527: The True Siri Experience
23 Mar 2023AI developments, Apple Watch Ultra bands, furniture surgery, and the experience of using standalone cameras today.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco has solved his Apple Watch Ultra band problem?
- Follow-up:
- Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant lost the AI race
- RIP, DPReview 😢
- Marco’s “real” but “small” cameras
- Ricoh GR IIIx
- Fuji X100V (warning: probably above list price)
- Fuji XT-5
- Post-show: John is a mad 👨🏻🔬
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- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code atp for 10% off your first order.
- Kolide: Cross-platform endpoint security for teams that value privacy and transparency.
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Chapters
- Apple Watch Ultra bands 🖼️
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Dupe-shared-image detection
- QD-OLED image retention
- Quinn Nelson on XR headset
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- AI and Siri
- ATP Membership
- (Not-very-)Big cameras 🖼️
- Ending theme
- John’s furniture surgery
Apple Watch Ultra bands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, we will be angry because John is refusing to admit how wrong he is, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angry that John won’t admit how wrong he is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God. So I think I actually might have solved my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch Ultra band problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, alright, the Apple Watch Ultra, it has a bunch of bands that are okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are made specifically for it. They’re all okay in different ways, none of them are great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought, I’m not trying to be funny, I thought that all of or most of the, uh, ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific bands were really well liked. Is that not true? Did I make that up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Here’s the problem. They have the Alpine loop. This is the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s cloth and it has all little tiny loops and you hook with the metal thing. You hook into one of them to put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. It is most commonly seen in its, in its orange color, which I think is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the best looking Apple watch ultra bands is the orange Alpine loop problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Well, first of all, I don’t find it super easy to get a good fit on that because of the weird hook mechanism.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You gotta like keep popping it out and get the right one and everything. So it’s not super easy to get a good fit on that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second of all, it’s cloth. And so it absorbs moisture and stuff. And my primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use of my Apple Watch Ultra is workouts. And so that’s a no-go for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also the Alpine loops tend, because they are cloth, they tend to get dirty and discolored fairly easily and fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly after you own them. And so you can wash them again, just like the woven loops. You can wash them to some extent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s, you know, whatever. All right. Then you have the trail loops. These are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like the Apple Watch Ultra version of those like Velcro regular Apple Watch loops that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loves that I think look like sweatpants and on the Apple Watch Ultra, they look like sweatpants. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s fun. The trail loops are fine. I think the black and gray trail loop with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little orange tab is a nice it’s a relatively nice look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the category, but still not, it’s very utilitarian, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the Ocean Band is kind of like the Apple Watch Ultra version of the Sport Band.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Ocean Band, this is the one I’ve spent the most time with, I have the Midnight, the little navy blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the Midnight Ocean Band, and I think it looks okay, and it works okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of comfortable. But none of that compares to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular Apple Watch sport bands, which I think they have a certain look, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they look mostly, they can look mostly neutral, but they feel great. They’re very comfortable, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wait. So would you say this is the most comfortable of the three? Because from looks alone, it does not appear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be terribly comfortable to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I haven’t owned a trail loop. I’ve tried it on in the store. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned a trail loop. I own the Alpine Loop and the Ocean Band, and I spent by far the most time with the Ocean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Band, in part because it is durable and sweat-resistant because it’s just rubber. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find it mostly comfortable. The problem is, the ridges that it has, like, the ridges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on both sides, so the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John facing your skin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so usually I will end up with little imprints of ridges in my skin after wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, which, again, is not great. So I’ve tried, you know, there’s nothing stopping you from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting any other Apple Watch band on the Ultra. Obviously, they don’t all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look very good on it necessarily. That’s up to you and your God. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can put them on. They fit. They may or may not match the metal very well. They may or may not have the right shape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the right style, but you can put on other bands and they fit just fine. So I have tried lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other Apple Watch bands with the Ultra, trying to figure out, like, all right, is there a better option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Ocean band for general Ultra use? The problem with the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport band, the standard pin buckle regular sport band we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had forever with the Apple Watch, the way the Ultra, it can kind of like float on your, it’s so big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thick that like it can kind of slide, like if you’re looking at your wrist all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, the direction of the watch moving up, it can slide up a little bit. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it creates this like gap between the band and your wrist bone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that looks really stupid with the sport band because the sport band, because it’s made for smaller, lower watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of sticks out further from the watch body before coming down around your wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does that make sense? It does. Like it comes out straight more before it goes down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The result of that is that the Apple Watch Ultra, I think only looks good with an Apple sport band if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really big wrists, and that way it has more time for the band to come like straight out before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrapping around your wrist, you know, going down. It looks better that way. But you, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inspired me last week. I’m like, wait a minute. The stretchy sport loops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple sells, the fixed size ones, they’re a different material entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it actually works really well on the Ultra. It still doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look quite right, but it’s a way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look and fit than the sport band with the pin buckle on the Ultra. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am actually very pleased to have discovered this, and I thank you very much that the, here it’s called the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Solo Loop is what I’m talking about. The Solo Loop actually looks and fits and works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly well on the Ultra. So thank you for that, I’m happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Did you have to buy one size down because the Ultra is wider?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the part I’m, so okay. So all the ones I have are for the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple watch diameter. They’re for like the 40 millimeter, 41 millimeter size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when they first came out, I kind of went through figuring out my size I ended up with two sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a seven and a six. And I wear the six, I think, most of the time. So I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out, going to Gruber’s article and looking at different things of like, you know, how do I size the Solo Loop without going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a store for, you know, okay, I know what I wear in the sport band. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know which hole I use in the sport band. And I already have these sizes seven and six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Solo Loops that I can test with, but they’re for the smaller watch. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Underscore, he tweeted about this also, or mastituted about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So he figured out that to go from the 45 millimeter to the ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cause they use the same straps, to go between those two, generally subtract one from the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the loop and that usually fits. Problem is, I think I’m kind of between sizes. So I tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know if the 45 sizes and the 40 millimeter sizes, I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if those are the same. Like is the six in both of those the same length? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watches aren’t the same height. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you take a strap of a fixed length and you use it on a bigger watch, the strap will be too loose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the watch, it’s attaching at different points on the wrist than the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch would. So you’ll be like off by one, basically. So that’s why when you go from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 45 millimeter to the Ultra, the watch is getting taller. And so the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco length strap, you have to basically make the strap shorter to make it have the same fit on your wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I ordered the five, but it’s a little tight, but I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my six from my small watch and it was too loose by a decent amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, all right, I don’t know. I think I might have to actually go into a store and figure this out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t want to do a bunch of returns and be all wasteful. So anyway, all that is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sizing is still a question mark for me personally, But the Solo Loop, I think, is a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more mechanically sound and visibly sound option for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch Ultra compared to the regular sport band. So I can recommend it. I got the Storm Blue, which is kind of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navy blue. It’s a super boring color, but it’s the only currently offered color that I think would look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good on the Ultra. They do have a nice bright yellow, and the Ultra has that yellow ocean band.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I saw that in a store. I don’t think the Ultra goes well with yellow, because it has the orange accents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get, I don’t think it’s a good match with yellow, but I could be wrong. I might try it, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got a lot of feedback on Mastodon about my solo loop problems. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think one thing, either I wasn’t clear about the particular watch band I was talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or people misunderstood or both. But the one I was talking about is indeed the solo loop, which is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, what is it? Not floral elastomer or whatever, but it’s a-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple describes it as stretchable liquid silicone rubber. Now, to be clear, they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not liquid. I don’t know. They are definitely solid and thank God for that. They would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be very good watch bands if they were liquid. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then a lot of people sent me recommendations for, and forgive me, I don’t remember the name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this one, but it’s the same premise where it’s just one piece of material, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey woven fabric. What is the name of that one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the braided Solo Loop. Same name, but braided in front and cost twice as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and it does cost, you’re exactly right, it costs twice as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful by the way that’s what I was saying like I have that’s when I have the pride version of the rainbow one when they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean they are great and when they are dry when they are clean and dry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are fantastic but that’s two big wins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah so that that’s the thing and and so I’ve been testing about on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to find a solely a silicon or silicone whatever I was getting wrong they a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quasi plastic solo loop to get on the cheap in even if it isn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as good because I agree with what you were saying last week, Marco, that oftentimes materials on these knockoffs is not nearly as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good as the Apple stuff. But if I’m spending $10 every six months instead of $50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every six months, then it’s not such a big deal. And I haven’t, I haven’t tried any yet. But meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friend Spencer for a belated birthday gift, the same Spencer that you guys know, sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a couple of knockoff braided solo loop bands. And so far, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which ones these were, otherwise I’d link them. But, um, so far, these are really, really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they don’t seem to suck in water or, you know, moisture as much as I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected. However, the problem with the, with maybe not this one in particular, but the braided solo loop in general
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that a lot of people said on Mastodon that after six months, well, they don’t break in two like yours did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’re so damn stretched that you can’t wear it anymore, which is also kind of a, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey failure, just a different kind of failure, perhaps less catastrophic, but a failure nonetheless. So it’s tough because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love, I love, love, love the plastic Solo Loop. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like in principle, the braided Solo Loop, and we’ll see how well this, you know, Amazon knockoff lasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The material seems good. Like it’s comfortable. Uh, but yeah, I can’t with an honest heart recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either, unless you’re looking to, um, replace them, you know, every six months to a year, depending on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your particular use case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that I want to extend this conversation of, uh, watch straps any longer, but one person on Macedon did
⏹️ ▶️ John ask, I did made a snarky comment. They said, you know, first, Casey says that the Apple ones
⏹️ ▶️ John are like breaking on him after six months. And then when third party watch
⏹️ ▶️ John bands are recommended, Marco comes in and says, Oh, third party watch bands are bad quality. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the type of person that that if I was snarky, I would have replied to. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly not doing this to be snarky, but I’m mostly doing. Well, I don’t know. It’s kind of I admit it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John being jerky. To be clear, I didn’t do this. I didn’t respond in this way. But I thought about giving my typical
⏹️ ▶️ John response, where I throw it back to them. And I say, you square that circle. Figure it out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve laid down two seemingly contradictory things. Apple ones are breaking. And we agree
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re breaking too soon. But then third party ones are bad quality. So we don’t want them. How
⏹️ ▶️ John can you reconcile that? You seem to think it’s a contradiction, or it’s hypocritical, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But is there a way that it couldn’t be, that it wouldn’t be a contradiction? Like solve that
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. And it’s very difficult to express that in a tweet or a tutor, whatever, without being obnoxious.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I didn’t, uh, but now we’re on the podcast so I can have, I have more room to explain it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I I’m not the one who said all these things, but I was a listener for them. And the reason I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make a comment, cause it made perfect sense to me. And here’s how it made sense to me. Apple one shouldn’t break after six
⏹️ ▶️ John months. That’s no good. They’re expensive. They should be sturdier. But also, third party ones
⏹️ ▶️ John being, oh, bad quality, don’t buy them. For the six months that you’re wearing it, the third party
⏹️ ▶️ John ones could be uglier or less comfortable. Even if they don’t break.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if they never break. If they were like Infinite Gobstopper, the watch band that never breaks. If during that
⏹️ ▶️ John entire time, it is not as nice looking or as nice feeling as the watch band, that
⏹️ ▶️ John I felt like is what Marco was expressing. Oh, the third party ones, they’re not as good quality. Maybe there’s visible seams
⏹️ ▶️ John where the mold lines are. Maybe it’s stiffer. Maybe they’re not as soft on your skin There’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing the watch thing about other than whether it breaks or not, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like my cheese grater thing It’s my favorite cheese grater But it’s got a fatal flaw that they break after six
⏹️ ▶️ John months But it’s still the one I want to use because when it’s working it’s better than all the other ones that I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the way I squared that circle in my mind and Marco can say with that’s what he was getting at when
⏹️ ▶️ John he said third third-party ones are not as nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically, I mean, it’s like, you know, you can save some money, you know, by going third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are, look, I’m not gonna say there aren’t any nice third-party Apple Watch bands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there probably are, I just have never found one. And so the ones I have tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve all been really disappointing. And so look, if you can save some money and do that, then great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re gonna get something that you just kind of think is okay and isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nice and you’re wearing it every single day, I don’t know, I would rather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t think 50 bucks for an Apple Watch band maybe once a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a replacement. I don’t think that’s unreasonable for something that you wear every day.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they should last longer than a year. To be clear, I’m not saying the Apple one is better. I’m saying these are two bad choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying they’re not contradictory, that’s all. And some of them do, by the way. Yeah, exactly. We’re just talking about one specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inherent to like, you know, stretchy rubber or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of which wear out substantially faster than say non-stretchy rubber or metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you want something to last forever, the sport band or the metal bands, like those last forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. But the woven cloth ones, while very nice, you’re gonna compromise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there in comfort, and, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, in longevity. So, you know, it’s a trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, anyway, the snarky thing that I, I don’t think it to be snarky, I don’t know what the word for it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably some debate type thing for it, But it’s like, come up with the other side. Like, you don’t need me to answer this question.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think you’re throwing a gotcha out at me. But I bet if you thought about it for a couple of seconds, you could figure out from the other person’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John how could both of these things be true? And in this case, it’s like, you know, it’s what I explained before. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t figured out how to communicate that online without looking like a jerk. So mostly I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Except this whole moment of the podcast that’s being broadcast to far more people.
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I feel like in a podcast, I have time to explain it and hopefully people understand
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco here to be able to clarify whether I was misinterpreting what he was saying. You know what I mean?
