523: I Can't Give Him the Carrot Fast Enough
24 Feb 2023iPhone 15 rumors, blood-glucose monitoring, and a special Neutral: Marco drove a Rivian, and you’ll never believe what happened… right before that.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: ✅ ATP hat-trick achieved ☹️
- Follow-up:
- Getting a copy of your data from Apple
- On our slagging of Dolby Pro Logic (via Rob Howard)
- A tip about
Skip Introon Apple TV (via Mark Johnson) - More on the Sony HT-A9 & SA-SW5 from John Coke and Ian White
- Alternative thoughts on why Xcode downloads are huge (via Michael McGuire)
- Marco should buy a Ford F150 Lightning? Maybe? (via William Vabrinskas)
- Some further thoughts on COVID from Keith, medicinal chemist
- iPhone 15 CAD drawings
- Post-show: Marco has many bits of car news
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Chapters
- How it’s goin’
- Getting your data from Apple
- Old surround-sound methods
- Follow-up: Sony HT-A9
- Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home
- Follow-up: Skip Intro woes
- Incremental Xcode/IDE updates
- F150 Lightning’s sunroof
- COVID corrections
- Sponsor: Memberful
- iPhone 15 enclosure leaks
- Blood-glucose monitoring rumor
- Ending theme
- Neutral I: Tesla
- Neutral II: Land Rover
- Neutral III: Rivian
How it’s goin’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so John, how’s it going?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think COVID-19, everyone’s favorite disease slash germ, has
⏹️ ▶️ John achieved the ATP hat trick. He knocked off all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosts. Yep. Apparently, so the way I think this has happened, this is the headcanon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I received it from Lex via your daily Lex. He infected me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he infected me, and then I have now infected you, and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not taken down the rest of the people in your house with you. What’s the status there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so far so good. I mean, so I’ve been having symptoms since Monday.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was negative on Monday and Tuesday, and then I was positive on Wednesday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Were you taking evasive maneuvers within the house on Monday or Tuesday, or were you assuming it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because here’s why. People are always having colds in the house, and whenever someone has a cold, we give them COVID
⏹️ ▶️ John tests, and they come up negative, and everything’s fine. So I had a cold, and I was giving myself COVID tests like I do any time I have a code and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John coming up negative. Yeah. And then on Wednesday morning, it was positive. And then I immediately retreated to my room where
⏹️ ▶️ John I have been hiding since then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what have you been doing to kill time then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, for the, you know, for the first, you know, three days of this, I just basically had a fever
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole time. That’s sucky. You know, I know it’s where people had it much worse than I have for sure. But no one likes having a fever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m used to fevers breaking and this, like wasn’t breaking. So that was kind of crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s not the worst cold I’ve ever had, but it’s pretty crappy cold. I did
⏹️ ▶️ John get a Pax Lovid prescription and I talked to my doctor and she was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, if you don’t want to take it, you know, because you don’t want any weird side effects
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. If you start getting better, that’s fine. But if I can tell you that, you know, the third day of your symptoms
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably not the peak. It could get worse, so do what you want to do. And after my third
⏹️ ▶️ John day of symptoms, it was not getting better, it was getting worse. And so I started taking it and that’s what I’m on now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so today, how are we feeling this evening? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I feel like the fever is mostly gone. So all you got is stuffiness, headaches, body aches.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s not a terrible cold. I do credit some of that to the medicine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but who knows? Honestly, I just started taking it because I was like, look, if it got better on its own, I wouldn’t have taken it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it wasn’t getting better on its own. I knew I had to do a podcast. So, you know, I did record a podcast on Tuesday, which at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure, had COVID, right? Even though I was still testing negative. And that was kind of miserable and involving a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John coughing and sweating and feveriness. And so, you know, it’s part of the grand ATP tradition
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of us podcasting when we are COVID positive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. I mean, that is that is the rule, apparently, amongst the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John us. The show must go on. And the great thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about podcasting the way we do it is, despite the earlier joking, it is not transmissible to the other
Getting your data from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s do some follow-up. What was the context for this? This is about getting your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data, a copy of your data from Apple. And for the life of me, I can’t remember when this came
⏹️ ▶️ John It was an Ask ATP about how to export your messages or something. I remember talking about Google Takeout, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is Google’s version of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm, that’s right. So I presume, John, somebody put this in the show notes. Privacy.Apple.com where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a copy of your data. And a few years ago now, Zach Whitaker at ZDNet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in 2018 did exactly this. And it It was funny, Zach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went through all the data he received and he said it actually wasn’t that much, which in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey context is a good thing because it means Apple didn’t have that much. Well, if you trust Apple to be telling the truth.
⏹️ ▶️ John think they didn’t even give him his messages. The reason the date is important here is that it’s 2018, is this is before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, yes, or it was around
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, I mean, if you’re wondering why Apple is improving this feature, I’m assuming it’s for regulatory compliance because
⏹️ ▶️ John what his download contained was like, well, here’s some metadata about your messages, but not the actual messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, Apple does have that data, even though it’s encrypted, they could give it to you and you could decrypt it with your local machine
⏹️ ▶️ John keys, but they didn’t used to do that. But I think now it has improved. So, you know, why is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple now making this feature better? Probably for regulatory compliance reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. I did think the post was interesting though, nevertheless, and it’s worth a quick read if you’re interested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then also tell me about iMazing, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a third party application that a lot of people recommended. I’ve I think I’ve either bought or at least downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John that application multiple times in the past to try to use it. It’s from the old days, back
⏹️ ▶️ John when you used to both like mount your iPod as a USB disk and pull things out of it. Remember that? I believe this
⏹️ ▶️ John software has its origins in that era of devices. Obviously, we’re far from that now, but still, they have a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you go onto your phone and pull stuff off somehow. And some people do use that to pull messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m amazed that still works.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure how they’re doing it. Maybe they’re secretly jailbreaking phone. I have no idea. I don’t want to cast aspersions on this thing, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John some people swear by it. They say, this is how I downloaded my messages from my phone onto my Mac to get a local copy. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking for a third party application that claims to do that, here’s one.
Old surround-sound methods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rob Howard writes with regard to, oh yes, the context here is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, I think it was John, was saying, was kind of slagging on Dolby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ProLogic, you know, the original, one of the original surround sound
⏹️ ▶️ John systems. I didn’t. I was saying systems that try to take a stereo sound and put it into back channels.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s lots of different ways you can do that. And the specific one that Rob is writing about here is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the better ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I actually, I didn’t interrupt you at the time because that’s, that was my understanding as well is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the system would just kind of make a best guess as to what was in the rear channel. So I obviously didn’t know much about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly less than I thought I did. So Rob Howard writes, old home surround sound systems didn’t rely on guesswork.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dolby systems encoded the rear channels into the stereo channels so they could be decoded later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not as good as discrete channels, of course, but calling it guesswork probably sells the work of Dolby’s engineers a little short.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is with regard to Dolby ProLogic. And building on that, and we’ll link to Wikipedia, Adobe ProLogic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decoder or processor unfolds, quote, unquote, the soundtrack back into its original 4.0 sound,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left and right, center, and a single limited frequency range mono rear channel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was fascinating. I did not think that ProLogic was that smart, but it turns out it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John A 7 kilohertz low pass filtered mono rear channel is not ideal, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John for surround, but at least they have a way of getting the signal out as opposed to just taking stereo and guessing. The reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is also true. If you have a multi-channel thing and you’re watching stereo, every receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John and every receiver-like device thing will have a way to say, well, I’m only getting two channels of sound, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll figure out a way to spread it over your speakers in a reasonable way. I mean, that’s a little bit easier because it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re losing information. Worst case scenario, we can just play back the same stereo sounds like evenly throughout
⏹️ ▶️ John the right and left half of the speakers. But it is true that no matter how many speakers you have, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna be watching content doesn’t match that number of speakers. And sometimes you might not be able to pick a soundtrack,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in the modern age of streaming, where back in the day when you get a plastic disc, they’d often have different soundtracks
⏹️ ▶️ John on them, the stereo mix and a 5.1 mix or whatever. But with streaming, there’s not that much of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re at the mercy of whatever the audio track is. And if your number of speakers matches that, great. And if not,
⏹️ ▶️ John some device somewhere is going to be having to do something for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. I’ve probably told this story five times on the show over the last decade. But I remember vividly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when this was probably like 93, 94, something like that, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad’s favorite party trick in the world, which says a lot about my dad in many different ways, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he would put on the top, I almost said top gear, the top gun laser disc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we had a laser disc player and a Dolby surround sound setup. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were times that the plane would pass from the bottom of the frame to the top of the frame. And ostensibly, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the camera you and it sounded like it was going behind you and I tell you what in 1993
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever this was that blew my mind and then it got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even better because we had one of those really ridiculous remote controls that had a physical jog wheel at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you could go frame by frame on the laser disc and that was also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earth shatteringly cool at the time it was amazing and of course the fidelity of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frames was straight trash I mean it was not quite Real player bad, but it was not great. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically VHS bad and somebody’s gonna correct me and tell me it was actually Big better than VHS. It doesn’t matter the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, laser disk was better than VHS for sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I well, I don’t think I don’t think the resolution was necessarily better But
⏹️ ▶️ John the fidelity is in terms of the reproduction Yes Not you know not being filled with noise from various
⏹️ ▶️ John things messing with the magnetic Garbage on a piece of plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it could freeze frame without like weird distortion or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Right, right And so that’s what he would do. And it was just, it just seemed like the coolest thing in the freaking world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like back in those days, like, you know, like, you know, talking about Dolby ProLogic and all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. I mean, there were so many amazing, clever hacks done with these old, you know, simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog formats to try to cram more data or more channels or more tricks into them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them actually worked pretty well. And many of them were from Dolby, honestly. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I remember I also had, you know, for all of my complaining about how surround sound really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t you know super compelling for me today we actually had surround sound in the 90s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had it pretty early because at some point in the mid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 90s my mom bought this 5.1 Bose system like like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she she basically made like three impulse purchases throughout my entire childhood and that was one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and and so we had this like Bose surround sound system and you know first it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just from VCRs or whatever was encoded on those eventually we got a DVD player and that you know that broadened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our horizons a little bit there but it was it was amazing for the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately though you know I you know I don’t find that compelling now because to me it is kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that 90s trick that we’ve made the trick better over the years but it’s still just kind of like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco novelty thing that when I don’t have it I don’t miss it so that’s why I’m down on it for myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now but I And I don’t fault anyone else for caring more than I do, obviously. I care more than most people do about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things, so I understand what that’s like. And if you care more than I do about this, more power to you. But all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to say that all this crazy surround hack stuff we had in the 90s was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually pretty decent and worked surprisingly well, considering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how little technical sophistication they had to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely, very emphatically agree.
Follow-up: Sony HT-A9
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of surround sound systems and hacks, let’s talk about John’s Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HTA-9 setup, shall we? We got a lot of feedback about this. Personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just sitting here smug on my Sonos throne, feeling very good about my world right now. But to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come back to the Sony HTA-9, if you recall, this was… I’m pretty sure John brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this up. It was considered… we considered it a more baller version of the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup that I have. The way it works is there’s a box, it’s like an Apple TV box, and it communicates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via a proprietary wireless thing to four satellite speakers, and then optionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subwoofer, and allegedly it sounds really fricking good. Well, a lot of people wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in to us to say, oh, there’s some evidence that this is not as good as we thought. There is a Linus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tech Tips video. I’m not a Linus fan, but we will link it in the show notes nonetheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m making that expression on my face right now that’s not all of his thumbnails.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s why a lot of people said this because they’ve seen he’s a popular YouTuber and a lot of people have seen that video. Surely not this
⏹️ ▶️ John many people actually own the the HTA-9, but some people who do own it did write it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. And so the first bit of follow up we got was from John Koch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I’m going to try to summarize this as best I can on the fly. It was genuinely fascinating follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, but it was extremely verbose. And I’m going to try to do my best here. So John Koch writes, starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off by writing, I’m writing strong to strongly warn you and the listeners about the HTA-9. Like you, I took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew’s recommendation, found the system on sale for much less than the $2,700, but still almost $2,000. The system advertises using 5 gigahertz wireless and it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s Wi-Fi. 802.11n Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, a wireless technology from 2009. It creates its own Wi-Fi network like Sonos, presumably to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bypass contention with other stations in the user’s home. The problem is it’s freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible at it. It uses a 40 megahertz channel, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other alternatives they could have chosen. It’s terrible about choosing a channel. In order to get it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work without dropping out, I had to reconfigure my own home Wi-Fi to not use channels that the HTA9 seemed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, which is not great, but okay. Other Wi-Fi systems may not be so configurable. The issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for John is that he lives in the townhouse and has a lot of other adjacent Wi-Fi that he can’t control, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah. So John said, sometime after I return the system, put in a traditional AVR or surround speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup. Linus Tech Tips posted a video describing an issue with the system affecting his own Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John finishes by saying, when it does work, it really is incredible in effect and simplicity. But unless you have precise control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over your own Wi-Fi and have little external 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi interference, you should stay away from the system, or at least be very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prepared to return it. Meanwhile, Ian White writes, I haven’t noticed any Wi-Fi interference, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a pretty intense mesh Wi-Fi setup with four nodes in a 1,500 square foot space. So it could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be that my overkill system can overcome any interference speakers might otherwise cause. One thing I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I do occasionally experience speaker dropouts. That’s not desirable. It’s not common.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It happens maybe once every two or three months, which, okay, fine, not that big a deal, says Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it gets better and requires me to rerun the built-in RF calibration to resolve it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not good, Bob. But I still find it irritating, considering the cost. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like when you’re on iMac, you’re like, it’s fine, nothing’s wrong with it. Well, it does randomly power off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice a week, maybe, and occasionally corrupts the RAM. Oh, but it’s fine. Everything’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Don’t look behind the curtain. So he writes, I still find it irritating, consisting the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that the little base station is not that far from all the speakers and has line of sight to all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last, I’ll say that I’m no no audio file, but I think the sound is great and nicely immersive. I wasn’t aware of the smile curve you guys talked about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t doubt it. I do sometimes wish it was better bringing the dialogue out. So yeah, that Sony magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is maybe not so magical.
