530: You Are Not Nintendo
13 Apr 2023Cameras with mirrors, cars without CarPlay, and other ancient relics that should probably stay in the past.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- The Letterboxd app (App Store) are native.
- We know it’s at least in part Daniel Compton’s fault
- Future update to IceCubes will note verified URLs (via Henrik Nyh)
- Apple Photos De-Duplication 😬
- Amazon will keep an archive of DPReview…?
- Manual sensor shake on Sony cameras
MENU→Setup→Cleaning Mode→Enter
- Sony cameras & dual-base ISO
- General Motors hates your iPhone
- Post-show: 🗣️ BREAKING NEWS 🗣️: The UltraMeh is still ultra meh.
Sponsored by:
- Kolide: Cross-platform endpoint security for teams that value privacy and transparency.
- Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
- Porkbun, LLC: An oddly satisfying experience. Over one million domains under management.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Hot, lean choices
- Follow-up: Letterboxd app
- Feedback Assistant “fix”
- IceCubes adding verified URLs
- Sponsor: Porkbun (code accidentaltech)
- Photos de-dupe problems
- DPReview archive staying up?
- Sony sensor-shake cleaning
- Sponsor: Memberful
- How image sensors work
- Sponsor: Kolide
- GM removing CarPlay
- Ending theme
- Ultracompromise
Hot, lean choices
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have, also I was just finishing listening to the Hot Pockets episode. Do you have Hot Pockets nostalgia?
⏹️ ▶️ John Me? I did. I’m ready to wait. Let me correct it. Casey, I can’t say it’s nostalgia with Casey. If
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wrong, I know he had Hot Pocket earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was an occasional special treat when I actually had a job that I would take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either what I would call a frozen meal, which you would call a TV dinner, typically like Healthy Choice or Lean cuisine, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. But I would take one of those or occasionally a Hot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pocket, although in the last few years of employment, I mostly had gotten away from that. I am not above Hot Pockets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the record. I am, that is totally in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my wheelhouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s not a childhood thing that you can remember? You’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey about your adult life. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was, I think I actually was, I was familiar with Hot Pockets as a kid, but I think it was more during my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John would. I realized listening to the
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast and looking at the art that I was mistaken in what a, I didn’t know what a Hot Pocket was, because what
⏹️ ▶️ John I had in mind- What? Have you ever had one? Well, looking at them, I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember those from when I was a kid, but we never really had them. But then I realized, no, what I’m thinking of are the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like the size of, they’re a little bit bigger than a postage stamp. What are those called? Tostinos, like pizza
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls? Yeah, they don’t make sense that they’re called rolls, because they look like little raviolis of stuff that burns your mouth when you bite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s always hot as lava inside of those things, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John never cool off. Yeah, but they’re tiny, but they’re very small. So that’s what I was picturing for Hot Pockets, So then I saw the picture on the
⏹️ ▶️ John box. I’m like, wait, no, these are not the size of postage stamps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, these are hot and these are pockets, but they’re not hot pockets.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not totally done with the episode, but nothing in that episode made me think I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John ever have them, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so disappointed, because I liked them a lot when I was a teenager. I was so disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to learn how crappy they are now, like from adult.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you were excited about, so far, around the listening, you were excited about the pepperoni
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. pepperoni one I think was was the best no spoiler but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but man it’s bad like they’re all so bad I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened and were they always this bad probably I mean or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my standards just you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh my god little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calm a little calm B
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah there and like and you’d like as an adult who has not eaten a hot pocket in a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoa you feel bad after eating them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah wait do they not make lean pockets anymore that used to be a thing. I don’t know if they still do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I would usually have, if anything. What’s with you and all this lean fr… Well, because it made me feel slightly better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like lean cuisine and a healthy choice are neither of those. Like, no, it is not. It’s neither lean nor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco healthy. It is a choice, I guess. I mean, it’s the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same junky food, but there’s just there’s just less of it and lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calorie. So what it basically boils down to is you’re trading, you’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in fewer calories and replacing it with all of the sodium on the planet, Just all of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And smaller portions, like that’s the other secret to getting the calories down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like after you eat your lean cuisine, you’re gonna then be so hungry, you’re gonna eat an entire bag of Oreos after. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really helping you in the net. Were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you watching me? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t challenge me here, because I will make you guys do a lean cuisine slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey healthy choice slash lean pocket challenge.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we can’t do any more food challenges like that. I just, I need another year to recover.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I still have nightmares.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have like the one that I bought that was like my backup one because I couldn’t find the other one that’s still in the freezer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eat it. I’ll feed it to Alex when he comes home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll mail it to Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco condition it’s in when it gets there, you gotta eat it. Wait till August. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still haven’t gotten up to the point in the episode where you try the one that says that you don’t have to cook it, like the room temperature one
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could like put in your lunch. It’s like deli meat or whatever. I can’t wait to see how that is. It’s got to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say those slightly surprised me, but I won’t tell you in which direction. All
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Lunchables.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Oh, Lunchables are my favorite. Oh, can we do Lunchables? Let’s do Lunchables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for a member special. Please, Daddy, please. Can we do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Handy Snacks with those little red sticks and the little flat cheese?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Oh, yes! Oh, yes, yes, yes. Those were good, too. Oh, man, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Dunkaroos. The red sticks are the best part of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The red sticks were the best. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John eat the stick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friend of mine, Brad, had a birthday, I think it was this past Friday, and he got from a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nephew of his who works at a candy shop, he got some Fun Dips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You ever had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fun Dip? MATT Oh, yeah. STEVEN Oh, those are my freaking jam. Gosh, I love those. Oh, so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and down. MATT That was like the best part of playing T-Ball as a kid is that afterwards we got to go to the concession
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand and get a whole bunch of hot dogs and Fun Dip. STEVEN Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John MATT You know, see, in the realm of candies that are not
⏹️ ▶️ John even trying to disguise the fact that that are just sugar, you see you got Pixie Stix, you got
⏹️ ▶️ John and I feel like the best one that figured out the best way to basically disguise
⏹️ ▶️ John pure sugar is Nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s pure sugar, but all they did was like, they made these little crumbly, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like what they do with breakfast cereal, like it’s all the same material, but it’s like what shape is it? They’re kind of like pasta anyway. You know, Pixie
⏹️ ▶️ John Stix is just like, we’re not doing anything, it’s just here it is, it’s in a tube, good luck. Fun Dip is like, well, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some powder, but also a stick, which is also made of sugar, right? And Nerds is like, we found a way to color them brightly
⏹️ ▶️ John and make them into these little granules. I think they would spray some flavor crap on them too, right? Nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. No, no, no, no, no. First of all, Nerds are good. Secondly, I started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording using former sponsor channels. I started recording, shoot, I’m gonna have to look up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the name of it, but it’s this show about the history of food, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in America, and it’s usually like my kind of garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it hosted by the guy from Double Dare? No. Oh, what is his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John name? Mark Summers who, but I’ve heard he’s like a real,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard he’s a jerk. I forget where I read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that what it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We’ll go with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Literally he’s been on talk shows talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. The food that built America on the history channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And that sounds like a
⏹️ ▶️ John history channel title.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And one of the episodes they talked about, you know, uh, different foods include
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or different candies, including nerds. And if memory serves, I might have the details wrong here, but if memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serves, somebody realized that in making, oh shoot, I can’t remember what other candy they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John were making. That was the waste product for like, It was the waste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey product. Yep, exactly right. And they were like, oh damn, we can turn this into its own candy. This is perfect. But let’s say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they spray it with like color and some kind of art, like the usual round of artificial
⏹️ ▶️ John colorings that they, you know, put on stuff like cherry, gray, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and that’s a brilliant use of just, which is essentially just sugar. I mean, that’s most candy though.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like it’s those that’s the barely discussed sugar in the family barely. This guy sure someone also point out
⏹️ ▶️ John smarties, which is compressed sugar. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing as the smarties versus the fun dipstick. Well, you know, spree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing like there’s I don’t know what spree is. Spree is like a better smarty that has like a candy coating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the like the asset of a nerd. It basically like a nerd that’s big enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like to be basically not even it’s like twice the diameter of a smarty. Oh, I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s That’s very, yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey recognize it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sprees are all right. Sweet Tarts are my jam, and the Smarties.
