gonna have it for next week’s show, but I don’t have it yet. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, I’m pretty encouraged by the reviews so far. The reviews basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it sounds about the same, but is faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s exactly what I wanted with the, that’s exactly the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low expectations version of this product. And I think, again, I’m very happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this update happened at all. There are so many things I would love to do differently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this product, if they actually put more effort into a real redesign and a real

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rethink of this product, and maybe this product line. I would love to see them do more, and we all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would. But I’m of the impression that, or at least I’m of the theory that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the discontinuation of the first HomePod was necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco planned or happened on schedule or whatever. I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a product that they expected to last longer than it did, and they expected to sell better than it did. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, we were hearing that they were still selling out their launch stock, so maybe it’s like at the end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. So maybe they just massively made way too many of them. And then something changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the COVID era where it used an old processor on an old process

⏹️ ▶️ Marco node and nothing else in the lineup at that time was still using anything as old as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A8 as far as I know. And so it’s possible with all the chip shortages and stuff, they couldn’t even get any more A8s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they wanted to make more. It’s also possible that all the different things we were hearing about, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain, you know, bad electronic parts or physical design flaws that would slowly fry

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain components, maybe it was just costing them too much in repairs and they couldn’t redesign it yet or whatever the case may be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that that product’s lifespan was cut short. They probably, at that time, when they discontinued

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s probably when they started making this one, and it took them this long to do it because, you know, apple’s apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think they actually really were stepping back and rethinking and redesigning this product. I think they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were putting out fires from the first one. You know, just metaphorically speaking, I don’t think it actually started fires,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know. They were trying just fix whatever was causing them to not even be able to continue the product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco existing. They fixed those things and engineered this new one with whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources they were able to justify here. Because again, this is probably not a high-volume product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So they can’t afford to like drop everything from their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more important product lines and put all but put a bunch of engineers on this and get a new version out there in in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months. Like I don’t think that’s a thing they could do here. They couldn’t justify that kind of of prioritization for this product.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did what they could with the resources that whatever team did this was able to get from the company.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is a good like HomePod 1.5 maybe. But if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever do like a true 2.0, I would hope to see more changes. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I don’t have mine yet, so we’ll see. But for instance, obviously some kind of input

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be great. I don’t think they’re ever gonna do it because that’s not their way, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would certainly be great for preserving the lifespan of these products, you know, to use them in the future. Look at how many people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have iPod Hi-Fis still in use today because they have inputs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re able to have this perfectly good working speaker. They’re able to use it afterwards,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after all of the technology is outdated, after the whole product line it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made to hold and work with, it doesn’t even exist anymore. Long after that, people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still can use iPod Hi-Fis today because it has a line input and it’s just an AC powered speaker.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those things tend to last a long time when they don’t have any major design flaws. I would love for the HomePods to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that kind of versatility and potential lifespan and future use. That would be great,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re really good speakers. I would also love them to rethink the control surface.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t tell you how many times, if you’ve ever had a HomePod on a counter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco near a light switch, you have had this problem where you walk by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to flip the light switch off and you accidentally brush a finger against that tuck surface

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe, since you’re turning the light off, maybe it’s late at night and your house is quiet and people are already asleep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because you suddenly brushed that finger against that tuck surface when you turned the light off it instantly starts blasting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Foo Fighters that you were playing earlier to your quiet house and ugh just…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of course that is not an option whatever action you… is like you know, you tap the home pod

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to resume playing whatever it was playing before Can’t turn that off. So that’s just it. Good luck ever dusting one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing, same reason. But why would dust accumulate on a flat surface facing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight up? Anyway, so there’s lots of little tweaks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The power cord, I’m glad it’s removable. But I would prefer if it had a standard IEC power socket,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because then I could buy a shorter or longer one. Again, these are things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would change. Maybe have some kind of, as I mentioned before, some kind of battery reversion or whatever. I don’t want to go too far into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but because I don’t even have mine yet, but basically, I think it’s right to look at this product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as a 2.0, but as like at best a 1.5 because this, this was a,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh crap, something went wrong product. This was not intended to ever to be like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was not the plan from the beginning. I don’t think if you look at what happened, I can’t imagine this was planned from the beginning to be this way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let’s judge this product for what it is, which is a revision to the, to the previous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod, not a sequel.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve watched a lot of the reviews and I feel like they’re kind of not encouraging to

⏹️ ▶️ John me. A lot of people say, oh it sounds just as good, it’s fine, like you don’t notice any of the missing stuff, but there are a bunch of ones,

⏹️ ▶️ John including ones that had people like blindfolded so they didn’t know what thing they were listening to that’s that were picking

⏹️ ▶️ John the old HomePod over the new one and I didn’t see a single one that was saying the new one sounds better than the

⏹️ ▶️ John old, so that’s not particularly encouraging, but it’ll probably be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see it is very very difficult. I talked about this before. It’s very very difficult to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair accurate blind tests of audio equipment because even the slightest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference in volume or the very slightest difference in like the EQ balance can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make somebody think one sounds better than the other.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know but if that was the case I would have expected to see some where the where it went the other direction somewhere the new one

⏹️ ▶️ John was preferred and I didn’t I mean I you know I maybe watched like seven reviews so it’s not a great sample size.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also for whatever it’s worth. I have found that whatever I am looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for in headphones or speakers, oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not line up with what tech reviewers are looking for when they review speakers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and headphones. Like there’s so there’s been so many times where the the tech world will just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fawning all over this. Some you know some new you know headphone or speaker or even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco microphone that comes out and then I get it and try it and I do a direct comparison to other stuff and I’m like, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get it. Why is this special? Why is this good? This is not as good as they say it is to my ears. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at first, my original MO on that was basically to go on my blog and say everyone’s wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s how I started my original beef with the wire cutter where he insulted my genitals on Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My new strategy here, my new approach here is just to assume I’m the weird one here. Because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, look, people’s tastes vary And also, people’s taste in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio products shifts over time. Like, your ears change over time, your preferences change over time, your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco taste changes over time. All I can say is, I often don’t agree with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what tech reviewers look for in audio gear. So, and I would imagine that probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco applies to lots of you out there. You also might not agree with them, for different reasons, and different directions maybe. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very, very difficult to measure audio quality of something. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very subjective. And then to try to communicate that in a review in a useful way is even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more difficult. And then, and then you reading or watching it, you really have no idea

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you would like this in your room, in your house, playing your music to your ears. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it’s so difficult to make comparisons. So that’s why you kind of just gotta, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can take general ideas from people like, Hey, in general, this set of products over here is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good and is worthy of consideration. and maybe this set of products over here is not so good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the specifics of small details. Hey, does this thing sound better than this thing? Well, kinda, sorta,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, depends on what you want or what you’re playing or whatever, your room. There’s so many little variations and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little details that matter a lot that you can’t make subtle distinctions very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well in a repeatable, useful way.

⏹️ ▶️ John Good news, Marco, you can buy a third-party cable and connect it to your new HomePod. You can? What kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco plug is it?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at this 9to5max story that was posted in the chat, and it has a little caption on a picture that shows some ugly black

⏹️ ▶️ John third party cable that says, plugged into a new HomePod, it says, you can use any figure eight cable

⏹️ ▶️ John as a replacement.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know what a figure eight cable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. It’s the one on the back of the Apple TV and the most PlayStations. Yeah, but it looks bigger than that. Maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t tell from the

⏹️ ▶️ John picture. It’s a similar shape.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it looks exactly like that. Yeah, that’s one of the IEC cable types. I forgot the name of it, but that’s a standard cable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s great. I was gonna say, I would imagine that they wouldn’t have come up with it because to get a

⏹️ ▶️ John new cable, new connector type, certified or whatever, blah, blah, blah, would be kind of annoying and

⏹️ ▶️ John painful. And I was going to say it looked a lot like the one that’s in the back of my PlayStation 5, but maybe bigger. But again, I can’t tell scale

⏹️ ▶️ John from these photos. So maybe it is the exact same size.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like it’s and thanks to David Chobb in the chat. It’s a C7 or C8 cable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Depends on whether the engine is in the front or in the mid-engine. Yeah.

USB-C charging follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you figure out or perhaps tell Marco the answer to all of his USB

⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging woes, please?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We can try.

⏹️ ▶️ John We got a big authoritative answer from our friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz, whose name I hope

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pronouncing correctly, as he’s written in so many times. Here is quoting from his email.

⏹️ ▶️ John The short answer to Marco’s question about why USB Type-C chargers don’t work with the Jenky accessories

⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re non-compliant. There are, however, chargers that might work with these

⏹️ ▶️ John devices anyway. So that’s quoting from him. And then he wrote a big long email explaining all of this. Way too long

⏹️ ▶️ John for me to put in the show. So I’m trying to summarize it. Forgive me if I’m getting any of this wrong. I did not run

⏹️ ▶️ John it past him, but here’s my summary of what was in the email. All right, so here’s the timeline.

⏹️ ▶️ John In the absence of relevant standards, Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others came up with their own proprietary

⏹️ ▶️ John charging standards for multiple voltages and currents over USB cables. Like they just did what they felt like

⏹️ ▶️ John they were doing. Mostly involved series of resistors, and depending on the resistance, you’d get different voltage and amps and blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John they all came up with their own thing, right? This is proprietary charging standards. They just did what they wanted, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Tons of manufacturers made chargers that work with these various proprietary systems, which makes sense once Apple, Samsung,

⏹️ ▶️ John and all these other companies do it, then people will just copy and say, okay, if you buy this, it’ll work with your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? With the release of version 1.3 of the USB Type-C

⏹️ ▶️ John specification on July 14th, 2017, proprietary charging was deprecated.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple promptly replaced all of its Type-C power bricks with new compliant models. So that,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it used to be these proprietary ones were sort of under the umbrella of the USB thing, but when they updated the Type-C

⏹️ ▶️ John spec, said, no, no, no, we have our own charging thing. This is what it is. All that old

⏹️ ▶️ John crap that you were doing before in the wild west, that’s out. And then the important part is that Apple said, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John now from this point forward, we’re not, all of our charging brick things that come are not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna support the old proprietary stuff. If you have a USB Type-C brick

⏹️ ▶️ John type thing, or a device that will charge from a Type-A charger, but not a Type-C one,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably using a proprietary charging mode. If you can get your hands on an Apple 29 watt, 61 watt, 87 or 87

⏹️ ▶️ John watt USB-C power adapter sold prior to the USB Type-C 1.3 spec changeover,

⏹️ ▶️ John that means one of those bricks that was sold before 2018, it

⏹️ ▶️ John might be universal charger. So that’s the answer. Why doesn’t this thing work? to make one or whatever, the thing you have

⏹️ ▶️ John is probably used proprietary charging method and you’re probably trying to use a more modern Apple charging brick because you have modern

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. So here, going back to Jonathan, his conclusion, Marco’s issue has nothing to do with

⏹️ ▶️ John USB power delivery as that specification doesn’t even come into play here. It’s related to buying non-certified,

⏹️ ▶️ John non-compliant crap made by people who are too lazy to copy a working USB type C design from some time

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past five years. So that’s the solution. If you want to find something that will charge it, apparently if you can find one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John old Apple chargers before they remove support for quote unquote proprietary charging, that will work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and apparently the root of the issue here is when they designed USB-C power delivery,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep in mind that power delivery, not only does it support a whole bunch of different voltages and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels of current across a pretty wide range and up to a very substantial amount of power,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it also supports powering things bi-directionally. Like the cable can’t tell which end is the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco source without these protocols being followed that are more advanced than old dumb

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. And so you wouldn’t wanna have the cable just always pass power without knowing what it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it could be passing power in the wrong direction. And that could do things like start fires in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst case scenario. So they have this basic method where, and forgive me if I’m getting the details wrong, but basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ports can optionally put like one resistor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco across two pins. and that will tell the cable, treat this like the old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumb charger thing. So, if you have that one resistor in place,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB-C port can take power from any PD supply, and it’ll just send