⏹️ ▶️ John with any kind of wireless system is, you know, if you’re gonna have wireless speakers, they’re super convenient, but
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? They communicate wirelessly and there’s only so much
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re in a situation like you’re in an apartment or a townhouse where you have a bunch of neighbors real close to you and you have no control over
⏹️ ▶️ John their wifi and it’s bleeding into your space, that can be kind of a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is just like, you know, earlier tonight, there was, unbeknownst to me, there was an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music outage. And what I wanted was to get music playing. I had just gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home, we were out of town, I had just gotten home, I was unloading everything, unloading groceries, had to wash the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dishes, I’m like, let me just put on some music. So I asked my HomePods, hey, play the Rolling Stones. Never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard of them. Yeah, well, yeah, Siri had not heard of them. It was giving responses like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry, I don’t find any songs by the Rolling Stones Apple music. Hmm. Like cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was there a contractual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey dispute? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventual and eventually I just airplayed it from my phone and that worked fine but and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually I learned there was an outage but as I was as I was going through it I was thinking like you know when our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parents came home from a long day and they wanted to put some music on what they did was they walked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to the stereo they maybe took out a record or you know later on a CD and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you know they would put it in the stereo if it wasn’t already there and they’d hit play and it would play.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wouldn’t play 60% of the time. It wouldn’t throw random errors halfway through songs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One speaker wouldn’t occasionally drop out for a few seconds for no reason. It would just play like that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes the record would skip. Really, I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rarely. And then once once we went to tapes and CDs that stopped being a problem too. Well sometimes the machine would eat the tape. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very rare. Every technology has its own problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have more of them. If you walked or jumped near the CD player sometimes that would skip as
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, you gotta go by the one with the big buffer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but the point is like, you know, I feel like we’ve with our modern ways of doing things, we’ve added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much complexity in the name of convenient features or nice abilities and many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those are great. Many of those features and abilities we really do use and appreciate, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has come with it a lot of complexity. And so in an area like this, we’re like, okay, if you have a home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theater speaker system that is communicating between the speakers via a a wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network or a wifi-like protocol or whatever it is, there’s so many layers of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And that’s just one part of the stack. Feeding that is whatever electronic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media source is feeding the TV or receiver or whatever, so there’s another point of failure there. And it’s like, the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complex you make your system, the more points of failure there are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more technical tricks you play, oh, we’re gonna make this one automatically smart and have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process the sound in this way to sense where the speakers are and have room calibration and Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more of those things you layer on top, the more likely it is that you’re gonna run into weird failures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or intermittent problems or bugs in people’s implementations. And electronics manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not known for fixing bugs, really, ever. So, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a recipe for a system overall, a setup overall in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco living room that seems really cool and is really great when it works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re just asking for like just periodic weirdness or flakiness or bugs. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, increasingly as I get older, I’m like, get off my lawn with that stuff. Like just give me like stuff that works every time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I think Casey Sonos shows that wireless speakers that are vaguely smart and communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other wirelessly is not necessarily a recipe for unreliability. It’s just that, you know, Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe is not doing as good a job as Sonos in this area. And I feel like the Sony system,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you said last time, it’s solving a specific problem that is not solved by other solutions. have a crap room where you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put things in the right place, a regular system is not going to sound good. It’ll be reliably bad all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John because you just, you know, you can’t put the speakers in the right places or they’ll bounce sound off of weird places. You need
⏹️ ▶️ John something like this where you’re like, this is literally the only place I have to put these speakers. I can’t run speaker wire. I need something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s small and I have to put them in weird, awkward places. Can you do something with that? That’s what this product is supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. It’s just, it seems like it would be better if it, uh, if it did that job without as much, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John wireless messiness, but everyone who’s wrote about it has said that it does sound really good. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is solving the problem. And that problem can’t be solved without this complexity. Right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still pro-progress. I don’t want to go back to big giant speakers like my parents had that are like taller than
⏹️ ▶️ John I was as a toddler and there’s only two of them and they’re next to a giant piece of furniture where the turntable is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. No, it’s funny listening to Marco talk and it’s, you know, tell me you’re a HomePod user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without telling me you’re a HomePod user. Well, whenever I try it, nothing works and and everything’s broken these days. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, okay. Now, to be fair to Marco and your HomePod setup, I can’t shout to the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Apple Music, unless I enabled like Alexa or something. I can’t shout to the Sonos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s probably a feature, not a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t have its own voice assistant where you can do, hey Sonos or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You absolutely, no, it does have, hey Sonos, but to the best of my recollection, that’s only about controlling the Sonos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like volume up, volume down, move this to whatever room. You know, it’s a very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repertoire. So in the defense of the HomePods, or in the defense of Marco’s broken HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I can’t do quite as much with my Sonos as I can, as he can with his HomePods. But genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has been, it’s only been a few months, I’ll admit that, but it has been pretty much bulletproof. And the thing, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did this just two or three days ago. I keep my Sonos Roam, which is a little, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jambox-esque portable speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I keep that on a base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right? God, I love my Jambox so much. Anyway, I took that off of its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base station, which is in our room, which is clear on the other side of the house from the screened-in porch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mashed down on the play button, which is Sonospeak for continue play, whatever’s playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in somewhere else. And take your best guess as to which one of the speakers you want to mimic here, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my case, there was only one other thing playing, and start playing it right here, right? So something was playing on the porch, I mashed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down the play button for a couple seconds, then it starts playing whatever was on the porch here on the speaker literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my hand, right? And I am clear, now we don’t have a very big house, but I’m clear across the house, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floor up. I go walking downstairs, I have three different Eero base stations in the house. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume that if I am on the house wifi that I’ve jumped between Eero base stations at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once. I go downstairs, I walk through the living room, which is playing the same song, into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey porch, and I could not hear not a millisecond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of difference between what was coming out of my hand and what was coming out of the speakers. as I’m moving between rooms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the house. It blew my mind because I would have absolutely expected that there would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been some small, infinitesimal amounts of latency somewhere. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard none. It was amazing. I don’t know how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, playing back music, you can cheat with buffers, but playing soundtracks to video is much tougher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, you can buffer the video as well, but the Sonos system and the other sound systems don’t have complete control over the video
⏹️ ▶️ John unless they themselves make a receiver, which is the hack to get that. or playing video games or whatever. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John latency issue and sync issues get much harder as the size of the buffer you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to have shrinks.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think playing back music, it can just build that sucker up and make sure everybody’s synchronized and have no underflow
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. And it doesn’t matter if it takes a second or two to build that up, you’re fine. Whereas if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to hit play on a movie and see audio and video start instantaneously, your buffer can’t be too big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything you said, I completely agree with. And it may just be as simple as buffering and timing. you said. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I want to very, very briefly mention is Sonos does have like true, it’s true something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or other, I forget the marketing term they use for it, but what you can do is for the home theater stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can take an iPhone or an iPad, and actually one thing that’s not great about Sonos is they’re not very good about updating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this for new hardware. I presume because they have to get that hardware in-house and figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the microphones are like and blah, blah, blah. But one way or another, you can take an iPad or an iPhone, as long as they’re not brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, and you can go into the Sonos app and you walk around your room as it plays different tones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you’re literally waving the iPad or iPhone up and down in your arms, you look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a frigging idiot when you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. But- This is one of those things, it’s like if your spouse walks in on you when you’re doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many better things for them to walk in on than this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the list of things that are worse is not very long. But nevertheless, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do have this true tone or whatever, I forget what it’s called, where allegedly it will do similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things to the Sony setup that we’ve been talking about. I am not here trying to say that it’s the same, I’m not trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that it’s better than the Sony or even as good as the Sony, but allegedly they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will do some sort of sound shaping in order to accommodate your room. I mean, I did this and I didn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a particularly big difference, but who knows?
Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home
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Follow-up: Skip Intro woes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Johnson writes with regard to John’s woes, and it’s not just John, with skipping intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and accidentally mashing on the touchpad and doing all sorts of various and sundry terrible things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Johnson writes, when using the Apple TV and presented with the skip intro prompt on the screen, don’t use the middle button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the top of the remote. Use the play pause button instead. In Netflix and Plex, that button works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The icon on the screen actually has the play pause icon before the skip text. I didn’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ John couple couple things of this so first I did since complaining about unless show I did actually bite the bullet and turn
⏹️ ▶️ John off touch sensitivity on my Apple TV remote just to try that for a while to see If I you know and
⏹️ ▶️ John predictably soon as I do that I try to swipe on the thing and then on the main screen to navigate and of course it doesn’t work But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying that to see if it helps reliability in terms of the the play pause
⏹️ ▶️ John button one of the things I didn’t mention when I was complaining about apps is is forget about the touchpad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some apps that I use on Apple TV, I’ll be watching a show and I will hit the play pause button to pause
⏹️ ▶️ John the video and then I’ll go to do something and then I’ll come back and hit the play pause button again to resume the video and it will start playing
⏹️ ▶️ John five minutes in either direction. And I feel like that. Yeah, I feel like that is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is as close to basic functionality fail as you can get with the Apple TV short of not showing picture or sound,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because it’s like, there’s no touchpad involved here. This is not a complicated UI. And it’s, again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John blame the Apple TV. It’s the app, whatever app this is, is doing something terrible. Like it’s just like the mortal sin of a playback
⏹️ ▶️ John application. Jump to jump me forward in a show that I’ve never seen before, five minutes when all I did was hit play, pause,
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-touch sensitive button on my remote. So, so angry. So I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV apps get better with time because a lot of them are really falling down the job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t use that many apps on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I do, unfortunately. That’s why I do
⏹️ ▶️ John the tour of all the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey programming across the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I’m not trying to argue with your experience. I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. But for me, most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my watching is in Plex, Disney+, or channels. And all three of them, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t recall having had this problem. Maybe I have, and I just don’t remember. But certainly not with the frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you seem to. So I don’t know if it just so happens that it’s not those three apps that you’re seeing this all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think. It’s usually the more obscure ones. And I’m counting Hulu as maybe more obscure than
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. Amazon, I think, is the worst, probably. Amazon is probably the buggiest in terms of fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs. I’ve had problems with Hulu. The various HBO apps over the years have been
⏹️ ▶️ John of varying quality. The Apple TV, Apple TV Plus one,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, is the only one that I’ve probably never had a problem with. The problem with that one, of course, is I can never find
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was watching. But that’s a universal problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just yesterday, I sat down to watch the first episode of Ted Lasso to prepare myself for the new season.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m a day behind already, but this is the time if you watch one a day, you’ll be you’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly synced up by the time the season starts. And for the life of me, the information architecture on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV app is the biggest pile of garbage. I it is so bad. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it’s just my brain doesn’t work the way that those designers
⏹️ ▶️ John do just give up, give up and search because if you have a goal in mind that you I will fight you every second of the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you they don’t want you to have a goal they want says don’t you try to watch something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let us tell you what to watch. It’s It’s like, but what if I already know what I want to watch? Like, no, sorry, that’s wrong, user.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should not know what you want to watch. I know you think you want to watch the next episode of the show. You’ve been watching for the past 30 days.
⏹️ ▶️ John All you’ve been doing every night is watching the show. You probably want to watch the next episode, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to show that to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I could not agree with you more. It’s so bad. It’s so bad. Anyway, I’m
Incremental Xcode/IDE updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along, Michael McGuire writes, this is with regard to your Ask ATP segment about IDE updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think your focus on incremental updates of Xcode versus full downloads might have missed the point of the question. In almost every other development platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve used, including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, and others, there’s a separation between the SDK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the build system, and the editor itself. Take Android, for instance. The SDK is a direct download from Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio, which uses Gradle for building. Even the compiler is a separate component that can often be independently upgraded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With Apple, it’s a big gelatinous blob. When you update Xcode, you are getting a new compiler, build system, SDK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and IDE. Other than simulators and Swift compiler toolchains, it is an all or nothing affair. And even with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift, you can’t use a compiler outside of the one shipping with Xcode if you are deploying to the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that this is perhaps why the writer of the question is confused. From the outside, Apple’s way of doing things is completely foreign.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a pretty good summary, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, but the explanation for that is pretty straightforward. Like, everyone who knows enough to ask this question knows why Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s more convenient for them. It’s more convenient. it’s, you would say it’s less convenient for users because you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to do this big download, but it has fewer permutations of stuff. If Apple lets you mix and match like they used to let you
⏹️ ▶️ John mix and match more than they do, but they let you let you mix and match debugging problems
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple and for developers would be more difficult because it’s so much harder to describe
⏹️ ▶️ John your situation. Whereas at least now you can say I’m using Xcode, whatever, whatever, right and that that that description
⏹️ ▶️ John encapsulates the entirety of your situation. If you had to say, I’m using this compiler with this
⏹️ ▶️ John IDE, with this, you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s more variables, right? So they ship it all as one unit,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, because it’s just simpler for everybody involved. It is more limiting. You have less flexibility. That’s true. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I kind of don’t fall top of this because they have, they have a fairly complicated thing. Xcode itself is a very complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John IDE. Their compiler tool chain is complicated. They target lots of different devices. I would not
⏹️ ▶️ John endorse the idea that Apple should at this point with their current quality standards and resourcing
⏹️ ▶️ John break out their IDE from their tool chain, from their build system or whatever. Please
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco continue to ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unit. Just make it work better. And frankly, as a developer, with the disclaimer that my internet connection is good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that the download sizes aren’t prohibitive, I actually prefer it this way because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to have to deal with, oh, this version of this tool is out of date. This is conflicting with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing over here. You know what it would be like. We’ve seen this in other areas of tech and with these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey ideas. Tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me you’re a CocoaPods developer without telling me you’re a CocoaPods developer. Holy smokes, it’s so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like we know exactly what- it would be a mess of like package installation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conflicts and dependencies and tool- you know, tools not working right with each other or things thinking they’re there when they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know what that world would be like. I am very happy to have this one area of my life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t have to deal with that. Thank
F150 Lightning’s sunroof
⏹️ ▶️ Casey William Vibrinskis writes, the Ford F-150 Lightning sunroof does kind of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you explained in the latest ATP. It’s the full length of the roof, slightly tinted. It fully opens and has a cloth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motorized cover. I am here for Marco driving a pickup. I cannot imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John look like. I’m shocked that something like this exists. Like, it really, I looked at a video, it really does all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s just a unicorn. I don’t know of any other vehicle in like the past two decades that
⏹️ ▶️ John had all these things, glass sunroof with tint, with a cloth cover that also opens, it’s unheard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of. Aarons does. Aarons, it’s not the full length of the roof. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a- Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like in modern, sort of modern full glass roof thing, but that also is tinted, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John also opens, but that also has a cloth cover. Like it’s everything combined. It used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the norm. Like, it’s when you get all of them back when sunroofs were these little rounded rec portals on the top of your car, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the whole roof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, Aarons is the largest sunroof that I have had ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, but it is not nearly as big as a lot of these.