⏹️ ▶️ John A Spree has more of like a coating, like the sort of shiny lacquery color thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. See, for me, I like a Smartie just fine. Spree was like my third tier. For me, it was Sweet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tarts all day, any day. Smarties, second level after that. And if I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go for a Spree, fine, I’ll go for a stupid Spree. But they were not my favorite. Sweet Tarts,
⏹️ ▶️ John look up what Sweet Tarts are, let me see.
⏹️ ▶️ John similar to spree, right? Oh, no. Sweet tarts is like Tums for kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, kind of. It’s like an adult Smarties,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Spree is a sweet tart with a candy coating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. How can you like
⏹️ ▶️ John sweet tarts over spree? Spree at least has the candy coating.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, spree’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, because then you can just scrape the sweet tart against the inside of your teeth for like an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hour, which I’m sure is super healthy. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John dentists recommend, I
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, exactly right. Just rub sugar right directly against your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Easter just happened in the United
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John States. if it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we have a different religious counter than this Canadian Easter. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that aside. So yeah, that just happened and of course, you know, we go to family and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they pour candy all over us basically like this. So just tons of candy, not even just for the kids,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco candy also given to the adults. I know, I got an
⏹️ ▶️ John Easter basket too, which I don’t know what I’m gonna do with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is like the one time of year I actually eat candy like really more than just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two here or there. Oh Oh man, does it make me feel crappy. Like I just get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so tired and I just want more candy. It’s like a drug. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John you do a Valentine’s Day. Because you can just have like one fancy chocolate instead of like a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, it was, it’s rough. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John rough. Yeah, the jelly belly is one of the weird flavored things and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like kids flavors or something. So I guess it was like excluding the weird flavors but they were wrong. there
⏹️ ▶️ John were some weird flavors in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, I feel like every jelly belly assortment contains some weird flavors and not and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be glad you didn’t get the ones where like they had they sell a set where they’re intentionally disgusting for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, like random draw like you this might be good or it might taste like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s and yeah, those are horrendous, although they did make a fun thing to bring to a bar last fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for some reason we got them in Halloween, but otherwise, like what you’re doing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the hot pockets in your freezer. You join the same thing as the jelly belly company does.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all look the same on the outside, but you don’t know what you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get. There are no more hot pockets in my freezer. John really did you use them
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they won’t buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco degree. Yeah, they won’t buy a degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You kid me. We tried. We asked all of our local friends. Hey, who wants these for free? Take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John I heard that theory of like who’s gonna come running over to your house to eat hot pockets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zero of our friend. And keep in mind, we live on an island where it’s hard to get groceries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of our friends wanted any of them, even for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t think you can get the deer to eat them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the deer will eat anything else. They’ll eat like pizza crust, they’ll eat watermelon rind. I doubt they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever eat a Hot Pocket, and they probably shouldn’t eat a Hot Pocket. The seagulls
⏹️ ▶️ John will eat that, sorry, the gulls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eat Hot Pockets. No, I ended up having to throw most of them away, because we needed the freezer space back. We had all these boxes that were half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eaten. You don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a compost where you are?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No. They wouldn’t biodegrade anyway. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna say like that would probably ruin your compost. Isn’t compost a pretty delicate balance like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a lot of things like?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like we have a service that comes and gets it. So like it adds.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Of course you do. It’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most first world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know that’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be like the like.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing as they come to get your recycling quote unquote recycling and your regular garbage and also
⏹️ ▶️ John your third can, which is your compost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and what percentage of that actually gets, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know, not thrown away?
⏹️ ▶️ John The compost all gets composted because it’s compost. You get it back later if you want it like this the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing is everyone puts in and then if you want a Bunch of compost they’ll bring it back to you after it’s been come.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah So you’re just kind of renting space and somebody else’s pile. Yeah. Well, we don’t want it
⏹️ ▶️ John back So someone else is getting our compost but if we wanted it, they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring it to us Is there a no I don’t anything about compost is there enough? Demand for the resulting compost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make up for all the crap people throw into their compost piles
⏹️ ▶️ John probably I mean like it costs money if you go if you go to the homestead and you want to buy like real good compost it cost
⏹️ ▶️ John money. Like, it’s heavy to, you know, ship around. Like, I think there is enough demand. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that’s good. I hope that’s good. I hope that works out. Because it’s not like recycling, which is BS mostly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Unlike the recycling, the compost actually is composted. Okay, that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s an improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve now given away like 15 minutes of members content, I’d say, because this is like straight out of our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent member specials. So if you want more of this garbage or compost, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of this compost…
⏹️ ▶️ John No, our members special are much more directed than this. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a mission. It’s a dumb mission sometimes, but we have it. Always. I think most times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just like top four. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wow. Brutal.
Follow-up: Letterboxd app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s get this party started. We have some feedback from Matthew Buchanan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is the co-founder of Letterboxd. And Matthew writes, with regard to John’s comment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about our iOS app, it’s native Swift, not a web view, except for a couple of screens like our member stats, which are embedded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web views. On Android, it’s native Kotlin. Perhaps he’s not used it recently, if he uses the website predominantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but both apps have always been native since we launched them. This was the most polite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to make this comment. Matthew is not Canadian, to the best of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco knowledge, but he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may as well be, because if it were me, I would have been like, are you freaking kidding me? None of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, effectively none of that is web. That’s all native, you big jerk. And no, that’s not the, that’s not throughout math you took. He was
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, like I said on the last show, I was saying that it’s all a web view, but you know, it’s a testament to how good
⏹️ ▶️ John their website is, that the app is as good. Apparently it’s not a testament to how good the website is, because it’s just a native
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I still think the website is really good. Like the point is that
⏹️ ▶️ John both of them are so, they look like they’re the same thing and in some cases they are the same thing like the member stats like he was mentioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John That they’re like the look and feel and functionality is so coherent between the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of the app, you know, the native application and the website that it’s difficult to tell which
⏹️ ▶️ John is which. And to be clear, I think both of them are good. Like I don’t think they’re all bad and janky. I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both good. But one of them actually is implemented in Swift apparently. And one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them is implemented with WebStuff. But I just think they did a good job of branding and blending such that they can put
⏹️ ▶️ John in pure web content into their native application and it fits right in because that’s how good their website is.
Feedback Assistant “fix”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For this next piece of feedback, I need a little help here. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I don’t want to give this person credit because of the wrong that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve committed. And they were proud of the
⏹️ ▶️ John committed. They’ve got their name in lights on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention to the offender. I refuse to read this feedback or follow up. Now I’m calling you feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for God’s sakes. I refuse to read this. John, if you would like to, you feel free. I am respectfully,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of respectfully abstaining.