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it old 5 volt, you know, 2.4 amp or whatever power, just like all the old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A stuff. And so all these devices that we have that are coming out that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have USB-C holes that do not charge from USB-C power bricks could have fixed that problem, apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the addition of one resistor. And they just don’t, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what he’s saying about janky, non-compliant stuff that didn’t copy a working design from sometime in the past five years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so now we know the reason. Unfortunately, that’s not really a solution,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sounds like there probably really can’t be a good solution.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what about the using the old Apple Power Bricks before they remove support for proprietary charging? Because that will work with your janky

⏹️ ▶️ John old crap, because those Power Bricks will, They can do PD, but they can also do all the old weird proprietary

⏹️ ▶️ John ones from Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, because they were just in the before before the standardization and before

⏹️ ▶️ John PD was sort of finalized. The all the bricks supported all the weird proprietary stuff because they just

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to be able to work. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John old bricks, it should work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the the process of trying to find a an Apple power adapter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s from like before a certain manufacturing year that doesn’t even have probably a separate skew or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. I don’t think that process is gonna be worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Also, here is another suggestion from Conrad Poos, if that’s how you pronounce his last name. My

⏹️ ▶️ John fix for dumb USB-C charge ports is to buy a cheap USB-A to USB-C adapter

⏹️ ▶️ John and attach it to the USB-A end of the charge cable. Then you have a C to A to C cable that

⏹️ ▶️ John will work with any USB-C charger even though a C to C cable won’t. I don’t know if that would work, but it sounds

⏹️ ▶️ John like a fun dongle to try.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and a few people wrote in to basically say, Because you can get cheap dongles that not only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what we often had in the Apple world since 2016, which is take a USB-C port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be able to plug a USB-A device into it, but you also have little dongles that go the other direction.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Take a USB-A port and make a USB-C port out of it to be able to plug in something with USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a USB-A port. And so if you just stick two of these together, so it goes C to A to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C, or you do the same thing with a cable, like what this person was writing and saying, it will basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a directional USB-A like buffer thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that it will work. The downside is that it will only obviously work in that one direction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so whatever this cable mess you’re making with this dongle thing in the middle becomes directional and that’s fine for many cases.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also it would be limited if it follows all the specs which I hope it does, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be limited to only the lower wattages supported by USB-A charging.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s honestly, that’s not a bad idea so I think I’m gonna try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe just to like keep some of these in my travel bag in case I need them but ultimately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people wrote in to basically say just have a charging brick that has A and C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes and have some A to C cables which that’s not the answer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that is probably the only solution like that’s that’s not at all what I was asking for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that is probably what I should do.

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M2 Pro/Max MBP reviews

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have some more reviews and things from the M2 Pro and the M2 Max,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most especially from Max Tech. So John, can you tell me about what, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it, Vadim? Vadim? How do you pronounce his name? Do you know?

⏹️ ▶️ John Vadim, yeah. So the Max Tech folks always do tests on these things. I just wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ John have some concrete support for what we discussed on past episodes with the M2 Pro and Max

⏹️ ▶️ John products. They are exactly what they appeared to be. They are, the

⏹️ ▶️ John silicon system on a chip is made on the same process node size as the predecessors.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re a little bit bigger. That results in systems that

⏹️ ▶️ John use a little bit more power. They get a little bit hotter and the fans run at a little bit higher RPM. And that is all

⏹️ ▶️ John borne out by the testing. Not big amounts because it is, you know, the M2 Pro and Max are a little bit bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John than the M1 Pro and Max. They have a little bit more stuff in them. They run at higher clock speeds. the fans go at higher

⏹️ ▶️ John RPMs, not ridiculously higher. Like, you know, the numerically it does look higher but the sound levels seem

⏹️ ▶️ John to be similar. But, you know, that’s why I thought the M1 ones,

⏹️ ▶️ John they had so much overhead, but the M2 ones eat some of that overhead. In exchange for having higher

⏹️ ▶️ John clocks for getting better performance, obviously, it’s, you know, it’s exactly what you thought it would be. So there’s no real

⏹️ ▶️ John surprises in there. The cooling systems are similar in both machines. The temperatures are higher.

⏹️ ▶️ John So like Apple is pushing the innards of the new M2, Pro M2 Max products

⏹️ ▶️ John harder than they were pushed in the M1 variants. They’re clocked higher, they’re allowed

⏹️ ▶️ John to get warmer, you know, in the course of normal running. Doesn’t seem to be any excessive

⏹️ ▶️ John throttling any more than there was in the previous ones, but just FYI, those M2 products

⏹️ ▶️ John are just a little bit more than the M1 ones. So if you really, really care about being

⏹️ ▶️ John super silent super cool and you don’t care about that 20% of performance, buy an M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro or an M1 Max.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then tell me about their new ultra mega clock speeds.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, this is, you know, just to put numbers on this. So the M2 Max was able to clock up to 3.68

⏹️ ▶️ John gigahertz on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it got the highest score they’ve ever seen for a

⏹️ ▶️ John single core, breaking 2000 on Geekbench. So yeah, for all of that extra

⏹️ ▶️ John noise and extra heat and all of that, you know, for that tiny bit of extra heat for that tiny bit of extra noise, that tiny bit of extra

⏹️ ▶️ John clock speed and tiny bit of extra power, you get the highest scores they’ve ever seen. So if that’s what you care about,

⏹️ ▶️ John then the M2 ones are the machines for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you have not ordered any M2 computers as yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I have the M2 MacBook Air from last summer, but,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but, uh, but no, none of the M2 Pro and Max machines. I’m, I’m still so incredibly happy with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my 16 inch. It’s, It’s just wonderful. While

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that Xcode is 25% faster with the new ones, and that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is tempting, and it’s tempting every time I do a build, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just so happy with this. I love that it runs a little bit cooler and quieter than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new ones. I still prefer that trade-off for now, so I think I’m going to skip this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation and maybe consider, we’ll see what happens with the M3 series of chips or whatever comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that. We are scheduled for a process node shrink probably with the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the M3 generation. So we’ll see what happens there. Or we’ll see, you know, we’ll see if I’m still doing desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. You know, maybe the Mac Pro or whatever will tempt me but probably not. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see what happens. But no, I’m very happy with my M1 and I think anybody with an M1 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Macs, MacBook Pro, or Mac Studio or anything, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have much reason to be envious of these new models. If I was buying new, sure, of course I’d get the newest thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I needed it, sure, I’d get it. But the ones from a year and a half ago

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still amazing, and I’m not motivated to upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I still love my M1 MacBook Pro, which is what I’m using to talk to you fine folks right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now.

iCloud Photos backup

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Frank Steyler had a very interesting piece of feedback. Frank writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the topic of how do you back up your iCloud photos regularly comes up on your show, and I’ve recently started using iCloud more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more and did not like any of the available options, I decided to take things into my own hands. About six

⏹️ ▶️ Casey months ago, I started work on my open source project iCloud Photo Sync that allows you to pull your whole library

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the native file system. There’s even a Docker version, so Casey can run it on a Synology Pi, Mac Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera. Once synced, you can use the backup service of your choice to persist everything securely because this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a sync program, not a backup program. Please note, I’m doing this in my free time, and only thanks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the time during my Christmas break, I was finally able to reach version 0.1. I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very happy with the project. I feel the sync algorithm is stable. However, did not yet encounter a library the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey size of John’s. In the future, I will be able to support shared photo libraries, but haven’t gotten around to implementing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it yet. So I have not tried this myself, but I I went looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the GitHub repository, and it looks pretty slick, just based

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the documentation stuff I looked at. It looks pretty, pretty slick. And this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something that I don’t know if I necessarily have a need for this because of my absolutely bananas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ingestion system that I’ve been using for years. But if I wasn’t me and I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any normal human, I would definitely be taking a look at this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Related to this, I didn’t put it in here, but we have a bunch of Ask ATP questions that I didn’t bother putting in because I felt

⏹️ ▶️ John like we’d answer this more recently. But people keep asking, I wanna back up my iCloud photo library, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I either don’t want to have or don’t currently have a Mac where I can do

⏹️ ▶️ John the option in Apple’s Photos app that says download originals just because they don’t have the disk space. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John my library is too big, it can’t fit on my Mac, but can I back it up? And the answer is no, you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John have the data to back it up. But with something like this, You know the the selection of

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs that you have In your house no longer need be the limiting factor you could if

⏹️ ▶️ John assuming this thing works again I didn’t try it either but assuming this thing works open source project that runs in a docker container

⏹️ ▶️ John You could rent an instance from Linode for a couple bucks a month run this little thing on it pull everything down there

⏹️ ▶️ John You know like there there are solutions that don’t involve running a Mac all the time people also asking do I have to leave my user? Logged

⏹️ ▶️ John into my account all the whole time. Do I have to leave the photos app open? The answer to those is no, you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John to leave photos open. I don’t think you need to be logged in, but I haven’t tested that. But either way, like messing

⏹️ ▶️ John with that and worrying that you’re not like that, you that is not pulling everything down that you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to be pulled down. This takes the guesswork out of that. It’s a you know, it’s a thing. You run it when you want to

⏹️ ▶️ John run it. It sinks the contents and then you point whatever backup system you have at that and then that backs it up.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much more straightforward than trying to divine the behavior of Apple’s completely

⏹️ ▶️ John faceless, completely uncontrollable sync services, which we all love to hate. Because you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s no way to tell it to stop, no way to tell it to start, no way to say do it now, no way to check whether

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s done anything. And all these, even if we were to like, you know, figure out experimentally, yes, it runs

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re not logged in, yes, you don’t have to run photos, that can change at a point update, right? You can’t rely

⏹️ ▶️ John on that. So for backups, it’s much better to have something that you’re relatively sure about. Like for example,

⏹️ ▶️ John the feature in Apple Photos says download originals, that’s straightforward. Maybe it doesn’t work because of a bug, but its intention is clear,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it will tell you if it runs out of disk space. Like I, you know, disk is full, couldn’t download the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And this command line thing, similarly, if it works, you know, you have total control over it. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what I would suggest. Not trying to play guess whether, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s downloading stuff when I’m not logged in or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

Apps for kids follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then very briefly, a handful of listeners reached out with regard to apps for small kids.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, a few people said Khan Academy Kids, K-H-A-N. It’s kind of like ABC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mouse, but without the fees. I put that on our kiddo iPad, and Michaela’s been playing with it a little bit, and she

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to really like it. Also for iOS developers, Andy Matuszak, I believe I pronounced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that correctly, who was formerly kind of one of the big cheeses on UIKit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and did a lot of really great WWDC sessions many years back. He was at Khan Academy in their R&D department

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few years. So he is an alumni. I’m pretty sure he’s not there anymore. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking of ABCmouse, this is from Will. And Will writes, with regard to ABCmouse, several public

⏹️ ▶️ Casey libraries in the US offer free accounts if you have a library card. The Washington DC library is one that comes to mind.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some of these libraries even offer library cards to non-residents for a fee, sometimes, or sometimes even for free,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for much less than what ABCmouse charges monthly. By using a library card, you also get access to all the library’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other online resources as well. So you might want to check that out if this is of interest to you.