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t, there’s glass between it and the windshield too, right? It’s not continuous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, there’s metal between it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the windshield. Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s true on the F-150 as well. It’s just the Model X is the full glass thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which by the way, we made all the Model X owners mad and don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more tint, more tint than it is. It does look more tended from the outside, that is true.
COVID corrections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a little bit of a COVID follow-up. Let me just start with a disclaimer that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are worried about getting advice regarding COVID, the last three humans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the planet you should listen to are the three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But- I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John that. We all have a lot of experience now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s true. We all do. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of way worse advice out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, okay, that’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. I’m trying to be self-deprecating here, but no, you are right. A lot. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we’re not the
⏹️ ▶️ John last. Well, hey, let me preface this, because the reason this is important, the reason I put these links in here.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I talked about this last time, I said a bunch of stuff about COVID and Mark was like, Oh, I hadn’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. Or one of you was like, I hadn’t heard of that. If you’re not constantly keeping up with all the articles that come
⏹️ ▶️ John out about COVID and the various studies, like stuff’s changing all the time. So I what I had said about, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, multiple COVID infections being subsequent COVID infections being worse, getting worse and worse instead of getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t just making that up. It was something that I had read. And then people said, Oh, actually, you know, been more studies
⏹️ ▶️ John and they found out that’s not really the case, right? That’s the way science works, right? But I was like, is that really super outdated information?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because people ask for the for like, where did you read this? I’m like, I’ve seen this recently enough, I can pull up the link and I would send
⏹️ ▶️ John it to people. And the the study was like a Washington University study or something. November 2022. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that long ago. No, it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John November 2022. It’s like already outdated, right? Because there’s so many people are studying this, as you
⏹️ ▶️ John can imagine, the status quo changes. And if you haven’t looked with the status quo since
⏹️ ▶️ John like 2020 or 20, if you haven’t like read up about COVID stuff since 2020 or 2021, so much has changed
⏹️ ▶️ John since then. So there’s a whole class of people who had, I’d never heard that subsequent COVID infections get worse. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John heard about it all over the place because like whatever, for whatever reason, my various news feeds and Twitter feeds and Macedon feeds,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tend to see these articles. And there was a big hubbub made about this article in November, 2022. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the last thing I had read about COVID that had stuck in my mind. And it wasn’t that long ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John but since then people have jumped on that and said, okay, we’ll try to reproduce this study. Let’s look at this study, their
⏹️ ▶️ John flaws in it or whatever. And so the upshot is that subsequent studies have found that they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce the results of this other one, and they’re not sure it was, you know, not sure it
⏹️ ▶️ John was representative of average people. So research continues. But this is just to drive home the point that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to stay on top of the stuff because it is changing like month by month, week by week. And even when there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big story that’s across all the big papers and everything, because there’s Washington University study, you’ll find it in every single big news site covered
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily, you have to look and see if they were. And of course, that story gets more coverage
⏹️ ▶️ John than the follow-up that says, actually, we couldn’t reproduce this because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not as exciting a story.
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. And there’ll be another one, like the recent round of things are like, what kind of things you’re more
⏹️ ▶️ John susceptible to after you’re infected with COVID? Oh, five times higher chance of heart disease and three times
⏹️ ▶️ John higher chance of diabetes or whatever. And then the follow-ups to those are like, well, does it give you more of a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John of diabetes? Are you now going to the doctor so you’re more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes, whereas before you weren’t going to the doctor
⏹️ ▶️ John because you were quarantining, and it’s like, research continues. So it’s hard to keep up with this treadmill, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, it’s not important to be on the treadmill, but it’s also not important to cement your idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John COVID in 2020, because so much has changed since then, and it will continue to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so I really enjoyed Keith’s feedback. I’m gonna try to make this very quick. As per the proof that your audience is extremely diverse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a scientist, PhD, medicinal chemist, who has worked on viruses for pretty much my whole career, first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a medicinal chemist, and then in other roles. and Keith has worked on basically anything you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard of in the past. Reinfection does not lead to increased severity. Most systematic studies have shown that disease
⏹️ ▶️ Casey severity is generally lower or similar on reinfection. There are tons of references out there, but there, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he cites different studies, would have been the show notes. And then a more recent publication seems to confirm this and suggests
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that reinfection has a similar severity to the first infection, not worse. Related, COVID does not interfere with the immune system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make subsequent infections worse. This famously occurs with dengue and likely Zika through a mechanism called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey antibody-dependent enhancement. there’s no evidence that this occurs with COVID. Selfishly, I thought this was fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keith had commented that if Michaela had been vaccinated in the last three months, which again, she was first week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in January and we got sick, what, like two, three weeks ago, then her antibody levels are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likely to be high enough to prevent infection. And we tested her a handful of times and she was negative every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John started sprinkling the links, which we’ll put in the show notes, to this study that you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey referring to just a moment ago, John. And in a subsequent email to me, Keith wrote, I would add that there’s a study that seems to show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse outcomes on reinfection, which I think John may be referring to. This is a veteran’s study published late last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it did indeed get a lot of attention. It is a good paper, and there are no obvious massive flaws. However, no other publication has shown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, and most have shown the opposite. Plus, it somewhat flies in the face of basic immunology, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immune system learns what infects it so that it is prepared for future infections. The study
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has received some level of criticism that the study is based to older white males. Personally, I think there’s something odd about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the selection criteria, i.e. who goes into the control group and who doesn’t, that makes me suspect that there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underlying bias that screws things up. Or perhaps the study is correct and old white dudes are getting some payback,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was quite funny. So thank you to Keith. There was a lot more, a lot more that Keith wrote that I, again, found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey utterly fascinating, but that’s the TLDR, which I also thought was very, very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And part of the, like, the people writing about and trying to study the idea of it messing with your immune
⏹️ ▶️ John system is the idea that if subsequent infections get worse and not better, that flies in the face of what you would expect
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it only happens in infections that do actually attack your immune system. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned measles last time as another other examples here. So that’s why people study these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why, you know, when someone does a study, someone follows up on it and tries to figure out more. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, every day, hopefully we’re making progress. But I think it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally dipping your toe back into the updated information on whatever your trusted
⏹️ ▶️ John source is. Probably not a newspaper, but, you know, the big health systems like the CDC in
⏹️ ▶️ John the US or whatever tend to take a while to get on board, as we saw during the initial wave of COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe CDC’s advice lagged behind the best thinking by a significant amount, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John as occasionally politically motivated, which is not great, but wherever you decide to check things out,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good idea to, you know, occasionally check back and see how things have changed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s also, you know, quote, COVID is not just one virus. Like, we’ve had so many variants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have become dominant at different times throughout this pandemic that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever variant you get now, you know, you might have different responses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it because it’s actually a different virus than the one you got two years ago. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, this is not a, you know, stationary target that we’re talking about here. The virus is also evolving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Conditions are also changing. treatments are changing, you know, people have have or don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vaccines and you know, different timings on that different vaccines, they could have gotten, you know, different drugs, they might have taken,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s so many variables here. So yeah, the way to stay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of things like this is to be willing to change your mind when new information becomes available.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a lot of the subsequent studies are on exactly that they’re like, well, we studied this, and we’re pretty happy
⏹️ ▶️ John that everyone was able to reproduce it. And we understood it. But that was for like the original variant. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to do all those same studies again with Delta, with Omicron, with like, because they’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ John redoing stuff to confirm, hey, does this still apply with the current variant that’s out now? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like they had to do with like, all this science they did about COVID before vaccines, they had to redo all that with
⏹️ ▶️ John vaccines. How do the vaccines change? How do they affect it at all? And that’s why even if you think everything is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John settled down and it’s understood, when new variants come out, they have to redo a lot of that stuff because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to at the very least confirm, is this also true of whatever the popular variant is now. So it’s tough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. There are definitely worse people to get the advice from than the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. I don’t know what I was thinking. This is the danger of speaking extemporaneously. We will
⏹️ ▶️ John never tell you to take horse paste.
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iPhone 15 enclosure leaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently, it is the season, tis the season for iPhone leaks and rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but more leaks. And we have a report from 9to5Mac, two reports actually, one about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPhone 15 CAD drawings, which allegedly reveal a larger 6.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch display and a dynamic island and USB-C. And then separately, they also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an exclusive first look at the special edition color for the iPhone 15 which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe is coral, if I’m not mistaken. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very, okay, there you go. They just need to pair it with orange and they’ll be set. And not many of you understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that joke, but power to you if you did, go Hokies. So anyways, this stands to reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the iPhone 15, the not pro is getting the dynamic island this year, getting a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey larger display. USB-C is a surprise if that’s real, but otherwise this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically makes sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is real because I feel like this is basically iPhone announcement day. like iPhones just reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John leak. I think this is earlier than normal, but once the CAD drawings, as they
⏹️ ▶️ John always call them in these stories, like once that stuff comes out and it’s close enough to the date and enough
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of people corroborate it and it starts appearing around, it might as well be the day of the iPhone announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talk about future iPhones all the time on the show, and usually we’re just covering the rumors. Here’s what people think it might be. Here’s what it could be. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what it means technology-wise, right? But at a certain point, all of that coalesces to be, here’s the new iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when they announce the new iPhone, they’re like, yep, that’s exactly what we knew about, you know, however long ago. And so if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at these CAD drawings, it has eliminated a lot of the things that I was hoping for and confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John some things that, you know, that I was expecting. So the USB-C on everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even though these are just CAD drawings, we know USB-C hole when we see it, right? That’s what this is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve talked about it in the past, my desire for less of a camera bump and my hope that the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote periscope camera lens assembly on the on future iPhones would make this happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not that year. The only place there’s going to be a periscope camera is in the Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not using it to make the bump smaller. They’re just using it to get more zoom. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John These drawings, they look kind of like you’re, you know, the existing iPhone 13
⏹️ ▶️ John or 14 Pro, but with more rounded edges. So it’s not the same case. It is, you know, it has more of a rounded edges,
⏹️ ▶️ John flat sides, but a little bit more of a rounded edge. And the pros apparently have a titanium frame, which will be cool from a materials finish point
⏹️ ▶️ John of view, if that’s even true. But otherwise, they, I mean, if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John CAD drawings, they look a lot like a 14 Pro. There’s a massive three camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic plateau with many, many levels. And the regular iPhone has just the two cameras with a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John plateau. They have not radically changed the design. There’s not a new camera hump. They’re not slimmer
⏹️ ▶️ John in the camera area. They’re just, you know, they’re just new iPhones, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is not disappointing necessarily, But I mean, I guess it increases my odds because this is not my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John year. Next year is my phone year. I guess it increases my odds if that’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll happen the next year, but I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just kind of feel like we’re stuck with this lump for a while and it’s kind of disappointing. But the titanium will be exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing in the story is, oh, breaking down how it’s going to be between pro and non pro and how they’re going to differentiate.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re already differentiating in this generation with the like the good S.O.C. and the pro and like, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ John last year’s S.O.C. and the non pro. That seems like they’re going to continue to do that. and
⏹️ ▶️ John this Max Tech video that we’ll link in the show, it’s had like a little slide that listed what they thought would be the
⏹️ ▶️ John pro features to get you to pony up for the fancy one. ProMotion,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that would be there. They list the screen sizes as well, but I assume those will be close. Apparently the Pro has a different size
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. The 15 Pro has a different size screen slightly than the 14 Pro, which whatever, it could just be
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen manufacturer. 2.5D Glass, which is their way of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like on the Apple Watch, if you look at it from the side, the glass bulges out a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John which seems wild to me. And you can’t really see in these CAD drawings because the CAD drawings are just of the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, wouldn’t you want the glass of your phone not to stick out past the edge?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like that’s what phone cases
⏹️ ▶️ John do. But on the other hand, kind of like the watch glass, maybe it does that because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s thicker. But on the other other hand, really thick glass would make your finger not feel like it’s touching the things under the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. So I don’t know what to make of that, but I’m just reading out what’s here. thinner bezels,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can even tell that without your, you know, calipers out. Titanium frame, solid state buttons, which we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about in the past, which is wacky. Periscope lens on the Pro Max model, the
⏹️ ▶️ John A17, which the regular iPhone 15 won’t have, presumably 8 gigs of RAM, Wi-Fi 6E and
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt 3. So the rumor is that the the plain iPhone 15 has a USB-C shaped hole,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is not Thunderbolt. And the rumor was that it’s USB 2 speeds, which, I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess That would definitely be an Apple thing to do, right? Put a USB-C on the iPhone and not increase the transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John speed. But the rumor is that the Pro has a USB-C H-shaped hole that does Thunderbolt 3, which would be a
⏹️ ▶️ John welcome improvement. So that’s actually a lot of advantages for the Pro, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John achieved by making the non-Pro crappier, I guess. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, if you’re wondering what the iPhone 15 is going to be, at this point I feel pretty confident saying that if you follow this link
⏹️ ▶️ John in 9to5Mac and look at the pictures, the only things you don’t know are the things nobody ever knows. goes, what are they going to call the color? What
⏹️ ▶️ John are the new colors going to be? What are the new finishes going to be? What are the exact prices going to be? All that stuff like basically doesn’t leak because
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need, you know, thousands and thousands of people to know it. But because you need to manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John so many of these things and because they’re probably going to start manufacturing them soon, this stuff can and will leak.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’ll, you know, when we watch these iPhone keynotes, it’s like the only thing we’re finding out is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, seeing the Apple promo videos and seeing what they’re going to call that coral color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This makes me very, very happy overall because here’s the thing, all the things that we don’t know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many, every year there’s usually some new camera feature that the new hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enables that’s only available on the newest phone, so there’s going to be some cool camera feature, we don’t know the details about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras really to any degree of credibility, like how good is the, if they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a periscope thing, how good is that going to be for the optical zoom or whatever, how zoomed in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it going to be, how color compromise is that camera going to be, you know, relative to the 1X camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s so many details like that, but for me, they had me at USB-C. They could change nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could make it just switch to USB-C charging, and I’d be like sold, and I’d buy it instantly. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to me, the two things I’m most excited about are USB-C, number one, buy a mile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then a distant number two, titanium. Because ultimately, I’m pretty happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my, what are we on, 14? with my 14 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except it’s really freaking heavy. And it’s not like a deal breaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do wish it was smaller, but I really wish it was lighter. And it’s pretty hard to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a modern smartphone lighter without giving up a lot of battery life, because batteries are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty heavy. And one of the ways they can do it is they can switch from steel for the outer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rim, which there is no reason to have that, they can switch to a lighter metal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco titanium is a great option and I was like you know these we see these renders here but remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few days ago somebody actually posted like a leaked alleged photo of the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh yeah and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I saw that photo and I saw the the kind of horizontal grained brushed finish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was like titanium but like I yelled it like it’s I was so happy like that you could tell instantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by looking at that that’s almost certainly titanium and I was so happy to