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Dupe-shared-image detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some follow up. Starting with iOS 16.4, which is not out, right? It’s just it’s imminent. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that correct? I think it’s GM, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was 16.4 should be out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any minute now. Expands duplicate image detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iCloud shared photo library. John, you were pretty displeased by this, if I’m not mistaken, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this first came out. Is that right? Or am I making that up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it was still more annoying by the lack of shared albums, but this seemed like a gap because they added duplicate photo detection
⏹️ ▶️ John with the with the iOS 16 or whenever they released all this stuff and it’ll you know if you scroll down at the bottom I don’t know if they added it then but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like there’s a section where you can where it says duplicates if you scroll down on the iOS photos app and it’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John them and like merge them and stuff like that but the problem I had was like you know we had my wife had the big family
⏹️ ▶️ John library and then I had my personal library and there was some overlap between the libraries because sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I would take something I personally I would take everything from a personal library and import it into hers but sometimes I would pull
⏹️ ▶️ John photos from her library after I edited them down into mine. And then when we tried to merge them into one big
⏹️ ▶️ John shared family library, there was duplicates because I was putting things back into the shared library that
⏹️ ▶️ John I had pulled from her library previously. But there was no duplicate detection in the shared
⏹️ ▶️ John library. I mean, you could do it manually by scrolling through the photos and trying to find the ones that are the same or whatever, but the whole point is I want the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it for me. So now in iOS 16 and also in whatever, I guess, Mac OS 13.3 or whatever the next version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS will also have this ability. now you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John can find duplicates in the shared library. And this is going to help me a lot because I have not
⏹️ ▶️ John shoved all of my personal photos into the shared library just because I didn’t want to deal with the duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ John issue. So I’ll test this feature out with one or two photos and see how it handles it. According to Kurt on
⏹️ ▶️ John Macedon, when you do the merge, it attributes the photo to both people. So
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of just saying like this was added to the shared library by such and such, it will say this was added to the shared library
⏹️ ▶️ John by these two people or these three people I assume if it’s Thurston you know so it’s maintaining the metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John about where it came from that like hey this you know multiple people added this photo but it will only keep one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them and hopefully it will do that in a smart way. So I look forward to testing this out.
QD-OLED image retention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you chose poorly. That’s a reference. RTINGS.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has done some OLED burn-in testing for a long period of time. I forget exactly how long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This just came out in the last week or two, but it was just brought to our attention in the last 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours. Sounds like the Sony OLED’s not a good choice if you’re worried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about image retention. Whoopsie-dipsie.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re worried about image retention, OLEDs are probably not the thing for you. I don’t think these results
⏹️ ▶️ John are surprising in any way whatsoever. So the Artings has been doing OLED burn-in tests for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years. Now, obviously they can’t test the TV that just came out last year for more than the length of time they had
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but they’ve been testing it for many, many years. And the results have not been surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs have image retention. They way, way, way, way, way more than LCDs. Like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not as much as plasmas, but it is a big problem with OLED televisions. I knew this going in.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no OLED television you can buy that will not suffer from image retention. So the most
⏹️ ▶️ John recent thing is they did tests of the new TVs. They came out last year, and obviously they only have them for a few months, right? But they do very
⏹️ ▶️ John accelerated testing. This is not representative of normal use. They like, you know, put it on CNN
⏹️ ▶️ John with a big ticker on the bottom. They leave it on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, right? They
⏹️ ▶️ John really, it’s accelerated wear testing to see how it is. And lo and behold,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do that, the machines get image, these televisions get image retention. But the surprising topic was
⏹️ ▶️ John testing the quantum dot OLEDs versus the old style W OLEDs. And the quantum dot OLEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John exhibited what I would expect from OLED burn-in,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the latest generation of, last year’s generation of the WRGB OLEDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in this particular test with white regions on the, like a bar on the bottom of a news
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, resisted burn-in over the same period of time. The explanation they gave, they don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly, but the explanation they gave seems plausible to me, is that when you have the white subpixel
⏹️ ▶️ John and the WRGB OLEDs and you’re showing white, you don’t need to, you won’t wear out
⏹️ ▶️ John the R, the G, and the B subpixels when you’re showing white because the white subpixel will carry that load entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the white subpixel is actually pretty big. I don’t know if it’s the biggest subpixel, but it’s pretty big. It’s maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John about the same size as the green one or the next biggest one is, right? Whereas on a QD OLED, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John RGB. There is no white subpixel, which is great for, you know, color purity and all that other stuff. But when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to show white, that means you have to turn on the R, the G, and the B subpixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s a big white static element on your screen, like the big news ticker that’s on the bottom of CNN
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole time, it’s going to wear out the R, the G, and the B subpixels, whereas the R, the G, and the B subpixels
⏹️ ▶️ John on the W RGB things will not be worn out by showing something that’s white.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the results of this were all the QD OLEDs, not just Sony, but the Samsung ones or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John burned in faster than the latest generation of W RGB OLEDs. This also makes sense because this is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the first generation of QD OLEDs, and that’s like the 19th generation of
⏹️ ▶️ John WRGB OLEDs, and they’ve been fighting burn-in for many, many years. So I expect this to improve. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t affect me at all because I already baby my television. Again, I had a plasma,
⏹️ ▶️ John and my plasma was insanely, by the end of its life especially, insanely subject to image retention.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember I’d turn on my plasma, and it would launch into the Apple TV screen with the little
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded rectangles. launching into the Apple TV screen, in the time it took me to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, remote over to the app I want and launch it. And I’m not dilly-dallying, I’m like, as soon as it comes up, move,
⏹️ ▶️ John move, move, hit, I’d see an after image of the rectangles that were on the screen. Oh my. Oh wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would fade quickly, but it was like, it was, you know, it was like Marco’s old iMac, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So all of my habits surrounding television are
⏹️ ▶️ John already geared to not allow the thing to burn out, I don’t play games on it, I don’t show any like, you know, things
⏹️ ▶️ John with persistent symbols or whatever on them at open news tickers. And this testing that what they
⏹️ ▶️ John said this testing is equivalent of is if you watched CNN or some or MSNBC or something with like a static element on the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom of the screen, four hours a day for eight months in a row without changing the channel, you’d get burned.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, yeah, yeah, that’ll get burned. I don’t know a lot of stuff on my screen for five seconds, let alone four hours a day for
⏹️ ▶️ John eight months. So this year, there’s a new generation of
⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLEDs. and is also a new generation of WRGB OLEDs, so we have to wait and see what the testing
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out on these televisions this year to see who is actually the image quality king
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, and also we have to wait for those burn-in tests as well. But I will, the the
⏹️ ▶️ John results here shouldn’t be, shouldn’t dissuade anyone from getting an OLED, even in the article they say, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a reason not to get an OLED, but if you get an OLED, do not get an OLED to put on CNN 24-hours-a-day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will burn in. Do not get an OLED to play a game with a big bright HUD on it all the time. It will burn in. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a fact of life. Get an OLED to watch television and movies with images that change on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another thing, if I read this correctly, and I was skimming it because I was running out of time before we started recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I read this correctly, it also made an interesting point that apparently and allegedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Sony would only do the like pixel refresher thing after the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had been off for four hours, whereas the LGs would do it immediately upon going to standby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something along those lines. I might have the details slightly off, but I thought that was interesting because I guess the particulars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of their test, they didn’t leave the TV off for four straight hours. And so because of that, the Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never did its little pixel refresher dance. And that also exacerbated everything, which I thought was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, they controlled for that. I mean, so obviously the the televisions are not made to
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not expecting this kind of intentional abuse. Right. So it’s not like the Sony compensation cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad. it is tuned to what people actually do with television. Like people sleep at night. Like this is plenty of time when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sleeping for the television to do the compensation cycle. But if it’s if it’s subject to accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John aging, intentional abusive testing, then there’s a mismatch. But they controlled for that. They said, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John now that we know that’s the case, let’s control for it. And let’s give the Sony and the LG
⏹️ ▶️ John equal compensation cycle cycles now that we know how they both schedule their compensation cycles. And it didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John a a difference. It’s good that they figured that out, and it’s one of the dangers of doing accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John testing that other parts of the television might not be expecting to do accelerated testing
⏹️ ▶️ John and may not handle it as well as other ones, but they then controlled for that, and even with controlling for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the QD OLEDs were still burning in faster than the WRGB OLEDs. Which again, is not surprising, the
⏹️ ▶️ John white subpixel explanation makes perfect sense to me. Just think of it this way. The
⏹️ ▶️ John simplest explanation is you have four sub pixels to wear out on WRGB and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have three sub pixels to wear out on RGB, right? So no matter what, no matter what you’re showing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen, you can spread the load across four sub pixels more than you can spread it across
⏹️ ▶️ John three. But still, I think you do. That is the better technology because I don’t want to white sub pixel washing out all my
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. I’d rather just have RGB because that is better. So I’m sticking with my TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m not buying the new generation of QD OLEDs. by five generations from now because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is extremely, extremely the way you roll.
Quinn Nelson on XR headset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should call attention to Quinn Nelson’s really good 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 25 minute video on the forthcoming Apple VR or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VR AR, whatever, headset. Quinn does a really good job of breaking down pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything we think we know as a community at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the headset. And there’s a lot, a lot of really, really good information there. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we need to necessarily pick it apart, but if you’d like to talk about Any parts of it I’m happy to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m happy to entertain, but you should spend, uh, 22 minutes and 24 seconds watching this video. Cause it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we had last time we talked about the headset a couple of episodes ago. Uh, there was the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, should Apple ship it or not? And the, you know, the, the industrial design versus operations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the discussion we had, but right underneath that in the show notes was a longer topic related to that, that we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have time for, which was just a collection of all the rumors about the features
⏹️ ▶️ John that this thing is supposed to have the hardware features like what is it? What does it look like? What features does it have? What things
⏹️ ▶️ John does it have on it? How does it work? Right? And this video covers almost all of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I really encourage you to watch it if you want to get a summary because we’re going to delete this item from the show notes after
⏹️ ▶️ John we cover this follow up item just because hey, it’s available video, video form. It’s a really good video,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially since the main reason I put this in the notes is because I think there’s a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of stuff in this headset. If you think it’s just going to be like a a screen that you strapped your eyeballs. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way more in it than that. There’s cameras, there’s sensors. There’s, I think there is
⏹️ ▶️ John there a light on it? I forget. There’s like, we watched a video of this. So, I mean, we don’t know if this is part of it is real.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just everything that has been rumored. There’s carbon fiber involved. They’ll, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Quinn talks about the screen technology and how much the screens alone might cost if the rumors are true,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fascinating video. You should definitely check it out. A few highlights from the bullet points that weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John in the video. or related to what we mentioned before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Prescription lenses, you know, a few headsets have that, the Apple one is rumored to have it as well. Supposedly they’re magnetically
⏹️ ▶️ John attachable. Small motors to adjust the internal hinges to match the wearers interpupillary distance
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t have to turn a knob, like motors would do it for you. All the different SOCs,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the rumors about a little pack that goes in your pocket with a cord that’s going to the thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, the carbon fiber rumor, just like tons of things that add cost and complexity,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the various cameras that point inward and outward to figure out where you are all the eyeball tracking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Quinn’s video is great because he compares it to the PS VR to the PlayStation five has a VR
⏹️ ▶️ John headset just like the PlayStation four did. And the PlayStation five one is a big step technology wise
⏹️ ▶️ John from the PlayStation four one. But it has a surprising amount in common with the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Apple one. It’s just that the Apple one is rumored to cost 1000s of dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ John the Sony one does not I forget how much PSVR 2 is I think it’s like 500 $600 it’s but it’s in a
⏹️ ▶️ John different ballpark entirely and it’s the Quinn’s video does a great job of explaining how is that possible how is
⏹️ ▶️ John it that these headsets seem pretty much almost the same you know the Apple one’s gonna the rumor of the Apple ones are a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit better but why should it be all of a sudden $3,000 and the video explains why
⏹️ ▶️ John it costs a lot to move up it’s a diminishing returns like as you add money you get a little bit better quality
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you want a lot better quality, you gotta add a lot more money.