Rumor: foldable iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, gentlemen, apparently we’re all gonna be getting foldable iPads with carbon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber kickstands next year, baby. Who’s excited?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because if there’s one thing I wanted carbon fiber on, it’s the kickstand to a tablet, because

⏹️ ▶️ John you know what it’s like when those kickstands are heavy. All right, right.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John saying. It’s a fun rumor along multiple axes. So we’ve talked about foldable devices many times.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are many foldable devices shipping. I think they’re mostly phones, although I think there’s like some tablet size ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John The magic of screen technology allows us to fold them in various ways. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a foldable rumor. It’s a carbon fiber rumor. We always love them because we always want Apple to experiment

⏹️ ▶️ John with new materials because they’ve done aluminum glass for a long time and aluminum glass are great, but maybe there could be something better,

⏹️ ▶️ John lighter, stronger, more durable, all those things. And then kickstand, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John throw that in too because the iPad does not really have a kickstand in the Microsoft Surface sense, as

⏹️ ▶️ John in like a panel that folds out at various angles, right? You could say the little triangle origami

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you make out of the Apple, whatever they’re called, smart cover things is kind of like a kickstand,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not really. A kickstand is more like a panel that hinges out from the back of the thing at various

⏹️ ▶️ John angles. And so then this rumor is that the kickstand would be made of carbon fiber.

⏹️ ▶️ John This rumor doesn’t make a lot of sense to me on multiple axes, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John collection of rumors related to Apple and foldable stuff continue

⏹️ ▶️ John to dribble out over the years. So there’s, Apple is certainly thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ John that, experimenting with that, but I kind of run into the same question I always have about foldable

⏹️ ▶️ John things is, what advantage do I as a customer get for having a foldable thing other than it

⏹️ ▶️ John being cool and sci-fi-ish? And it’s really difficult for me to answer that question, especially with something

⏹️ ▶️ John like an iPad, because iPads are big, and if I could fold it to be half the size, Now it’s half

⏹️ ▶️ John the size, but still pretty big. You know? And in exchange, I gotta

⏹️ ▶️ John deal with all of the things that come along with folding. You know, is it gonna be creased in the middle? Is it gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be bulky? How sharp can that curve be? There’s a bunch of rumors related

⏹️ ▶️ John to that in here as well about like who’s gonna be supplying the, where is that one? Is it like LG or something was gonna be supplying

⏹️ ▶️ John the ultra thin cover glass that could be used on the company’s foldable products. That would be cool instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of having to be plastic, have a big glass, but that, you know, then what’s the radius on that bend or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ John Just, there’s just a lot of information surrounding all of these things here. And I still can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John make any sense out of it in terms of the kind of product that I would want to,

⏹️ ▶️ John that I would want to buy. Like, I had the pitch now has not yet been made to me for why

⏹️ ▶️ John I would want an iPad that folds.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think the pitch is obvious. It’s that you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s, you know, pocket, as pocketable as an iPad mini. well, not pocketable, but you know what I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m saying, like it’s not, because it’s half the size, right? If it folds in one direction, it’s half,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s twice as thick, but half the length and width, right? And I don’t think with an iPad size thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John that buys me anything. You’ve gone from really big to still pretty big, you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know? Like it doesn’t become pocketable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe it could fit in a jacket pocket, maybe? A big jacket? I don’t like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. To me, I have yet to see any foldable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen device that really nails, like, okay, that was worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The foldable phone that folds vertically, I don’t know, there’s a whole bunch of these. I don’t know if Quinn Nelson’s got one of them he likes. That,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can kind of see, I feel like that does, what we’re talking about is like a vertical phone

⏹️ ▶️ John that folds down so it’s more like a little square. I think that does make it more pocketable,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially with big phones than when it’s vertical, because phones already fit in your pocket, and usually

⏹️ ▶️ John the limiting factor for pocketability is not the thickness. So trading, I

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna be twice as thick, but then half the length and half the width makes sense for a trade-off

⏹️ ▶️ John if pocketability is your limiting factor. But in exchange for that with the phone thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John now you gotta constantly be folding it and unfolding it. And unlike the flip phones, it’s not as cool to do. Remember

⏹️ ▶️ John when we had flip phones, you could do the little flippy thing? Yeah, let me just flip up my iPad, whack.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John then you snap it closed and everything like that. It’s not quite the same. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t think that’s a big deal, we all just take our phones out and look at them and put them back in. There’s no folding and unfolding

⏹️ ▶️ John process in there. Adding that step is a complication. Like that trade-off, you

⏹️ ▶️ John really need to be pocket limited. Maybe if you’re a woman who’s

⏹️ ▶️ John constantly stuck buying clothes that have no pockets on them, that is your limiting factor, in which case,

⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up. But remember, we’re not talking about a phone here. We’re talking about an iPad. iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John is never going to be pocketable, even if you’re wearing overalls. especially in someone of the rumors like 20 inch foldable

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. That’s still pretty big once you fold it like. No. So here’s here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the other angle on this, and it’s kind of goes into the kickstand thing. What if it folds and the horizontal

⏹️ ▶️ John part could be a keyboard and then the vertical part is the screen? Sure,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I don’t know if people are jazzed to use an iPad with an onscreen keyboard in an L

⏹️ ▶️ John shape. It seems like people like using iPads with physical keyboards as like little mini floppy

⏹️ ▶️ John laptops, but on screen, you know what I’m saying? Like make it like a laptop, but have

⏹️ ▶️ John one half of the screen be the keyboard part and then it could change it to a tablet part. I get how that could work, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t appeal to me. It’s not solving a problem I feel like I have with the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and it is bringing a bunch of other weird stuff with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I tend to agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s kind of the problem with all foldable stuff we’ve seen so far, is that it doesn’t really seem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve problems that we have, and it might be a fun novelty here and there, especially maybe on phones,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just, I don’t see it happening. Like, suppose we succeed in creating a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco foldable tablet or laptop-sized device. What have we made? We’ve made a worse laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, in every way, it’s worse. It’s more fragile, it’s more expensive, the keyboard sucks, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, and then what have we gained by that? Well, you could, I guess, unfold into a flat screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have a big screen with no keyboard. I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know why this is something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we are focused on so much in the tech world as being like some cool new thing on the horizon.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it is cool. That’s why you see stories about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those like, it’s cool in the CES sense. Where it’s like, it’s cool in the sense that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow, that’s a fun demo to see at a trade show. But it’s not a product you’d actually want to live with for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most part for most people.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some people do like it with phones. So let me just show you some of the highlights of how all over the place these rumors are, right? So this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a Ming-Chi Kuo saying that he was quote, positive that foldable device will

⏹️ ▶️ John arrive in 2024, but did not provide a more specific timeframe. Then another bit of rumor here from

⏹️ ▶️ John CCS Insight says that Apple plans to use a foldable iPad in 2024 as a practice

⏹️ ▶️ John run for foldable technology before adopting it on the iPhone. Again, I think a foldable iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John makes way more sense than a foldable iPad. Doing a weird product as a practice run

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t seem like a thing, but whatever. And this is

⏹️ ▶️ John Ross Young talking about the 20 inch size. Young expects the device to hit the market a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot later in 2026 or 2027. Well, that’s a daring rumor, because it’s way out in the future. Then

⏹️ ▶️ John LG with the ultra thin cover glass. Ross Young said he is expecting multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John OLED iPads in 2024. Now we’re talking. I’ve wanted an OLED on the iPad for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ John That has nothing to do with foldable. That just has to do with a higher quality screen really good blacks.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Ross Young said he’s heard nothing about a foldable iPad in the same year. And here’s another update from Mark Gurman.

⏹️ ▶️ John He says that he has not heard anything about a foldable iPad in 2024, which he expects to be the year of the OLED

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro models and spec bumps for the entry level iPad and iPad mini. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I want to believe the more conservative rumors that just say OLED iPads are coming because that

⏹️ ▶️ John is a straightforward upgrade to iPads with a better screen, something that I really

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted because I watch tons of TV, my iPad and an OLED screen will be better. I also

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of believe that Apple has been working on foldable iPhones for a long time. It’s, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be irresponsible for them not to be looking into that. There are foldable phones on the market and there have been for a long

⏹️ ▶️ John time and some people like them for the reasons I described before. You got to at least look into it on the iPhone. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’ll just be one model that’s foldable, maybe it’ll be like the return of the mini is like a thing that folds up or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. Thumbs up. Foldable iPad rumors and especially the carbon fiber kickstand. I honestly

⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea where that’s coming from, but I suppose stranger things have happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think it was on Upgrade that Jason and Mike had said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of interesting things. First of all, you know, where is the fold? And I forget the terminology for this, but I think they described

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as any or Audi. So if the thing folds like a book, right, and the display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on the inside, then what do you do when it’s folded up, right? And this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what you were talking about with the phone as well. Like you have to unfold it to use it. That doesn’t seem terribly useful. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then if it’s the other direction where the display is… But

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s in the Anyone though, that’s the way where you could use it as a laptop with a screen keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s true. That’s like you would keep

⏹️ ▶️ John it open in an L-shape and you’d have it in front of you and now the fold is letting you use it as a mini laptop kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of type deal with a kickstand behind it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Whereas if you go Audi, then that potentially means that you can use it folded,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that still, it’s basically you have two modes, completely folded or completely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfolded.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and one screen is like, presumably you’re touching it with your hands, so it would have to be do like palm rejection on

⏹️ ▶️ John the side that’s not facing you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know. And the other thing they said, maybe it was Jason, but I don’t remember for sure, that I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really astute is, this feels like one of those things if it’s true. This feels like one of those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, And actually, this is also true of the headset, which we’ll probably be getting to in just a moment. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels like one of those things that we’re just not seeing it. And Apple will, you know, slap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something on the table, table and say, Oh, this is it. This is why you want this. And all of us will be,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, oh, yes, I do want that. Yes, please. I’ll take three, you know, and

⏹️ ▶️ John or just as likely, Apple will never release this product because they will look at it and say, there is no reason for you to have this product.

⏹️ ▶️ John So never mind. But eventually we’ll get a foldable phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep. I agree with that. So I agree with what you’re saying, John, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, you know, I don’t get what the, what the cat, not the catch, but the, the, the draw is. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand why I want this in my life, but you know, Apple’s got to throw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff against the wall, see what sticks. And I, if this is something that’s thrown against the wall, then power to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they should throw it against the wall in Apple Park and only show it to us if it sticks.

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AR/VR apps with Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s talk headset. Uh, Apple’s reality pro AR VR goggles.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, and as John put in the show notes, I think, what is it good for? Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we don’t know. We really don’t know. Uh, but the information has information. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re saying in short that, uh, Hey, you’re going to be able to like write apps and stuff without even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing code. It’s going to be amazing. What?

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh-huh. Yeah. I think this is a cool. I think you should read this quote because this is I think this is directly from the information which

⏹️ ▶️ John broke this story and it’s It’s the type of 9 to 5 max summarized it But I always like to try

⏹️ ▶️ John to go back to the source to see like What did they actually say because the 9 to 5 max story

⏹️ ▶️ John reads? Nonsensely non coders would be able to rate VR apps using Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I can’t even play music using Siri reliably like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey how’s that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gonna work?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I literally yesterday yesterday morning going downstairs after breakfast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey Siri, stop. It’s playing music. Wait, wait, hmm. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, delay. One sec. Wait. The music’s still playing this whole time. Wait, wait.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, something went wrong. Blasting music again. Like it’s just, I can’t even stop reliably. Like for God’s sake,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are we, how, how are we going to write apps using Siri when Siri still,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is it, 12 years after it was unveiled? Still can’t do the basics reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ John before I came to record, we were in the living room, the other room where all my

⏹️ ▶️ John various devices listen to me is. And we wanted to know

⏹️ ▶️ John what year the original Superman movie was released. And I made my guess, which turned out to be

⏹️ ▶️ John right. Thank you very much. But then of course, we did the thing. No one believes me. They need to double check with the internet,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John did my normal bake off. And I’m not good at speaking to devices. I gave it like kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of a weird kind of strangely structured sentence. I think I said something to, and I always try Google first cause it’s going to be the good one. And I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I said to the Google thing, what year was the original Superman movie starring

⏹️ ▶️ John Christopher Reeve released in? And that is a weirdly structured sentence because I don’t get to the released in

⏹️ ▶️ John part till the end. And I say like original movie and like it’s, I don’t just say

⏹️ ▶️ John like what was the year of release of or when was, you know, like his release is at the end and you got to connect all this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John It nailed it. It just, it gave me the answer. It’s in 1978. That’s like, that’s what Google said, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I, you know, later on I did a second question, which is, oh, how old

⏹️ ▶️ John is Chris Novoselic? Do you know what the Google device said to me? 57. It just

⏹️ ▶️ John said 57. It didn’t say, according to the page of Wikipedia, blah, blah, blah. It just told me the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey answer like a human would. Right? Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I also asked both of these questions in pretty much the same way to my original HomePod.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ John Fell on its face. The first one, it’s like the webpage blah, blah, blah says, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it started reading a bunch of crap about Superman. Didn’t get the date. And I was like, all right, stop. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, and it did, to its credit, it did stop. And then it asked about Chris Novoselic. It started

⏹️ ▶️ John reading, oh, what the, I forget. It started reading some other webpage that was not relevant. It was just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh for two, as usual, Google’s voice assistant still champion. I was particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John impressed about how it just said 57. Like, yes, I don’t need a preamble, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John need a postamble, I don’t need to be addressed, I just want the answer. Oh, and by the way, the answer was real, real fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, what are you doing? Anyway, let’s write some VR apps. Wee!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whoever at Apple is in charge of Siri this year, because it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be a bit of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey revolving door over there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love for them to just spend one day in my house using my HomePods, just please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco However you think Siri’s working out there in California on whatever hardware you’re using, I urge you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco come here to New York and use it on my HomePods and tell me everything’s all right. Like, just try doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything on my HomePods for one day.

⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, that’s another, like I watched a bunch of the new HomePod reviews and everything. I mean, obviously we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John weird and niche here or whatever, but I was amazed at how few of them, pretty much none

⏹️ ▶️ John of them made any mention of, I mean, maybe they mentioned in the specs, like, oh, this has X processor and the old

⏹️ ▶️ John one had Y processor, but none of them talked about, why do I care about that? Why do I care that the new HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ John has a different processor? Like, was there a weakness of the old pod related to the processor that might, that

⏹️ ▶️ John might, you know, like they didn’t test response time. They didn’t say it’s great that it’s faster. They didn’t check

⏹️ ▶️ John whether it responds fast. They didn’t do any of that. It’s like, I know Apple doesn’t talk about its specs or whatever, but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things we hope, and Marco will tell us, is an improvement in the new thing is it has a new processor and it will

⏹️ ▶️ John be faster. And the comparison point, like Marco said on the last show, is the Mini, which has the same processor

⏹️ ▶️ John that seems to be, you know, none of the reviews did any of that. It’s like it didn’t even exist to them. It was very disappointing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I feel like the HomePod is a product, I mean, we can go back to this for a minute, the HomePod is a product,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who get Apple review units, and like, you know, all like the YouTubers and the big publications and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are tech reviewers. This is not an area of their incredible specialty or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco care. Like this is an accessory product. they review the HomePod the same way they would review

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, an iPad smart cover. Like, okay, I’m gonna try this, it’ll be cool. But how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comprehensively are you gonna look at it? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the channels did compare it to the competitors. Here’s how it compares to the Amazon things, here’s how it compares to the

⏹️ ▶️ John Google things. And I think if you’re making that comparison, one of the things you test is, hey, when I ask it a question, how long does it take

⏹️ ▶️ John to give me an answer and how well does it answer those questions? I’ve seen a lot of reviews of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John bake-offs like I do in my house all the time of like, ask device A, ask device B, say how they weld. but response time,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s just a sore point for us because we’re impatient, but I feel like that is one of, like a new HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ John arrives, and that’s one of the things I care about, because all the past HomePods haven’t been real snappy with the answers,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so if a new HomePod arrives and it has a new SoC that is, you know, more

⏹️ ▶️ John updated and hopefully, you know, as fast as it was in the Mini, that’s a thing I would test and mention

⏹️ ▶️ John in my review, but these guys just, anyway, whatever, I don’t want to bag on YouTube reviewers. It’s great that they got review units.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really like, I think also a big part of this is that Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been so bad and slow and unreliable for so long that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of given now. Like they just given up on it. Yeah, and like nobody when you’re reviewing a product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that relies so heavily on Siri as the HomePods do, you don’t even spend much time talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how crappy and slow and mediocre Siri is because everyone just knows that and we’ve just given up expecting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything more. Again, like, oh god, I wish, I hope, I really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope that whoever the current leader of Siri is this week actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks it’s as bad as it is. Because if they know it’s bad, then that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives us hope that okay, maybe they’re really gonna rethink this, maybe they’re gonna really put a lot behind this. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously Google and even Amazon are way better at it in so many ways. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, obviously it’s possible to do well, It’s been possible to do well for quite some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time now. Um, and so, but if Apple knows it sucks, then great, then that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco step one, is learning you have a problem, and admitting, hey, we can do better. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly wonder, like, does Apple think this is good? Because, obviously all their PR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always says how good it is, and they have to, of course, but like, internally, behind closed doors, do they know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how crappy Siri is? Do they know that it can be better? Like, I’m not sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do. I don’t, I don’t know if we’ve seen enough evidence that they actually believe that or have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any idea how to make it better.

⏹️ ▶️ John I should send them some of my, uh, my free, uh, Google home minis. Do they just have them

⏹️ ▶️ John sitting next to their home pods? And the next time you want to know when the movie recently released or how old a celebrity is,

⏹️ ▶️ John ask both, see how it goes for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, I think Marco, you said three different things, you know, does Apple know that Siri is trash?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they do. It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if they don’t, but I think they do. What

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were the other two? Can they fix it? That I’m less convinced about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco because they’ve had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time to fix it. And I don’t know if they’re capable of it. Shoot, I forgot what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the third thing was. That’s all right. But whenever I’ve talked to engineers at Apple, now granted I’ve not talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to any Siri engineers, possibly because they don’t exist. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But one way or the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other, I’ve never talked to Siri engineers. But you know, general rank and file Apple, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, software engineers, they claim, and I believe them, that they are their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey own biggest critics, that they make John look like a pushover, you know, in that they know in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and out how garbage so much of their stuff is. Now, they also make excuses for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, much like they make excuses for radar and feedback assistant, because they know how the sausage is made. They know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why, you know, a stage manager sucks. And they might even know why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri sucks. Because, oh, well, we don’t have the this, that, and the other thing. Or, oh, you know, corporate politics.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or, oh, this or that. But they know that it sucks. Like, that’s not up for grabs. They know. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. But again, the question is, can they do anything about it? And or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do they care enough to do anything about it? I don’t know the answer to those questions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You were

⏹️ ▶️ John saying that rank and file employees know. But as you go up the org chart, it becomes more and more important

⏹️ ▶️ John for you not to know that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because when you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, I’m in charge of Siri, it’s time for my annual review. How’d you do? Way too great.

⏹️ ▶️ John We made huge improvements to Siri, and Siri’s doing great. It is good for your career to actually

⏹️ ▶️ John believe that Siri is doing great, because then you can convincingly say that Siri’s doing great, so you can get your raise in your new stock options.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas at the rank and file, when you’re just down there, you can have a more clear-eyed view of Siri’s

⏹️ ▶️ John bad because it doesn’t have the resources, or it was moved from X department to Y, or everybody quit, or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that’s completely fair.

Anyway, VR headset

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, VR headset. Should read this passage from the information

⏹️ ▶️ John about making apps. So here’s what they say. With the software tools, Apple hopes that

⏹️ ▶️ John even people who don’t know computer code could tell the headset via the Siri voice assistant to build an

⏹️ ▶️ John AR app that could then be made available via Apple’s App Store for others to download. So that is quite a claim.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s saying not only will you be able to do something with Siri that makes something that could be considered an app,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that you could then put them on the App Store as well. The tool, for example, could allow users to build

⏹️ ▶️ John up an app with virtual animals moving around a room and over or around real life objects without the

⏹️ ▶️ John need to design the animal from scratch, programs animations and calculate its movements in 3D space and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ John And 9to5Mac notes, this is similar to features already offered by headsets from Meta. The Quest headsets, for

⏹️ ▶️ John example, have an app called Horizon Worlds that allows users to build 3D environments without coding. Additionally, features

⏹️ ▶️ John similar to this have already appeared on the iPhone as part of Apple’s other augmented reality and virtual reality work, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is much less interesting then the story makes it seem. It’s like, okay, you can make a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing in AR VR out of a bunch of pieces that are pre-made and you assemble them. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John could in theory be packaged up in a few standardized ways into an app that you could then put it on an app store.

⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of reminds me of the ebook plague of the early days of the app store where it’s really easy to package up an ebook

⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS app and put it on the app store and make some quick money before Apple realized this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible idea and bans the practice. Only now it’s Apple doing it by saying, hey, make a thing with

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of animals that walk around your living room and upload it to the app store. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ John sure, whatever. And this is leading us to the title of this section

⏹️ ▶️ John that Casey tried to sing and I think- Failed miserably.

⏹️ ▶️ John What is this AR and VR headset good for? Again, we’re not talking about a pair

⏹️ ▶️ John of glasses that you wear that can project things into them because there’s a million awesome uses for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re talking about a headset, a thing that is pretty big, pretty bulky,

⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot of computing power, has peripherals,

⏹️ ▶️ John has like a battery which may or may not be clipped to your belt, which was the style at the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, why would I want to buy it? It may be expensive, why would I want to buy this? What is it good for? Here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John from Bloomberg. People familiar with Apple’s content strategy for the headset say, Apple executives are emphasizing health

⏹️ ▶️ John and wellness, including proposals for AR apps that assist with meditation and exercise. One

⏹️ ▶️ John early AR demo allowed users to sit inside a Zen garden. All right, sure. Another

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple demo for executives allow users to walk through the Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, by blending its fantastical

⏹️ ▶️ John environment with the real world. All right. Oh my word. These all sound like cool tech demos.

⏹️ ▶️ John Still waiting to figure out what’s gonna make me wanna buy this big

⏹️ ▶️ John headset and what’s gonna make me want to strap it to my head to pick up

⏹️ ▶️ John potentially the two things that I might have to hold in my hand to make it work. Gruber

⏹️ ▶️ John took a shot at it and went through, he’s had the same question for a long time and he wrote a big article about it called the Billions Dollar

⏹️ ▶️ John Question. What is it good for? He came up,

⏹️ ▶️ John so here’s his summary. What are the intended use cases for Apple’s headset? After you buy it,

⏹️ ▶️ John unbox it and power it on, what are you supposed to do with it? What features and experiences will seem

⏹️ ▶️ John worth spending a thousand or even thousands of dollars? I ponder this every day and I come up short.”