⏹️ ▶️ John Carry on. I don’t blame this person for this thing that happened. I just, you have to blame
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple here. Because when you’re, again, when you’re as big as Apple, you get feedbacks about everything. It’s up to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John what to do about those feedbacks. Like whatever it is that you care about, they get feedback saying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it both ways, the way you want and the way you don’t want. On this case, Daniel Compton wrote to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John us this. On a recent ATP, he talked about how it would be great if you could see the last time Apple touched a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John This used to be the case up until 2017, when I reported it as a security bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had reported a suggestion to Apple in 2014 in Bug Reporter, and I never received any response. But around
⏹️ ▶️ John April 2017, I noticed that my radar had a last modified date of April 2017,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though there was no activity on the radar when I looked at it. My assumption was that this meant someone at Apple had posted
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. I reported this as a security issue as it leaked information about which radars were being worked on.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an interesting way of phrasing that. It leaked information about which radars were being worked on because, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John the modification date changed. And to be clear, he’s saying, from the outside, in my three-year-old bug report that had never
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten any response, suddenly the modification date changes. And that made me think that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple is doing something to it, something that I can’t see, but I did see the date change. So this is a security issue
⏹️ ▶️ John or report that you’re leaking information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not wrong. Like that’s not wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it doesn’t really, you know, it makes an already terrible system even worse for those of us on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And so here, three months later in July, I received an email from Apple product security thanking
⏹️ ▶️ John me for reporting the issue and asking if I’d like to be acknowledged on their security reporting page. I said yes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John here is the listing showing my name. We’ll put a link in the show notes. the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey original will not know. The original knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John credit credited this as a server configuration issue, which I thought was a funny euphemism. So to
⏹️ ▶️ John be clear, the bug he reported never got any response after three years, but then someone looked at it and it bumped
⏹️ ▶️ John to date. But then when he reported this quote unquote security issue, three months later, it was apparently fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John and he got credited for it. And part of what why that’s the case is some people said like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you report a security issue using like the security, whatever, there’s like a form for there’s an email address like it’s separate
⏹️ ▶️ John from feedback slash radar that they’re actually responsive and like you know deal with stuff in a
⏹️ ▶️ John more timely manner because security issues in theory are more timely you can also report security issues through feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe gets funneled into the same place but anyway the point is that quote unquote bug got dealt
⏹️ ▶️ John with uh and uh now we’re all worse off for it so thanks daniel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no no do not give this person any accolades whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason I say this is on Apple is because if someone reports that your
⏹️ ▶️ John your answer to that shouldn’t be, oh, let’s lock this down and make sure that doesn’t show up anymore. Your answer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey should be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John why are we worried about people on the outside knowing that we’re working on their bugs? Is that such a bad thing? Maybe we should
⏹️ ▶️ John actually communicate with them, but no, they went the other direction. Of course they did.
IceCubes adding verified URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then this is actually pretty much all the follow-up you see this week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure. Henrik Ne writes, future version of IceCube’s app will include verify URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and search results as promised on the show. And there’s a poll request that we’ll link. And from the poll request, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see the original issue, which basically says, hey, I was listening to ATP. And they said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this might not be a bad idea. I think this was John. Maybe we should do it. And they did it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon, or now maybe, on IceCube’s app for Mastodon, you’ll see a demarcation of some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when a verified URL is in somebody’s profile.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, boy, they’ll take that suggestion from me, but no one will make a unified timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s because nobody wants a unified timeline, John. Stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John trying to make fetch
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s just so many Mastodon clients, just one. I just need one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody wants it. All right.
Sponsor: Porkbun (code accidentaltech)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Porkbun.com, a refreshingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different domain name registrar. They have over 500 domain name extensions to choose from, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the usual .com,.net, to all the new ones,.app,.tech,.dev, all sorts of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have all this with competitive pricing. They have the best pricing on the majority of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco domains. So you can choose the perfect domain name for your website at the lowest prices around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Porkbun is currently the best rated registrar. They have more authentic five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco star reviews from real actual customers than any other domain name registrar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can see why everything is backed by five star support. 24 7365.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all a simple user interface with no weird upselling or anything like that. You manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything about your new domain name from one place. You don’t have to like hunt around to find the features that you need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they avoid upsells like the plague. They don’t you know push you on made up products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’ll never use. There’s no constant recommendations of other stuff and other domains you should be buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No none of that. It’s super nice super respectful of you. They include free with every domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is privacy free SSL certificates web and email hosting trials and so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more because they believe why pay for things that should be free and they also have a really cool feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this. They have a new AI generated search feature using chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change the way people search for domain names because you know search is one of the hardest things because a lot of times the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name you want might not be available in like the TLD you want. So search for registrar is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important feature and pork bun just nails it. So see for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by going to the link in our description. It’s pork bun.com slash accidental tech.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pork bun.com slash accidental tech. Go there and you can get a free dot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or dot dev domain name by going there. Pork bun.com slash accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech or use promo code accidental tech. Thank you so much to Porkbun for sponsoring
Photos de-dupe problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so trouble in paradise for Apple Photos dedupes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was talking last week about how I was using their new shared library deduplication feature and that I had trial
⏹️ ▶️ John run it over dozens and dozens of photos manually checking each time that the thing was doing what I wanted it to do and
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually it never made a mistake and I had faith in it. I’m like, okay, dedupe all my things and
⏹️ ▶️ John it found 30,000 duplicates and I was like, all right, well, off I go. A bunch of people wrote in to say that they had different
⏹️ ▶️ John experiences for me. Here it’s Aaron Gabbert saying, My Apple Photos duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ John experience was a bit distressing. It seemed to be doing some kind of hashing slash abstraction on the photos to verify whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re duplicates, and as such, it won’t pick up on very slight differences in pictures. For example, there were Sir Quote Unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicate pictures taken on a tripod from a distance, one of which had my wife, and one of which had both
⏹️ ▶️ John of us. She was sitting in the exact same position in all of them, and apparently me joining her in the picture did not change
⏹️ ▶️ John the abstraction value enough for photos to recognize them as different. There weren’t many cases like this, but I think I may have lost
⏹️ ▶️ John at least a couple of honeymoon photos along the way due to me trusting the process before going in. That’s pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Picture with one person in it, picture with two people in it, not duplicates. Very different picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s photos. Matthew Schaefer provided an actual example, which he posted on mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will link to you if you want to see these pictures. Just FYI, duplicate detection has a number of false positive for
⏹️ ▶️ John me. He’s really annoyed that there’s no way to say these are not duplicates, which is true in the interface. There’s not really a way
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to say, I mean, you basically just ignore it. You say, don’t merge them and it won’t merge them, but you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make it go away, which is kind of annoying. It’s like having a little red badge on your application that you can never make go away, which
⏹️ ▶️ John also happens with Apple software. So in this example, this is a more, a less egregious one. It’s like a family
⏹️ ▶️ John portrait, and you can see the two different pictures, like the little kids had different expressions in each one, right? Because they can’t stay
⏹️ ▶️ John still, right? And Apple Photos thinks they’re the same photos, right? So after seeing this, I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I didn’t check all 30,000 of my photos. I just spot checked many, many of them until I was confident, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So what do I do about this? Well, the good thing is, and the reason I would say to Aaron that you didn’t lose your