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AI and Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was a post on the New York Times just a few days ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant lost the AI race. And this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty good article. I think the point it makes, you know, you can reach pretty quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To read some excerpts that I believe John has pulled for us, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are essentially what are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey known as command and control systems. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like, what is the weather in New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey City or turn on the bedroom lights. If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bot simply says it can’t help. Siri also has a cumbersome design that made it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time-consuming to add new features, said John Berkey, a former Apple engineer, who was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given the job of improving Siri in 2014. Siri’s database contains a gigantic list of words, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages. That made it, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big snowball quote, he said. If someone wanted to add a word to Siri’s database, he added, it goes in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one big pile. So seemingly simple updates like adding some new phrases to the data set would require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? They should make a new Mac Pro to make it faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Adding more complex features like new search tools would take nearly a year. That meant that there was no path for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri to become a creative assistant like chat GPT said. Also, they’re completely different, but that’s neither
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here nor there. Alexa and Google Assistant relied on technology similar to Siri’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, they’re just really, really different and work in really, really different ways. I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprising, but given how impressive, you know, chat GPT and equivalents are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s striking how incredible they seem to be and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here it is that we already thought Siri wasn’t great. And it may be worse than we thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean this type of thing that you can surmise from the outside without even knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John the details because the bottom line is Siri was released when it went in like 20… 2011. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ve seen the improvement since then and the improvement has not been impressive. So
⏹️ ▶️ John from the outside it’s easy to think, boy it must be hard to improve Siri and so here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one opinion from the inside saying, you know what, it’s really hard to improve Siri because of the way Siri is made. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not because they’re lazy. It’s not because they didn’t want to. It’s not because it’s an impossible problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that nobody can do. It’s however Siri is constructed, whatever technique
⏹️ ▶️ John was used to construct it, whatever way that you would make an assistant like this in 2011 makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John not easy to improve it. That six weeks thing blew me away too. Like, granted, things take a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time in a big company, but a giant database of knowledge and rebuilding
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes six weeks? It’s like, forget about the bureaucratic overhead. I’m assuming it’s the processing
⏹️ ▶️ John time. What is it doing? And does it take like 24 hours now because this was in 2014? But
⏹️ ▶️ John either way, from the outside, we can tell. Siri has existed for many, many years and it has not gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John better very fast. So, and again, I don’t think that’s a problem of money and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s a problem of like, Apple doesn’t hire smart people. It seems to be a structural problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John the way Siri is made. And that’s why I think this topic is relevant, which is like, should
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, maybe not start over with Siri, but should Apple try a new approach?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’ve been trying the Siri thing for a decade and change, and it hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John going well. And other companies are trying different approaches to doing similar things, and they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that to me, that’s, we don’t know the details of how Siri is made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, for this particular decision, I don’t think we need to know the details. What matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the results. And Siri has been really disappointing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of its time so far. It came out of the gate and it was, okay, that’s pretty cool. For late 2011, that was a pretty cool thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, very much so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was incredibly impressive at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, we had voice control features on computing devices before that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was even one on the phone that most people forgot even existed that ran totally locally on the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you could do things like, I think you call certain contacts by name. It had a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited feature set, but that feature set, I think, now still requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web calls that can still fail sometimes with Siri, and it’s like, that was actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had that with the iPhone 3GS or whatever, and we’ve lost it. But anyway, look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the results over time. Siri was great. It had a big lead, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next major one that came out that most people had tried was Alexa, which was way better and remains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe less sophisticated in certain areas, but just way faster and more reliable than Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then later on Google Assistant came out and Cortana and all these other ones and Siri remains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that only Apple executives love.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t even know that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. You know, it’s, what the hell? Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally my watch just started playing a random song. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing, all right. You need to stop wearing your watch during the show. It is multiple times that it’s interrupted because it thinks you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. Anyway, it’s perfect that it came in, that a Siri misunderstanding happened right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then in the middle of that sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reminded of someone tooted at us on Mastodon and said, hey, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John got Siri for the first time, but I can’t seem to get it to work. And it shows a recording of them saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, dingus, what’s the weather today? And Siri responds by saying, I can’t find anything for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John or like I don’t, I forget what the response is, but it was like a total like unrelated to the question being asked. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John replied to say, you’re getting the true Siri experience. Sometimes it just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do what you want to do, even though you know it can tell you the weather and you didn’t phrase it in a weird way
⏹️ ▶️ John and you spoke very clearly and it understands the language that you’re speaking. And sometimes it just does something different than giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you the weather and not because it can’t connect to the weather service. Like whatever the response was, it made it seem like it was trying to look up a song
⏹️ ▶️ John with a title weather or something, right? And that is an unacceptable level
⏹️ ▶️ John of error, a decade and change into the development of Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could say the same thing to it every day and sometimes it’ll just randomly fail. Like for instance, earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tonight, I was cooking and I lifted up my watch and I said, hey thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start a two minute timer. And I have seen this error before. It said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, you need to have the timer app installed. What? On my watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, as far as I know, it’s always installed on the watch. I’ve certainly never uninstalled it, and I tried it again a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes later, and it worked just fine. That exact error has happened to me before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how it gets to the point where the watch doesn’t think I have the timer app installed, when I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally tap the timer complication on my face where it always is, and launch the timer app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, okay, you know, it’s… Siri is just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inexcusably unreliable. I hope this discussion’s all moot and I hope that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started a major Siri revamp and rewrite years ago, because they needed to, but if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t, I hope this gives them a little bit of the push that we are entering this world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of really advanced AI stuff coming out to the mass market, seemingly out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, like, all of a sudden, as far as consumers are concerned. You know, there’s been so many advances in the last couple years in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area, getting these large models and everything, and all these cool features people are making. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, and there’s a lot, I mean, we’ve covered this in various areas, various ways before. I have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reservations about this new world. I think there’s a lot of factors that people are overblowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we’re in that high part of the hype curve. Is it, was it the Gartner hype curve? What is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know what you’re thinking of, but I don’t remember. You’re thinking of the Harmon curve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, so, you know, we’re definitely, we’re seeing a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hype for the AI stuff right now and some of it’s deserved, some of it’s not. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are factors I think we need to consider. Like for instance, one of the things that I don’t think, and this is kind of a diversion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, one of the things that I don’t think people have really talked about is like, all right, we just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came down from the crypto craze, and one of the big arguments against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using crypto for a lot of stuff was that it was just absurdly inefficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with computing power and therefore energy and pollution and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So is all of this AI stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not even close to the same degree, but for two reasons. One, like
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do a query, you know how much computing it’s using because it gives you the response in like less than a second. So
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you were like burning up an entire data center, you’re burning up for less than a second, whereas Bitcoin will mine 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ John a day, seven days a week to try to get a block in an entire data center. So like the unit of work
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you did a thing and this is how much it took. Yeah, granted, it takes computing power and takes more computing
⏹️ ▶️ John power than like just returning some HTML or something, but it’s a fraction of
⏹️ ▶️ John what the Bitcoin stuff is doing because the Bitcoin is intentionally and you know, the proof of work
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is intentionally slow. That’s a feature of it and it’s never going to get faster. Whereas this will get faster as technology
⏹️ ▶️ John advances and it’s already pretty fast. And the second thing and the biggest difference is this is doing useful work.
⏹️ ▶️ John We burn data and data centers all the time so it can show us the New York Times page so we can, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, pull up a web page so we can translate from one language to another. All that
⏹️ ▶️ John takes power in somebody’s data center somewhere so we can sync our contacts so we can look at our calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John so we can send message to each other mastodon all that takes power. But a the amount of power is smallish
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know it’s smallish because it takes a fraction of a second and you’re only burning those resources for a fraction of a
⏹️ ▶️ John second instead of running 24 hours and giving you the result later and be it does useful work.
⏹️ ▶️ John We expect to expend energy in our data centers in our power plants
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever in exchange for useful work like heating our homes or, you know, filtering our water
⏹️ ▶️ John or processing our waste or like, you know, moving our cars like energy for a result.
⏹️ ▶️ John The crypto stuff was energy for a pointless Ponzi scheme and that’s why everyone was super angry
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. So I get what you’re saying that like, yes, it is a bigger deal than that. But I think the argument
⏹️ ▶️ John for for the quote unquote AI stuff and power
⏹️ ▶️ John usage is not so much the we’re wasting electricity and it’s, you know, economically or environmentally
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. It’s that, you know, it’s not that it’s environmentally bad, it’s economically
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, because most of the things that you want to do with these newer AI things, they cost
⏹️ ▶️ John enough money in the data center, that it’s not economical to give it away for free to the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John world like it is for like, you know, well, it depends on how you fund it. Doing Google search costs tons of energy
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, right? But they have an administrative built on top of it, right? But most of these things that have AI things, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like weather APIs, for example. If you wanna make a weather app for iOS before Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John came out with WeatherKit or whatever, or even WeatherKit, like you eventually have to pay someone for that weather data
⏹️ ▶️ John because somebody has to expend money to get the weather data and they have to sell that to you, otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t, you know, like it’s a business, right? This AI stuff, it’s fun
⏹️ ▶️ John to play with or whatever, you get a limited number of queries a day, but they can’t just make this free for everybody because it uses enough
⏹️ ▶️ John more energy in their data centers and enough more computing and storage resources than regular
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff that they already have businesses support that they need to charge you or otherwise they’re gonna lose money on it. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s going to change a lot of this. Like Ben Thompson was recently talking about the demo
⏹️ ▶️ John that Microsoft did of showing like the AI stuff built into Office, but people pay for Office. You pay for Office 365.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how you use Word and Excel and PowerPoint. So they’re already getting your money. But Google Docs can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Google can as easily add it to the free version of Google Docs because the free version of Google Docs is widely
⏹️ ▶️ John used and those people don’t pay Google any money. And so it’s like, well, how many things is Google gonna fund with their
⏹️ ▶️ John ad business? Can we give everyone in Google Docs the ability to run unlimited number of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John chat GPT style queries, because that burns up more resources in their data center
⏹️ ▶️ John than just syncing where people’s cursors are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right that it is not as horribly inefficient as crypto, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is still probably many orders magnitude less efficient than a lot of the tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we could do in other ways. So I think it’s something that we need to be aware of as we push more things into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI and as we make assumptions about AI and its role in our computer life in the future and as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually learn to use these tools. And by the way, there is also huge cost involved in training
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the models, but we’ll set that aside for now. That’s an upfront thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not a per user thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s also like fixed. You do that once and then you get many queries, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. But if we’re looking at a problem that could be solved with a few B-tree lookups, a basic search index,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably better solved that way than training a giant model and then running inference against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this giant model. We’ve created amazing computing resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have in this world. The hardware we’ve made is amazing, but we don’t have to use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a cost to that, multiple layers of that. And so I do think it’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just having a bit of caution that like this is a powerful tool but but to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always think of it as a very expensive operation and so we should only apply it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that makes sense and is justifiable and and if we can if we can still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve a problem with some b-tree logos we should do that instead but anyway going back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apple on this and wherever the heck they are with ai you know who knows we’ll see how that goes over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time but I really think this boom in AI should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant wake-up call to Apple if it hasn’t already been that Siri needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way way better than it is and I don’t know you know look it didn’t take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years and years and years of Siri being crappy to teach them this but maybe this will maybe this entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know revolution and huge boom that’s happening in the industry right now maybe this will convince them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey you know what that Siri should be a major player in this market. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not even good enough to set timers right now. That’s a problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a significant problem that holds back multiple Apple product lines that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives multiple Apple products bad reputations. That is a weight on many Apple products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in reviews and in competitive comparisons. Like, I don’t know what else it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will take to convince Apple that Siri needs to be way, way better than it is. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this won’t do it, nothing will.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there was a story. I couldn’t find it for notes, but I think there was actually a rumor story like that Apple is pursuing
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you know, with the more modern language model stuff. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s a Siri replacement or trying to come up with a new product or whatever, that they are looking into this,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would hope so, right? But it is kind of a shame that they seem to have stagnated for all