⏹️ ▶️ John And so in his article, he lists everything he could think of and I’m just gonna give the bullet points here and you

⏹️ ▶️ John can read his article to see what he has to say about them. The things he came up with is, well, what you might use it for is,

⏹️ ▶️ John games, movies and TV, virtual meetings with FaceTime-like calls,

⏹️ ▶️ John personal computing via projected displays. And then he says, think of any other use cases

⏹️ ▶️ John for VR XR headset. I cannot believe that such a headset would be intended for wearing around as you go

⏹️ ▶️ John about daily life, augmenting the real world with virtual displays and ambient contextual information. That’s what we need AR

⏹️ ▶️ John glasses for, not AR goggles. And you can read his summaries of

⏹️ ▶️ John descriptions of why he thinks games, movies, TV, virtual meetings, and personal computing with projected displays

⏹️ ▶️ John probably aren’t going to make him want to use this thing. But, and there’s probably more

⏹️ ▶️ John items that you can hit. And I can look at each one of of those items and say, well, if Apple did a good job of games,

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a reason. If Apple did a really good job of virtual meetings, that might be

⏹️ ▶️ John a reason. But again, read the Gruber article to see all the countervailing forces. I don’t think I have to describe the countervailing

⏹️ ▶️ John forces when it comes to Apple and games. We know about those virtual meetings. The countervailing forces are like

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and Google, also pretty big forces. You know, just anyway, I thought it was a good article and I

⏹️ ▶️ John thought it was a good time to revisit the idea of like, what are we supposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to use this thing for? And finally, the reason we’re talking about this now for the time is that

⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors are heating up about Apple’s AR VR goggle thing. German,

⏹️ ▶️ John his latest thing, he said that is reportedly set to be announced sometime this spring with launch to

⏹️ ▶️ John consumers happening later this fall. So around WWDC ish time, rumors say Apple may

⏹️ ▶️ John actually be ready to release this thing. This thing that the earlier rumor was that it might actually be released for the end of last

⏹️ ▶️ John year. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But if they’re ready to release something, the mystery

⏹️ ▶️ John of, as Gruber says, when I take it out of the box, what am I supposed to use it for? That

⏹️ ▶️ John mystery kind of remains.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I keep thinking back to previous Apple new platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch, you know, warmups, like when we’re about we’re about to get the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the Apple Watch. You know, we kind of knew ahead of time, like, oh, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re working on something, even even Even the phone, we kind of knew they were working on a phone. That was a special case because that really blew us away.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or even the Apple TV. People don’t remember that was going to launch as iTV. People think, oh, there

⏹️ ▶️ John was never any question about what you’re going to use the Apple TV for. If you remember what the original iTV thing was

⏹️ ▶️ John intended to do versus what the little puck does, it’s similar, but kind of like all the other products you’ve named,

⏹️ ▶️ John the what you’re supposed to use this product for actually has evolved over time as

⏹️ ▶️ John the market has decided, no, this is what we want to do with it. So for example, DVRing things from

⏹️ ▶️ John broadcast television is not a feature that Apple went with for their TV connected

⏹️ ▶️ John boxes, but it could have been because the technical capabilities were there, just turned out that’s not what the market wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like, you know, when you look at these previous product launches, you know, like I’ll do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, look at the iPad, for instance, you know, when Apple was rumored to, you know, the iPhone was already going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a couple of years by that point, and they were rumored to be doing a tablet. And the rumors ended up being, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, not too far off. Everyone kind of knew, like, okay, it’s going to be like a big iPhone. They got the price wrong famously,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, we were wondering, and at the time, there were other tablets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that predated it, and they weren’t very compelling. They had a market, and there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a couple different types of tablets. There were like the PC world’s kind of tablets, which were actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually convertible laptops where you flip the screen around, and those did okay in certain industries.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they had, remember right before the iPad, They had like the crunch pad, crunch

⏹️ ▶️ John pad. No one should remember the crunch pad,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were some other like dumb startup that was like a thousand dollars for their tablet too. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was way worse. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things about the iPad launch that’s interesting to remember is kind of like the headset launch before

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has launched a product entry into a space is the time of kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber was covering it. The time of infinite possibilities, right? There are lots of things this could be

⏹️ ▶️ John and people’s minds go wild. well, this could be X, this could be Y, but there’s no actual product yet. We haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seen what Apple’s really, so we don’t know what they’re gonna do, but we have all these ideas that could be possible. One of the most fantastical

⏹️ ▶️ John ones around the iPad was, if you remember this one, the iPad’s gonna save newspapers. Do you remember that one?

⏹️ ▶️ John Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s gonna save

⏹️ ▶️ John magazines and newspapers because there’s a business that existed for lots of the lives of people

⏹️ ▶️ John who were writing articles at the time. You know, old people remember magazines and newspapers, and they’re dying,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple’s gonna come out with a tablet. So one thing this tablet could do is it could save magazines

⏹️ ▶️ John and newspapers by making a modern digital equivalent and all those newspaper reporters and magazine writers will

⏹️ ▶️ John keep their jobs and their pensions and still continue to be paid $20 a word and

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell, you know, like that didn’t happen really in the way that people expected.

⏹️ ▶️ John But before there is a product, there’s lots of fantastical ideas about what it could be. And then the

⏹️ ▶️ John other analogy, which I’m sure you’re gonna get to eventually, Marco, is the Apple Watch, where Apple itself

⏹️ ▶️ John had lots of very fantastical ideas of what the product could be, even when it was launching it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we eventually narrowed it down. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But going back to the iPad for a second, so in the lead up to the iPad launch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were able to look at other tablets on the market that were in kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moderate success, maybe in certain areas, but hadn’t really taken over the world by storm or anything like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But we were able to look at other tablets in the market Well, tablets have the following

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcomings. They’re a little bit, you know, a little bit unwieldy to have in a pocket

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even most bags or anything, but they’re still useful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re hard to have text input on. We haven’t really solved the tablet text input problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for all these problems that we would think of, we would say, well, I bet Apple has a plan,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Apple has such a good track record now at this point. I bet they have a plan to solve things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, text input. And then the iPad came out, and all those things that we thought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple surely has a plan, we can’t think of it, well, it turns out they didn’t have a plan for any of those things. They just tried to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good job with whatever they could do within those constraints. And what the iPad was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a really good tablet that was the same type of thing that we’d already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been imagining, just a good implementation of it. So the Apple Watch comes along. Again, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors are that Apple’s about to make some kind of smartwatch. Great. By this point, we kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of knew their MO. We were kind of like, okay, it’s probably gonna be like a tiny iPhone on your wrist. And yeah, it pretty much was that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We pretty much nailed that. But everyone’s like, oh, the smartwatch is gonna replace your phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In a few years, you won’t even be buying an iPhone anymore. And here we are many years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, and we’re all still buying iPhones. And the Apple Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while it has good attributes and good uses and it’s a good product in itself,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really hasn’t overcome the fundamental limitations of smartwatches. You still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only have to use it one-handed because naturally it’s strapped to your other hand and your hand doesn’t bend that way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still has a very small display, very limited battery power compared to a phone, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very limited computing resources as a result of its small size and limited power budget and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are certain things that the smartwatch just can’t really do because of its physical realities. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so again, there were other smart watches that came before the Apple Watch, and Apple came out and did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something within the realm of what we already knew to be plausible. Just a good job of it, eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They found their way through a little bit of stumbling at the beginning there, but they found their way. It’s now a good product. By the way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate to… I already admitted last week that Gruber was right about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his stupid gloves, his stupid thin North Face gloves. I now have to admit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s right about one more thing. is almost as bad as when John’s write about something. When the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch first came out, there were two leather bands for the large… there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were three leather bands. There was the modern buckle, which was only available for the small size, still around today. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was the classic leather strap, which they don’t make anymore. That was just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically a regular like black leather strap like any other watch with a buckle and everything like that. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped making that a few years in. And then they had this thing called the leather loop and the leather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loop was kind of like the Milanese loop where you have like it where like the strap is like one long piece

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of goes through the buckle on one side and then like the excess then folds back over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and magnets to itself and I had such high hopes for that leather loop and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried on in a store and I was so disappointed by how just rock-hard it was it felt like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a plastic loop.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is this story leading to you touching a used warm John Gruber watch strap?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Okay, go ahead. He told me, oh, you gotta check out the new ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have since, I don’t know when, I think a few years ago, they have since replaced the old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather loop with a new one called the leather link, which is now a two-piece

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of them just magnets over the other one so there’s no more like loop and bend back and however they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made this one differently materials-wise, it is so much nicer than the old leather loop.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it is by far the nicest looking strap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Apple Watch if you’re trying to dress it up that also feels really comfortable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it is a really nice, soft, pliable, practical band. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended up trying one in a store, I bought it, it is super nice. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re trying to, like, you know, because it’s leather, you know, obviously you have some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco animal concerns there, but also, you know, it doesn’t deal well with things like moisture. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t work out in this band if I could help it. But if I was say like, going on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a trip somewhere, and I wanted to just bring the Apple Watch and have it be like a little bit dressed up so I could, you know, kind of look a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit nice on my trip. No question I’d use this band, the new leather link, it’s it’s so it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much nicer than you think it is. And it’s it’s much softer than you think it would be based on the old leather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loop thing. And I think it looks pretty good. And it’s nicely adjustable and everything. So anyway, big thumbs up for that. Anyway, going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back for Go back to where we were. Thanks a lot, John Gruber.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going back, as we look at the AR headset now, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that kind of lead up period where there are other, not AR, sorry, the mixed reality headset, because obviously it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like we’re not near AR yet. So there are other products in this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realm that we can look at, most notably the Quest line. You know, we can see that, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can see they are a successful product line. People do buy them, people do watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video in them, they do play games in them. I don’t think a lot of people use them as second screens for their computers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re just too low resolution. And obviously the Apple product is rumored to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be pretty high spec’d in that realm, so maybe it can be better. And Meta does have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their, whatever the, is it Horizon work?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever the thing is that Ben Thompson always talks about as being like,

⏹️ ▶️ John virtual meetings, let’s sit around a virtual table stare at our virtual faces and talk with each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which almost everyone who’s tried it basically says, yeah, it’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to do it, but it’s pretty cool. And everyone says, yeah, like if everyone bought one of these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we could do this all day and it was comfortable, then, yes, our meetings would be better. But those that’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ifs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the last part is the key part there. Yeah, well, everyone buying them is like, OK, well, then what if your work buys?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s fine. But being comfortable, that’s where you start getting into technical limitations of these things

⏹️ ▶️ John are not small. There is a not a social cost, but there is a weirdness of

⏹️ ▶️ John strapping them on. There is the practicality of strapping them on and strapping them off. And then it’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ John just like what advantage do you get? I mean, you know, the thing I think about is, especially during

⏹️ ▶️ John all the covid times and we’re all like working remotely and everything, the the social

⏹️ ▶️ John and cultural development surrounding whether or not you have your camera turned on.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you two probably didn’t do lots of virtual meetings, but I was

⏹️ ▶️ John at my jobby job for most of the, uh, you know, first few years of COVID and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that was the thing. Do you even turn your camera on? Uh, should you ask people to turn their camera?

⏹️ ▶️ John Should students in classes have to turn their camera on or not? Should you force people to turn their camera on? Is it polite to even

⏹️ ▶️ John ask them to if they have it off? How does that change in school versus work? that was just simply

⏹️ ▶️ John basically toggling a switch in software. Now imagine what it will be like in

⏹️ ▶️ John terms of we’re gonna all have a meeting, take this multi hundred or thousand dollar

⏹️ ▶️ John device that work bought for you and strap it on your head. Oh, you don’t wanna strap it

⏹️ ▶️ John on your head? Why don’t I see you with the virtual table? I can hear your voice and maybe I can even see you on the camera,

⏹️ ▶️ John but why don’t you put the headset on, Jill? I don’t wanna put the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco headset on. Why can’t I see your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco face at all times?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna mess up my hair. It’s uncomfortable. I have a headache

⏹️ ▶️ John from being inside it. It makes me motion sick. Do I have to do this as part of my job? If only

⏹️ ▶️ John some people are on their headset and other people aren’t on headsets in the meeting, does that make it a haves

⏹️ ▶️ John and have not thing? Kind of like people who are meeting in person versus the people who are meeting remote. So much complexity

⏹️ ▶️ John around this that it is not, even if you’re setting aside that this is never gonna happen because Microsoft owns that market

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple’s never gonna be able to sell to the enterprise because they suck at that and blah, blah, blah and all that other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John in there. Just the idea that like the killer app is going to be virtual meetings with a headset

⏹️ ▶️ John like this, I have such a hard time believing it, no matter how good it is,

⏹️ ▶️ John simply because of what I just said. Like we have experience with things that are much less invasive and much

⏹️ ▶️ John simpler, and that we all really do have laptops with cameras and everything on them like that. We’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John crossed all the hurdles, and yet we still have the difficulty of, should I be on camera

⏹️ ▶️ John or not? I haven’t combed my hair, I’m still in my pajamas, is it important to be on camera? And all we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John asking you to do is click a button, not strap a couple pounds of plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John and batteries and technology to your face.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s so many issues if we actually get to this world of everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has VR heads so we can do meetings and then like, and we aren’t even there yet. I mean, we’re still, again, like we’re still talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, is this product even gonna be compelling to people? And that’s the thing, like when you look these products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, you can see the use cases. You can see like, you know, group of articles citing these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this is what people do with the ones that are out there now, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like it’s more of a novelty or a specialty product. And it does not seem like anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mass market really wants yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s not, novelty and specialty and mass market, like the place

⏹️ ▶️ John where that doesn’t apply is games. Games are mass market. Games are not a novelty. Games are bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John than movies, television and everything combined. Games are huge. Games are the main application

⏹️ ▶️ John for VR headsets and has driven most of the development for VR headsets. The technology we have is from Oculus

⏹️ ▶️ John and from Valve doing their, like that’s why these things exist because people play games for

⏹️ ▶️ John entertainment in shortish spurts, huge advantages to VR in games, like

⏹️ ▶️ John games make sense for VR. But the reason we all give a funny face about this, like, oh, you can’t think of anything

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d wanna use a cool VR headset for? Well, what about games? Like, cause we know Apple sucks at games for

⏹️ ▶️ John the million reasons that we’ve talked about it. Like that’s what it, and it’s not like there are no entrance

⏹️ ▶️ John in this space. Valve has a headset that’s really good and expensive and works with a bunch of really good games.