⏹️ ▶️ John honeymoon pictures, when you do merge duplicates, as I mentioned last week, it doesn’t immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John delete, hard delete, the ones that it gets rid of. It puts them, it deletes them the same way Photos always does, and they end up in
⏹️ ▶️ John the recently deleted folder. So since I did this entire big merge in one big operation on one
⏹️ ▶️ John day, my recently deleted folder had 30,000 photos in it. And the things in
⏹️ ▶️ John recently deleted, like they basically get permanently deleted after they’ve been there for 30 days, and if you look in photos on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, you’ll see a little underneath every photo will say 25 days remaining 15 days remaining. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how much longer they have to live in recently deleted before they get deleted for good. Right? So what I did was
⏹️ ▶️ John I went back into recently deleted and I selected all the photos that had that said, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ John were all said 29 days remaining or whatever. I think it was 29 or 28 whatever day it was when I did that big
⏹️ ▶️ John merge. Uh, and here’s the process I did. So select them all while in recently
⏹️ ▶️ John deleted. Then I applied a keyword to them while in recently deleted that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John what was it like, recovered duplicates or something like that. After I applied that label to all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them, or the keyword to all of them, then I hit the recover button to recover them from deleted.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s important to do it in this order, because if you just hit recover, all you’ve done is just sprayed them back into your photo library and you have
⏹️ ▶️ John no way to find them again. But if you label them with a new keyword, you know, recovered duplicates,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you recover them. Then I went back to my main photo library, made a smart folder that said keyword is
⏹️ ▶️ John recovered duplicate or whatever, and there’s my 30,000 photos, right? And then what I did, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I missed your backup, is I exported unmodified originals for all 30,000 photos and
⏹️ ▶️ John threw it into an archive drive and pushed it up to my cloud backups and sucked, you know, I just, I got
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of photos, onto disk, into a dedicated directory
⏹️ ▶️ John structure that said, hey, just FYI, these are the 30,000 duplicates I got rid of. And I pushed that into my backup
⏹️ ▶️ John vortex. And then I re-deleted them, and they went back into recently deleted, only now their count
⏹️ ▶️ John is 30 days instead of 29 or 28 or whatever it was, right? So now, if at any point in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John I say, where is that picture? I thought I had a picture of this, and all I see is this other one. Did
⏹️ ▶️ John that accidentally get merged as a duplicate or whatever? I can go into my archive of 30,000 backed-up
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicate photos and sift through there and say, was there another version of this pose around the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time, date and time or whatever? And now at least I feel confident that even if the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos duplicate resolution thing totally screwed stuff up, I still didn’t actually lose any data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s kind of sucky that that has to be the case. And it is kind of sucky that the the duplicate thing
⏹️ ▶️ John does this. But remember, when you’re doing the merge duplicates, you do have it does distinguish
⏹️ ▶️ John between the different kinds of duplicates. If you just select a bunch and say merge these all able the
⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue that pops up, at least on the Mac, will say, do you want me to merge all the pictures you selected?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do you want me to merge the exact duplicates only? And it’ll give you the count. Merge, you know, 20
⏹️ ▶️ John exact duplicates, move 50 duplicate, merge 50 duplicates, right? If you only ever click
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact duplicate one, I think that is the exact duplicate, like byte for byte, identical
⏹️ ▶️ John file duplicate thing. And I think the non-exact duplicates are the thing where it tries to figure out,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently poorly, whether the photos are the same. So, I mean, I didn’t really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got them out of my library, I got my library merged, but I didn’t really save the
⏹️ ▶️ John storage space, which honestly, like, you know, it would have been nice to get that storage space back, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I was already using it anyway for, you know, my photo library when they were in separate photo libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you got it back on iCloud, didn’t you? Yeah, like everything was on iCloud. I’m saying you got the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage space back on iCloud, right? Because you’ve now-
⏹️ ▶️ John I will in 30 days. Well, sure, right, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like I didn’t, I had, uh, I had this Mac downloading originals for both of my libraries. So everything
⏹️ ▶️ John was on the local disc here. But anyway, the other pushed off into there, they’re on, they’re on two synologies
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the cloud backup. So if I need to get them someday I can, it was, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a little bit of an annoying process. Oh, and as part of that process, exporting the 30,000 photos
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever reason, photos was having a real hard time with it. I don’t know what its problem was. I’ve exported more than that before
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s had no problem, but it would get like 30% through and it would just hang
⏹️ ▶️ John up and not do any more exporting and I would look at all the processes and see if anybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing anything is anyone doing any file on the IOS anything doing any CPU you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not always gonna be the photos app it’s gonna be like photo library D and all these other things and no they would just get hung up and I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it was hung up on I could never figure it out I restarted several times I tried to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John in small batches like I hate babysitting programs like that you know I mean, like, if a program has a feature where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can select a certain number of photos and do something that you think should be straightforward, like export unmodified originals,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when you’re doing it from a photo library, I said download original. So it’s not like it’s waiting for them to come from
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud down to my computer, they’re all on my computer. All I want you to do is export them. And the originals
⏹️ ▶️ John just export. I mean, I know where I can just get the original myself and do it right. But so tedious. So I was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing them in batches of 1000. And it was working, but I wasn’t didn’t want to do 30 batches of 1000. So I kept getting greedy. And I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, okay, I did a couple batches. Let me just do the rest of them and then it would hang up and I wouldn’t be able to resume
⏹️ ▶️ John that operation Because when you do the export on modified originals, it does not ask you
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it looks like there’s a file with this name already in this folder Should I overwrite it or skip it? Like, you know, like the finder does photos does
⏹️ ▶️ John not ask that it just blindly exports and picks a new file name with like a number And parentheses
⏹️ ▶️ John after it so you can’t re-export unless you know the exact photo where it got hung up and I didn’t because it’s just A stupid little
⏹️ ▶️ John progress bar that says I’m 30% done So tedious. Eventually I did get it to export.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I should show you the screenshot. I think I saved this just for the purposes of the show. Yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is great error handling from Mac Photos. I guess this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark can put this in chapter art if he wants, or we can just look at it here. It’s not that exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take a look at the Slack. Take
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a look at this amazing error dialog.
⏹️ ▶️ John worst. Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before. So this is a dialogue, a results dialogue.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says, export results. It’s not an error dialogue. It just says, export results. It says, export completed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with errors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like when they used to get your app rejected from the app store and the subject line would be application submission feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Export completed with errors. 18,862 of 19,480 files have been exported
⏹️ ▶️ John to duplicate photos. The export operation failed to create files
⏹️ ▶️ John for 618 photos, semicolon, the first 100
⏹️ ▶️ John are listed below, colon. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then there is a scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John list of file names and errors. The file names are just the actual file names and the errors just say unknown error,
⏹️ ▶️ John parentheses 1000, one comma zero zero five, right? So it knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that 618 photos failed to export, but it’s not gonna tell me what those are. It’s just gonna list the first 100.
⏹️ ▶️ John What am I supposed to do with that? I can’t go and retrieve those 618 myself. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d only know the first hundred. You can’t scroll to get any more. There’s nothing to say. Just tell me the other 518.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, nope, those are a secret. We can’t tell you what those are. Nevermind that file name is insufficient as a unique thing
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, because I do have duplicate file names just because
⏹️ ▶️ John of multiple cameras and stuff over the years. So that was incredibly frustrating. I eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John my success scenario was this. On my successful export, which happened over the course of like eight hours
⏹️ ▶️ John I slept was this, where it said, this is me
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing all of them. 27,570 of 27,575 have been exported. The
⏹️ ▶️ John export operation failed to create the files for five photos listed below. Yay! And I just
⏹️ ▶️ John manually exported those five and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked fine. And now you have a different error code, negative one for these. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And why, you know, and by the way, I would have to like, since those file names are not I
⏹️ ▶️ John would have to go look at all the DSC underscore zero zero three one dot JPEG files and see how
⏹️ ▶️ John many there was four Of them I have three so this fourth one is the one that didn’t export Let me export that one and so I just
⏹️ ▶️ John did it manually for five files and now I’m sure I have all the files.
⏹️ ▶️ John least as sure as you can be about anything with Apple Photos.