⏹️ ▶️ John see that I do wonder if that’s an unfinished model. You know what I mean, though? Like, like they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t put the finish on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, yeah. We don’t know what the final finish will be. It looked like brushed, finished titanium, and it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprise me if that is the final finish. I wish they would
⏹️ ▶️ John sell one that look like that. Like the look would be brushed, unfinished titanium. But I have a feeling they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. Well, I mean, I can’t even tell you what the outside of my looks like because it’s in a case all the time because these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are too big to hold. I know you just want to just want to be lighter. Like, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the titanium watches, they have also not been looked like unfinished titanium. They’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of had a uniform matte kind of thing going on. I’m not sure what that finish is but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s… Well no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s interesting. The… So the Ultra, which is titanium, basically has like a… like a uniform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandblasted look to it. There is no… there’s no grain on the Ultra. Whereas the…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previous series up to seven editions that were titanium have vertical or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horizontal graining on… and it looks really nice. This is… I mean, I I still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my daily driver, Apple Watch, is still a Series 7 because I like titanium so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. And they took it away with the Series 8. Again, I really hope they bring this back with the Series 9.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like my one wish for the Apple Watch Series 9. My biggest wish is bring back titanium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then my second biggest wish is things like, you know, make the software better. But that’s a different story for a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so iPhone 15 rumors, thumbs up for me so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a dire need for USB-C in terms of travel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think is when most people would be interested in it because I do love my little docking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base thing that I talked about many moons ago. But I will tell you that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a single USB-C Apple charging cable strung from the wall through the couch, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically available to whoever’s sitting on the couch at the time. And you know what’s great about that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can charge Aaron’s computer. It can charge my computer, it can charge the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kid iPad, it can charge my iPad. But you know what it can’t frigging charge?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My stupid phone. I would love it. I mean, I would love to have Thunderbolt in a pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, but even leaving that aside, I think this is what you were saying a minute ago, Marco, like just give me the connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I don’t even care if it’s USB two speeds for the most part, just give me the damn connector. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can sit on the couch and use the cable that’s right there and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge the phone. Yes, please. I’ll take two. I can only hope.
Blood-glucose monitoring rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a very interesting release from Mark Gurman this week. Gurman says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple has made major progress on a no-prick blood glucose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking for its watch. Apple Inc. has a moonshot-style project underway that dates back to the Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey era, non-invasive and continuous blood glucose monitoring. The goal of this secret endeavor, dubbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey E5, is to measure how much glucose is in somebody’s body without needing to prick the skin for blood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey After hitting major milestones recently, the company now believes it could eventually bring glucose monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to market, according to people familiar with the effort. I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t know very much about all of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my limited understanding is, and please one of you jump in whenever you’re ready, is that for those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us who are diabetic, you need to know what the status of your blood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glucose is, and to do that is a kind of a pain, and there are these continuous monitors that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can get, but I guess they’re very complicated, they don’t work very well, and then people will like hack them didn’t um
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the guy from Microsoft whose name is escaping me right now that’s done a lot of this all out no no no no no no no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dead right no I didn’t think he was is he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to derail everything um no other programmer guy yes he died in 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco oh wow I didn’t know that I think I had cancer or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways no the the developer guy oh gosh I’m so mad that I can’t think of his name.
⏹️ ▶️ John developer guy Raymond Chen. Hanselman? Scott
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hanselman? Yes, thank you. Hanselman. That’s who I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of. I would not have
⏹️ ▶️ John pegged him as the Microsoft guy. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, he is at Microsoft. I know. I get
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, you’re right. He’s a guy at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, this is going right off the rails, and I’m pretty sure it’s my fault. And I’m not the sick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. But anyways, I believe that he is diabetic or something along those lines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and has done a lot of stuff with regard to continuous blood glucose monitoring, and I guess there’s like a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hobby, not even industry, but like a grassroots thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people will figure out how to hack existing blood glucose monitors to make them work way better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and something like that. So all of that is to say my very, very limited, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignorant understanding is this is a big fricking deal. And I can only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine how amazing this would be if I were diabetic to have something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John is you’re now 40% more likely to be diabetic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Because COVID?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is this is a March 31st 2022 story, so I’m sure it’s changed since then. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people again, it’s the question. So I was saying before, so they do these studies and it says, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who had COVID-19 were 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later. But then it’s like, okay, but is
⏹️ ▶️ John that just because they went to the doctor? Right? Because they had they have they’re getting diagnosed because they made a
⏹️ ▶️ John trip they wouldn’t normally take him to the doctor. And so now it’s discovered and it would have been there So it’s hard to sell.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just making a joke. But anyway, I think that corrects that is like 10% of the US adult
⏹️ ▶️ John population is diabetic or something. It’s it’s not a rare condition, which is why uh this
⏹️ ▶️ John story which by the way as as the you know, The german article notes this project has been known
⏹️ ▶️ John outside of apple as as a rumor, of course Because apple isn’t confirming this stuff for just a long
⏹️ ▶️ John long time and it’s kind of like saying yeah We’re working on perpetual motion or you know, cold fusion or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a thing that if you were to find a way to do it, it is a big moneymaker
⏹️ ▶️ John and also it would have a big effect on people’s lives. Doesn’t sound like it’s a big deal. It’s like, oh, what’s the big deal? You prick your finger, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. Yeah, imagine if you had to do that every day, sometimes multiple times a day to like plan out
⏹️ ▶️ John your eating. It is painful and annoying and inconvenient and it really messes with people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lives and it’s not and it affects millions and millions of people. So if you can find a noninvasive
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do that, you can make a lot of people’s lives better, which means you can also make a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s those things they have now that you sort of slap onto your skin that look like little stickers, but they have little things that
⏹️ ▶️ John poke into your skin. And they’re not painful, but they hook up to some other meter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone’s always trying to crack this nut, because there’s a huge addressable market. It is a big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And current solutions are seemingly barbaric. I mean, pricking your finger with a piece of metal and putting a drop of blood
⏹️ ▶️ John onto a strip of paper is Stone Age technology from a medical perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if your Apple watch could just tell you, boy, wouldn’t that be an amazing kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like if you had a car that could drive itself while you sleep at the wheel, wouldn’t that be amazed? That would be amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also really hard to do. So the fact that Apple is trying to tackle this, I mean, at
⏹️ ▶️ John first, it probably kind of seemed like, all right, I mean, I get it, that would make the world better place would make a whole lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. It’s the intersection of liberal arts and technology, the intersection of altruism and capitalism,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you want to call it, kind of makes sense. But why does Apple have to this Apple’s not a health care company, right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other hand, as technology advances, this problem, like the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to solve this problem, it’s like, Okay, well, we need a bunch of sensors that are attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to your body with a microprocessor to interpret the results, because it’s not straightforward. Like, it’s not like, Oh, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, take this measurement. And if it’s above this value, it’s your, you know, it’s complicated. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the technology they’re talking about the rumors is they fire a bunch of tiny lasers to your skin
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything and look at the scatter back and analyze it with this complicated out like you need a little
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. And if the idea is you need to have sensors attached to your skin with a powerful little
⏹️ ▶️ John computer that people are willing to wear, suddenly like hmm, Apple seems actually a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good fit for this. So if Apple can ever figure it out, they’re as well positioned as anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve this problem in a way that, as they would say, synergizes with their business.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re already selling Apple Watches, Apple is primary purpose is already mostly for fitness and health related things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people have this health problem. Being able to sell them an Apple Watch that would solve this problem, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John would sell so many Apple Watches. The one the one bad thing that Apple probably doesn’t anticipate is that if they actually
⏹️ ▶️ John solve this problem, there will be immediate pressure for them to sell Apple Watches for less money, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco unfair to sort of keep
⏹️ ▶️ John this technology, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s Apple patented, no one else can implement it and blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is terrible. And all and the cheapest Apple Watch that has this feature is like $400. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John people will still pay it because you know, they’ll they’ll pay like they’ll find a way to pay because it’s such a quality of life increase,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it almost seems more than insulin. Yeah. Yeah, it almost seems ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John and unfair that that something that could improve so many people’s lives is you know, under the control of a private
⏹️ ▶️ John company that for reasons unrelated to evil, but just related to their market positioning doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of serve down market. And even You know, you mentioned insulin thing like it was the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who made the insulin discovery or got the patent for it or whatever, intended it to be available for everybody and
⏹️ ▶️ John never wanted it to be expensive. But that person died and the rest of the people took that ball
⏹️ ▶️ John and ran with it. And now insulin costs a bazillion dollars in the US because people found out that other people needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to live and you can charge them a lot of money, which is why health care should not be a for profit enterprise. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess this is good to to hear, oh, progress is being made. But at this point, this is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John original product Titan. Like at this point, when I hear stories about the blood glucose thing, I’m like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when you figure it out, let me know. I’ll just wait another decade here because it’s going on for so
⏹️ ▶️ John long. And so far we’ve got pretty much nothing to show for it. Like Apple does health stuff and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John blood pressure and ECG or whatever. Like they do all these health things, but not once
⏹️ ▶️ John has there been a whiff of blood glucose anything from Apple. So obviously they haven’t figured it out yet. So I’m rooting
⏹️ ▶️ John for them, but I really, you know, I don’t think it’s a story until
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a story. And until then it is a very long running money pit
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple that I think honestly has more promise than Project Titan at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, far more.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also been running longer than Project Titan without results, so I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the thing is like other companies make cars and they’re pretty good, which we’ll get to a little bit later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, you know, it’s fun. Like we don’t need Apple to make a car. No one has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done this. And you’re right, if they can pull this off, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive deal. And so that’s why I think hearing even a rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Mark Gurman that this might have made major progress and that this might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to become a product at some point in the future, hearing news about this, it’s not quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the same level, but I think it’s a similar kind of moonshot as Fusion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, oh my God, when you hear news like we’ve made progress as we actually recently have made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progress in in the area of sustainable fusion energy like that’s how that’s the kind of moonshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is it’s like this is like that would be curing diabetes
⏹️ ▶️ John i think we categorize that and not just finding a better way to deal with it curing it would be more of that type of or maybe cure
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe curing cancer because infusion by the way so we don’t get all the follow-up on that the progress on fusion the
⏹️ ▶️ John the fusion naysayers are going to write it and tell us that it’s not as close as you think because that’s the way fusion works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i didn’t say it was close but i said they made progress which is true And that’s how this is. It’s hard to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re so far from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I know. But you know, the point is like people care a lot, even when small progress is made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if we ever pull it off, it’s such a big deal. That’s how this is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any news on this front is a big deal, because if this thing ever actually is workable as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real product, that’s a huge deal. Like, you know, none of us have diabetes, but my dog does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually have used on him one of those continuous monitor things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know you mentioned, oh yeah it doesn’t hurt, well…
⏹️ ▶️ John The dogs don’t understand though, you can’t explain to them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, but like, you know, so here’s the thing, like, what you’re trying to sample, and please actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diabetics out there, I apologize for if any of these details are wrong, I only know it through my dog, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re trying to sample is, you’re trying to figure out the curve of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your blood glucose level over time, and you know, when you eat, that goes up and then it comes down over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time as the effect of insulin comes in and everything, And so when you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prick your finger and get a little sample there, you’re sampling one point on a wave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You might not necessarily know where on that wave you are. So while the point sampling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has clear value over no information, continuous data is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far more useful. Way, way, way more useful. Way more actionable, way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precise. And in fact, I’m pretty sure, I don’t know the details of this, so forgive me, but I know that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diabetic human world has long since largely moved to insulin pumps, which kind of monitor stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuously and give you the right amount of insulin at any given time is how I understand it, but instead of just one big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shot, whereas I have to give my dog just two big shots a day, because they don’t have those for dogs, and he’s really small anyway, so it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even fit him. But anyway, and yes, it’s horrible giving your dog insulin shots, it’s heartbreaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They let you do it because they let you do anything, but God, it’s heartbreaking for you, because you can’t tell them why you’re hurting them. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I can’t give him the carrot fast enough. just oh god anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it breaks my heart but anyway but so when we were first figuring out his diabetes we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had one of those continuous monitor things and it’s basically it looks like it’s like the size of like maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two half dollar coins stacked on each other but it has about a half-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needle pointing straight out the back it’s like sticking a thumbtack into your arm like yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sits there and it stays there for like a week and then after a while you and you gotta like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change it and put a new one on. And they have these things for humans. It’s the exact same product for dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget what it’s called, but it’s the exact same product. It’s this Bluetooth thing, I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go on the app and see his blood insulin or his blood glucose curve and see, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s where he’s peaking roughly, so we’ll give him the insulin here, we’ll measure it and we’ll see over time how it does and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s how it’s gonna work, here’s when we need it, all that stuff. So for diabetics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuous monitoring is hugely valuable and if you can do it on a device that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already buying or that you might be buying for a combination of other reasons, maybe you’re buying it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fitness notifications, whatever it is you’re buying an Apple Watch, you already have it, then it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then additionally, there’s a huge amount of value for non-diabetics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who would never have a reason to get a prescription for the thing that you stick in your arm and have continuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitoring. I personally would never,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why would I get one of those? I’m not diabetic, so I don’t have any reason to get one of those and to stick it on my arm and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this needle sticking in my arm for a week. But there is huge value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in knowing those levels if you’re doing things like paying attention to your nutrition or maybe trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid getting type two diabetes in the future if you’re at risk for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re on the border, you can start making changes, you can see what you have to do, you can maybe see like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? After I have this one kind of breakfast, my glucose spikes really high, maybe I should think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about changing that diet. There’s so much value there, in the same way that right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch will, there’s settings that, and I believe that are on by default, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re in a super loud environment, it will tell you, hey, you’re above 90 decibels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last minute, this could really hurt your hearing if you do this all the time. Everyday people can get that and see, huh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s interesting, maybe I shouldn’t my desk right next to this jet engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the same way, maybe they could have a future feature where if you have some massive sugar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bomb meal and your blood glucose spikes way too high, maybe it could tap you in the wrist and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, your blood sugar is really high right now. Like, you know, maybe consider, you know, having some fiber or something, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, even if you can think, not only would this be life-changing to diabetics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, But even just for everyone in the world, they could build other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health conscious features around it. And so there is just, and not to mention the fact that even people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who aren’t paying attention can get kind of alerts in extreme cases like that. But people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are paying attention, like I would love that because I care a lot about diet and fitness these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would love to know, to set goals, to be like, you know what, I wanna make sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not achieving or I’m not exceeding this range of glucose levels in my day-to-day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. And maybe I would like to get an alert if I ever do so I can make changes just for my own,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same people track their sleep and stuff. I wanna be able to track that kind of health as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are huge possible features and benefits to this kind of thing if they can get it going. A huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the Apple Watch is taking something that used to be a specialized medical thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the EKG, for instance. taking something like that and bring it to a device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of people are going to just have for other reasons anyway. And then if they, if they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a weird, you know, heart arrhythmia or something, their watch can tell them, Hey, something’s something’s a little bit off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is such massive value. So, you know, you have the massive value for the people who have certain conditions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the AFib detection is huge. If you, if you know anybody who has AFib or if you have AFib, you know, having, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple watch be able to track that and tell you when you’re in AFib is a pretty big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also it’s a big deal for all a whole bunch of other people who don’t know that this might be a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. And then if it starts becoming a problem for them, like one, one of the things I figured out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdly, I know that this is going to sound really crazy and stupid, but I’ve had COVID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice, I think. And both times I had COVID the day before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tested positive, there was a point in the day where I was feeling crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Apple watch gave me that alert that says, Hey, your heart rate’s a little bit high and you don’t seem to be doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alarming. Both times I had COVID that happened to me the day before I tested positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve never got that alert any other time. So it is telling me, Hey, your body’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something’s wrong, like something like that kind of alert that helps that that is actionable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people that that really has a pretty big benefit to people even who don’t have whatever kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain conditions might have them get some kind of medical device in the first place. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is amazing for diabetics, but it is not just limited to diabetics and benefit. This could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge benefits to everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially hypochondriacs, they love it. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the dark side of all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. Sometimes as Merlin would say, having more data is not helpful, especially with people who find it kind of an attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John nuisance. But in general, it’s a net win to know this stuff. In particular, especially if our healthcare system wasn’t barbaric
⏹️ ▶️ John and this could, for for example, funnel into your doctor, who is probably more qualified to
⏹️ ▶️ John know if this is normal for your age and activity for you or if there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John to be concerned about. You know what I mean? So it’d be great if that could be tied in for them, not to just ask you, how have you
⏹️ ▶️ John been feeling or to look at your most recent measurements, but to just, if you’re doing continuous monitoring, it would be great if they could just see
⏹️ ▶️ John that graph over the past 30 days and say, looks like you might be a diabetic or
⏹️ ▶️ John no, actually, you’re fine. Don’t worry about this. when you see this number because for your age and what you ate
⏹️ ▶️ John at that meal, this is actually fine and it’s not a thing to be worried about because they know whether it’s something to be worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about and not, whereas you’re just looking at a number saying that seems high, I googled and that number shouldn’t be that high, maybe I’m dying.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s tricky, so don’t get too hung up on that. But the difficult thing with the glucose monitoring, I feel like is,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it’s not difficult for them, but like when you see the story, it seems like what they’re going for is the brass
⏹️ ▶️ John ring of like continuous monitoring that you can use instead of pricking your finger, right? That’s what people want.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, no more patch, no more finger pricks, just a non-invasive Apple Watch, the holy grail.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for all the other stuff they’ve done, like AFib detection and stuff, they’re really cautious. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took the words right out of my mouth. I was gonna bring this up as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John If something’s really out of whack, we’ll be like, hey, we think this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not great, but that’s not what you want from glucose monitoring. I mean, it’s better than nothing. That’s what I’m saying. It’s better than nothing. We don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go get the brass ring. If it just tells you, oh, you might have missed a shot
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and things are really bad and it alerts you, that is useful, but you really don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John that to be the only functionality. You want to be able to have the watch let you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John you would find out from doing your testing or whether it’s continuous monitoring with a patch or pricking your finger or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t get into the bad situations. That’s what you want. You want to avoid the extremes. But with the health measurement stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s been so cautious because it’s really difficult to be sure. And with something like this, where someone is
⏹️ ▶️ John making essentially a life or death decision about whether and how much insulin they should take, it’s not like, oh, if I get
⏹️ ▶️ John it wrong, nothing bad will happen. No, bad things can happen. And if the pitch is kind of like self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, if the pitch is this car will drive itself and you can go to sleep, boy, that better be true. Because the consequences,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not, are really bad. And so if they say, oh no, you don’t need to measure with anything else except for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Watch, they better really have solved that problem. You know, and again, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily have to be the pitch. They could say, now we have glucose monitoring in the Apple Watch, and it will give you an alert if things are
⏹️ ▶️ John way out of bounds, but you still have to test normally, but it’s just an insurance mechanism. That’s still useful, still give that a thumbs up. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when these stories come out, it’s people dreaming that they won’t have to do whatever uncomfortable thing they’re doing now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the bar, the crossing the bar for that, it’s really high. Like, because you have to really be
⏹️ ▶️ John sure it is literally life and death for millions of people. You can’t, it can’t be guesswork. And you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if your watch crashes, there are big consequences. And if it gets a wrong, there are big consequences. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how they’re gonna handle it. Kind of like the car, It’s one of those type of things where, in general, Apple doesn’t have products
⏹️ ▶️ John where if they get it wrong, people die in short order. That’s true of the car, and that’s kind of true
⏹️ ▶️ John of complete replacement glucose monitoring, if that is indeed what they’re going after.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was thinking about, and then you brought it up, when they did the EKG thing, they were very quick to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, this isn’t, this is just a hint, this is just a hint. And when they did the ovulation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking and prediction and whatnot, oh, well, we’re just giving you something else to think about. you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still do your own thing, just something to consider. And you know, when they, with the AFib stuff, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the, we don’t know if you’re having a heart attack. We don’t know that. We just know we have an idea about AFib
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they, they pump the brakes on like everything, which makes sense. Like I don’t begrudge them having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pumped the brakes, but yeah, this is, like you said, it is do or die, literally. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can’t pump the brakes on this if they are trying to get that brass ring as you referred to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know, I’m not sure how they’re going to handle this. And if I were diabetic, I, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say, I don’t know if I would trust an Apple Watch this, but I would imagine I’d be so miserable with what I had been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for years and years that anything would be like a cold glass of water in hell, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it’s like. Even if it doesn’t solve the problem entirely, if you just have to have like one fewer prick per day
⏹️ ▶️ John or three fewer per week, still, that’s an improvement. It’s just a question of what
⏹️ ▶️ John are they actually able to achieve? I have no doubt that they will not, you know, they’re only going to announce
⏹️ ▶️ John what they can actually achieve. They’re not going to over promise like some other people who may be familiar with related to self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ John cars. Whatever they can do, they were really they’ve been so conservative, right? They’ve been so sort of underselling
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’ve done. So if they’re not able to solve the whole problem, I have full faith that they will not claim to have solved the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. They just say, here’s what it can do. Here’s what it can’t do. It can improve your life, but you’re still going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the other more invasive methods to supplement your Apple Watch. It will just
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe help you skip some of those or increase the granularity of the sampling or whatever. Like it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, any improvement is good, but this story is always so simplified in its rumor form, which is like, they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John solve it. And, you know, it’s great to think that before they actually announce anything. But as a story notes, this is this story
⏹️ ▶️ John is so old that it was around when Steve Jobs was still running the company. So it’s taken a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Right. Oh, but blood oxygen was the other thing I couldn’t think of a second ago. Blood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oxygen. They were also like, we’re not telling you if you have COVID or not. We’re just letting you
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers may not be, you know, accurate, accurate. But like if they’re really out of whack, you might say, hey, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe look into this. Yep. And blood oxygen, like the official thing, they use that
⏹️ ▶️ John in hospitals is very similar to an Apple Watch. So it’s not even like they’re far from like that is not new technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Shining a light through your skin, as long as your skin is white, shining light through your skin and getting a blood oxygenation
⏹️ ▶️ John measurement is long established technology. And even on that, they’re like, well, we do have a light and we do shine into your skin,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re not going to make lots of promises because it is your wrist and not your fingertip and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful and the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so
Neutral I: Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see something fascinating in the show notes for the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It reads as follows Marco drove a Rivian Tell
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would he do that? He’s already got a perfectly good Vehicle for driving on the
⏹️ ▶️ John sand. Why would he ever even look at another one? It performs beautifully. It solves his problem entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John He even gave this car a watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we really going there? I was gonna I was gonna be gentle on you, Marco, but I am here for laughing about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the poorly constructed British car if that’s what we want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I would love to know the order of events. Did the car rebel when it heard you were straying or did you stray when it rebelled?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That car rebelled on the way to drive the Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ John when you take your dog to the vet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It knows. It knew.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey knew. But I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say so there’s a few relevant details here. First, what happened the day before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I sold the Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you didn’t tell us this. This is genuinely new news. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not putting on an ad here. Yes, I was saving it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. Oh, this is news. Who or what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did you sell it to? So as you know, I’ve been looking to try to get just somebody to buy it. I just wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do some kind of trade-in thing. I didn’t want to go through eBay or Cars and Bids or anything because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hardly ever there where this car is. It’s winter. I don’t want to go get it cleaned and
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re perfectly timing this sale for the peak of the used Tesla market. Oh, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, and what kept killing the value of the car in, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever you go online, you fill out a form of like, give me a quote for this car. What would kill it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco officially in whatever database they’re looking at, it has an accident report. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think I said this in the show when it happened a couple years ago, it got scraped by a plow in the ferry parking lot. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey we talked about it. Yeah, it blew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tire up and everything. So I- While it was parked? Yes. I wasn’t even there. It was parked. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got scraped on the front bumper panel or whatever. So it was bad enough that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a body shop had to replace the bumper. And I went through insurance because it would have cost like $6,000 because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way Teslas are made. Cool. Anyway, I went through insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and apparently that got reported as quote, an accident. But there were no details in these databases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what this accident was. So whenever I’d go on, whenever I’d like fill out a thing, I’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, you know, model year, model, mileage, and it would tell me, okay, it’s worth this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then once it got down to like, all right, give us your license plate or VIN so we can give you like a firm offer on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular car, it would go down like 10 grand because of that stupid accident report. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was at my wits end, and I was going like, I’m fine, I’m just gonna, let me just see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few people said, try CarMax. And I hadn’t tried CarMax before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because for certain cars, they won’t give you a quote online.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It basically says like, your car is too rare or finicky in the market value, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to bring it to our store and we’ll give you a quote in person. So I was like, I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with that. But I was at my wits end, so I eventually, I’m like, you know what? Let me go see what they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say because I don’t wanna deal with this anymore. I’m tired of having three cars. It’s a pain in the butt. this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car is decreasing in value every day I don’t sell it. And the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I want is to be sitting on this any longer than I have to. So it’s already gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down enough since last fall. I wanna sell it, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went, I drove all the way to the nearest one, which is in New Jersey, it’s an hour away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I’m gonna drive an hour for this. But let me just see. And honestly, I was a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sad to sell the Tesla because I loved that car. But as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was driving there, my back’s all hurting and I’m trying to get the seat in the right spot so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t irritate sciatic stuff. And I’m like, since I’ve been away from this car for so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, I can’t get comfortable in it now. Like, and I’m sitting on the ground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone’s all higher than me. And I’m like, you know, I’m ready to get rid of it now. Plus, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving around in a big red Mega hat. So anyway, I get there and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of saying goodbye of the car on the way there. We’ve had our good times. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my cars, not all of them, but many of them, I love my cars. But yeah, the comfort thing, it was time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it took forever. You go in there, and everyone there is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, but it’s like, oh, we’re behind, it’s gonna be like a 45 minute wait before you even see somebody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you sit down with somebody at, it basically looks like a car dealership in there, it’s like a bunch of sales desks. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sit down with somebody, and it takes forever to go through all the different steps on the computer. And they’re very nice about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a very slow process. I think I was there for like two and a half hours, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I eventually got a number. And I was on the way there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like telling myself in my head, all right, I’m hoping to get this. Here’s the like, you know, Kelley
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blue Book dealer traded in value. Then here’s what I would accept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below that. And then like, you know, another big chunk below that, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimum I would accept. And I told myself, even though I’ve driven there, and I’m gonna be tempted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just, even if they lowball me, I’m gonna be tempted to take it just because I’ve driven so far and it’s been so long, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna take anything below this number. I tell myself before I get there, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go through the whole thing, and sure enough, they’re like, well, here’s what we’re basing the offer on, here’s all these, check, check, check, check,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these different lists, and then here’s, it says there’s an accident, and I explained to the guy what that was, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s any human input, really. I think it seemed like it was all algorithmic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then take it or leave it. Like it didn’t seem like there was a lot of negotiation or human adjustment happening there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, there is, but keep going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, there is? Well, that’s good to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, because I have experience with this because the BMW almost got sold to CarMax.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by the way, CarMax based in Richmond, and I actually did a little work for them a couple of jobs ago. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am more familiar than you would expect with how CarMax works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re the reason I originally heard about it. But anyway, so the offer came back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was right in the middle of what I wanted. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 10% less than the Blue Book trade-in value and a recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Model S recently sold on Cars and Bids that had very similar specs, very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, very similar mileage, Model S, unlimited supercharging, all that stuff and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slightly below what that sold for. So I was like, sold. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s yours, take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Give me the check right now and I am sprinting out of here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s basically what happened. It was great. So I can honestly say I had a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience with CarMax. It did take forever, but everybody was very nice. And the offer was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was way higher. I would say it was probably maybe 20%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher than anything else I got from anybody else, any other