⏹️ ▶️ John And even there in the giant vast market of games, so far based

⏹️ ▶️ John on current levels of technology, most people are playing games on their television or on their phone

⏹️ ▶️ John or on their iPad or on their whatever, you know, on their console or on their PC

⏹️ ▶️ John rather than a headset. they’ll buy a $2,000 gaming PC so they can play their favorite game at super high

⏹️ ▶️ John resolution, higher frame rates. And they will choose to do that instead of buying a VR headset

⏹️ ▶️ John because there aren’t enough good games, because people get motion sick, because the VR

⏹️ ▶️ John games are not compelling enough to make people buy an additional $1,000 thing to connect to their $2,000 PC.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s all sorts of reasons why we haven’t quite gotten there, but games are potentially a huge market. And

⏹️ ▶️ John even there with existing entrants with really good technology, that if Apple is simply

⏹️ ▶️ John incrementally better than them, and given Apple’s inability to really grok

⏹️ ▶️ John and succeed in the gaming market outside of mobile games, because obviously they’re very successful in

⏹️ ▶️ John mobile games, and I don’t think mobile games lend themselves too well to VR, that’s what makes it a

⏹️ ▶️ John puzzle. And movie and TV are also a mass market, but I feel like that is another place where people have

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly chosen to buy a large television and sit on their couch, rather than to strap something on their head, because again, if

⏹️ ▶️ John the family’s gonna sit down I just show now everyone needs to have a headset or if one person has the headset and everyone else is watching the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s weird, right? Those are the mass-market things meetings movies TV games just going from Gerber’s list, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John personal computing via projected displays You know like I think

⏹️ ▶️ John there are mass-market uses for projecting computer images in front of your eyeballs

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about about projecting computer images in front of your eyeballs

⏹️ ▶️ John with a thing that looks more or less like existing headsets that weighs the same, looks

⏹️ ▶️ John the same, has the same limitations. It’s not the same as putting on a pair of your Clark Kent

⏹️ ▶️ John glasses and being able to see people’s names hovering above their head, which as we know is the killer app for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco augmented reality. Yeah, and even, I mean, and that has its own set of like weird, creepy issues, but, you know, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like just going back to the, so what we know now is like, you know, the most likely like, you know, mixed reality headset kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing. I don’t see this being a big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, maybe, again, we say this every time, maybe they’re gonna blow us away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something that we are not thinking of. But again, if you look back at their previous new product launches

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in young hardware categories, they usually have not come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with things that we hadn’t thought of. They just do a good job of what we already knew to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slow down. What about digital touch, baby?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the most personal device I’ve ever owned. So here’s the reason we think about this is because

⏹️ ▶️ John there is the phenomenon where a technology existed for a long time and Apple does a better one.

⏹️ ▶️ John We see that all the time, right? But there is a phenomenon where Apple does a better one and

⏹️ ▶️ John the increment, they are better, crosses some divide that we didn’t previously know existed. And the obvious example

⏹️ ▶️ John of that is the iPhone. Tons of touchscreen iPhones, touchscreens had existed, smartphones had existed,

⏹️ ▶️ John touchscreen smartphones had existed. all those things exist before the iPhone. iPhone is better than them,

⏹️ ▶️ John sure. Apple makes it, it comes out with a phone, it is a touchscreen phone, it is better than previous ones, but it was better

⏹️ ▶️ John by enough to cross over this chasm. And the chasm was going from a weird product that nerds

⏹️ ▶️ John are into, to a thing that literally every person on earth can use really, really easily and get

⏹️ ▶️ John used to it. With the responsiveness, the scrolling, the intuitive, you know, like Apple did that.

⏹️ ▶️ John The iPhone was only, you know, let’s say 50% better than the phones that came before it, but that 50%

⏹️ ▶️ John jumped over a gap. We didn’t know that like touchscreens are like, suck, suck, suck, suck, suck, you know, responsiveness.

⏹️ ▶️ John However you wanna measure it, there’s this much lag, this much, you cross this threshold, this threshold of

⏹️ ▶️ John responsiveness and ease of use, and it’s a discontinuity. You go from not viable or

⏹️ ▶️ John nerd niche product, like the Trio or whatever those Sony touchscreen phones were to

⏹️ ▶️ John this other thing that sweeps across the whole world. That’s why we’re interested in stuff like this. Okay, so they come

⏹️ ▶️ John out with an incrementally better headset. Does their increment of betterness cross a similar divide

⏹️ ▶️ John that suddenly brings it from the realm of weird, stupid crap that no one cares about to mass market, or does it not?

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s so hard to tell with that. The other things you listed didn’t do that. The watch was

⏹️ ▶️ John better than other smartwatches by a huge margin, I think, a huge increment. Think of the best

⏹️ ▶️ John smartwatch that existed before the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch. I think it made a hugely, but it didn’t cross

⏹️ ▶️ John any sort of divide. You know what I mean? It didn’t go from, here’s the thing that nobody wants to a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that everybody wants. It just was a better smartwatch. It was better by I think a lot, but it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John jump any kind of gap. And I think that’s true of the iPad. It’s the best tablet it had

⏹️ ▶️ John ever come out with, but it was similar to the iPhone in that we’d already jumped the responsive touchscreen divide,

⏹️ ▶️ John so it was right on the other side of that. And this was just like, like I said, a bigger iPhone, which is great and a useful thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John but didn’t necessarily break any new ground. And the headset,

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason people are interested in technology is we see a divide. If you can get out of

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I strap onto my head that’s bulky and big or whatever and get into a pair of glasses like that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John wearing right now, but that I can see, you know, 8K displays in each of my eyeballs with,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is clearly over a divide. And suddenly that is a product that everyone on the planet is gonna be like, yes, please give

⏹️ ▶️ John me that, right? But we don’t have the technology yet. And Apple doesn’t either. Like they’re not coming out with

⏹️ ▶️ John a pair of glasses. They’re coming out with a headset and people have already done that. So that is the question for

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing. Is it better? First of all, is it better? I think we all probably assume it’s gonna be better because it’ll be the newest

⏹️ ▶️ John one. The newest one will have the best technology and the specs on it seem like they’re pretty good or whatever, right? So it’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ John good. Maybe it won’t be as good as the highest of high-end gaming things. I think, you know, Meta Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John has scaled back on that and they’re less interested in making the best of best for

⏹️ ▶️ John gaming with like, you know, a multi-thousand dollar device with the highest resolution and the lowest response time. It feels like Valve

⏹️ ▶️ John is more, what is that? Valve Index is what theirs is called. They’re more aiming for that market.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas Meta is trying to go mass market, which whatever, I’m not sure that’s a great decision, but either way, that’s where

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going. So I think the Apple one will be like the best headset you can get in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of the raw specs, and maybe it’ll do some novel things, but it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be far, far away from a pair of glasses. And I don’t think it’s gonna cross any sort of divide

⏹️ ▶️ John where the audience for this product suddenly explodes just like the audience for a touchscreen

⏹️ ▶️ John phone exploded after the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, frankly, I think if you look at where technology seems to be now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re so far from that, from the idea of just like the glasses that are just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco glasses and somehow project AR stuff and are powerful and powered and things like, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far from that, I think that if we’re looking at this as a product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna actually be like real and shipping soon, I think we have to think of it more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a VR headset than an AR product, just because it is so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like we’re so far from the AR dream here. And-

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think we’re as far as you think, related to that though, related to last time about the touchscreen stuff or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m always keep reading these articles about screen technology, mostly in relation to television stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John The latest set of screen tech that allows you to lay down very

⏹️ ▶️ John low power, very high fidelity, very high resolution, very thin screen material on transparent

⏹️ ▶️ John surfaces is within the realm of our lifetime spec wise

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of just having a screen. Like you could put them in a pair of glasses. If these experimental stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ John they can make some tiny little postage stamp sizes thing actually existed and were economical today, you could put

⏹️ ▶️ John them on glasses and then you could power them. What you end up doing is powering them from your phone. So 2040,

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of a pair of glasses for the high res, high fidelity color display that is wirelessly

⏹️ ▶️ John seeing what is projected from your smartphone, which will then be insanely powerful. It already is insanely powerful.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is plausible. So when you say we’re so far away, it’s not like the type of thing where we’re like, we’ll all be dead.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is plausible. The people on this podcast will be alive when something like that exists. And it’s mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with screen technology, right? Because the screen, the technology to have a low power, lightweight

⏹️ ▶️ John screen that has the specs that we need is the limiting factor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Powering it, all you need there is enough, because you can just power it from your

⏹️ ▶️ John phone, right? Like phones are incredibly powerful. In 20 years, they’ll be even more powerful,

⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully. And then you can just project it and the thing that’s on your face is just a screen, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what this device is, even though it seems like it’s tied to your iPhone, it’s gonna have its own SOCs in it, according to the rumors and all that

⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff, which is fine. Like, I’m not, that’s why I don’t dismiss

⏹️ ▶️ John this entire market, because I think when they do cross that threshold, it will be really big,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think we are in, in a generational shooting distance

⏹️ ▶️ John of getting there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s possible, but I do think, like, the products that people think of when they think of AR,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when I say we’re not close, I’m thinking, you know, we’re like 10 years or more away. Not to say that it’s our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifetime away, you know, hopefully we live longer than that, but I’m thinking it’s at least 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years away probably from that kind of product. But that brings the question up though, okay, well what do they do in the meantime?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the meantime, if they’re gonna have this product out there that’s more of like a VR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, we’ll see what, quote, mixed reality ends up being like. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge question mark. Maybe they’ve done such a great job with mixed reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe a lot of these questions become moot. And we don’t know. We’ll see when the product comes out, if the product comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. You know, we’ll see that.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you say mixed reality, what are you referring to? You’re referring, like, give me a use case. You’re saying just projecting

⏹️ ▶️ John 3D stuff onto the real world?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically like, you know, what the current MetaQuest 2 does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like, you know, you step outside of the circle and you get the little black and white crappy view of the world, the current rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple thing are that it’s gonna have much better cameras to the outside world, possibly even that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goopy sounding thing that it shows your face on a screen to the outside world. I hope that’s wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ John That reminds me of some terrifying things from the Peripheral TV series.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now showing on Amazon Prime. It’s pretty good. You should check it out. Yeah, I can’t imagine that not looking horrifying, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, but we’ll see. Anyway, but if that’s the direction they’re going, if they do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really great job of that, maybe there would be a decent amount of utility