DPReview archive staying up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, in happier news, Amazon is going to keep DP Review Archives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shrug? Maybe? It’s extremely unclear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey General Manager of DP Review, Scott Everett, wrote, we’ve received a lot of questions about what’s next for the site.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and we want to assure you that the content will remain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available as an archive. That’s it. We’ve also heard that you need more time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access the site, so we’re going to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving. Like that’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but even just a hint as to what the, what shape that archive would be or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be, would be neat to know. That would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John What does that second paragraph mean? So they say, remain available as an archive. Okay. We don’t know what that means, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s vague, right? The second paragraph, we’ve also heard that you need more time
⏹️ ▶️ John to access the site. That makes it sound like you’re taking a site offline. That’s why we need more time to access it because
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point you’re going to take it away and then we don’t have any more time and so you need more time to access the site. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re so in response to us having more time to access the site, which already doesn’t make sense. We’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving. What does keep
⏹️ ▶️ John publishing more stories have to do with us that needing more time to access the site. Those are two different things. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, we don’t need to access the site in any given timeline because they just said they’re going to put an archive up
⏹️ ▶️ John but they said they’re going to it’s going to remain available as as an archive, and I don’t think they understand, like, we just want you to leave the site online
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the same URLs, just make everything read-only. Like, that’s, I don’t think they get that. I think they’re just gonna give it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here, here’s a 70 gigabyte zip file, good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t, I don’t know what they mean, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And doesn’t this kind of sound like we’re gonna keep running the site? Like, keep, like, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna keep publishing some more story? Doesn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John kind of sound like-
⏹️ ▶️ John While they work on archive, I think the idea is like, look, if the site’s up, we have to be posting stories to it. If we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not posting stories to it, then there’s no point in it being up. We’re like, no, there is a point in it being up, even if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not posting stories to it. Do you understand? So this is very poor communication, General Manager Scott Everett,
⏹️ ▶️ John please clarify. But mostly this has been taken as good news in that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John heard the cries of DP review readers and are trying to do something about it, but they’re really bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it. Oh, I mean, and maybe, I mean, I would read this as a sign that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe Amazon’s willing to keep like one or two people working on it. I don’t know, but, cause it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird that they’re gonna keep publishing new stuff. It kinda sounds like they’re still employing people. That’s what that sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John Even on the YouTube channel, the folks who are doing YouTube channel who are going over to Petapixel, they
⏹️ ▶️ John said, you know, DP review is going away, but stay tuned cause we’ve got like, we’re gonna do like five or six more
⏹️ ▶️ John videos before we go away, and they’re doing like fun, sort of like on the way out the door videos. Like I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I showed you one of them. Actually the focal length one wasn’t one of those. But anyway, like just fun videos to
⏹️ ▶️ John wrap up And one of the most interesting things about the videos is they always get to the part where you have to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t forget to like and subscribe or whatever. And they’re like, well, I guess you don’t need to subscribe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like this is the first YouTube video,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re at a loss, like don’t subscribe because the channel is going away,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I guess you can like, but it doesn’t really matter honestly because the channel is going away. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re still, you know, like lame duck YouTube channel, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re still putting out content. And I think the website is the same thing. Like as people go out the door, it’s your last
⏹️ ▶️ John chance. Like that one article that you always wanted to write and they would never let you write, write it now, who’s gonna stop you, right? And I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, what a mess. And I still think this is, this is not a good management decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Amazon. Cause like this couldn’t have possibly cost them that much, especially when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add to, you know, whatever net cost, when you also then like subtract out all the affiliate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales that it generated. Yeah, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John perfect synergy for a site that sells camera junk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I don’t know, oh God, maybe B&H should have bought them, who knows, but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, I don’t know why it would make sense for a camera retailer not to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run this site. That makes no sense whatsoever
⏹️ ▶️ John me. It’s just small potatoes for Amazon, so I don’t get it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how big could the staff have been?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s why they don’t wanna bother, it’s too small for Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bother. And the shit, I keep going there, because I’ve been doing all this camera stuff recently, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just so sad to think, Next time we need a camera, like in another five years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever. It’s not going to be on. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be and I and like these other sites that are trying to replace it. Frankly, I don’t think are as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t have you know, the history of having the database of how these cameras compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what I had before so I could compare when shopping like, oh, you know, have had things gotten better since my old Canon, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me see, you know, like I love being able to do that. And I mean now it’s it’s already now it’s becoming difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use the site because possibly in response to all the people trying to archive it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They seem to be having extremely strict throttling control on the site. So like if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load a camera review, just loading the review for one camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get there by Google, so I didn’t even get any other you know pictures in their site, just the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of requests it makes to load one review makes it so that if I then click on a picture to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom it in, I get the you know the rate limiting screen. Like I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the blank white screen, dead request if you look at the you know request it’s setting a rate limiting code like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like just loading one review makes you hit the rate limit which is very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it very difficult to use the site so already it’s it’s like breaking in weird ways but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that shows me like wow what a loss this is like I just want to go you know look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up you know this cool camera somebody just told me about or this cool lens I might want or something you know and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I and then you hit these walls and it just reminds you oh this is gonna to be gone soon. And then so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go look at some other site to get the information I need because they block me and the all the information is worse or missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on other sites. So it’s just what a waste what what a loss for what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Amazon like why what what could this have possibly been costing them when you net out all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affiliate sales like what could this possibly be copy cost to them and they decided to kill it like what a weirdly run company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, then people from the sites will go elsewhere. I’m sure like the youtubers going to pedopex or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like what you said before, wherever they go, they won’t have the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ John tests, for example, whereas the DB review has been doing more or less the same tests, the
⏹️ ▶️ John same sort of test pattern screens and stuff. So you can actually compare, you know, at least within a few years of each other, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John directly compare. I know there’s these cameras are being tested in more or less the same way as the new ones. Whereas when you go to a new
⏹️ ▶️ John site, you know, you don’t have that same history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re being a bit ridiculous, though, because think about all the money Amazon has to pay to host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this site. I mean, they must be paying… Wait, let me check my notes. They must be paying Amazon a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to host that site.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t blame them for wanting to shut it down, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing, too, is like, now that Amazon is sending all these people to other sites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have their own affiliate links, Amazon presumably didn’t have to pay DP review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their affiliate links. So, all those links that are going through the link to Amazon, Amazon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now gonna have to pay out like seven or 8% of all those links to some other site. So by canceling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DP review, they’re actually potentially gonna lose more money overall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet they did pay them for the affiliate links. I know it sounds silly, because it’s all like we’re all same team here or whatever. They
⏹️ ▶️ John did just because it’s easier in terms of, not special casing or anything like that with all the old
⏹️ ▶️ John affiliate links. It’s like just run it through the system. It’ll all come out in the wash.
Sony sensor-shake cleaning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you wanted sensor shake on your camera. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to I wanted sensor shake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s always John, except this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because yeah, because I had my old Canon 5D Mark II’s. They had sensor shake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time you turn the camera off. And those cameras never got any dust on their sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the entire many years and many lens changes that we use them. We have Sony’s for like two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they get lens dust on or sensor dust on them. That’s very hard to clean off. I also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned that my new Fuji X-T5 also has sensor shake every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I turn it off. So I don’t expect to have a lot of dust in that one either. But Sony apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do have this feature sort of. I think you have to tell it to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it each time, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. And I believe I did it, but the one time I cleaned my sensor on one of my cameras, which which is a terrifying
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. Before I broke down and bought a sensor cleaning kit and
⏹️ ▶️ John did the whole little scary surgery, I did try the sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John shake thing and it didn’t entirely work. But anyway, if you want to do this on your Sony camera, I’ll put a link in the show notes to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is my Sony camera. Hit the menu button, then go to setup, then cleaning mode, then hit enter and it will shake.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t think there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to make it do it every time you turn the camera on and off. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t want that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Being able to do it manually
⏹️ ▶️ John trust me, you want that. No, I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to not have any dust issues
⏹️ ▶️ John on any of my cameras. I just had that hair that got caught in the shutter mechanism, which the sensor shake, as you can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John did not help. I had to go in there with some tweezers and get that out. But yeah, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to do this, you can do it manually. It would be nice if they put in a way to do it automatically.
Sponsor: Memberful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Memberful. Monetize your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passion with membership. Memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your audience, letting you build sustainable recurring revenue and is used by some of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco independent creators on the web. They are passionate about your success and they’ve aligned all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Memberful to match your goals. They let you build a membership that’s best suited to your audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with custom branding, newsletter support, podcast support, gift subscription support, Apple Pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free and paid trials if you want them, automatic referral discounts, and tons more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have everything you need to run your membership program at Memberful, including a streamlined and powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkout, an easy to use member management portal, transactional email support, member management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dashboards, and they seamlessly integrate all of this with the tools you already use, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MailChimp, WordPress, Stripe, Discord, and more. need any help getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up, they have a world-class support team ready to help you get set up and they can also help you simplify your memberships,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grow your revenue, whatever you need to be guided by because they are there to support you. Memberful is passionate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your success and you always have access to a real human. You can get started for free with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no credit card required at memberful.com slash ATP. Check it out today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, Memberful is just the greatest way to sell memberships to your audience. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.