⏹️ ▶️ John you take two cars there? Is that how you dropped off the car and then got driven back in someone else? No, I took a Lyft back.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that must have been expensive. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really cutting into the sale price of your car with that ride. Seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like $60. It wasn’t that bad. I mean, considering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, and that was easy. That was fine. It was New Jersey. That was the hardest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part. I had to turn left. And that’s the whole thing. But we figured it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you didn’t have to pump your own gas, though. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s true. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey congratulations. Congratulations. That’s exciting. heart rate highs, which is
Neutral II: Land Rover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The following morning, a friend of mine has had for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Rivian R1T, the truck Rivian. And he had offered months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, if you ever want to come by, see a test drive it, let me know. And I was in town, so I’m like, hey, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to do that. Yes, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so I get in the Land Rover. As I’m pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of my driveway, the dashboard lights up with a whole lot of lights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The car is like losing power. like it was shifted into neutral. I’m like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened? What the heck is going on? And it’s you know all the lights in the dashboard are on like all the error lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything’s warning warning like something’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. Did the British National Anthem start playing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t even name the song. The joke would have been better if I knew more about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. God save the king. Sorry Brits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway I’m like what do I what do I do here? And I noticed one of the lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was lit was the battery light and And I happen to have plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in to one of the little 12 volt ports one of those like big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rechargeable lithium batteries. Like the kind that has a built-in AC inverter. I bought one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months ago so that for multiple reasons, you know, backup power and stuff like that and all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a small one so that could go in the car and that way Adam could use his gaming PC on long car trips. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had this battery and this… I’m not gonna name the company because it’s a terrible battery. It is very buggy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was supposed to have like USB-C in and out, and it’s the buggiest thing I’ve ever used in that way. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s incredibly unreliable. I have no faith in the reliability of this battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I should have gotten a Jackery. That’s, I know this is a ridiculous sounding name. That’s the good brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had one of those in the past and it got water damage at some point. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have it anymore. Oh, you don’t say. It was indoors, okay. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was- Like actually indoors? It was in the water
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. Actually indoors or indoors-ish? It was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basement water closet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the water main comes up from the sand and goes into my house. Many rooms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Marco’s house are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it was sitting on sand, running some heat trace on a pipe so it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freeze over Christmas when we had that massive cold spell, but we were leaving for a few days. I hooked up this backup battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that in case we had a big power outage, our water main would have something like 18 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of backup power before it could potentially freeze. And there was a huge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that massive Christmas storm came through here was first as a whole bunch of rain. This backup power thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sitting in a boxed-in insulated closet where the floor of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand. And enough water came up through the sand to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have at least a few inches of water to the point where when I got home, I pick up this battery and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear whoosh, whoosh, and I’m like, oh no. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not good. Batteries do not like to have salt water inside them in general. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pick it up and I tilted it and all this water just pours out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, that’s very bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that happens with your car also, also bad. Yes. You ever tilt your car and salt water comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so that’s how I lost my Jackery and I should have bought another one, but instead I tried this other brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was all like USA and it’s terrible. Anyway, so I had the other brand’s battery plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in charging to my car and as I am driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting all this what appears to be you know power loss the engine is cutting off like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so I don’t know enough about gas-powered cars to know but like if there’s too much draw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the alternator is it possible to the engine actually stop because it can’t like make sparks is that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like the if your battery is dead it could undervolt all the electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John which could screw with your engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so my theory of what happened is that this crappy battery that I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged in that was charging through the cigarette lighter plug, maybe it was pulling too much power. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t the fuse have tripped? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Yeah, no, I don’t think. I mean, the only way this should ever happen in a healthy car is if your
⏹️ ▶️ John battery is no longer holding a charge sufficiently. That’s basically it. I don’t think there’s anything you can
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in that would cause the electricity to be pulled from the engine to a degree
⏹️ ▶️ John or any of the other essential systems. I don’t know. I mean, I would assume there’d be electronic lockouts, like you said, a fuse
⏹️ ▶️ John or something similar. Yeah, it doesn’t let you stop the engine computers from functioning and
⏹️ ▶️ John firing the fuel injectors or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, I’m like, I’m like, what do I do here? So I just unplugged everything that was plugged into any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB port on the car. And I unplugged that battery thing and it restarted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had to as part of getting to my friend’s house, I had to drive up a hill and it started losing power again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going up the hill. and I’m like, oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it felt like a transmission
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Now that doesn’t feel like, also here’s the thing that’s confusing this, right? So some
⏹️ ▶️ John people in the chat room are saying, well, it’s not like you overloaded the battery, you just hit, it had just drained the battery, like leaving your dome
⏹️ ▶️ John light on for the people who know what a dome light is or what. And if your battery is drained, it doesn’t have, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like your battery is bad and has to be replaced, but you’ve drained all the electricity out of it and you end up undervolting something
⏹️ ▶️ John and it gets screwed up, right? But then with the whole thing of going up a hill and you’re losing power, it’s like, well, it’s not an electric car.
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery doesn’t actually drive the wheels, how is that happening? Once you undervolt systems in modern cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and parts of your dashboard light up, the car may not be happy until it is
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced that all is well, because as far as it’s concerned, all sorts of error codes are happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because parts of the car are necessarily broken, but because they briefly didn’t receive
⏹️ ▶️ John enough electricity to function and are now throwing error codes because you’re like, I don’t know what’s going on, the world has gone crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, as a sensor, declare sensor bankruptcy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know what’s going on. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to sort of reset all the systems, right? And that could cause the car to say, like, go
⏹️ ▶️ John into limp mode or not provide power or whatever. But I’m giving you these things because it’s the hopeful answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, don’t worry. Just unplug all your stuff, recharge your battery, reset all the codes and you’ll be fine. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John other possibility that your car is breaking like British cars have for many decades is much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it felt bad. Like, I’ve never felt a car do this before. It felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bad. Anyway, I made it up the hill. I got the rest of the way to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend’s house. When I was driving back after the Rivian test drive, which we’ll get to in a moment, it had the check engine light on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, what did I break? But then today it wasn’t on anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the car worked fine all day today. And I drove it a lot today and everything was fine. So I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a temporary battery thing caused by that stupid battery pack that I should never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have bought. I should have gotten the Jackery, dammit, but I didn’t. I should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just gotten the same one again, but I thought I could go smaller and this other brand, and that was a mistake. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Land Rover seems to be fine now, but it- Well, Sunroof accepted. Oh yeah, the Sunroof is still broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I consider that a win.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s already got things that he’s just signing off as, well, that doesn’t count as being broken anymore. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just part of the car now. Yeah, right. You
Neutral III: Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I did get to drive an R1T. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the R1S, the SUV. That’s the one I’m actually waiting for. I’ve been on the wait list for the R1S for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, a long time. And every time I look at my date for when my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R1S reservation is going to come in, it is a few months later than the last time I looked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is very discouraging. Anyway, I can tell you one thing. When my landing reverb was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken yesterday, I definitely, if there was an easy way for me to have gotten a Rivian that day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have. I would have sold the Lamb of River that day and traded, like gotten a Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, but you can’t get them. So I do get to drive it. I get to play around with the console. I get to ask my friend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, what he thought of it after months of ownership and everything. And ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am very impressed by Rivian. And so here’s general high level overview.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels a lot like a big Tesla and in lots of ways, You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s and you can clearly like I would almost compare it to like handspring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus Palm back in the 90s when like handspring was a whole bunch of like ex Palm people that like went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off and formed like a better Palm basically. And I think there’s a lot of that in Rivian. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know they’ve had some ex Tesla employees that have joined Rivian. There’s tons of Tesla influence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at the whole rest of the auto industry and the way they do things, the way they make cars, the way they’re like how
⏹️ ▶️ John supports Apple CarPlay an Android Auto, but not Tesla, but also not Rivian. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you look at the rest of the industry, they do things a certain set of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you see, oh, and here’s how Tesla does things, and it’s very different, better in a lot of ways. Well, Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in that other group. They’re in the Tesla group of lots of similar stylings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of how the screens are, how the dashboards are, what’s in the screens, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in the screens, the layout of the screens, the general design the UI design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feature sets. Like there’s so much. Like one of the biggest things I miss since having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Land Rover, I really miss dog mode. Which is this mode of Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you could like, if it’s electric you can keep it running, you can keep the heat running or air conditioning whenever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want for a very long time. And so if we’re like on a family trip, and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a road trip and we have to like, you know, go in to have a meal somewhere, we can leave the dog in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have dog mode keep the climate control running the whole time and show on the screen, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dog is happy, it’s 70 degrees or whatever, and so no one’s gonna break my windows and my dog is not in danger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a feature that I don’t know how many cars offer that. Every Tesla does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Rivian does. And I don’t know if anyone else does. Like, the Land Rover has a remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco climate thing where you can start the car climate remotely, but it’ll only run for 30 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it stops and it won’t do it again until you go start the car physically, like in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of has that feature, but not a very good version of it. There’s a whole bunch of features like that, that Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Tesla have, and no one else seems to, or at least doesn’t have a good version of it. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lots of that kind of stuff on the Rivian. But the Rivian is like a better Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’ve clearly taken a lot of influence. They’ve learned from Tesla’s pluses and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minuses. They’re basically doing a better version. It’s a lot like if Tesla was run
⏹️ ▶️ John We have stocks on the steering wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have a steering wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They actually have a steering wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Yes. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a complete circle or at least close enough. I think it might be have the flat bottom or whatever, but it’s got a flat bottom. Otherwise why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But yeah, so it’s a circular steering wheel. There are, there’s a shifter, like a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shifter on, it’s a column shifter, but you know, it’s a, it’s a shifter. Yeah. There’s the stocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the knobs and the buttons and everything. Not a ton, you know, there’s still a lot that’s on, on the screen, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen is well-designed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like your original Model S, which used to have stalks and everything like that, before they decided, no, we’re moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Right, and I found the touchscreen to be very responsive. Like the animations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really smooth, panning around on the map is super fast and smooth, almost iPad-like, very responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very impressed by that, because the Tesla is not that responsive. It’s gotten better over time. Like the older Model S’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were way slower than the more modern ones, but it’s still, Rivian was very good in the responsiveness.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the quote unquote older Rivians also were worse because a lot of these EV companies, the day they
⏹️ ▶️ John launch their software is super janky, but they rapidly iterate on the software responsiveness because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s usually at this point not a hardware limitation. It’s just that I don’t know why they all have this problem, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John always launch with bad responsiveness on the touchscreens. And you’re like, if you’re worried, if you’re a day one owner, is it always going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like this? But you know, software updates very often save it. So you’re getting to see the Rivian with the 1.0
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs shaken out a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still, I mean, for instance, one of the clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits here is like the Rivian is designed for people who are still driving it. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not making these big pronouncements, oh, we’re gonna have self-driving cars in two years or one year, or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give us an extra $5,000. They’re not doing that kind of crap. And they have what Tesla calls Autopilot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is lane centering with adaptive cruise control. They have that. And it’s, by all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews, I didn’t actually try because we didn’t go on the highway, but from all reviews, it seems like it’s just as good Tesla autopilot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t do like you know lane change and stuff but I never did that anyway because it was it was really conservative and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird and I never I never really used that feature. But the regular like you know lane keeping and adaptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cruise I use that all the time and I really miss that because the Land Rover has neither of those things and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss that. But you know this is a car that’s designed to be driven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a human still. It’s just to have these assistive functionality you know when you want them but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still has a steering wheel it still has a shifter it still has knobs and buttons on stocks and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot on the stocks. Can you open the glove box