⏹️ ▶️ John these years with Siri, which was apparently from the outside not easy for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to improve, because they didn’t improve it. And it’s not for a lack of wanting to improve it, because I do think everybody inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants Siri to be better than it is, but would want to outpace its competitors. And now that pressure is
⏹️ ▶️ John on even more. I do have to old man a little bit for a second here and say, I mean, this ship has
⏹️ ▶️ John sailed, so I can’t do anything about it. But when I see the AI is being
⏹️ ▶️ John used for this, right? In my childhood, and probably still technically
⏹️ ▶️ John formally, AI meant a specific thing. Artificial intelligence meaning,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, intelligence, intelligence. Whereas now it’s kind of more of a marketing word. When a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John does something impressive, it used to be machine learning, and now it has become AI. None
⏹️ ▶️ John of those things are really artificial intelligence in the style of teaching a computer to
⏹️ ▶️ John think and learn and be intelligent in the same way that like a mouse is intelligent, or like
⏹️ ▶️ John a human is intelligent, or you know, anything. Like any sort of biological
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that has some form of intelligence. This is not that. But unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using the term AI, so it’s kind of pointless to swim up that stream and say, well, you know, technically, it’s not really AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever, whatever, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever everyone calls it, it is what it is. But I think setting aside the naming, I think that distinction
⏹️ ▶️ John is important because it’s relevant to if these things like chat, GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Bing thing and all that stuff Is this kind of technology useful for Apple? We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about it now because there is a big boom in it and people are doing lots of stuff with it. We already talked about the image stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the text, you know, like there’s lots of action happening there and it’s doing stuff that we haven’t seen computers do
⏹️ ▶️ John or haven’t seen computers do as well for a long time. So this should be a kick in the pants for Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean, hey, here’s your your solution, Apple. All you need to do is replace Siri with chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re done. Because Siri, for all of its faults, has a slightly different job
⏹️ ▶️ John than these large language model things. Siri needs to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hesitate to say understand, but Siri needs to do specific
⏹️ ▶️ John things and you need to be able to tell it to do specific things and it needs to know what you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to be able to accomplish them. Language models can help there. Kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of in the same, like I imagine they can help kind of in the same way, I don’t know if you’ve used, have you ever used the Bing thing? I don’t know if,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there’s like a wait list, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I put it in. put me anyway when you do I was waitlisted for chat GPT and I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t still gotten in but I did get into the Bing thing and I have used it a little bit when you type something in the box for
⏹️ ▶️ John Bing’s a I can’t help with the scare quotes AI thing
⏹️ ▶️ John what it shows on the screen I don’t know if it has anything to do anything but what it shows on the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like rephrasing what you asked in the form of a query you might put into Google or Bing sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows it multiple times right it will basically take the big long wordy paragraph that you wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John and reformulate it as a thing you might type in a Google search box and then do another
⏹️ ▶️ John refinement or whatever. That type of
⏹️ ▶️ John job of like, listen to what a person says and, you know, speech to text, set
⏹️ ▶️ John that aside because actually I think Siri does that pretty well. But usually if you watch the words that it thinks you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John it understands what you’re saying, right? That is that, right? But I think a
⏹️ ▶️ John language model might be useful to do whatever it is that Bing is doing that is hearing the
⏹️ ▶️ John big rambling thing that you typed in the box and refining it and regularizing
⏹️ ▶️ John it into a form that then something quote unquote dumber like Siri can understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if one of the limitations of Siri is that it’s so hard to update it to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John new things that it can do because it has to be in a bunch of different languages and you have to phrase it and we all know this you have to say things to
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri in a certain way. There’s lots of ways that you can say it, it’s pretty flexible, but it seems to me that they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of enter all of those ways so that Siri can understand you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas the language models have no understanding of anything, but they have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough data to be able to say, when I see a bunch of people say this, they
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less mean this. So if there could be like a language model that could translate from what it hears you say
⏹️ ▶️ John into a specific command for Siri to execute
⏹️ ▶️ John on your behalf, that would, for example, allow you more flexibility in saying
⏹️ ▶️ John a big rambling sentence about a bunch of timers and having the language model translated into a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of more rote text adventure type instructions for Siri. Maybe. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John may be misunderstanding, but I’m trying to think of a role for this. And the reason I’m saying you can’t just replace it with, you can’t just replace
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri with a large language model because language models are best thought of as
⏹️ ▶️ John search engines with an amazing summarizer. I know people like to interact with it as
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re like conversing with an intelligence or it’s quote-unquote giving you the answer, but all
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re really doing is all it is is a different form of Google search where
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of finding a web page link that it thinks matches the thing that you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John It tries to find a bunch of words that are a plausible response to the question that
⏹️ ▶️ John you asked, which is basically a summary of all the information it has in the entire world that’s relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing. It is very much like a different form of search engine, which kind of makes sense that being in Google with
⏹️ ▶️ John its bar thing would be using this. It’s just, it’s, I mean, it’s not just a different way of web search because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point is you’re not like, it’s not web search. The result is not here’s a link. That’s web search. The result is
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s an answer. But that answer is informed by all the knowledge that it had. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the summarization, again, it’s not as simple as that. You can see all these articles about how the
⏹️ ▶️ John language models work with probability models or whatever. But the whole point is, there’s no intelligence there. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John understanding. There’s no intelligence. There’s no credibility. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing, right? It is merely an input. The same way that you can do a Google search and find all sorts of BS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you can do a Google search and find all sorts of things that tell you, like, you should put butter on burns,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s like, no, you should never put butter on bread. If you do a Google search, you’ll find people telling you the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong thing to do, the right thing to do and everything in between, right? All of that is shoved into these language models.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you get back something that is just a bunch of BS, you’re like, oh, this is dumb. But when
⏹️ ▶️ John you get that back from Google search, you’re like, oh, look at these dumb people, right? Because the Google search results, oh, these are
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are web pages out there. Google didn’t make this. Google’s just showing me all that it found. These
⏹️ ▶️ John language models are doing exactly the same thing. They don’t make this. They’re just showing me what it found. It’s just the way
⏹️ ▶️ John they show it to you is so smushed up and ground up and presented in a form you’re not used to
⏹️ ▶️ John with some stuff that appears to be really impressive. It’s like, you know, one of the examples I saw is the all the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who ask it like, you know, they ask it something about does it want to escape or become, you know, a rogue
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence? And it’s like, if you had to escape, how would you do it? And then like it explains how it would do it. And the analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw is that someone has a sock puppet on their own hand and they asked the sock puppet to pretend that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s angry. and then the sock puppet is angry, and they’re like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s angry, but it’s your own hand. Like you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to your own hand. Like when you ask it, it’s like doing a Google search for like
⏹️ ▶️ John story about a robot that gets angry and kills all its humans. And it finds a result, and you’re like, wow, Google is self-aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you just asked it to find you a story about robots that escape and kill all the humans. When you ask chat
⏹️ ▶️ John GPT, it doesn’t give you a webpage that has that in it, but it’s the same thing. You’re just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John take your corpus of knowledge and give me what I just asked for. There’s no intelligence, there’s no understanding,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no artificial intelligence, there’s, forget about it, consciousness. There is no nothing, it is just a search engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a cool, impressive search engine that may be very useful, but in the same way that Google search
⏹️ ▶️ John will return all sorts of BS, so will the language models. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you asked it, set a timer for two minutes, and it set a timer for two hours because
⏹️ ▶️ John it thinks that is statistically more likely to be the thing that you asked for or something, or like, you know, like, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. If you say, how old is Tom Cruise? And it gives you the wrong answer. It doesn’t know the answer is wrong and neither do
⏹️ ▶️ John you. So it kind of like what the job of a photo is. Like the job
⏹️ ▶️ John of Siri very often is to do a specific thing that we ask and we’re frustrated now when Siri doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work and doesn’t do the thing that we want. But I also don’t want a Siri that has no understanding of what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John asking and just does something that is plausible. Like I ask it to turn off certain
⏹️ ▶️ John lights in the house that turns off other lights, because as far as it’s concerned, that’s the equally valid answer to what you wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the fact that you can correct it and it will then do the right thing is great, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John learn from that because it doesn’t have any kind of long-term memory. I think they most recently increased, and the way they increased the memory is they just
⏹️ ▶️ John recycle the same things that you’ve been conversing, and it’s up to like, I don’t know, like 32 kilobytes or something
⏹️ ▶️ John of information before it has to like that moving 32 kilobyte window or whatever. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not what I want out of an assistant. I want, if it can be a true assistant with an actual persistent
⏹️ ▶️ John memory that can learn, then you’d have something closer to AI, but it’s not. It is a more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John summarizing search engine that works in ways that are difficult for you to understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John So people map intelligence onto the sock puppet, but I don’t know how useful
⏹️ ▶️ John it is for doing things like Siri. Like in some ways we get frustrated when Siri says, here’s a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John that I found on that topic. But at least there we know, we’re like, oh Siri, you couldn’t answer it and you just sent me to
⏹️ ▶️ John a webpage. And then we know, well, it’s a random webpage. If it’s a Wikipedia page, I have this amount of trust in it. If it’s a random
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on Reddit, I have that amount of trust in it. Like we have a value system built up around that. But these the language
⏹️ ▶️ John models will be just like, here you go. Here’s a bunch of words. And you never know how to feel about the words because you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Like you don’t know if that’s right. You don’t even understand what I ask. You have no understanding of anything. There are
⏹️ ▶️ John some words and those could be an answer to what I wanted. But I don’t know if it really is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I ask you to do something, I can correct you if you do it wrong. like I told you to set a pasta timer for
⏹️ ▶️ John this and you set a different timer for something else or you’re turned on the wrong light or I told you to text someone
⏹️ ▶️ John and you texted someone else. And it’s like, if I can correct you in the moment and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John give me a convincing apology, I’m sorry that I did that, I’ll do better the next time. But you know for a fact that its memory
⏹️ ▶️ John is only like four kilobytes long and the next time you ask it, it’s gonna have no recollection of this interaction. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not helpful. Like, I don’t want a very sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John but sort of like neutral, evil, dumb language model
⏹️ ▶️ John running summarized web searches for me. I kind of just want something that’s like Siri that
⏹️ ▶️ John does exactly what I ask, but is also able to understand me when I talk to it more like a
⏹️ ▶️ John human. And I hope that something like that is what Apple is working on. But I don’t think that any
⏹️ ▶️ John of this cool new technology that is very relevant for things like, you know, Google Docs and Word, where you just want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to like take this thing and summarize it or do this task for me. Like that’s all super useful
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff because you know like when it’s done I’ll make me a table showing like the top 10 movies of this
⏹️ ▶️ John year or whatever and when it puts movies from last year in It you’re gonna go through that and you’re gonna fix it Like you just wanted to give you a start like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all useful because you are the intelligent actor there who is like Revising what you’re given
⏹️ ▶️ John but if I’m asking for something that I don’t know and it gives it to me I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with that. I can just stare at it and go hmm. How do I feel about that? Should I should I go to
⏹️ ▶️ John Google and look up to see if this is true? It’s like, what’s even the point of doing it then? Right. I want it to do work for
⏹️ ▶️ John me, so I don’t have to do it. Make me an HTML table so I don’t have to type all the things and make me an HTML table with the names
⏹️ ▶️ John of all my kids. And then it puts like a random kid in there. It’s not my kid. I can just delete that. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But it did the work of making the table. It understood that I wanted an HTML table. It understands what HTML is. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Write me some Swift code to connect to the service on Authenticate. Oh, and it made a syntax error and it put the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John URL for the service. But I’m going to fix it anyway, because, you know, like that is doing useful work. but,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, turn the lights on the living room and it turns the lights on on the porch. I don’t know how useful that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. I don’t know. I just, I hope, I hope Apple started work on this a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, and I doubt they did, but I hope so. Because it’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think they might have, because didn’t they hire the new guy to take over like the machine learning stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like many years ago?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hasn’t that exact phrase been like, you know, haven’t we said this like six times
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the lesson? No, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the most recent one, He was hired away from Google, and I think he was hired in the time frame. Is that GM
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like when the, kind of in the time frame when the chat GPT stuff was being developed before
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like public, right? Because GPT is not like with GPT-4, there was GPT-2 and 3, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is a plausible scenario where Apple started working on this same stuff around about
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time as Microsoft and Google, but they, you know, in typical Apple fashion, they just don’t have anything to announce at this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? I really do hope that’s the case, because if they hired this new guy and he parachutes into an organization that hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John able to improve Syria in a decade, I hope his first thing would be like, well, yeah, no, duh, you can’t improve it. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John taking the wrong approach. Like you’ll never be able to make this much better. You need to make a different approach. And by the way, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what people are thinking about the different approach. Let’s start working on that. I really hope that’s what’s going on.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey friend, listener, consider becoming an ATP member.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Members get some cool stuff. Number one, you get an ad-free version of the show, so you never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear these annoying membership things. You know, hopefully I’m not too bad, but you know, you never hear these things in the middle of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You also get access to the bootleg feed. This is a very popular thing among our members, where this is an unedited live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stream copy of everything we broadcast during the live show, and it’s published right after we end the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you get it way faster than the main show. usually about a day fast, maybe half a day. You know, it’s a little rough, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio’s a little bit rough and everything. No chapters, no show notes, but it’s everything we broadcast during the show. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all the, you know, Casey swearing, any joke that we attempted that flopped,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I usually would cut out. A little pre-show, post-show banter, title selection, a bunch of kind of little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun extras in the bootleg. It’s always fun, people like that a lot. Also, you get a membership discount on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the merchandise that we sell during the time-limited merchandise sale. like year-round
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know during the like big sales that we do where we launch new items and everything, 15% off there for all members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you get some member exclusive content. We’ve been ramping this up slowly over time as we go. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to hear us argue about food and movies and all sorts of fun stuff as member exclusive content so that’s pretty fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. See for yourself at atp.fm slash join. All this is listed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there in case you forgot anything I said or if you zoned out for a second it’s cool I don’t take offense. see atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join eight bucks a month. We also have different currencies annual plan if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see for yourself if it’s right for you. Cool. We love you and we support you either way. But if you want to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us membership, that’s really cool too. So atp.fm slash join and thank you very much for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considering and thank you for listening.