How image sensors work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, you want to take us to school, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John I will try. This is a very long video. This is what I referred to
⏹️ ▶️ John last episode with the Sony cameras, and there are two different kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of ISO that I couldn’t remember the name of. It’s dual base ISO or dual gain ISO. Different
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturers use different terms for it, and I was trying to summarize it from memory and did a bad job. So I will
⏹️ ▶️ John do a better job this time now that I’ve pulled the URL, which will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s how it works. This is apparently only on recent-ish Sony cameras. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, someone wrote in to say that Marco’s older Sony A7R III doesn’t have this, but the current
⏹️ ▶️ John A7R V does have it. So somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in between those two, they added it to their cameras. And it’s something I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John about Sony cameras. For all I know, it’s on other cameras and sensors as well. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony sensors are actually in many brands of cameras, kind of like LG OLED panels are in many
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs. I think Nikon uses Sony sensors, maybe even Canon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Canon does not, Canon has their own stuff going on, but Nikon uses Sony sensors usually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I’m not saying this is exclusive to Sony, but this particular YouTube video was specific to
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony. That’s why I was watching this channel. I don’t know if the whole channel is specific to Sony cameras, but this video definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John was. That’s why I was interested in it. but I found it fascinating because I had never heard this before. Probably because I don’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with video where this is more of a well-known thing. It’s a 43 minute video, which you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna watch. So I’m gonna try to summarize it. And even in the 43 minute video, I think there is not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John information for me to fully understand this. Like the guy says he’s purposely simplifying it to fit it in and
⏹️ ▶️ John the simplified version takes 43 minutes, but it’s fascinating to watch. So I suggest it. So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the summary of the interesting thing. So first he’s describing how the, what they call the photo sites work and the sensors, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little thing that light hits, that senses light hitting it. And the way it works is the light
⏹️ ▶️ John hits the top of the photosite and that makes it send a bunch of electrons
⏹️ ▶️ John downward, you know, in the sensor where they get, this is not how it actually works, but this is the analogy,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they get collected in a little well. It looks more like a bucket to me, but they kept calling it a well, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so then the sensor basically counts up how many electrons
⏹️ ▶️ John by measuring the charge, counts up how many electrons were in the well by measuring the charge at that photo site and that gives a
⏹️ ▶️ John value. And every one of the little photo sites is, you know, whatever, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John one per pixel, but just imagine it’s like that. So that’s how a sensor works. But the dual gain
⏹️ ▶️ John thing works where there’s two wells. There’s a big well and there’s a little well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the camera can choose, do I want the electrons that get, you know, chucked out from
⏹️ ▶️ John the photo site? Do I want them to try to fill the big well or do they want them to try to fill the little well?
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s the difference. So the large capacity well is what’s called low conversion gain mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s a bigger well, it has more dynamic range, which means you can put more electrons in
⏹️ ▶️ John there before it fills. And by the way, if that well fills, you just get 100% white. That’s when your highlights are blown out or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna get any more whiter. No matter how much more light hits that sensor, you’re already at max, right? I guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ John you I can get whiter. Yeah, right. A big bucket,
⏹️ ▶️ John the big well, has a larger dynamic range between, you know, one little electron
⏹️ ▶️ John and a whole bunch. But there’s also apparently more read noise, and if you don’t know what read noise is, watch the video.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why the bigger well has more read noise, I believe it, it just wasn’t explained in the video,
⏹️ ▶️ John but take that as read. The smaller capacity well is what’s called high conversion gain mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John that has less dynamic range but the well fills faster. And why would you want the well to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John faster? If you have a dark seam where there’s less light, that means less light is needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to reach an equivalent sensor output. So basically it seems like the sensor output, like the voltage, is determined
⏹️ ▶️ John by what percentage full is the little well, right? A big well with the same number of electrons as
⏹️ ▶️ John a small well will be a lower percentage full. So if you put that same number of electrons in the small well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it fills up to 90% capacity, you get the 90% of the voltage value. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a higher voltage that means it’s higher above the noise floor of like the circuitry and the sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything like that so if you’re in a very dark scene you want to use the little well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the high conversion gain mode to get better low-light performance at the cost of less dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John range. And this is the cleanest way to lift the signal above the noise floor because it happens
⏹️ ▶️ John within the sensor itself before you get to any other part of the read pathway again see the video to see the read pathway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is as opposed to the ISO control, which, you know, it’s, it’s interesting that we use the same
⏹️ ▶️ John terms for like film cameras and regular, because in the world of film cameras, I believe ISO was
⏹️ ▶️ John just basically saying how sensitive is this film stuff to light, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And whatever chemicals are on that film, you know, the sensitivity was measured with this ISO number,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Obviously, there’s no film and no chemicals that are being exposed to light inside digital camera, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they still use the same term. The way ISO works, at least in this little diagram of the Sony cameras is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get those voltages from the photo sites adjusting the ISO tells an amplifier
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s behind that saying hey when you get the signals from the sensor amplifier you know
⏹️ ▶️ John crank up the signal you’re getting by whatever amount as you crank up the ISO it amplifies it more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John but of course that adds noise because there’s noise in the amplifier circuit so on and so forth so by using the
⏹️ ▶️ John littler well the the the high conversion gain mode inside the sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a similar effect but you get that within the sensor itself before you get to the stage where ISO
⏹️ ▶️ John has any effect. And that’s part of the reason why the most recent Sony sensors have really good
⏹️ ▶️ John low-light performance. When they use the little well they do much better than when they use the big well. You
⏹️ ▶️ John may be wondering, okay but when does the camera switch from using the little well to the big well? Is that a thing that I can control?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently not but you can find out where that is. There’s instructions in the video. One way to do it is to just
⏹️ ▶️ John put the lens cap on your camera so it’s just black and then like crank up the brightness on your screen on the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve ever done this, you can see, you know, it’s black, right? What am I, I don’t expect to see anything. The lens cap is on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as you crank up the ISO, you’ll start to see noise in the blackness. Cause you know, noise, see
⏹️ ▶️ John the video for all the different places where noise can come in. There’s a surprising number of them, including photon noise, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John scary. Cause the real world is not simple as you think it is. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see is, it’ll be black with noise. And as you crank up the ISO, it’ll get noisier and noisier and noisier. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John when you go one more notch up on the ISO, get wait the noise decreased and then it will start to go back up again
⏹️ ▶️ John right when the noise decreases that’s when it’s skipped switched from one of one of the buckets to the other
⏹️ ▶️ John the other way you can tell as you can go to one of these weird sensor measuring nerd websites
⏹️ ▶️ John the one he recommended was called photons to photos it’s photons to photos net put a link in the show notes and you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John charts for your specific sensor and your specific camera measuring various things I think the clearest one
⏹️ ▶️ John is the shadow improvement scale thing and you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John pick like if you pick two cameras you can see it well this is the one I picked for the show notes here is showing
⏹️ ▶️ John the a7 for and the a7s3 compared and
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t really matter so much what shadow detail is at some measure of something whatever but you can see there’s a discontinuity in the graph or
⏹️ ▶️ John all of a sudden it jumps that place where it jumps is where it switches from one of those buckets to the other and also
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way this one you can see that the a7s3 has an incredibly low noise floor compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John the a7 IV that’s why the a7 III is beloved by video people because it’s less noisy
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway you can you can mouse over these little charts and find for your specific camera
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have dual gain ISO you will see that jump in the graph and you will see it exactly what ISO level it occurs
⏹️ ▶️ John at so you don’t have to guess I don’t know why they don’t just listen listen to specs but they don’t and finally
⏹️ ▶️ John why doesn’t Sony say that their cameras have this dual base ISO which is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and here’s what the video had to say about about that. Sony reserves the term dual base ISO
⏹️ ▶️ John for something specific. In order for Sony to say a camera has dual base ISO, both base
⏹️ ▶️ John ISOs need to perform the same way with regard to noise performance and dynamic range. And to Sony, the alpha
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras don’t qualify mostly because they don’t have the same amount of dynamic range at higher base ISO as they do at lower base
⏹️ ▶️ John ISO. We just got done saying they don’t have the same dynamic range, they don’t have the same noise performance. Their video cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John do. So Sony’s video cameras advertise, hey, we have dual base ISO, but the photogamers
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. It’s a, you know, they, you get trade-offs. You get less dynamic range for the little well or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a Sony article that tries to explain this. It does a way worse job than the video, but we’ll put it in the show notes anyway because it’s an official
⏹️ ▶️ John source. So there you have it. Something that I definitely did not know about Sony cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John not all Sony cameras, but apparently more recent ones, that they have this strange behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John where the performance of the sensor changes at a particular ISO level. And by the way, it’s not the same ISO level for
⏹️ ▶️ John every Sony camera. That’s why you have to look at these charts to find out where it is. And hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you watch that video and you see what’s actually happening inside your camera and how different it is from how you may be
⏹️ ▶️ John visualizing it if you came from like the film world, it will help you realize all the different places
⏹️ ▶️ John in that chain where things can get screwed up and what effect the various controls on the back of