⏹️ ▶️ John hand? It doesn’t have a glove box. Oh, that’s right. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big, yeah. Yeah, so anyway, I’ll get to that in a second. But for the most part, like every Tesla vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some like weird door handle thing. Rivian doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there is no like pop out door handle. There are no gullwing doors. There is no weird like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle that you’re not supposed to pull like on the Model 3 where it’s like, okay, don’t pull this handle. And every time you get in there for the first time, you pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, you’re like, oh, you opened the door wrong. I did that to Underscore’s car, I think, twice. Yeah, me too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you just operate this car. It has regular, pretty much regular door handles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the inside and outside, you just operate it like a regular car. And it just works, because it’s designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a really good regular car, as opposed to Tesla is designed to be some kind of self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spaceship that no one’s ever actually supposed to touch. And you kind of have to work around their constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desire to be innovative in superficial ways. The experience of being a Tesla owner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a lot of really nice things, very nicely driving cars, but every car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has at least one of those dumb things that you have to work around and you kind of have to forgive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re being very forward-looking. It’s like, this thing is stupid and breaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s great as long as you don’t want a steering wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the, by the way, I saw my first one of those in person, the first half steering wheel Teslas. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super weird when you see it, Especially like when you’re sitting in a Land Rover, like in the sky, looking down into a Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S. That’s, it looks really weird. Anyway, I’m so glad I didn’t buy one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Rivian, it just, it seems like a really nicely designed vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, and it’s, it’s thoughtfully designed. Like there’s all sorts of functionality in there. Not just like the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving stuff. I mean, that’s, that’s one thing. And that’s a big thing. That’s, that’s most of the appeal is like the regular driving stuff seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really well done. But also, you know, they have all their cool utility features, you know, like the, this is the trucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It had the gear tunnel and stuff like that, and there’s all sorts of stuff like that But it just overall the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling I got from driving It was like this is a car designed by people who have learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from all of Tesla’s mistakes Are doing a better job of that style and are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it in a much more Utility centered way instead of trying to be too extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for extremities sake There were a few a few little things that I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So some things that are, I would say, not negative, but neutral. No CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s negative. That ain’t neutral. That’s negative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, now that I’ve been using CarPlay full-time in the Lenovo for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been, how many months? I think it’s kind of a toss-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly. Oh, hard disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’m also using the ProClip USA phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount next to it. next to it. I have a dual screen setup, which is really nice because I can have like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music on one and the Waze directions on the big one. Or I can actually, most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time what I do is I have Waze on both because if you run Waze in CarPlay when your phone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, in a dock or whatever, on the phone it’ll show the list of turns.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then on the CarPlay screen it’ll show the big map and all the other stuff. So you actually, it’s like having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dual monitors, like you have more information available to you, so it’s actually very nice but when I’m like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I was in the Tesla like driving driving to go get rid of it that was just you know using just a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount for my phone like I always do in there when I don’t have CarPlay I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss it if I as long as I can have a way to have my phone screen visible and have Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever running on that that’s fine and in some ways it’s actually better than CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so CarPlay is to me a nice to have I hope they add it I hope they have a software update in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that adds it, but I don’t need it. It’s not something that I find a requirement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hard requirement. So it’s nice to have, but not a hard requirement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I hear what you’re saying and I strongly disagree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am genuinely glad that you feel that way because that leaves you more options, particularly when it comes to fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pants electric cars. I personally find it to be very, anytime I grab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone, which I don’t do often, I’ve gotten better about over the years, but anytime I grab my phone the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in motion, even if I’m in a position where I feel like it’s safe to do it, which it probably isn’t, but that’s neither here nor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, I just feel like whatever I’m doing on that, whatever I’m doing, it’s way less safe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than doing this, either waiting or doing a similar thing using CarPlay. And so for that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone, I find CarPlay is very worth it to me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, to each their own and not insisting on it like I petulantly do is certainly the easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, certainly I would prefer if it was there, but it’s not as big of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a negative to not have it as many people would feel, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I noticed also the regen braking was actually way stronger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than my Model S, which I actually consider a good thing because, like, you know, the other car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we now own is still Tiff’s little i3. We bought that out for her. And I took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few drives in that when we were back because I could and it was there and It was way more efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and smaller than the giant land rover. So I took a few drives in that and like that car has extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regen. Like you can come to a total stop very easily with the i3 as regen. And so and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. I like having very strong regen because then I can choose how much of that power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use, how much of that, how much that’s captured. You can actually do the, you know, partial one pedal driving a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. Model S is, um, it has, it has good regen, but it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the, the Rivian is, was far I noticed that instantly. Um, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other downsides about it. Um, no sunroof as mentioned, although I currently have no sunroof. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here we go. Only only two cup holders in the front. I know this is like the standard number to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the model S actually has four, at least the one I had because you like in the little center console, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can set up two in there with these little like inserts that they had that were actually really clever idea. And then there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also the main two, like by your elbow in the middle. in the middle. Oftentimes we actually want like three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be like, you know, me and Tiff will have like a coffee and then we’ll also have like a shared water or maybe a water for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dog or something. And so like oftentimes I want three cup holders in the front. This is a small stupid thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but two is not enough really if we can have more
⏹️ ▶️ John regular non fancy cars, you can put that water in your door pocket, that place for water there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I know, but it’s, it’s not as nice anyway. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is. I think it’s better for like that’s why we keep the the driver’s water or so you would call it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So drinks go in the cup holders. Our court has, I think, just two cup holders and they’re pretty big. But there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John in everybody’s door, there’s a place for a pretty big water bottle. So the kids have theirs in their their doors. I have mine as
⏹️ ▶️ John the driver by, you know, by my shin in my door. My wife’s got hers in her door. And it always annoys me when I
⏹️ ▶️ John see these reviews of these eighty thousand dollar luxury cars where they show trying to put even something as tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John as a little like, you know, Poland spring water bottle. And they can’t fit it in the stupid door pocket because they made
⏹️ ▶️ John it so skinny that you have to crush the bottle to get it in. Total waste. I think the Rivian has, does it
⏹️ ▶️ John have crappy door pockets? I forget. A lot of the, some of the EVs have like- They have, you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s right. They have the accordion ones. Yeah, those are not good. Really? I find them usually to be pretty good, but-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like what we’re talking about is a door pocket that is a big rigid plastic thing that holds a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John kid’s water bottle and you do not have to open or stretch anything. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s the way my car is. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s like what the utilitarian like minivans and Honda Accords have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s what the Land Rover has. it just a giant, just giant pocket. Yeah. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would, I would, I consider it a bit of a negative to the Rivian that it has very, very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to early Model S’s. It has an overly minimal front console and dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, you know, it’s in fact exactly the same mistake that old Model S’s made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have that like flat floor across the front where you have this giant spot in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the front, like between the armrest and the front dashboard area there’s like a flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco floor and you can’t really put much there like maybe if you have like a figure that’s for your purse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly what I was gonna say I’m not kidding that is for the purse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but it’s way too big
⏹️ ▶️ John for most purses I’m not sure you’ve seen most persons right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and you also you don’t want to put much there because it can very easily tip over into your footwell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that you don’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ John the better the better ones put little fencing there but I know that that spot actually is really important a place to put your gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John purse that is not the passenger seat is is actually a big design consideration for utilitarian family cars. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they’re going for. But what they missed is what you’re talking about, which is like, you can’t, like on electric cars, it’s easy to make it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John flat. Cause you’re like, hey, there’s nothing going through there. Like there’s no transmission tunnel, right? It’s really easy, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John they forget, some of them forget that you kind of do need something to, kind of like a ship at sea, to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of hold that giant person place up, doesn’t roll into anybody’s foot well. And that’s why a lot of the better ones have
⏹️ ▶️ John like, not big like fencing there, but like little ridges or whatever to sort of make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to put a soda can in there, for example, it wouldn’t actually roll on your feet, it would just go back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it has like, it’s like a small little like, you know, kind of tray thing on the floor there, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantial. Like, and that’s, I would like, I loved, in my very first model, I had two Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S’s over the years. The first one had that flat floor thing, and there was just some aftermarket company that made inserts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just got an aftermarket insert that looked like a big, regular console. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that lease sort of ended, And then I got the second one. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second one basically had that built in from the factory. Like it was a very similar kind of thing. They realized, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people want this and they built it in. So, you know, hopefully, you know, with Rivian’s, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears to be pretty clear success, hopefully the aftermarket companies will come around and make…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might have already made some kind of like, you know, console insert for that. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the Defender that I’ve been driving now for whatever months, The Defender has a more comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ride. You know, it’s… One benefit Land Rover has, they don’t work very well, but when they do work, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. Like, they’re very comfortable. And the Land Rover was more comfortable. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Defender also has way more console storage. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compartments all over the place with the Defender. And the Defender ones are also lined with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rubber material, because it’s made for… made to be an off-roader. So even like the cup holders have those little like rubber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protrusions into them, so they like hold, they can like squish your bottle so it stays in place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Rivian doesn’t have, it has a little bit of stuff like that but not much. It’s much more like you know, minimal, flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surfaces, not a lot of storage, interior. The Defender also has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rear view mirror camera, which I love. Like the rear view mirror, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip it and it becomes a screen, and there’s a camera in like the tail fin thing, looks like a radio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco antenna, There’s a camera and that looks back and so you can replace your entire rear view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from an optical mirror thing to a camera. And the screen is so high res and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high frame rate, you instantly forget it’s a screen. You just see better. And it’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’ve never seen as smooth and nice of a camera and screen as that is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so, so nice. Caribbean doesn’t offer that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of shocked that the big EVs don’t have that because that’s becoming more and more common on just regular cars. Like you noted, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, it’s a Land Rover and it’s not even the latest model of Land Rover. And a lot of cars have that now as an option,
⏹️ ▶️ John like with the flips from mirror to screen. Why wouldn’t they put that on all the EVs? You know, they’ve got the cameras, you know, they’ve got the computing
⏹️ ▶️ John and the screen tech. I guess they just figured, oh, we don’t need that. We have the big screen and the dashboard, but like it’s the internal
⏹️ ▶️ John combustion engine seems to be getting that feature faster than the fancy EVs do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s, and that’s like the one thing that I think Rivian does lag behind in cameras. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a backup camera and it’s nice and high resolution. And it has that top down view that most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern cars have now that have a bunch of cameras on them, which is nice. But like the Defender still has way more cameras. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has like better, like, you know, like the different views for the off-roading modes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get. Oh, show me like, you know, my front left wheel, you know, what’s going on around that. Like there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras, I think, in the Defender. Certainly it makes better use of them. And again, that rear view camera is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a good feature. I really hope more people adopt it. The Defender overall, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Defender rides higher and everything, But on the plus side to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian, the Rivian is electric. That makes it better in a billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. I miss electric so much, and I cannot wait to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to it. It’s so much better than gas in every possible way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Rivian is way faster, way more responsive. You have all the benefits of electric,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging at home, never having to go to a crappy gas station, the massive environmental savings. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, it’s so, so nice to be electric. Also, one little fun benefit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so one of the different experiments I’ve done over the months I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the Defender is I keep and occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use MaxTrax traction boards. And these are these giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Australian plastic boards with all these little teeth on them, and if you or someone near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you is stuck, You can stick these under the wheels and basically drive out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of miraculous how well they work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’d be a perfect candidate for the gear tunnel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes! So, the downside of MaxTrax is that they’re huge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also, once you have used them, they are then covered in sand or mud or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t really want to put them back in your vehicle. So, I learned this the hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. I have not yet had to pull myself out of anything with the MaxTrax,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I have occasionally pulled other people out of situations with Max Trax. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wonderful feeling to be able to help somebody. I love having that capability. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to then put them back in my vehicle. I first was storing them just in the trunk. And they’re huge. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take up a ton of space in the trunk. And then getting them out of the trunk is hard if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in front of them, blocking them in. And I tried keeping them in a roof box, but that made my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too tall. There’s all sorts of roof rack mounts you can get for them, but the Defender is so tall stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t want to put anything on the roof if you ever want to go into a garage or anything. You can’t. So any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of roof mounting option was out the window for me. I eventually found a spare tire mount that worked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they’re mounted on my spare tire, like on the back of the car. But this has its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges. First of all, it makes the car longer, which makes it fit less well in garages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a different dimension. They’re also just out there in the elements, So they’re getting damaged by the sun slowly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to like lock them So I have a I have like a lock that has to lock them in I have to you know You get a key out of the glove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box to unlock it whenever I need to use them It’s so that’s kind of a pain So the Rivian I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the truck has not only of course a truck bed But also the gear tunnel and the gear tunnel is massive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome But I thought hey, you know what could you pop the frunk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max tracks are very wide like they’re they’re huge They fit in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the frunk. The frunk is so wide. The frunk is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could fit four… I’m telling you off-roaders, I have MaxTrac’s Extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular size boards. It fits four of them stacked, plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still had enough spare room in there that I could put all my towing gear. The kinetic tow rope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the various shackles and all that crap. I have a shovel, I have so much towing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear that I carry around in the Defender. and it could fit all of that in the frunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god I am so I cannot wait to get my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R1S. I am like anybody if you work for Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can like push a button oh my god I’d be so thankful like I don’t ask for much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but oh my god I I’ve been waiting so long for this car and now the wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now that I’ve driven one and seen the utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god it’s the perfect beach car like it it is exactly what I need to drive to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house like literally today I drove to my house it involves driving over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two miles of sand not like dirty roads sand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the waves right there on the national park beach that’s what I do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car is made to do stuff like that and oh my god It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very happy with the defender as an off road. The defender is an amazing off roader, but I would so much rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the R1S as a general all around vehicle. Like it’s such a nicer vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in in the ways that I care about. It has more space inside. It’s again, electric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really good electric, too. Like it’s I would so much rather have an R1S and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot wait. I’m I’m I’m watching all the resale sites trying to see like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m honestly I’m waiting for a yellow one. No one’s selling a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yellow one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes! You stop it! You stop it right now! Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not! It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome in the pictures! I’ll throw in the yellow. It’s fine. It’s gonna be the beach car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s either… I either want the blue or the yellow. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two. Oh! God, I’m gonna vomit. Oh, not yellow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The blue looks cool, but I think the yellow looks even cooler. So I’m waiting for a yellow, but God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I just want… No!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No! No! No! No! No! Application denied. No!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The green one looks nice too. Ugh, not yellow. Anything but yellow. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of good colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re gonna sit here, wait wait, you’re gonna sit here after ten years of slagging on white cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re gonna sit here like a jackass and say that yellow is the correct answer for something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size of a f***ing bus? Hell no! Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John not. It’s a happy, fun car with its little funny eyeballs in the front.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, I’m so upset with you right now. I was all on board with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have to get the yellow.