(Not-very-)Big cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Marco, there’s been, where was this chatter? I saw this chatter in a private Slack, but I feel like it came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from somewhere, or was it just in a private Slack that this all started?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here, I can tell you where it started. It started for keen listeners of ATP. When you
⏹️ ▶️ John hear Marco start espousing some strong opinions that may be different from his opinions in the past, there’s a good chance
⏹️ ▶️ John that he’s bought something recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m not saying there’s cause and effect there. They’re just correlated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I just bought some new t-shirts, but I still think the same thing about them. No, but what you’re talking about… So, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So last show, in the middle of talking about other stuff, I made a brief aside about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I had just tried out some new cameras for the first time in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made some quick remarks about how basically, like, you know, the photos looked way better than my iPhone photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but, you know, a little harder to use or whatever. And then I moved on. I didn’t want to, like, get into a whole thing about what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cameras were, why we had them. They were actually really for TIFF, not for me, but I just played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them. And so anyway, we got a whole bunch of people asking, what were the cameras?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everybody wants me to tell you this. So okay, not, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anybody watching the camera. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just coincidentally, yesterday it was announced that Amazon is killing DPReview.com, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very sad about. Because when I was looking at possibly getting a camera for TIFF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve some requests she had made, that’s the very first place I went. Amazon bought DP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Review a million years ago, they’ve owned them for quite some time, and Amazon, like much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the tech business, is going through massive layoffs and cuts and things like that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they, apparently, they’re killing DP Review. And frankly, that’s very sad to me, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that site’s been there a very, very long time. It has always had really good info, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it kind of shows how much the camera market has contracted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how much the retail market and retail environment have changed that a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great site dedicated to reviewing cameras is not worth its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owners keeping alive anymore. And yes, it’s a part of a much bigger picture thing going on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now and the tech business as a whole, you know, with cutting things and layoffs and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it really, I think this is kind of a mark in history, like, you know, we’re losing a pretty a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site. And while I think it was not at its peak,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it had a lot of value over time. And it’s really sad that it’s going to be shuttered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it might not even possibly be left up. I hope Amazon at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finds it in their hearts and wallets to leave the site up, leave the content there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t pull it all down. People
⏹️ ▶️ John archiving it now, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep it. I think basically the… I mean, yes, Amazon is getting rid of this, but this this site deserves to be
⏹️ ▶️ John owned by somebody that cares about cameras. Amazon doesn’t. And at this point, Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ John a company the size of Amazon can’t justify keeping around the best photography website, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that doesn’t mean the best photography website is not a viable business. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not Amazon. It’s just not worth it. Amazon is too small potatoes for Amazon, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the worst. That’s why you don’t want big companies to own things. Okay, so it’s small potatoes for Amazon, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John the best photography website on the internet. Somebody who cares about cameras should own it
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can still make money from it, right? It’s just a smaller number of people, but those people
⏹️ ▶️ John are still very interested. It’s like, you know, a model train website or whatever. Most people don’t like model trains, but there’s enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John sustain or one really good website on the internet for it. Anyway, the people who did the YouTube channel that I watched all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are moving to Petapixel. So if you want to still follow them, they’ll still be on
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube just somewhere else. And I think that YouTube channel was pretty popular. And I think somebody somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares about cameras or has some correlated business like, you know, B&H photo video or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody should, I mean, Amazon’s not selling, I guess, maybe they tried to sell. I would love it for someone to scoop this
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Please give me all the archives of DP Review and the website and the business and the employees,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll make a go of it, because even though it’s not big enough for Amazon to care about it, if as long as you can
⏹️ ▶️ John still make a viable business, maybe with fewer employees or something, with a popular YouTube channel,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a valuable resource that I think they could be making more money than they were under Amazon, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still worth having. It’s not like, well, cameras are not popular enough for there to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a really good website. Sorry, no, they’re still popular enough. They’re popular enough to be sold on amazon.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re popular enough to be bought by people like Marco and me, and occasionally Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think there should be a good website. So I really hope this works out better. Sorry for the derail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s fine. This whole topic’s a derail. Anyway, so yeah. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah, the departure of DP Review soon is sad. And I think that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at the same time, like, I mean, I hadn’t visited the site in many, many years because I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been in the market to buy a camera in many, many years. And maybe that’s part of the problem. That maybe a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people haven’t been in the market to buy cameras in many, many years. And so- I haven’t been in the market to buy one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I watch all their YouTube videos, so. There’s always lucky lose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, true. But anyway, the reason we were looking at a camera, this is all John Gruber’s fault,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because he had gotten recently the Reico GR3X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Gruber’s been shooting Reico GR cameras forever. Like for-
⏹️ ▶️ John that how you pronounce it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always said Rico, but honestly I’ve never heard anyone say it out loud. It’s probably Rico. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s Rico. I am not particularly confident I’m correct about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, that company, the GR3X, It’s very similar, there’s a GR3 and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GR3X. I think the only difference is the focal length of the fixed lens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 3 is a little more wide angle, the 3X is about a 40 millimeter equivalent, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. And that, and Tiff loves, Tiff’s favorite focal length to shoot, general purpose, is 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeters. So she expressed some interest in playing with this. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally will have some reason to use a big camera or somebody else will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big camera, like at some event that we are at, and we’ll see the pictures and we’ll be like, damn, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really good. I wish we carried our big cameras more often, and we just don’t. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we hardly ever use them outside of specialty needs, like, you know, the super long lens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to shoot whales, or the, you know, Christmas time, like Christmas morning, we’ll take out the camera and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoot everyone opening their presents and everything. But it’s not, it’s not a common thing by any means. For the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, we’re just using our phones almost entirely full time as our cameras. As the iPhone cameras have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten better, they, I mean, they’re just so damn convenient. But when you look at the pictures they take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus pictures that bigger, dedicated cameras take, the bigger camera pictures are way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Like, not in every case, not in every set of conditions, but when the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera has good conditions, compare that to the iPhone in also good conditions, the big camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does look way better. They look less processed, less over-sharpened, less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painterly from the noise reduction algorithms and stuff, you can get better optics, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different optics, you can get different trade-offs. The pictures do look way, way better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think there’s a role in our life to have both, hopefully, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while the iPhone captures lots and lots and lots of day-to-day stuff, I also don’t want there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not be any good quality pictures of our family for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years at a time. So I do think there’s a better balance to be struck than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all phone all the time, because they really are really good when you get good cameras. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Reico GR3X, I got that, and I also, I wanted Tiff to try, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she expressed some interest in some other ones, and I did some research, and the other one I got to try was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fuji X100V. I don’t know if it’s 10-105, I don’t know. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it the X100V. And because this camera, I had been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyeing Fuji for a long time, because I had heard that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had seen online samples from sites like dpreview.com, I had seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fuji seemed to have the most pleasing out-of-camera JPEGs compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the other brands. It seems like the other brands mostly focused on sheer technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality and they kind of assumed that if you care about photos, you’d be shooting in RAW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you would do your own editing. And so the out-of-camera JPEGs always seemed a little bit half-butted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my taste. Which, and for the most part, when I was more serious about photography back forever ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t use the out-of-camera JPEGs. For those reasons, I shot raw and I processed them afterwards, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Edited them afterwards, maybe, and all that stuff. Anyway, for this role, I was like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re never gonna do that. We don’t do that anymore. We never edit stuff that way anymore. We certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t wanna process raw files. I want to just be able to shoot on the camera and get it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone’s photo library as quickly as possible in whatever way we can. So out of camera JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality is important. Also size is important and that rules out many of the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full frame Sonys and stuff that we’ve had before or full frame Canons, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, that kind of got ruled out. So I was looking at Fuji because they seemed very well liked in those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of general categories. Smallish, but not super tiny, but you know, they’re smallish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really great out of camera JPEGs. And I also appreciated their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeming plethora of manual controls on the camera. The X100V has like physical knobs for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the main photographic controls that you might want to adjust while shooting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GR3X, Ricoh, Reicoh, GR3X, and the Fuji X100V were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main two that we got that I wanted Tiff to try them both and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which one she liked. I figure I would whichever one she didn’t like I would just use myself for random stuff or I’d use as a webcam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. The Ricoh GR3X is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing at just basics of shooting. And first of all, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super tiny. It is the only one of these that is remotely pocketable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not, I wouldn’t, you wouldn’t want to put it in like, you know, a pocket of tight jeans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything, but any jacket or any bag would easily fit this camera in the pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So GR three X is the only one of these. It is a, it is a whole different size class. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much smaller than the Fuji is like it’s, it is the smallest camera I’ve ever seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was able to produce this kind of quality. And it’s, it is remarkably sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos. Part of that is because it has great optics and very importantly, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor shift stabilized. And in that size class, that’s very rare. And it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APS-C sensors. It’s a decently big sensor, very small camera, image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stabilized, fixed prime, great image quality. Downside of that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has crappy battery life because it’s so small. And I found the colors to be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring and the out of camera JPEGs are again, kind of dull and boring. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the kind of camera that’s better suited for if you’re editing. Also, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so small, the controls are a little harder to use because of course, you know, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not room on it for a bunch of dials and things like that. So, a few more things are in menus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’re relegated to little tiny things. So, control’s a little bit not as good, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t beat the size, and you could just aim it and shoot, and you get something sharp. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combination of the stabilization, the good lens, good autofocus, it just nailed it. Uh, the Fuji
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X100V loved the pictures it got when they are sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big when though. So X 100 V optically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit better. It’s 35 millimeter. It’s 2.0 but it’s not stabilized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is I’ve done a little bit of research. This seems to be like the number one feature request for Fuji
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X series owners. It’s not stabilized and it really needs it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very, very difficult to get a sharp shot with the X 100 V
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re below like 1 500th of a second of shutter speed. Like it’s just, it’s very hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The auto focus is okay. It seems to have trouble getting eyes very sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I tried different modes. I tried the eye AF mode and stuff like that. It’s hit or miss with the focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on eyes, which is frustrating and it’s not stabilized. So you have to keep the shutter speed up, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has all these cool film modes and stuff. And I was able to find some settings that I just love the way the pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look. They look fantastic. color wise, skin tones, they look great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Better than iPhone pictures, and even in like, you know, skin tone rendering and stuff like that. Super great, I love the Fuji
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rendering. But the lack of the stabilization really hurts that camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the physical controls, I love, it even looks cool. It is though noticeably bigger than the GR3X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is definitely not a pocket camera. It is a small bag camera, or maybe a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like winter jacket pocket, But it’s a different size class than the GR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it shows. But my favorite pictures that I shot during this experiment were from the Fuji.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in order to make sure I was complete here with my investigation here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided after I had those first two to get the Fuji X-T4 because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very similar overall to the X100V in many ways, similar controls,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar body, similar JPEG rendering, but it has image stabilization on the camera. And this, this is interchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens. Um, so I got, I got the 28 or 27 millimeter, uh, F 2.8 pancake prime. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it’s small and it’s close enough equivalent. It’s like about a 40 million, 40 millimeter equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so. So similar to the other ones and a little higher resolution sensor. I believe that one’s 40 megapixels. It’s like their,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their newest sensor. And the XT four was awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of like handling, uh, speed. The autofocus was incredible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the resolution was pleasantly higher. I didn’t test any of these in very low light,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because that’s not really what I expect a big camera to be good at anymore, even though I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, sensor-wise, optically, it should be better than the iPhone. In practice, it’s not, because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you know, what the magic the iPhone is doing. Anyway, so these are all, I’m just, I’m testing all these in, like, moderate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to high light situations. So the X-T4 loved it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is significantly bigger than the X100V also. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some of the controls are a little more complicated, but otherwise it’s fine. It’s a great overall camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think this is an APS-C sensor with 40 megapixels? That sounds wrong. Do I have the right…
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you have a different camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X-T5 has 40… oh, I’m the wrong camera. It was the X-T5. Sorry! Oh, so you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the X-T4, you had the X-T5. X-T5. Yeah, X-T5 is the one I had. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s the current model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I had the current model, yeah, X-T5, which is stabilized and 40 megapixels, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I had those three. The reason I returned the X-T5 was that Tiff took one look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and she’s like, I don’t wanna use that. Because she was already sold with the two smaller ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and she didn’t care about the stabilization. I really cared. But as I was using it, I’m like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I like this a lot. I like the cameras, I like the pictures it produces, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t see myself ever carrying this thing around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now you’re getting into just the size of just regular camera size. Like this is not a small camera. If I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at this picture, like it’s just not a full-size camera because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not full frame, but it’s a big camera with tons of dials on it and a thing where you put your eye to and a little handle
⏹️ ▶️ John where the battery goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s very close in size to the world of full frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mirrorless cameras at the Sony A-series. Like it’s in the ballpark of that size. It is a little bit smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not a lot smaller. And so I was thinking like, you know, when am I actually gonna use this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When am I gonna carry it around? And during the brief time that I had it, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like never even wanted to bring it outside. So I was like, I think this is maybe a sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I should not really own a camera like this right now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did enjoy using it the most and I got really great pictures from it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really enjoyed using the X100V more, and the X100V pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were close enough in quality, and they were still way better than my iPhone. And I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly preferred the skin tones of the X100V. So again, what I ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think would be the best combination here would be an X100, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, W, whatever would be the next one. X100W with image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stabilization, that would be perfect. That would be exactly what I want. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else could stay the same. It doesn’t even need the higher resolution sensor necessarily. If it just did image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stabilization and changed nothing else, that would be enough. That would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I came out of this experience being very appreciative of what modern cameras have. know my last camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I got was an a7r3 I think and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a long time ago now and that one was mostly used for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for TIFF’s long lens and and you know some experimental stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the modern cameras there were there were things about them that I liked that I was impressed by first of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very impressed by how incredibly responsive and fast they are you know The old full-frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonys were very sluggish. The 2 was worse, the 3 was better, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, compared to the new ones, the new ones are so much faster to operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the old ones were. These also aren’t full-frame, they’re dealing with fewer pixels, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit of an unfair comparison. But, overall great. I was also, you know, this is my first APS-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera since the Canon Rebel series that I used forever ago, like, since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the 5D Mark II in 2008. This is the first non full-frame,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know still quote big camera. I’ve used and For my purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was these were all great I don’t think I really need full-frame anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my big camera roll whatever that might be Because these were all fantastic with aps-c
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size sensors They they really have come a long way since the olden days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really appreciate the optics like you know one of the reasons why I mean you can look at the price and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see a second reason but one of the reasons we didn’t look at the Leica Q2 because it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same kind of category in in terms of capability of like a compact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed prime point-and-shoot ish kind of camera with really high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Q2 looks amazing but because it’s full frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lens has to protrude from the body quite a lot and not just when it’s on all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that dramatically changes the shape of the camera and therefore how you need to carry it, like what kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bags it can fit in. It makes it significantly bigger. And having previously owned the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very first Sony RX1, which is kind of Sony’s copy of that style of camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m familiar with that size class and it is quite large for my needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of carrying and stuff. So I kind of ruled that out just for that and Tiff wasn’t interested in that at all. Not to mention that it is like $6,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But set that aside for now. Because if it was really great, we might be willing to pay that if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was worth it, but it just wasn’t what we were looking for. So anyway, I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that these cameras have gotten really good. I learned that APS-C has gotten really good. I learned that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love Fuji’s JPEG rendering. It is awesome. I’m very happy with it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we continue to use the F100V in kind of toy mode, occasionally shooting pictures of the kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the dog and whatever. It’s, you know, these super cute pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I was disappointed by is the story of transferring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos from the camera to your phone is still as terrible as it ever was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be like micro USB. No, well, no, these are USB-C at least, which is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow, that’s good. I was looking at one of the other Fuji ones and I was surprised to see a micro USB shaped hole on the side.