⏹️ ▶️ John your camera have on those various stages and what effects they don’t have. Anyway, I thought it was fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ John and it sheds a lot of light on the process that we think is magic, where you just point a camera at something and the sensor does some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the magical stuff and you get a picture. And as always, it’s way more complicated than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I was like looking at, you know, watching this and figuring all this, like, you know, how this stuff works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of blew my mind is thinking like, wait a minute, they’re not just reading the sensor when I push the shutter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button. They’re reading the sensor in a mirrorless camera whenever you’re seeing through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera. Whenever you’re like watching the screen on the back or using the viewfinder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sensor is sampling itself usually at least 60 times a second. Like, so it’s doing all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that at least 60 times a second. That kind of blew my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s part of the reason why, I mean, I remember when mirrorless was first kind of coming up, one of the big complaints was,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it doesn’t let you see through your lens, right? I can’t actually see with my eyeballs the
⏹️ ▶️ John light, right? Because the old, the SLRs that had a mirror where the light would come into your camera, hit the
⏹️ ▶️ John mirror, bounce upward, hit another mirror, and then bounce into your eyeball. So your eyeball would be literally seeing the photons
⏹️ ▶️ John that were entering your camera. But with mirrorless, that wasn’t happening. With mirrorless, you’re looking at a tiny little EVF, electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John viewfinder, a little computer screen. Your eyeball doesn’t even get to see the light because it’s shoved against the camera or whatever and how
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s bad. But I mean, there’s many reasons why mirrorless eventually won out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them is, you do get to see the entire imaging pipeline. It’s not, you know, because with an
⏹️ ▶️ John SLR, yeah, you get to see the photons, but you don’t get to see, Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what do my current exposure settings look like? On a mirrorless camera, it will show you, oh, you’re way underexposing, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is dark, you can’t see anything. Cause you get to see like the, if you were to take a picture now, here’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John or less what it would look like. It’s not exactly the same, cause there’s more stuff that happens when you hit a shutter but it’s much closer. Whereas if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just looking through a camera lens, you know, your eye can adjust to an aperture that may be
⏹️ ▶️ John underexposed or whatever. It’s, there are advantages and disadvantages, but I feel like the trade-offs for mirrorless
⏹️ ▶️ John are well worth it, which, you know, again, the market seems to agree with. But yeah, I think the EVFs
⏹️ ▶️ John on all these cameras run to like 120 frames per second too. So again, there might be trade-offs there where it’s not doing like the full imaging
⏹️ ▶️ John pipeline every time, but it’s doing most of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One huge advantage that I found, cause I shot SLRs with the mirrors for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at first I didn’t like mirrorless more because I missed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look through the viewfinder, I missed that experience of shooting that way when you’re looking through the lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly. Like, you know, you kind of have infinite refresh rate when you’re looking through like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is very different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I pause you that we should probably re-explain the difference between mirror and mirrorless. And I can take a stab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it, but please either of you jump in when you’re ready. In a big, big, big SLR camera, really anything with mirror,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is literally a mirror behind the lens that takes all that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light and pushes it up kind of periscope style up to the viewfinder, right? And so you are literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is what you guys were alluding to a second ago, or saying a second ago, is that you’re literally seeing what the lens sees,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not what the sensor sees, but what the lens sees. Whereas by comparison, and this is what you were talking about a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second ago, Marco, with a mirror-less camera, that means there is no mirror, of course. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the only way for you to see what the camera sees is for the sensor to be reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s coming through the lens, and then show that on a little LCD that’s behind a viewfinder,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps the bigger LCD that’s on the back of the camera. And so that’s the difference between the two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And most cameras that I’ve used in my life, I’m in fact, I can’t remember since film anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a time that I have used a mirrored camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it’s, it’s kind of incredible that like, you know, with the old mirror equipped SLR is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time you took a picture, that mirror would first flip up out of the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that the light could hit the sensor. And it was, it was, you know, a, a incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated system. Mirror flips up, then the shutter behind it, like, you know, does its shutter thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and then you get to see the picture on the back. And that had a number of advantages. I mean, first of all, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor, they kind of had to do it that way first because the sensors simply weren’t advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough yet to give live video feeds, you know, for much of the SLR’s development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also, the huge advantage they had was battery life because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t have to be running the entire sensor imaging pipeline constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just see, like, as you’re waiting to take a shot. You were sitting there waiting to take a shot, looking through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lens, through the mirror, and the camera was mostly idle as you were sitting there doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when you took the shot, that’s when it had to activate the sensor, do the image processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in that way, they’re only doing one image to be processed, just the one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you took, and then showing it on the screen. The screen was on for a few minutes, or a few seconds, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, unless you were shooting in what later came was like, Later SLRs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did add the continuous video mode where you could use the screen on the back continuously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the mirror would flip up and just stay up and it would work the way mirrorless cameras do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a brief way. But when you weren’t doing that, when you were just using it normally, the battery life of a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SLR was incredible compared to the battery life of mirrorless cameras. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone just accepts worse battery life because-
⏹️ ▶️ John that much worse though. It’s so much better than it was. Even the short period of time that I was buying interchangeable lens,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony cameras, the battery life on these new ones is just phenomenal compared to what it used to be. And part of that is just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, silicon shrinks and stuff like that. But part of it, I think, is just the efficiency of all of the parts on
⏹️ ▶️ John the inside. Like the camera on my desk here, I just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish my iPad had this kind of standby time. It just sits here for literal months. And every time I pick it up, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John got charging. Eventually it will go down to zero over the course of like four months. But, you know, and I take these to the beach and I
⏹️ ▶️ John shoot literally 2000 pictures and I have more than 50% battery
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco life at the end of it. Right? So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what more could you ask for? And by the way, the batteries are changeable and I have a spare if I actually needed it, but I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John needed it. Now that I’ve gone to the Z size battery, whatever the big Sony size battery is, which is not that big,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like the previous size battery, whatever the small one is, that one’s not big enough. But the Z size battery, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John now that my A6600 also has the Z size battery in that tiny little camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like infinity battery life. It might as well be infinity, because it’s like, I go to sleep before the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing’s gonna run. Maybe if I shot something where I was like holding down the shutter for four hours straight at a sporting event, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John need to swap batteries, but 2000 pictures of the beach, no sweat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, the biggest thing I like about mirrorless since switching over, now that they’re better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that the EVFs have much faster frame rates than they used to, the battery life problem has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly or entirely solved depending on the system. So now the advantages that mirrored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SLRs had are mostly alleviated now by mirrorless being better, but my favorite thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the mirrorless cameras, because the viewfinder is a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they usually do is, when you are looking at the viewfinder, it just shows whatever it would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing on the back screen. You know, it just, you know, it senses your eyes there, it turns off the back screen, and it turns on the viewfinder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my favorite thing is that in bright sun, you can, when you hit play to review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the picture you just took to see if you got it, you can look in the viewfinder, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the picture, no matter what’s going on around you, light-wise or distraction-wise or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can look through the viewfinder and see the picture you just took and review it to see like, oh, did I get what I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get? That is my favorite thing about mirrorless, besides the fact that they’re just way smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But other than that, that’s a game changer for me. And that’s one thing where as I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at very small cameras, like looking at the Ricoh and the Fuji X100V
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Sony RX100 series and stuff like that, like looking at all these small cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all of them have EVFs, and the ones that don’t have them, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really miss it when it’s gone. And even the cute little tiny pop-up EVF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Sony RX100, I’ve still found myself doing that and being very thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was there. And so that to me has kind of become like a must-have. Like if I’m gonna buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a non-iPhone camera, it’s gotta have a viewfinder. And not necessarily because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always wanna shoot through it or even frequently will shoot through it, but mostly because I wanna be able to review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures in bright sunlight. I guess I suppose I could just make the back screens way brighter, but that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John harder. Yeah, I mean, they do have, a lot of them do have a super duper bright mode, but I’m never haven’t really tried that cause
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume that really would eat at my battery. Yeah, it just, I just, just to be fun. In fact, when I’m at the beach, I just turned the back screen off,
⏹️ ▶️ John which also extends battery life. Cause honestly, you can’t see it at the beach. Like there’s no point, right? I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John the- Yeah, I’m aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The viewfinder the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do kind of miss the sound of the mirror clacking up. That’s another sort of kind of like listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to floppiness drives thing that the younger generation probably won’t be familiar with because that was definitely a,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was an audio experience, but also you could feel it. You know, there was the shutter, the mirror clacking up the whole, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I know SLR is pre-date digital, but just, you know, that whole experience is kind of going to disappear
⏹️ ▶️ John someday, I imagine.