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, but that’s not, I don’t think this is gonna be the kind of thing you’re gonna see people walking around on the street

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing this thing. It’s probably more gonna be, you know, you might play with it in the office or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home sometime. But if they do a really good job of that kind of mixed reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they can get to truly AR type glasses, maybe that’ll be really great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way that I’m not thinking of and won’t be super creepy and weird and uncomfortable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with a short battery life. But again, I look at these rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far and it just does not sound like a product that excites me at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so again, I hope I’m wrong. It’s not to say that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple can’t do this. They have a lot of resources and a lot of smart people and they tend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mostly do successful things. So I’m sure if they really put their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind to it, they can do it. But I wonder what exactly they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing here. And is this gonna be good enough and successful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to be worth all of this effort? And I don’t know the answer to that yet. We have to see the product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see how it sells. But none of this sounds very exciting to me. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll just be very pleasantly surprised, or maybe it actually, maybe they haven’t thought of something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can’t think of. Maybe they haven’t broken out of the limited imaginations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have. And maybe it’s just gonna be a kind of okay product that doesn’t go very far. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll find out eventually. But frankly, I’m so excited about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their other products that I worry this might just be a big distraction.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve been throwing links into the chat room with a little L modifier so they show up in case he’s

⏹️ ▶️ John linked us to things that I’ve posted on my blog in the past about these topics. One of them was the

⏹️ ▶️ John article I wrote entitled Antacid Tablet, which was throwing cold water on all the fantastical rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John about the iPad before it was released. and I’ll take my annual

⏹️ ▶️ John victory lap for being right about that. But the other one was like, to your question about like, why are

⏹️ ▶️ John they building this AR headset now if it’s gotta be this big bulky thing and we’re not quite at the point where

⏹️ ▶️ John we have the glasses or whatever. The article I wrote back in 2013, Don’t Stop Thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John About Tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Another song.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you don’t get to the glasses without doing all the

⏹️ ▶️ John hard work of the steps in between. And kind of like how we always talked about how it’s important for Apple to do

⏹️ ▶️ John like their reality kit and the LiDAR sensor on the iPad and the AR VR apps with

⏹️ ▶️ John placing furniture in your house, how important it is for Apple to do that. Even though it seems like it’s a silly thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and they do those AR table demos and we all laugh at them or whatever, because what they’re doing is they’re developing the

⏹️ ▶️ John technology that will be needed for the day when we get those

⏹️ ▶️ John glasses, right? You can’t just wait, oh, we’re not gonna look into this field until the glasses are ready because then someone else will come and eat your lunch.

⏹️ ▶️ John So similarly, I think it is important for Apple to do the work

⏹️ ▶️ John to make a, you know, Oculus, uh, you know, Quest,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Valve Index style AR VR headset thingy,

⏹️ ▶️ John more or less at the current level of technology, but a little bit better, even if it is not a particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John successful product. Because if they want to be a player in this space, you can’t just wait

⏹️ ▶️ John around forever, right? so that people were complaining at the time about the slimming edge

⏹️ ▶️ John of the 5K iMac, because they took out the optical drive to make the edge of the 5K iMac slim, and they were like, why

⏹️ ▶️ John the hell are they making the edge of the iMac slim? Who cares how slim it is, right? Or like the iPhone 5 was

⏹️ ▶️ John too skinny. It’s like, my phone didn’t need to be that skinny. Why do you keep making it skinnier? And the analogy I made for the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John was like, yeah, but what if I told you it was as thin as a credit card? Then when you dropped your phone on the ground like hazy,

⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t break, because it would just flutter to the ground like a little credit card type thing, right? You’re never gonna get to that type

⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, fantasy clear phone that you see in sci-fi shows that is light and durable

⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, much, much sturdier than an aluminum glass thing that we have now or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And for the iMac, I would say, you don’t get to the current 24 inch iMac that’s practically the thickness of a phone

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t spend years and years and years making your desktop computer thinner for reasons that people don’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I’m not advocating for doing, making stupid computers. I rail against that all the time. I’m just saying that like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t just make a big fat computer for decades and then you have your next computer

⏹️ ▶️ John be as thick as a 24 inch iMac. Like the expertise you build learning how to make skinny things pays

⏹️ ▶️ John off. And similarly, making headsets. Hopefully this one will be a little bit slimmer, a little bit lighter

⏹️ ▶️ John than existing products. Have better specs, be more responsive, have more power,

⏹️ ▶️ John have better battery life, like all the things, right? And still it might be the Apple Watch Series

⏹️ ▶️ John Zero of headsets where people are like, ah, it wasn’t that great, it was way too slow. There was no good

⏹️ ▶️ John applications for it. The games on it were silly, you know, whatever. But if you ever

⏹️ ▶️ John want Apple to make those glasses that let you walk around the city streets, seeing Apple map, projecting everything

⏹️ ▶️ John in all directions and being able to look at messages and see people’s names floating over their head and

⏹️ ▶️ John all that other good stuff that we want to happen, you don’t get there unless you do all the work leading up to it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can’t. And by the way, you can’t do all that work internally and never ship a product. So I’m already

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like preemptively giving Apple pass on this thing that even if it is

⏹️ ▶️ John a massive flop, Apple needs to do this. In a way, they don’t need to do a car because I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John this is up Apple’s alley. If and when the technology gets to

⏹️ ▶️ John the point where we can all have information displayed on our eyeballs in a way that is unobtrusive and lightweight,

⏹️ ▶️ John like with glasses or in the distant, distant future, magical contact lenses or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where Apple should be. That’s right up their alley. That’s what they’ve always been doing. Personal computers, computing

⏹️ ▶️ John devices that you use yourself, right? Maybe less so with the car, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I do want to see them trying here and I do want to see them ship something.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if this ends up being, you know, I was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gonna say the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco original

⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod, then, you know, we’re gonna go back to the drawing board and come out, maybe not with the Apple VR goggles 1.5,

⏹️ ▶️ John but who knows, this year, apparently we’ll find out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I can’t help but wonder what has Apple already said to us about this device

⏹️ ▶️ Casey without us realizing it. And the canonical example of this is auto layout before they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch to more than one screen size. You know, they kind of choreograph that switch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by saying, hey, developers, what if we made this system, that was a pain in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ass, but what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if we made this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey system that would let you kind of dynamically adjust to different screen sizes and layouts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot with magic? And, you know, they did this for a year or two. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally we got, what was it, the iPhone 4, first iPhone that had a different size screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And obviously the clear example of how they’re potentially choreographing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this headset is all the AR stuff they’ve been doing recently. And I don’t know enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about AR or VR or any 3D programming or any of this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to be able to theorize where they’re going. But I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if somebody more knowledgeable than I might be able to put together,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, based on what these APIs are doing and the direction these APIs are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going, what does this indicate to us? You know, I can’t help but wonder if, you know, James Thompson, who’s spent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an inordinate amount of time doing all sorts of interesting and I say that genuinely, interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sometimes silly, but definitely interesting work in AR and VR, well, maybe not VR, but like in AR

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 3D space and stuff like that like Carat Weather’s AR mode, which I’ve used like twice, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey still a thing. You know, what are these APIs telling us about the future? And all too

⏹️ ▶️ Casey often, we don’t put it together until it was too late. I think in the, in the auto layout example, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we all kind of had a feeling where that was going, but a lot of times we’ll look at it after the fact and go,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, like a lot of the changes. I can’t think of specific examples, but a lot of the changes that were,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it turned out were to support Swift DSLs, like Swift UI, we didn’t really know where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was going at first, I didn’t think. Maybe my memory’s bad. And then once SwiftUI landed, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were like, oh, that’s what that was about. And maybe one of you guys

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can kind of theorize about this. I don’t think I’m the person to do it, but I can’t help but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wonder if we look at the changes and the new things introduced over the last several years, particularly around AR,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what does that tell us about the future?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they were particularly secretive about that, though, because like all the AR stuff we see, it’s right there out

⏹️ ▶️ John in the open. And we’ve been developing it for years. What we were always asking is like, why the hell would I wanna do that

⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone? Why do I need a LiDAR sensor on my iPad? And it’s like, oh, well, if you wanted to change your

⏹️ ▶️ John paint color and interior decoration, and you can hold your iPad around and scan your room, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you can use the Ikea app to drop furniture in, or you can tap on your walls and change the color. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John like, and it all makes sense. Like, yeah, I guess. And you know, you can use this to measure. Remember the measure tool? Oh, you

⏹️ ▶️ John use it to measure. and it’s just, is it accurate? Well, you know, kind of, not really

⏹️ ▶️ John as accurate as using a tape measure, but it’s a fun thing to do. And like, you could always see what they’re doing. Oh, the new AR thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John like we have better 3D rendering and it’s better about detecting objects and things won’t clip and overlap. And

⏹️ ▶️ John here you can, remember putting the new Mac Pro on the table, they have the 3D model. It’s right out there in front

⏹️ ▶️ John of us. The API is for it, what you can use it for, but it’s like, we’d always be looking at that and saying, okay, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is cool. I like that you’re making this technology better. Every time at WWDC, you have new sessions, how you’re making it better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And all of us were just saying, but we know, we know all this is for when we strap something to our

⏹️ ▶️ John head, when we put something into our eyeballs, when we have a stereo image, one image in the left

⏹️ ▶️ John eye, one image in the right eye that allows us to have a 3D view of things. And like, we know. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so we’re waiting for this product to come out. And the questions about the product are things that I think that we haven’t had

⏹️ ▶️ John hints of. Like, for example, what is the UI? Unless stage manager is the hint. Lots of people read into that. Oh, stage

⏹️ ▶️ John manager is exactly what the UI is gonna look like. And here’s the problem with that prediction. It’s almost impossible for that prediction

⏹️ ▶️ John to be wrong because they’re like, if there’s literally any like computer window

⏹️ ▶️ John floating on an angle, they’re gonna say, see, it’s just like stage manager. Even if they share no code, if the teams

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know about each other, if they were in different parts of the world, right? Everyone will say, it’s just like stage manager.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you right now, there will be an ability to see essentially a screen that is

⏹️ ▶️ John not square with your eyeballs. And so if you wanted to predict, is it gonna be like stage manager? Yeah, there’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John a screen that’s floating off to the side that’s not square with your eyeballs, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same as stage manager. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I might literally be called stage manager. I don’t know, I’m just saying like, we can kind of see what they’ll do, but what we haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seen is like, what is the UI? What is the equivalent of springboard? How do you launch apps? How do you find apps? How do you interact with it?