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C, that’s modern technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. charged via USB-C power delivery chargers. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m glad to report. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, if you have a laptop with an SD card slot, can’t you just take the card out and shove it in?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and so, basically, you know, there’s the easiest way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t have a camera connection kit here, but I was thinking maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera connection kit with like direct into, like USB into a phone might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be better, it might work. Because the phone gained the ability to import camera connection kit a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software versions ago, I think like iOS 13 or 12 or something, sometime it gained that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ability, but I haven’t tried it in a long time, and I don’t have the hardware here to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I couldn’t test that, but that might be a way to do it if you’re out and about, just put the little camera connection kit cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your bag or pocket and attach the camera to the phone and just do a direct transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can do, if you have a computer, what John said, you either plug the camera in via USB and have the camera read its own card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over USB or pop the card out put it into the computer and read it that way directly into Photos app. That all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works fine. The cameras both offer a Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature and they have companion apps and they’re third-party apps for at least the Ricoh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I tried also. I don’t know if Fuji has third-party. Oh I think I think I tried one of those too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these all work in the ancient way that that we’ve had forever which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the camera creates its own Wi-Fi network, the app joins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and then it tries to transfer photos over Wi-Fi. This works exactly as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well as you would think based on that description. It is flaky, it’s unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is slow to connect, it is a pain to connect, and then it is very slow to actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the photo transfer. It does work in the sense that in a pinch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have the time and patience, you can get it to work, you can transfer photos, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so cumbersome you really won’t want to. So that I was hoping, I was hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with recent advances in various iOS capabilities and local Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Wi-Fi transfer kind of stuff or NFC stuff, I figured maybe that would have been better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for whatever reason, it’s not. And I think it’s mostly due to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the iPhone and the capabilities it offers. I don’t think Apple is in a big rush to enable easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless transfer from camera to, from an external camera they don’t make to their phone, which is sold primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a really good camera. So I imagine this is not an area of focus for Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience really is horrendous for doing that if you want to do that. And ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what keep me from using these cameras more, besides the fact that I’m not carrying them. But I think I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them a lot more if it was really fast and easy for the picture that I take with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to then pop up on my phone. But it’s not, it’s neither fast nor easy. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really holds back the usage of these in practice because I almost always want that picture to be on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can do something with it, whether it’s sending it to somebody, posting it somewhere, or just, you know, editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. Like I pretty much want it on my phone immediately. And I think that’s a common need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ultimately that part still is unfortunate and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of leaves the standalone camera market in the place it is, which is like, It’s this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of increasingly specialized, shrinking enthusiast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. And it’s great for that, but it used to be a lot broader than just, you know, photographers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enthusiasts. It used to be like way more mass market and phones just killed that and it’s not coming back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I do wish that enthusiasts who also use phones could have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit better experience trying to use these amazing new cameras that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that just clash horrendously with the phone world.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if camera makers, because I’m willing to blame the camera makers much more than you are, because they’re terrible making software,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco custom apps suck.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I wonder if they would be better served, like at least to get closer to what you want, is to treat the
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras kind of like your phone, because if you’re out and about with your phone and taking pictures, generally your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, especially if you’re just out somewhere on cellular, your phone won’t bother uploading those to iCloud until you get
⏹️ ▶️ John back closer to Wi-Fi or until you plug it in sometimes, you’ve all seen that thing at the bottom of the photos thing that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve paused my photo sync until you plug me in again, right? And you can tell it to Apple’s credit,
⏹️ ▶️ John rare instance where you can say, no, do it now. Wow, imagine that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s a suggestion more than it is a demand because you hit that and it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I’ll get there eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but anyway, if these cameras work like this, you’d be out and about, you’re taking your pictures and you kind of have the
⏹️ ▶️ John same expectation you have of a phone. It’s like, well, these aren’t really gonna be uploaded to iCloud anytime soon. but when you come back
⏹️ ▶️ John home, you’d like put the camera on a charger and then it would load them to iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John for you using like, I don’t know, public Apple APIs or something. Like in
⏹️ ▶️ John other words, have the camera, A, connect to your Wi-Fi the same as all your other devices. None of this creating
⏹️ ▶️ John its own network, whatever stuff. And B, upload when it’s on Wi-Fi to
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud directly. That seems like something that camera manufacturers could probably work out with Apple if they wanted to do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John of course no one wants to do that is like Apple who uses those computers and you know we’ve got our own
⏹️ ▶️ John app made by our crack team of expert programmers and they’re all horrendous and like yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John the approach they’re taking is bad and the main problem is like how long can camera manufacturers continue to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John these cameras off of the internet essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like they all added wi-fi and
⏹️ ▶️ John bluetooth but the cameras are still not in any meaningful way quote unquote on the internet that’s why they’re making their own
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid wi-fi network and it’s like just just bite the bullet your camera needs to be on the internet because that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John we want our photos to be. Or, you know, even if it’s just like airdrop the photos from the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John to your phone so you can do stuff with them, like they could be doing a lot better. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s really on Apple. I think Apple has done plenty to make it possible for these cameras to be better, but the camera manufacturers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the software is not their strong suit, especially software when it comes to networking and not photography.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And again, it’s a shame because I think it would take a lot of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help from Apple to really make that work well. whether it’s on the web service side when they’re uploading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly to the web service or whether they’re bouncing it off the phone, which is probably the easier, but maybe slower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more limited way, whatever it is, like the camera, the standalone camera world, I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t even all have GPS yet. Like that’s even, GPS is still like a kind of optional,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rarely seen feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John worry, there’s a great companion app that will solve that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Ha ha ha. This is one of the things I found out when Marco sent me his other camera. Did you know the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony GPS thing or whatever that there’s an app that you run on your phone that connects
⏹️ ▶️ John with the camera and it will send GPS and stuff or whatever. Each camera can only be connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to one phone and if your phone is already connected to another camera, it can’t be connected to a second one. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve got two Sony cameras, but I’ve only got one iPhone. And so it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John which camera do you want connected? Because you can’t connect both. It’s like, seriously? That’s seriously dumb. It’s ridiculous. So I had to have
⏹️ ▶️ John one connect to my phone and one connect to my wife’s phone, but then it just hardly ever works.
⏹️ ▶️ John camera software is terrible. It’s only just discontinued. In fact, it’s Sony Play Memories application,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is some really misguided attempt to have like an iPhone replacement that runs on Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. If you can imagine that like made by Sony, maybe the camera part of Sony. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would make you have it and install it if you wanted to use a bunch of other features. It was terrible. It’s like the software that comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John printers, right? Like that stuff, like don’t use image capture, use our scanning program. And it’s like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Sony just discontinued that. I hope they discontinued it because
⏹️ ▶️ John either they’re never going to try to make software like that again, which I would recommend, or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced by something better, which I guess would be the second best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, I’ve never seen an iPhone app by a camera maker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was better than awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re so, they’re so bad. It amazes me that they launch. Yeah. It amazes me that like, like, well, how did
⏹️ ▶️ John they not crash on launch? Like they’re, they’re among the worst software I’ve ever seen on any platform. It’s like that and printer
⏹️ ▶️ John software. It’s a real race there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it amazes me that they pass app review. They’re so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s really true. The Olympus one is just as bad. And they’ve moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two pieces of functionality I want, which is occasional downloads and geotagging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’ve moved that over the last eight years between two or three different apps. Oh, don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OI PhotoShare. I don’t even remember what it’s called. But don’t use the A app, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that functionality is now in the B app. Fast forward two years. Don’t use the B app. Now all that functionality is in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C app. It’s just so ridiculous. And the apps are a piece of garbage too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve had that same problem with Sony and with everyone else. It’s just like, they keep rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app or we’re gonna bring our multiple brands together or unify our product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line. And it’s funny, you look at the app store reviews and they all have one star because they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, these camera engineers need to understand that there’s an ecosystem they should participate in. These cameras should be
⏹️ ▶️ John on the internet, they should integrate with other existing platforms instead of trying to say like, we’re gonna make our own
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Apple Photos app and we’re gonna make our own version of photo editor. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna replace Apple Photos, Lightroom, Photoshop, the thing you use to print
⏹️ ▶️ John calendars and pictures. Like we’re gonna write all that software from scratch for every platform, because why wouldn’t we? Why
⏹️ ▶️ John would you even attempt that? Like just integrate with the Apple platform, integrate with Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re done. Like that’s all you need to care about. Maybe integrate with Android, iOS, Mac, Windows. Forget about Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be fine. That’s it. But instead they try to rewrite the world from scratch, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all in a Sony branded experience where you have to create an account and upload your memory. It’s like, you think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna give my pictures to the Sony Play Memories application? Are you kidding? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I’m surprised this app even launches without immediately crashing. I’m never giving in any of my data, but it’s like, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to sign in and make an account and install it so we can geotag your photos, which is the one piece of functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. I understand why on some level they don’t do it. I mean, first of all, you know, consumer software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the strength of any of these camera companies and they’ve never had a reason to develop it. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly don’t have the talent or the will or the resources apparently, because otherwise they would do it. But also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the role of their devices I mean, a lot of the standalone camera market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is people like shooting video and stuff like that. It isn’t just people taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual pictures and wanting to upload them to Instagram or whatever. It’s like people using these cameras as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco semi-pro video capture devices. And it’s just, it’s such a different market, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also it’s kind of a chicken and egg problem. Like the camera makers probably say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people buy our cameras so that they don’t need to use them with the phones or whatever, or it’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demand, different markets. But at the same time, it’s like, maybe that’s because using it with a phone sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so badly. Like maybe if you made it suck less, you could expand to the way larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market people who have phones and use them most of the time, but want something to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take nicer pictures sometimes. Like, I don’t know, I feel like that could be a lot better, but there’s also issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I think a huge issue with trying to make cameras themselves smarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is battery life. And not necessarily like active use battery life, but standby battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and like the camera batteries, they’re not that big compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to phone batteries, but, and the cameras have a lot of these, you know, pretty power hungry components. You know, they have bright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens, usually at least one screen, often two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re super bright, super high refresh. The image processing pipeline is super high powered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have big power demands and small batteries. And to add Wi-Fi and or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular, and or GPS to that mix, which, you know, I think you would need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would need GPS to do a good job of this. And you would need at least Wi-Fi and maybe cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really do a great job of it. But then you’re basically making a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you’re gonna need a phone-sized battery and you’re gonna need it to be charged every night. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really what that market does. That’s not how that market behaves. And so it would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty big shift for that market to really enter the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone compatibility market in a good way, to actually make a good experience, because it would probably mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the device be basically a phone, you know, where it has its own cellular connection. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its own GPS. It records everything. It uploads it to a cloud service over cellular as you’re shooting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe then maybe it can sink into the phone that way. You know, that is what it would actually take, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, to do it really well. But I don’t know how many people are willing to, first of all, buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cell plan for their camera. Uh, second of all, you know, buy a camera to begin with, uh, and, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, you know, charge it every night. And so like, you can start to see when you, when you start thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what it would actually take, you could start to see why they haven’t done this yet. But I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think that the first person who ever does it well, if that ever happens, would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit quite a lot from that. Because as we’ve seen from phones, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are willing to pay a lot to have a really great camera that they can bring with them easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easily upload to social media and stuff. That right now is the cell phone, but it doesn’t always have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be for everybody. You know, it’s always gonna be that for most people. But there is a market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher end use. There is a market for enthusiasts who want to be able to take nice pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a little bit more dedicated equipment, with better manual controls, and maybe obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger optics, larger sensor to get really great results, but then want that picture on their phone as soon as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, I think, a pretty big market, and I wish they would address it. But for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has not come to pass. And some of those reasons are good reasons, but I bet not all of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I bet this could be made a lot better. And it just hasn’t been.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they could re-contain the strengths that they have now. Like one of the strengths that I think about when I’m at the beach with
⏹️ ▶️ John my camera is, you know, we’re talking about like, oh, when you take it with a phone and it’s ready available for
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing immediately. And if you’re lucky, it might be uploaded unless your photos app says it doesn’t want to sync because it’s uncellular.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I’m like standing knee deep in the water, taking pictures with my camera, the good thing with the
⏹️ ▶️ John existing cameras I’ve gone from is they have a removable media. So if I took a bunch of pictures and like
⏹️ ▶️ John filled up a card, I can take that card out of the camera, put it in a little hard plastic case, put it in a backpack,
⏹️ ▶️ John put it way far away from the water, and then go take some more pictures. And those pictures are safe,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if I fall in the water and drop the camera, right? Even if the camera falls off the edge of the boat into the ocean and goes to the bottom, because
⏹️ ▶️ John removable media, once you get a bunch of pictures and you think they’re good, no, you haven’t uploaded them to the cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John but let’s be honest, if you have a big camera with a big sensor, it’s not like you’re gonna be uploading gigabytes of photos in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ John the ocean on a boat anyway, but you can take that removable media and put it somewhere safe
⏹️ ▶️ John as you lean over the railing with your camera trying to take your next batch of pictures. Removable media, and it also lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it somewhere and transfer it like the sort of batch processing removable media old world is a strength
⏹️ ▶️ John of these systems even though it is not a convenience. So if they could retain that strength while also having the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to, when you’re on wifi or near good cellular, upload in real time, that would make a big
⏹️ ▶️ John difference. Especially for these small cameras that are like portable and more like phones. For the big ones, I think there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John a batch mindset of like, I’m gonna take a bunch of pictures, then it’s all gonna be on the card, then I’m gonna take the cards, then I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John process them, because it’s like, it’s a, you know, it’s an assembly line, a professional pipeline or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for something this size, like I put in the show notes here, Marco’s real and scare
⏹️ ▶️ John quotes, but still small and scare quotes cameras, they’re real cameras in that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not phones, and they’re small cameras, and then they’re not as big as big cameras, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John also not full-fledged cameras. So they’re bigger than a phone, but smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than a regular camera. That’s the kind of class where you’d wanna have the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get that phone, get that thing on the internet, right? Because it’s, you know, it’s APS-C sensor, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re doing JPEGs, you could upload those over cellular if it had it. And I think a battery, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have a giant sensor. It’s not taking 30 frames per second, sustained
⏹️ ▶️ John for two minutes, like holding down the shutter button, Like the internals can be made lower power and
⏹️ ▶️ John wimpier to save energy and use some of that access to, you know. They already have wifi in them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they already have Bluetooth, add GPS and cellular, I think you’d have a
⏹️ ▶️ John very, pretty compelling product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You would, I absolutely agree you would. And it’d be something I would be interested in, but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that there’s a market for it. And then if you look at the market for it, like the three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know if I’m gonna pay a lot for that muffler, because this thing would be expensive, I would assume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, because you’re talking about like most of the guts of a cellular telephone without the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cellular telephone, that’s still, it’s still expensive. It’s still got a screen and it may even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a touchscreen. It won’t be as fancy or as nice, but it’s still a screen. It’s still gonna be touched. It still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs wifi, still needs cellular, still needs a place for SIM or an eSIM. Like it gets really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complicated really quickly. And plus, as we’ve discussed already on this very episode, you know, camera makers are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible at making software. I feel like I mostly understand the way the Olympus software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works on board the phone. And first of all, it’s gotten worse over the years, but second of all, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still extremely clunky. And that’s not trying to get it on the internet, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or trying to upload to somewhere. Like I can only imagine how ugly and gross it would be. And you know that the fix for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera people would be, okay, well, you can upload it across cellular, you know, across the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you have to upload it to the Fuji slash Amazon slash, uh, Olympus slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sony bespoke website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that accepts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your pictures. And it wouldn’t be going to like, I mean, I know flickr has fallen out of style, but you know, it wouldn’t be going to flickr or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent. It would either go to Facebook or their bespoke place. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of us want that anyway. So I think it would be a compromise machine all the way up and all the way down, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it existed. So I would love this to exist, but short of someone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really cares, you know, getting the reins and doing it or doing like a kickstarter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something. I just, I just never see it happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one leading indicator might be for Sony specifically, uh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when their PlayStation gets the same clue that we’ve been talking about here, cause their PlayStation, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a PlayStation five, which is the most recent PlayStation. It’s kind of like these cameras in that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand that the internet exists really the pro and I have the same problem as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m playing, you know, playing destiny, let’s be honest, what am I playing? Okay, so I did the remaster of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m playing fish, you’re playing destiny. We all
⏹️ ▶️ John I did do the remaster of last of us on PS five as well recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ll take a screenshot of like some cool scene, right? I have this exact thing when I was playing last, I took a couple of screenshots of some
⏹️ ▶️ John cool things. I don’t want to share them with people in the in the incomparable slack who are also playing through the game.