⏹️ ▶️ John The R1S doesn’t come with the gear tunnel, you know, but the good thing is that the car from the A-pillar, the A-pillar’s forward is
⏹️ ▶️ John identical to the R1T, so the frunk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the same. That’s why I asked about the frunk, because I knew I’m like, you know, because I was wondering, like, should I get the truck?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, but ultimately I would have more use out of the, I would have more utility from the SUV, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because I want a lot more interior space, I don’t really need a truck bed for anything else, and so that’s why I was so shocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the frunk was as big as it is, because I thought for sure there’s no way I’m fitting max tracks in a frunk of anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but nope, they fit just fine, and four of them, and with room to spare. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, the yellow isn’t like a big bird yellow, it’s like a tan. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John called compass yellow, but it is barely yellow. You should look at it a bunch. All right, let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, it’s basically metallic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you see like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at like real life photos of them, because like one of their press cars was yellow, so there’s a few like real life photos of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not Honda S2000 yellow. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s closer to that than beige, but it’s it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to tell like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t really see them in person But if you just do like a Google image search for like r1s yellow or something, you’ll see there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s I mean It’s it’s a yellow, you know, I mean and this is this is actually a somewhat popular color now Like if you look there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a yellow Bronco. There’s yellow Wranglers. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stand by this. I’d know yellow Wranglers No, yellow Broncos. No yellow Rivians What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you have against fun colors? That’s the thing. And like, so I have, I currently have a blue car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as fun of a blue as Land Rover can produce, which is not very fun, but it’s still blue. And it’s a nice blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very nice blue. But now I feel like, you know, for the Rivian, the Rivian has a really nice blue. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote Rivian blue, which is like their bright one. It’s a very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey blue. It’s very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it turns out I can’t get yellow and I have to get blue, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know, that’s… You can’t get yellow. That’s tempting. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turns out you cannot get yellow. I’m telling you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right now. No, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yellow. Oh. Just a
⏹️ ▶️ John bit. Honda s2000 yellow versus Rivian yellow. Do you see what I’m talking about here?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s I see the comparison. I think the Rivian looks fine in that color. I think I think that the green
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe more fun for the Forest, let’s see. Is the blue the blue maybe a little bit more beachy. The blue is
⏹️ ▶️ John way more beachy Oh and and despite what Casey has said in the slack here I have a close-up picture of the the
⏹️ ▶️ John purse holder and I declared the walls purse ready Look at them. They’re pretty deep. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh Marco. This yellow is so bad. Just no no no no no
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what your objection is
⏹️ ▶️ John My neighborhood someone in my neighborhood has a white R1s now And I think it even looks good in white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know white can just happen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I would say I think the white looks decent if you get the black wheels Which I would like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my intended wheels are the the black off-road wheels all-terrain dark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s all-terrain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark This is what I want right
⏹️ ▶️ John here. God, I cannot wait for this trend of blacked out wheels to end. The
⏹️ ▶️ John I buy cars, it’ll probably be fine because it’d probably take about a decade for it to stop and that’s when I buy a new car.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I know they’ve been in fashion for many, many years. Now I cannot wait for it to end. I hate blacked out wheels so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They occasionally work on like yellow, which never
⏹️ ▶️ John works. I don’t think I’ve ever seen. And I think the closest they’ve come to working is on off-road vehicles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I’m gonna get the Rivian with the blacked out wheels in yellow and piss off both of you. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I think looks the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think on off-road vehicles is the closest I’ve come to accepting blacked out wheels because it just kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of goes with the look of like, you know, not like military style vehicles with like off-road type of utilitarian things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like I’m talking about like, you know, sports cars, sports sedans. I just…
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like a B. It looks good. I like wheels to be… They don’t have to be shiny chrome, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like to be matte finish, silver, neutral colored, like I do not want them to be black. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be shiny black. I don’t want to be matte black. Can we go back?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looks like a bee. It looks good. Yes, because when I want to think of something I want, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look like an annoying piece of crap insect that all it does is piss you off and hurt you. Yes, that sounds wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, people like, no, the wasps are the jerks. People like bees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cue the stripey, buzzy things, whatever that image is that goes around every spring.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you try the self-leveling thing? No. I feel like it should be part of dog mode. Your dog should be
⏹️ ▶️ John comfortable and also level. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, man, I cannot wait to get this. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doubt in my mind. Looking around the rest of the industry, there’s no doubt in my mind now. This is going to be my next car. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a question of how quickly can I get this car?
⏹️ ▶️ John The company is struggling a little bit. So hopefully they’re still around by the time. It’s a tough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in many ways, it feels like early Tesla days in a lot of good ways. in the sense that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rolling out all sorts of great features and software updates on a regular basis. My friend said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the servicing story has been pretty good, that he’s only had a couple of issues, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were minor, and they came to his house to fix them. And this is over six or eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months, he’s had it a while. So that’s pretty good for a brand new car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think ultimately, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would not surprise me if somehow, like Tesla bought them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. Because I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t want that to happen. No, I don’t say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco energy in the world. You want like General Motors to buy them. I don’t want that to happen. But they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so clearly like taking Tesla’s playbook and just doing it better. Like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they remain independent and succeed like crazy, because they seem to be doing a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. And God, I’m so now, like, I almost wish I didn’t go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive it, because now I want it even more, and I’m so impatient. Like, if anybody was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling a yellow one, I would probably justify buying it somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m telling you, I was so, like, I could not care less about a pickup truck. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand that for some people, they make sense, they’re useful, et cetera. I am not some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this context. I could not care less about a pickup truck. I do care about car play, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than that, this thing blew my mind. And I’m pretty sure I drove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quad motor, which was a mistake because, oh my good grief, this thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so fast. And it weighs more than the earth, but to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it move that quickly is just astonishing. Do you happen to know if it was a dual or a quad that you drove?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe they’re all quads so far. I don’t think they’ve-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Is that right? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve actually shipped any duels yet because the duels are like the lower priced ones. You got to fleece the whales first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think all the launch
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are all quads. To try to stay in business yeah I mean both both companies that are populated with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey fleece me I’ll pay I’ve already like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking for a freebie I want to buy the car fleece me well I’ll even you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll even pay the like the higher price like because you know I booked it when it was the lower price and they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honor it but like now if you book it now, it’s higher. I’d pay the higher price if I could get it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I just want, I want my freaking car. I miss electric so much and this is so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of the companies that are populated with ex-Tesla engineers who are trying to do the Tesla playbook but
⏹️ ▶️ John better are also both financially and struggling with their finances and struggling with their ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John make enough cars to give to customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Who’s the other one? Lucid?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Lucid, the guy who runs that is the guy who designed the Model S and he basically made at a better Model S. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said many times, Lucid has the best motor technology in the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John EV industry. So if and when they go out of business, somebody is going to snap that out because they have good stuff there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the cars are pretty good, even though it’s their first car, growing pains, blah, blah, blah. But boy, being a car company is tough,
⏹️ ▶️ John not funded by an eccentric multimillionaire at the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and or aren’t as good at getting government subsidies as Tesla was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, honestly, Lucid I’d be more wary of, just because they’re selling into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much smaller market. Whereas Rivian is selling into pickup trucks and SUVs in America.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For God’s sake, that’s a massive market.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re no longer in the Lucid market, though, because you can’t stand cars. You need to be in a big SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, I kind of like the, you know. It’s really nice not having leg problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately. No, I mean, I can see myself in the future if I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something smaller. Like I was more comfortable in the i3 because it is more of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a crossover height seating position, even though the car itself is tiny, but it’s tiny, but kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a golf cart. It is like a golf cart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so like I just need to be careful not to get these like, you know, super low,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, touring sedans anymore. Like, you know, get something a little bit higher, but even crossover height would be fine with me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that reason. But right now, you know, living on the beach, I still need something that’s off-road capable, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is not a lot on the market that is electric and off-road capable. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Oh, the F-150. Oh, yeah, I guess that’s true. But yeah, I don’t want to be, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to drive one of those. I want to drive a Rivian. The Hummer EV. That wouldn’t fit on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the roads. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also true. Hey, so to go back, if you were to build one, you said the god-awful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vomit-inducing yellow, the black wheels, which I agree with John, not my thing. but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. Then for interior, I presume you would be contractually obligated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to choose Ocean Coast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing. I originally had selected Ocean Coast and they kept sending out these updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically saying like Ocean Coast is delayed, that it’s taking a while. And if you have Ocean Coast in your configuration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your date might be softer and squishier. So I thought, you know what? I don’t really care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much. I’ll switch it to the black one. And I switched to the black one And what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you change anything about your configuration is your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco estimated date disappears and then like a month or two later, it refreshes and it’s further
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So that’s what happened. I thought I was gonna get closer by changing it to black and instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it pushed me on another six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll take, at this point, the interior could be purple. I’ll take anything like just.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if they were better on their website, they’d let you know if those changes had any effect on it, but it could just be that everybody got pushed out six months
⏹️ ▶️ John because again, the company is struggling a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, and yeah, and that’s, you know, I, I expect stuff like that, honestly, like it’s fine as long as, as long as they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco healthy longterm. That’s, that’s ultimately what I want because there are so many companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all make very similar vehicles. You know, if one of them stops making a vehicle or goes out of business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t that big of a loss. Whereas like, you know, if you’re a company like, like what Tesla has done for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up until fairly recently where you’re like the only one in a certain role or now what Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing, Like they’re the only ones doing what they’re doing so far for the most part. You know, there’s, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of what they’re offering in different vehicles, but not all of what they’re on. Not, not this whole package.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one else is doing this. Like, so if, if they go under, we’re out of luck for, for as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes for the rest of the market to catch up and do something. And then when the rest of the market does something, it might not be as good. Like they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might, you know, do things in the more traditional, you know, badly designed, bad user experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no future looking features, all this stuff, the way that if you look at what BMW is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, first of all, ignore the giant kidney girls for now, I know, but one of the vehicles I was looking at was the iX,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the iX I think has a lot going for it, and the reviews all basically say, yeah, it’s hideous, but it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice to drive. So there’s a lot going for that, but there’s a lot about that car that I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, it would be a lot less useful to me. First of all, it can’t go on the beach, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of off-roading capability like that. It’s not made for that. But even just for day-to-day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, It’s too small. Like it’s it’s still like a it’s a larger vehicle in terms of footprint But they put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like no storage space in it They made a bunch of weird decision with that car that like and then and then the you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The infotainment system is all this like huge overwrought You know BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity there that like there’s a lot of hits and misses in that, you know A lot of some of its good a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it’s really, you know Experimental what I ultimately want. I just want my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco s I just want it now And I know that’s the stupidest, most impatient thing to say. Like, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I don’t feel good saying that. But that’s how I felt after test driving the R1T and looking around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seeing how much better it would actually fit my needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are two R1S launch editions available, including one in Katona,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sir, on Cars and Bids right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a search alert. I’ve been watching them come in for the last few months. There has not been a single yellow or blue one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a blue one on AutoTrader in New Jersey right now. Oh, come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off it. off it. If you want the car, who cares that? As long as it’s not yellow,
⏹️ ▶️ John If he’s going to overpay by buying an aftermarket by somebody who’s taking advantage of the supply
⏹️ ▶️ John and demand imbalance, he should get the color he wants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the good thing is the resale prices are actually decreasing pretty quickly now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot more supply than there used to be. So they’re actually coming down to more reasonable levels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think they seem to be making colors in timed color batches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because because like the ones that hit the resale sites are all the same groups of colors at the same times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think they’re like delivering them. All right. This week our factory made some black ones. This week our factory made some gray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. Like that’s kind of how it feels. I don’t know if it’s actually how it works. That’s kind of how it feels on the resale sites. I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen one blue one for sale. It’s in New Jersey. And honestly, if I had had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the title to the land Rover with me on that trip, I might’ve gotten traded it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. I was very tempted. I’m like, this is stupid. I shouldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I almost did it. I was very close. If I had the title, I probably would have done it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just been really stupid. But you know, ultimately, I should just wait for mine. It would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a lot cheaper and you know, it’s the right thing to do. But I don’t know, YOLO, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, Katona, I forget exactly where Katona is. I just remember being off the Metro North. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s not far from you. Yeah, exactly. No, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a better color. Also, very few of these have the off-road wheels that I actually would want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the blue in a new jersey does. So, we’ll see. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna buy it. I’m not gonna buy it. I’m not gonna buy it. God, I want it. I’m not gonna buy it. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna buy it. Please buy that one, because at least the blue is very pretty. It’s so pretty.