⏹️ ▶️ John How do you enter texts? Like all the, there’s possibilities when you look at the competing products and how they do it, but we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have answers to that because that’s the stuff they don’t have to release. But what they are releasing and what we do see is

⏹️ ▶️ John how do you project objects into real space? or metal, their 3D API, what does that support

⏹️ ▶️ John all? You know, like we see that, we see the GPUs, we see their shader technology, we see their

⏹️ ▶️ John rendering pipelines, we see their sensor technologies with the cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John and the LiDAR, that’s all out in the open for us to see because they ship products, they ship products and people ship apps and we can get

⏹️ ▶️ John to use it. But every time we use it, we think this is great and all, but it really needs to be in a headset.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so when the headset comes out, we’re gonna be like, oh, now finally it’s in a headset and then we have more complaints, which is like, well, I don’t wanna spend $1,500

⏹️ ▶️ John on a thing that I’m not sure what I would use it for.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Trade Coffee and Squarespace. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at a to p.fm slash join. We will talk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show

⏹️ ▶️ John is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, check podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long

Post-show: iPad use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to figure out what to do with my iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you mean by that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in general, like, you know, I bought an iPad for like stage manager testing with my app that turned out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to really be much of a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should have sold it to me, so I could have given it to my son, but you turned me down. I’m never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John sell anything to you. And now you don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what to do with it again. Yeah, I’m back to not knowing what to do with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John go back in time and sell it to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Easy peasy. Because I bought a

⏹️ ▶️ John brand new M2 one, it was way more expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, whenever I try to, so I tried once again

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the iPad for some productivity roles and just doing simple things, email, notes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, basic things like that. And it just frustrates me every time. Are you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it with a physical keyboard? The keyboard’s fine, but it’s just like, I had to jump between a couple of, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had, I started this yesterday, I had a mail message open that I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was composing. I wanted to refer to an attachment in a different mail message.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, you can actually do this now. This wasn’t always the case with iPadOS, but nowadays you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. You push the little compose window down, and it goes into the little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ghost lineup of lost windows that every app has somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hidden. And then, okay, how do you get back to that window? Well, as far as I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you have to tap the mail icon in the dock, so bring up the dock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first, then tap the mail icon, then it brings up a little hovery ghost lineup, and then you pick it from there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was doing that, switching between that and like a notes window, and trying to view this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attachment so I could comment on it. And it was, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so cumbersome. And I’m like, you know what, I’m just gonna go do this on a Mac, where I can do it in two seconds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super easily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You don’t have to solve the puzzle of

⏹️ ▶️ John how to subdivide your screen, and how to find the ghost windows. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then how to unsubdivide it. Like when you’re done, how do you close all these ghost windows? Like it’s, ugh!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything about it, just

⏹️ ▶️ John like. And even within the realm of, the main multitasking thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John I use on the iPad, because my use case is very simple, is I use SlideOver a lot, just because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly the case where I’m, I have one big thing that I’m doing, which is, let’s be honest, probably watching a YouTube video

⏹️ ▶️ John or a TV show. And then in SlideOver, I have a bunch of other crap, like reading Twitter or Mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ John or looking at a Slack thing or whatever, right? And so I know how all of those modes work. I

⏹️ ▶️ John know how to get things in and out of SlideOver. I know how to switch between them. I know how to move them from one side to the other. I know how

⏹️ ▶️ John to bring them full screen and move them back. Like within the realm of the small corner of functionality one, I know how to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then on top of that, apps have bugs. Slack, for instance, when

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in SlideOver, if you want to type something, very often you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John hit the send button because the keyboard slides up over the send button. Like you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get to it. The only way to send that message is to put Slack into full screen because it’s something about the, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the layout of the thing is wrong. Like they’re measuring, they don’t know where the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John is, they’re measuring it wrong and there’s physically no way without an attached hardware keyboard, which I don’t have, to

⏹️ ▶️ John hit send on the message you want. So you have to bring it into full screen, hit send and then put it back into Slido.

⏹️ ▶️ John Bugs like that would not be tolerable in a Mac app. Imagine if like an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Mail that when you opened a new message to compose it, you couldn’t send it

⏹️ ▶️ John until you put the window into full screen. That would not be an acceptable shipping bug, but

⏹️ ▶️ John on common applications like Slack, basic functionality does not work in slide over.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is it an OS bug? Is it a slack bug? I don’t know whose fault it is, but it’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John unacceptable. I say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just like every time I have tried to find a role for the iPad in my life,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve either failed immediately or I have failed eventually. It’s either,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works for a while and then all the limitations irritate me, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my needs change or my priorities change and it goes away. I hear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from all the people who use and love iPads all the time, including the rest of my family, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see how much everyone else uses them. And for the stuff I want to and have to do, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have just failed so hard, so consistently, making this device and this device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco family a routine part of my life. And I almost feel like I’m failing as an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerd to find a use for all of their products. I really should be using an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad on a regular basis, but there have been long spans, months long spans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I haven’t even had my own iPad. Oftentimes it’s because my kid’s iPad broke, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I traded in mine for a few weeks while I got his fixed or whatever. There have been long spans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I just haven’t had one, and it’s never really been a problem with a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco few occasional exceptions like, oh, there’s now a new iPad with a heart rate capability I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to test for my app. That’s about it. And I think Stage Manager was the first one of those in maybe five

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. So it’s like, and I just like, am I, I understand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that because I’m a human being, I don’t need to find a use for every single one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s products. I know that, academically speaking. But as an Apple nerd and a technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enthusiast, and a person who makes a big part of my living from talking about as many Apple products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we can, I feel like I should probably find a use for this device in my life. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is it? I don’t know. You need to watch

⏹️ ▶️ John more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You need to watch more TV. You need to watch

⏹️ ▶️ John more movies in bed. That’s literally the main use of my thing. My iPad is on my nightstand

⏹️ ▶️ John next to my bed. I use it to watch YouTube, television, and movies

⏹️ ▶️ John in bed while I read other parts of the internet. That’s what I use it for like 99% of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, whoa, whoa, hold on. It’s playing TV show on your lap while you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsing like on a different device like on your phone

⏹️ ▶️ John or something? No, it’s the only thing on my lap. It’s my iPad. It’s in a little stand. It’s propped up. I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at it and I’m watching either YouTube video, a movie, or a television show before I go to bed.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I’m saying I slide over things like Mastodon and Twitter and Slack. Oh, oh, oh.

⏹️ ▶️ John is boring. It’s a two screen experience with one screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like I mean even like YouTube is better on a laptop than it is. Oh no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s not. That’s why your

⏹️ ▶️ John kids as that’s why other it’s that you to the iPad is the

⏹️ ▶️ John best device for YouTube phone is probably best for Tick Tock vertical and all but and to

⏹️ ▶️ John the extent that anybody should be using Tick Tock but YouTube iPad they go together like bees and carrots.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way the app that I usually would watch him before going to bed is TikTok. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably not going to work very well on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a phone thing, but I can encourage you to maybe check out some of those YouTube channels

⏹️ ▶️ John you subscribe to. Maybe they’ll be more interesting and educational. If you’re interested in seeing someone

⏹️ ▶️ John rebuild one of those hydrogen-powered V12s from those BMWs, that’s what I was watching

⏹️ ▶️ John earlier today. He’s got the whole bottom end of the engine

⏹️ ▶️ John reassembled is just waiting for the heads to come back from being ported in Poland. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John tune right into that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I see when I go to YouTube is like, you know, people’s expressions of surprise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or confusion with their exaggerated faces. Stop looking at the thumbnails. A big headline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds really sensational and then like holding up a diagonal Apple product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s and there’s like 17 like I remember like what I think was yesterday

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all the HomePod YouTube reviews came

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was looking at probably like the MacBroomer’s page, listing them all, and they had embedded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like five or six or nine different YouTube videos all in a row. Like, here’s all the reviews. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look down, you look at all the thumbnails, and they all look exactly the same. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all different people on different channels, but it’s like, okay, I can see the formula clear as day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is all YouTube looks like when I see it, And I don’t like that. It just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns me off so much that all of these people who are otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, smart people who I respect, and for most of them, or if not all of them, but to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all stoop to this crappy formula, it just really turns me off.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you that M539 Restorations does not have thumbnails like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So again, if you want to watch a BMW’s engine being slowly rebuilt over the course of a month,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the channel for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, Marco, I enjoy using my iPad when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the couch, you know, so I’m multitasking, you know, two screening, etc. I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really good time for it. Now, you could absolutely use your phone. I’m not saying this is required, you know, an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad isn’t required for this, but I do like it for that a lot. I also really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like it if I’m a passenger in a car for a journey, you know, that’s, that’s relatively

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long. So if I’m going to be in the car for like an hour and Aaron’s driving, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey great device for that. And why is that Marco? Because guess what? It has a cellular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey modem. If only, if only I could pay Apple an obscene amount

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of money to include one of those in a MacBook Pro. Gosh, that would be amazing. Have we ever talked about I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we should talk about that sometime. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I mean, really, legitimately, I really do enjoy it for those kinds of things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really do, for the most part, like using it. And I know this is such

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tired thing to say, but I like using it for consumption. If I am not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my desk and I want to catch up on the things that I think we’re going to talk about tonight on ATP, then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes grab my iPad. Because if I’m just reading stuff, it’s great for that. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m sitting down to add things to the show notes, oh no, put me in front of a Mac all,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, every day, any time, because not only is doing like multiple things on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad a pain in the butt, as you two have both described, but the Google apps on the iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my personal opinion, are straight trash and are terrible. And so because of that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m adding stuff to the show notes, I will absolutely be doing that on a Mac. But if I’m just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, consuming the things in the show notes, I’m catching up on the the videos that you and John have put in or the links that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and John have put in, I can absolutely do that on the iPad and it’s no problem. And it’s a much more, even with the big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey heavy keyboard, it is a pretty convenient thing to carry. Even with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pencil on the side of it that I don’t even use that often, I still find it far more convenient to carry that around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I do a laptop. And the battery life, although now with the M1 laptops and M2 laptops, battery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey life isn’t really an issue anymore either, but the battery life on the iPad is great, even with cellular modem on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying you’re wrong for the record. I think I’m not creating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses for it necessarily, but I am finding uses for the iPad where I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other devices that would work almost as well. So you’re not really wrong or missing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out or anything like that. But I do think if you are the kind of person to two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, you know, in the living room or if you want it to be out and about in, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like say on the boat to or from the mainland, I can imagine, assuming you have cellular service there, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume you do, that’d be a perfect time for an iPad. If you’re just goofing off on the boat and you just want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spend however long that boat trip is, what, like half an hour? Just goofing off, that’s perfect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an iPad, assuming you have cellular.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually just use the phone for that. And that’s not unreasonable. It’s not unreasonable at all. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have one to use, you might as well use the iPad. I mean, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re watching, like I was saying, watching a video, yeah, like TikTok or something small like that, but if you’re watching

⏹️ ▶️ John a television show or movie, which I know you’re not that into, a bigger screen is better. You know, and if you’re watching someone

⏹️ ▶️ John rebuild an engine and you want to see the details, it’s too small on your phone. You can’t see it. Like it’s too zoomed out.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it’s like 4K, it’s everything’s tiny, right? So the iPad is a bigger screen, not so big that it’s unwieldy,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, same thing with like on a tray table on, you know, taking a flight. iPad is a better thing to

⏹️ ▶️ John watch a movie on than watching a movie on your phone. Right. And even, even I, so like I have the big phone

⏹️ ▶️ John because I do watch YouTube videos on my phone plenty of times, right? But in the winding down going

⏹️ ▶️ John to bed thing, I use the iPad for that because it is a better device for that. And also

⏹️ ▶️ John it stands up on its own. It has a little, you know, I turn the little smart cover around and make the little triangle

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t have to hold it up at all. Whereas my phone, I would have to be holding, right? And when I’m going off to bed, I don’t wanna have to

⏹️ ▶️ John hold it up. So, and would a laptop be better? There’s no way I would keep a laptop next to my bed. I don’t need the keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s big and unwieldy. I don’t need that complexity. So that’s the place the iPad fits

⏹️ ▶️ John in in my life. and I would be very sad without it. Whereas on the other hand, I

⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t worn an Apple watch in ages and I don’t spend any of my time thinking about how I can fit an Apple watch

⏹️ ▶️ John into my life. But I still have my Apple watch, although at this point it’s probably dead. Like it’s been in the

⏹️ ▶️ John drawer for so long. Like they always get to the point where they’re so drained that they can’t even charge anymore. I should check that out sometime.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, is this still the first generation one?

⏹️ ▶️ John Series zero. Yeah, my wife has the current watch. She’s, I’m living vicariously

⏹️ ▶️ John through her watch use to be up on what it’s like to have a watch because she gets a new one very frequently, uses it every single

⏹️ ▶️ John day. You know, I see her use it, I see her send messages to and from it and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, so I feel like I’m up on the watch, even though I’m not wearing one, just because I’m not a watch person.