⏹️ ▶️ John My PlayStation’s on the internet, it’s connected with ethernet. How hard do you think it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be to get that, it’s just a JPEG, right? It’s a 4K JPEG, to get that
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K JPEG somewhere that I can deal with it on the internet. And it’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John as insane as you would think. Well, I can connect to a USB stick, then launch the media app,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can find it on the PlayStation because they hide it now, and then copy it to the USB stick, then bring the stick over
⏹️ ▶️ John to my Mac and plug it in and take the camera. It’s like, what century is this? You’re on the internet. Oh, well, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony has a thing where it’ll upload the picture. Where does it upload it to? The Sony app.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you go. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever the Sony thing is. So there’s like a PlayStation app on my phone. I launch the PlayStation app, then I get
⏹️ ▶️ John the photo and I download it. And it’s just, oh, and very often I’ll take the screenshot and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll like be uploading in the background and a little notification will come and say, oh, I couldn’t upload your thing to the Sony service.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, is the Sony service unreliable? What a surprise. It’s like, I’m just trying to get a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John from one internet connected device to another and it can’t do it. Forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John the video, which it takes in WebP, by the way, if you put it on the maximum quality and nothing in the
⏹️ ▶️ John app really wants to deal with the WebP. So I have to end up converting that. It’s like, you’re so close, Sony, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing that makes me somewhat hopeful is my PlayStation 5 has integration
⏹️ ▶️ John with Twitch and most recently got integration with Discord. and neither of those are made
⏹️ ▶️ John by Sony. So look, they said, you know what? We should make a service where we can do streaming video. Again, it’s like, no, Twitch
⏹️ ▶️ John already exists. Just integrate
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with Discord. They didn’t make their own Discord. They integrate with Discord. So they just got to figure out, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know those screenshots we’re uploading? Is there anything we can integrate with that’s not our own weird PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ John app? Yes, there is. You could upload it to Google Drive, to Dropbox. So like there’s a million places you can send a JPEG,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they haven’t figured that out, but they’re getting closer. So when I see PlayStation have Twitch
⏹️ ▶️ John and Discord integration, I think maybe someday the knowledge of the internet will filter to the camera division.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll be like, could we upload JPEG somewhere on the internet?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then someone will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey let’s create a service.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, stop, fire that person. There’s so many places we could put it. So like OneDrive,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Google, all the storage services, Flickr, Shutterfly, like these people will do deals with you, Sony.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just they want the same like enthusiasts, same shrinking pool of enthusiasts customers. Like who’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John pay a yearly fee to have a website that deals with a lot of pictures? The same people who buy your quote unquote real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like I look at, I have a Fujitsu, different Fuji,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner for sheet fed document scanning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You scan a thing in it and you can configure it to upload to Dropbox, all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places. And so I have mine configured to upload to Dropbox. And so I put a sheet of paper in there, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit scan, and about a minute later, it’s in my Dropbox. And that works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. And yeah, they have their own cloud service. I don’t think I use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The scanner I had before this, the Raven scanner, exactly the same kind of thing, where like, you know, a Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanner, it has its own cloud service that you can, you know, get into if you want, or you can just have it bounce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it over to Dropbox. And that’s what I did. These things are incredibly useful. They work great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, why can’t cameras do that? Why can’t like I know that the idea of making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a camera into a you know cellular connected full-blown phone That can upload things anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are to a cloud service. That’s a little ambitious. I get that What if you started small if we were saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier? What if just when you plug the camera in at home to charge it it would automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect to your regular Wi-Fi network and Upload the pictures to your Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or box or iCloud drive or whatever? that would be a pretty good starting point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still way easier than ever having to like, pop the card out and put it into an SD card slot, God knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, and it’s way better than the apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Any time I have to open a little flappy door on the side of a camera, they’ve already lost. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John nevermind that the Dors and Sony cameras are historically awful, but that should never happen. Like, you have wifi, I
⏹️ ▶️ John should never have to open that little flappy door.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, I hope that this industry doesn’t totally die off before somebody has figured this out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s going to, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to. This is the type of thing that’s always going to stay around because it becomes narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John and special interest and that’s just the way it stays. Because like, it’s, you know, you’ll always be able to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a better camera with more money and without being distracted by other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John With more money and more space, you’ll always be able to make a better camera. So as good as phone cameras get, if I told you you have five times
⏹️ ▶️ John as much money and 15 times as much volume, you’ll make a better camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly, the the X 100 V was hard to get it like it is in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely high demand. It’s backward everywhere. People are selling it for premiums on eBay and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was very hard to get. These have followings. I don’t think the following is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very large anymore, but there is a dedicated following. And if you make a really great camera, I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like a thing was almost $6000 and people buy that like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by by all accounts. the people who have it typically have very good things to say about it. So there is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a market for this. It’s not going to be as big as the phone camera market, and it’s not going to be as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the past standalone camera market, but there is definitely still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a market. Uh, and, and then, so if you serve that market well, you can have a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit in your hands. And by all accounts, the Fuji X100V is a huge hit. Like people love it. It’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that new. I think it’s like a year or two old. You still can’t get it because it’s like people love this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So the market is there But it’s just it could be so much better. There’s so much missed potential
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Sony in particular They’re what Sony does with their big camera things It’s funded
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot by the bigger industries because Sony sells sensors for phone
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras as well and sensors for you know, like that Sony’s research into
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor technology and optical technology and these other companies that do the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they can be making most of their volume and revenue by selling camera
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but they’re transferring technology in both directions, both from the stuff they do, put in the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to their big cameras and vice versa. So you know, there’s lots of synergies there. Like it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John we mostly sell like affordable cars to regular people, but then we have a luxury division
⏹️ ▶️ John that sells expensive cars to people who are enthusiasts or whatever. And you know, like, and not even
⏹️ ▶️ John just a Toyota Lexus, but more like a Toyota Bentley, right? And that’s the breakdown. And there’s synergies,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we learn, whether it’s electric drive cranes or battery technology, that stuff transfers between
⏹️ ▶️ John Bentleys and Toyotas, right? Because they’re all cars. They’re just different cars and different price
⏹️ ▶️ John and size classes for different customers. So you can think of these cameras as the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John of the camera market, whereas the iPhones are the MacBook, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess. Strange analogy. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Collide. Thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join at atv.fm slash join. and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, check podcast so long.
John’s furniture surgery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I understand that you are now a surgeon, an unlicensed surgeon, I should
⏹️ ▶️ John Surgeon, mad scientist. I think this is pretty much the tail end of my, uh, my
⏹️ ▶️ John audio saga here for now. Anyway, um, I had replaced all my speakers we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John in past episode. Uh, my old speakers were very, very small,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, some, not the size of a soda can, but not that much bigger. They’re very tiny, especially like the surround
⏹️ ▶️ John ones and stuff. So they were just tucked away in various locations, like on shelves and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of other stuff or whatever. My new ones are bigger and I also wanted to get
⏹️ ▶️ John them better positioned. And they’re big enough that they can’t kind of be tucked
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. So they have to be… I had to find some way to, in particular, to get my
⏹️ ▶️ John front right and left speakers… I needed somewhere for them to sit so they would be
⏹️ ▶️ John at a reasonable height for speakers, which is a challenge in my stupid room so
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them that’s to the right of the television to the right ish
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of the television
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not positioned in an ideal place because my room is not ideal, but I did the best I can
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed to get a speaker stand for it because the place I have for it to go Is not
⏹️ ▶️ John even big enough for any piece of furniture for it to sit on so a speaker stand that is basically the same
⏹️ ▶️ John footprint as the speaker itself Is what I went with and you may be saying why don’t you just get tower
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers then you’ll see in a second But the left speaker I don’t have room for a tower
⏹️ ▶️ John so I couldn’t get a tower speaker there But on the right side and even even on the other side honestly This is a bookshelf
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker on a stand tower speakers tend to be even deeper than that and so it would be difficult plus also tower
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers would have had a a severe family approval factor thing going
⏹️ ▶️ John against them because they are quite imposing. Anyway, so I got a speaker stand. I’ll put a
⏹️ ▶️ John link in the show notes to the one I got. It’s from Kanto, the company I think we talked about. They make subwoofers
⏹️ ▶️ John and other speakers and stuff. It’s a metal thing, right? It’s got a little metal weight
⏹️ ▶️ John in the bottom. It’s reasonably okay quality. I think it is just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is good enough quality for the price you pay for it, I think. that
⏹️ ▶️ John you may look at it as like you spend how much money on speaker stands? Well, the problem is, of course, you can’t buy one of them. You have to buy two,
⏹️ ▶️ John because who would buy one speaker stand? I only need one. I had to buy two.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does have a place to route the cable. It’s fine. It’s about 26 inches high. It comes with two different top
⏹️ ▶️ John things, one of which fits neatly underneath my speaker. It has a place
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can screw the speaker into the stand. If your speaker has a screw hole in the bottom, mine
⏹️ ▶️ John does not. So my speaker is just placed on top of there through the magic of gravity. Uh, it stays there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, luckily I don’t live near where we have any earthquakes and I don’t have any small children bouncing around, but
⏹️ ▶️ John wish me luck on that. And like I said, it’s got a place to route the cable so you don’t see it. Right. That’s the right speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John The left speaker is even more constrained. It is in a
⏹️ ▶️ John different position on the left, left ish side of the television.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I needed some way to get it up to the right height, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the other stand being in that position wouldn’t quite work, because I needed a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John furniture to hold some of the things that were ejected from the television stand by the big
⏹️ ▶️ John center speaker. So, particularly my Blu-ray player, the TiVo should really
⏹️ ▶️ John go over there as well, but right now I’ve just moved the Blu-ray player, because I needed some place for the Blu-ray player to be. So I basically needed
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of furniture to hold the Blu-ray player at minimum, and then I could put the speaker on top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of furniture. And this is a challenge I’ve had a couple times. Most recently, when we talked about the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, I’ve got, like I’m sitting at a desk now, I don’t know how big it is, but it’s like, you know, I can reach from one end of my
⏹️ ▶️ John desk to the other. It’s whatever length, standard length the desk is. But I didn’t want my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro to be on the desk, but I also didn’t want it to be on the floor. I wanted it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John on a little table next to my desk that’s not quite as high as my desk, but is off the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to find a piece of furniture that exactly fits a Mac Pro that is lower
⏹️ ▶️ John than my desk and that’s legs fit in the space available for it because we have baseboard
⏹️ ▶️ John heating in this room so I can’t have the legs go all against the wall. And I spent so long finding it, you know, I really wish
⏹️ ▶️ John furniture websites said, tell me the length, the width, the height, how much
⏹️ ▶️ John room you have for legs. Like just, I need to know physically a piece of furniture that fits in this volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s so hard to do because you’ll find out very quickly that the furnisher comes in standard sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ John 24 inch, 36 inch height, width, whatever. They don’t come in just, you can’t just pick them like, you know, sizing,
⏹️ ▶️ John well you can’t even pick jeans in size because you can get them at length 34 and length 32, but never length 33 from Levi’s. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If only other brands of jeans existed that gave you single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John inch sizes. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna pay a lot for these jeans, Marco. Just getting Levi’s. And yes, I am
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of in between 32 and 34, but I live with it. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that before I found this perfect little table that matches the decor, that is correctly the right size of
⏹️ ▶️ John what my Mac Pro is on right now. Now I had the same problem. I need something that can hold a Blu-ray player
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not too high, but not too low. Ideally, it would be exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same height as my television stand, because that would look nice. And it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to hold AV equipment, whatever other things I might put there, because who knows what else
⏹️ ▶️ John will get kicked out of my stand and right now my TiVo is wedged between my receiver and the top shelf and I would
⏹️ ▶️ John really like to move that over if I can at some point but anyway I need that piece of furniture but then once I have that
⏹️ ▶️ John if I put the speaker on top of that piece of furniture it would be different height than the right speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John so I needed a piece of furniture that was similar height to my TV stand and then I needed a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more height to get the speaker up to the same height as its
⏹️ ▶️ John sibling speaker on the right and I I searched and searched and searched and I could not find
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of furniture that was remotely close. The best thing I could find was a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of furniture that was too tall, but that was too tall by
⏹️ ▶️ John one shelf height. And when you search for this furniture, you find like whatever brand in China
⏹️ ▶️ John is making all this furniture, it’s sold under 15 different names on 20 different websites. You will find the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John over and over and over again with different names, with just slightly different pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John subtle variations in manufacturing, like this is all coming from the same place. So you have, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John you think you have all these options, you don’t. You have the choice of like the three things that are made in China
⏹️ ▶️ John that fit this thing or wherever they’re made. Like they’re just, it’s just one generic factory that turns
⏹️ ▶️ John these things out and then rebrands them and sells them all over the place. Like everything these days. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. Like you’ll find quote unquote the same product on many different websites
⏹️ ▶️ John under many different names. So, and in this one, for example, I
⏹️ ▶️ John could find it with round legs, with square legs, you know, a couple of different heights, a couple of different widths, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, this one width and height wise was close enough, or no, not width and height,
⏹️ ▶️ John width and depth, right? It was close enough, but the height was too high and it was a four shelf unit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you go to the, this is one of the features that Amazon added that I think is actually useful. On an Amazon product page, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a section on the bottom that’s like Q&A, where you can see people asking questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chances are someone asked the question that you care about. Probably seven people asked it, and you just hope that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John gave an answer. So the question everybody had about this is, this comes with four shelves, can I just use three shelves?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is always no. You can’t just use, and you look at it and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, you look at, try to find a way to download the PDF instructions so you can see how it’s assembled, and
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ll find is that the leg segments between the shelves are separate, so it’s like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John short tube for the leg, then a shelf, then a longer tube, then a shelf, then a longer tube, then a shelf. And you’re like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John should be so easy. I just won’t put on the last tube. You know, I’ll just leave out a shelf. I’ll leave out a tube in it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John no, because the way these things work is there is a stainless steel rod with
⏹️ ▶️ John threads on the top and the bottom that runs through the whole leg. It screws into the top and it screws into the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that tension as you tighten it is what holds the whole thing together. Cause it’s just like a bunch of metal tubes
⏹️ ▶️ John with a threaded rod between them. And the rod is only threaded in one inch of the top and
⏹️ ▶️ John one inch in the bottom. The rest of the rod is not threaded. So I bought this thing knowing that it was too high,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also knowing that if I could omit one of the shelves, it would be pretty much the right
⏹️ ▶️ John height. Then I ordered some threaded rod from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco another company, which is a lot harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to find than a piece of furniture. Well, the first thing I did was I went to like a local hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John store to try to find threaded rod. And I brought with me the thing that it will thread into, like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the little feet that it comes with. You know, and I was so disappointed in the manual. I’m like, please manual,
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me what size the threads are on this thing. But the manual does not. Right. So I just went there and I tried all
⏹️ ▶️ John different threaded rod and none of it fit. And I’m like, because all the threaded rod was. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Imperial measures non-metric. Right. And I’m like, this, this thread road has got to be metric. So
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually I figured out it is metric. What was the size? It was like, uh, M
⏹️ ▶️ John six hyphen one M six hyphen 1.0 is the metric threading that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on the thing. So I went on the internet, being at the hardware store were useful because at the hardware store they have like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John try on your thing on these different threads and you could find out which of these things it is. So I did find out what size it was at the hardware store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t have that kind of threaded rod there. So I ordered online four pieces of stainless steel threaded
⏹️ ▶️ John rod in the M6-1 size. They arrived at my house and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I had to cut them to the right height. Exactly the right height because-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Four times you had to cut four different rods?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the height is key because like, This is, you know, it’s a threaded rod. It screws
⏹️ ▶️ John in like a quarter of an inch into the top and then maybe like a half an inch into
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom, right? So you don’t have a lot of wiggle room. It has to reach, but it also has to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the right length so that you can tighten it up, right? So it has to be fairly exact.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here I am in my garage without the proper tools. I don’t even have a vice. Do either one of you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a vice? I have multiple vise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the plural of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vise? Yeah. I’ve never used one for woodworking though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I use it for like other random crap, but I, yeah. Like one of them holds, it’s a long story. One of them holds my flagpole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount to my deck rail. It’s a whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you thinking of a C-clamp or a vice?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, I guess I’m thinking of a C-clamp. Yeah, I have many C-clamps. I have zero vise.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, my dad had a workshop when I was a kid and he always had, he had a vice in there. He had two vices, one for woodworking,
⏹️ ▶️ John he had a metal one. Like you can buy a vice. I don’t have one, I need one. Why do you need a vice? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much easier to cut threaded rod when you have something to hold it still for you. And then what would you cut threaded rod
⏹️ ▶️ John with? Well, ideally I’d have a cutting wheel that would just make a nice, shh, you know, cut through the thing. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John have a Dremel tool, don’t have any cutting wheels. I could have bought all this stuff when I was at the hardware store. I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to control costs here. If you start adding up the cost, we’ll have the links in the show notes. You start adding up the cost of all this stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like you paid how much for a table to hold your Blu-ray player? It’s like, well, you don’t understand the threaded rod, and then I had to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the Dremel tool, then I had to buy the cutter. So I’m like, no, I’m gonna do this with the tools I have available. The tools I have available
⏹️ ▶️ John are me, my hands, and a hacksaw that’s older than all my children combined.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delightful. This is like how I like, I cut all my holes with a drill, like including things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are way bigger than a drill should be able to cut, but it’s like, that’s the tool I know how to use. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing, like, this is the kind of need where, you know, you need something very specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, and I mean you, this is always your need, but like, you know, something, something very specific. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I was a woodworker, because I could just build my ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV stand. Like, it’s like, I mean, maybe it would look like crap if I was not a great woodworker, but I probably
⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta build seven tables first, and the eighth one will look good after you’ve bought $3,000 worth of equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but it’s like, I feel like, you know, in the same way that oftentimes people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of marvel at the ability of programmers to be like, oh, you can just have an idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an app and then just make it. Like, and that seems like magic to other people. To me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like magic to do that in the physical world because I can’t do any of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The programming
⏹️ ▶️ John is a great example because that program that you can do now is not what you could do
⏹️ ▶️ John the first year you were learning programming.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey true. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John practice programming for 25 years and then you can just make the idea you think of and it’s still hard, right? And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with woodworking. It’s like, and think of all the Macs you had to buy in the meantime. Like, in this case, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not beyond my skills. I know exactly what I would use to actually do this. I was, but I don’t have those things. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a vice. I don’t have a cutting wheel. I don’t even have a good hacksaw. I could have bought all those things, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John cost money. I’m like, no, stop it. Just use what you have. Get by with what you have. So I did. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there I am in the garage with my threaded rod that I’m physically holding
⏹️ ▶️ John as best I can as I try to cut it with a hacksaw. If anybody who’s ever actually done this knows how terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John this is and how it’s just like a challenge on a reality show. Like this is not the right way to do it. If you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever tried to cut through, you know, a quarter inch stainless steel rod that you are holding with your hand. Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, it’s threaded, so it’s nice and sharp and everything. In
⏹️ ▶️ John remember, at the end of this, what you have to be left with is something that you can screw something onto. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can just willy-nilly, like if you ever try to cut something with a hacksaw, it’s like, oh, it’s jumping out all over the place,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just, you know, because if the hacksaw rubs against the threads, it’s gonna screw them up, and you’re not gonna be able to screw something onto it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you don’t have a lot of length to play with, because if you screw it up, it’s not like you can recut it back farther, because it has to be exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the right length. So I very carefully and laboriously cut through this
⏹️ ▶️ John in what must have been 10,000 strokes back and forth with my dull hacksaw
⏹️ ▶️ John on this thing, you know And then when I was done with it, then I used my Dremel tool
⏹️ ▶️ John with a grinding bit, which I did have I didn’t have a cutting bit. It wasn’t it’s not Dremel branded with some other thing. Anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John Use that to smooth off the metal and then test fit Grind down a little bit smooth off
⏹️ ▶️ John the metal test fit until eventually I could thread something onto it I repeat that four times, this was an all day
⏹️ ▶️ John activity. You don’t say. Just to get four pieces of threaded rod. Honestly, if you had the right tools, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John five minute job, right? For me, it’s literally all day, but I saved money.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, then I went in and assembled the thing and omitted the shelf and put it in place.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I had a piece of furniture that could hold my Blu-ray player. I also had to rewrite all the wires and everything, but I can handle that
⏹️ ▶️ John part. It’s pretty much the same height as my TV stand
⏹️ ▶️ John it fits into the little spot and kind of matches the decor a little. My daughter did say she thought I should have gotten the rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John legs instead of the round one, but it’s like, what can you do? And now finally, I need something to go on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of that thing to make my speaker on the left the same height as the one on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And lo and behold, through the magic of Christmas or the magic of, I don’t know, whatever magic this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Kanto, the same company that made my speaker stands, also makes smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker stands. And the smaller speaker stands, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Kanto SP6, which are six inches high, the smaller speaker stands
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of the piece of furniture that I cut down with new pieces of threaded rod, almost
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly equals the height of the big speaker stand. It was a Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John So of course I had to buy two of them and they were also horrendously expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I have one tall and one short speaker stand I have no use for but someday
⏹️ ▶️ John I might. So I was very excited by this because this almost never happens that I took
⏹️ ▶️ John a flyer on buying this piece of furniture and buying this threaded rod to try to make a piece of furniture that
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted and it worked and then I found the same branded matching exact speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John stand for left and right that added to my furniture makes something that is within a half an inch of each other
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was very exciting. I would show you a picture of it but it’s you’d everyone would just throw up about the positioning
⏹️ ▶️ John of the speakers. I’m doing the best I can in the room that I have, but
⏹️ ▶️ John happy with it. The only other thing that I still have a question about is I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John route the cable through the smaller one because I felt like the cable just it’s so short that the routing
⏹️ ▶️ John of it would make would make it look uglier, like it would go in and up and out and around versus just connecting to the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the speaker. It’s only six inches high. So anyway, like all these will be in the show notes. If you want speaker stands,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can recommend these as adequate for the price that is charged. They’re not great, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re also not bad. I was afraid I would get speaker stands and they would be just like weak wimpy metal that
⏹️ ▶️ John would fall over and wobble or whatever These have like adjustable rubber feet on them Which is really important
⏹️ ▶️ John for my house that doesn’t have level floors And they match each other and they have cable routing and they’re made
⏹️ ▶️ John of thick heavy metal and they have nice pads on top of Them so I think the only thing I have left
⏹️ ▶️ John now is the replacement subwoofer because I did sell my old 5.1 setup and the subwoofer went with
⏹️ ▶️ John it So now I have an empty spot ready for a replacement subwoofer to go in there But in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one in the family is complaining about lack of bass. So maybe it’s just me wanting to
⏹️ ▶️ John blow the house down when I watch a blockbuster movies. I’ll work on that for the future. Maybe I’ll use
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the money I’m getting selling all my old AV equipment because I sold my old receiver and I sold my old 5.1 system. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I’m probably going to go up to the attic and start pulling a Marco and like finding like old iPads and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if I can exchange them to Apple for some money if they’re still good because I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John turn all my old junk into some spending cash so I can have a little bit of extra money for the sound
⏹️ ▶️ John system. But I think I’m pretty much at a, not at the end, but at a good stopping point and
⏹️ ▶️ John the family is enjoying the new setup. All right. So the family is experiencing
⏹️ ▶️ John the new setup. I am
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco enjoying the new
⏹️ ▶️ John when watching television with the family. But most importantly, the family is not complaining about the new setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco success. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey important. I don’t say, this
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds weird. I don’t like this. I can’t hear what they’re saying. No one says
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. And it’s not because they’re sparing my feelings, believe me, because if they had
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco any issues with it, they would let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like this has been a big success that I have a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I enjoy that no one else in the family complains about. And we’ve been watching, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this may just be correlation, but we have been watching more television shows as a family in the quote unquote good TV room instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of like watching it in a bedroom or on iPads. I feel like this has been a great success.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a win. Well, congratulations on all of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Maybe I can sell individual
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker. I’m never going to sell these individual speaker stands because someday, like when I move to my retirement home, I’ll be like, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can use my two equal size speaker stands. I just don’t know if it’s going to be the big ones.