Sponsor: Kolide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Collide, and they have some big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news. If you’re an Okta user, they can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If a device isn’t compliant, the user can’t log into your cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that simple. Collide patches one of the major holes in zero-trust architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device compliance. Without Collide, IT struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS and browser up to date. Unsecured devices can log into your company apps because there’s nothing there to stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of authentication, and it’s built to work seamlessly with Okta. The moment Collide’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agent detects a problem, it alerts the user and gives them instructions on how to fix it. If they don’t fix the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem within a set time, they’re blocked. Simple as that. Collide’s method means fewer support tickets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less frustration, and most importantly, 100% fleet compliance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collide.com slash ATP to learn more or book a demo collide is spelled k
⏹️ ▶️ Marco o l i d e k o l i d e.com Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
GM removing CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is our turn to get grumpy because, believe it or not, we weren’t yet. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe at least, maybe two thirds of us. I don’t know about all three of us, but I can tell you I’m grumpy in principle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey General Motors hates your iPhone. That is the headline from Jason Snell at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Six Colors. Jason has spent two episodes of Upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaining and whining and moaning justifiably about what General Motors has said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently, reading from Jason’s post, General Motors has decided that the company’s future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric cars will drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto, preferring the company’s own infotainment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system based on the lower-level Android Automotive operating system. Essentially, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of GM’s EVs will run Android and offer access to certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android apps, but any hope of connecting your phone to the cars via any means beyond Bluetooth will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be gone. There’s also a blog post from Gruber at Daring Fireball,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we’ll put in the show notes. We’ll put the original Reuters article in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just, why? I mean, I know why. The answer’s money. The answer’s always money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But why? Steven
⏹️ ▶️ John McGlude Read the Reuters thing, because that’s the explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Charles Well, there’s the stated explanation, and then there’s the likely real explanations. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John stated explanation is pretty close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the real one. Go ahead. Charles Buyers of GM EVs with the new systems will get access to Google Maps and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Assistant, a voice command system, at no extra cost for eight years, GM said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GM said the future infotainment systems will offer applications such as Spotify’s Music Service, Audible, and other services that many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drivers now access via smartphones. Quote, we do believe there are subscription revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opportunities for us, quote, Kummer said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executive Mary Barra is aiming for $20 to $25 billion. It’s billion with a B
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in annual revenue from subscriptions by 2030.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the answer, as always, is money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the secondary answer is GM is dumb and bad at what they do. Because I know they
⏹️ ▶️ John want money and I know it seems like that if we do this we’ll get more money,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think they will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think we can look back at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different parts of tech and, you know, different eras that we’ve achieved or gotten to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. And certain times things are just better for consumers than they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are at other times. And it’s usually because of some accident or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some standard was adopted or some company got a whole bunch of other companies to agree to something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that later on, we don’t get that kind of luxury again. So think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when open ecosystems then become like, you know, know, closed centralized services or become taken over by them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when services have APIs for a while and they shut down those APIs, things like this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we can look at the era that we are that we are in now where almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every new car sold and many of the cars for the last few years that have been sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support CarPlay and Android Auto and therefore support pretty much any phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re likely to have. And if you if you have an older car that’s older enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a DIN socket you can get a double DIN radio to add CarPlay yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly inexpensively and easily. And so we’re in this era right now where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost everything, asterisk Tesla and Rivian, but almost everything else supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay and Android Auto. And it’s wonderful as a consumer using these products. It’s great because you can get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any reasonably recent car and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have these experiences. And that’s ultimately what people want. They want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use their CarPlay and their Android Auto because it’s better than all the crap the car makers make. By far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s way better. Even the car makers that actually used to make pretty good software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interfaces by comparison to their peers, CarPlay is even better than what they do. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And I’m going to tell you, I don’t actually like CarPlay that much. But it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better than what the automakers have made. And so we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this situation now where the automakers are totally marginalized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their UIs because all we want is get your crap out of the way so I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show my phone projection system on your display. That’s what we actually want. We actually want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get all your stupid custom stuff that you made that looks like Elon Musk drew it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually. Get all your like, and I don’t mean Tesla, I mean like the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are worse. all the ones you look at like GM and all the vehicles that are marketed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards like you know men like those have the most comically overwrought disgustingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad you eyes. So you have all these car makers who just have done horrendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs of making you eyes. It’s not their skill set as screens have gotten more ubiquitous as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical needs have gotten higher as the graphical capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these screens have gotten better over the years. the car makers have only gotten worse at making software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. Like Amazon with their Kindle UIs. The Kindle UI has only gotten worse over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Kindles have gotten better screens and more computing resources because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gives Amazon even more rope to hang themselves with in terms of their horrendous UI design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s how cars have gotten to it. Car UIs are horrendous and they keep getting worse as the screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep getting higher resolution and we keep putting more controls on the screens. Like the way everyone else is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designing their screens is just getting worse. And so but we have this great moment right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we, for most new cars, we can just connect our phones and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get all their crap out of the way and have what we actually want. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s temporary. Usually when we have these kind of, you know, very consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friendly, more open ecosystems, oftentimes it’s in the earlier part of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what happens in the later parts of those markets is the people with the power realize they have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power and say, hey, why are we giving this away? Why are we letting other people control our stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why are we not bringing this in-house and reaping more benefits from it? So you can see this in lots of places all over tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course. I think one of the more common places you see it recently is streaming services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we used to have everything on Netflix. Over the years, the various rights holders have realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don’t we just launch our own service and take this off of everyone else’s and they have and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that world is worse and more expensive than it was before. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the reality like it’s it’s gotten worse for everyone except for the people who run streaming services and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we have to subscribe to 15 of them to get all the stuff we used to get in like one or two. You look at you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music industry has gone in in and out of things like this but you know so these kind of things are all over the all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the the the tech world. So I think the automakers have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized, wait a minute, why are we letting Apple show whatever they want on our screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we can have our own maps app and we can have our own subscription pricing that we charge people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we can charge them, you know, the 12 bucks a month for their GPS service or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Car makers want that revenue for themselves and so from their point of view they’re like, wait a minute, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just gonna take this back. So, you know, we as consumers, we have a a few things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can do in response to that. We can refuse to buy those cars, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Tesla has shown, sometimes the cars are compelling enough that we’re willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget about that. Or a lot of people just don’t, they don’t realize or they don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they might not care until after they’ve driven it off the lot and then like, well, I guess this car doesn’t support that. I guess I’ll use the crappy Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, you know, but a lot of people don’t realize or don’t care. So those of us who do care,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s It’s like we’re kind of out of luck. So we can say we’re not gonna buy these cars, but ultimately, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GM today, and this is gonna go one of two ways. Either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s gonna be enough backlash and they’re gonna see enough loss of sales that they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revert this decision and say, oh, nevermind, we’ll add CarPlay and Androida to back these cars. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not gonna affect the sales in a big enough way, and I think this is the more likely outcome. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other automakers are gonna be like, a minute, we can do that too. GM is making X billion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year in recurring subscription revenue for their vehicles after sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by selling all these services on the touchscreen and no one’s buying those on our cars because everyone’s using their phones instead for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. So why don’t we capture that value for ourselves? I heard Jason’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arguments and I think he’s more optimistic that consumers will prevail here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not that optimistic. I honestly don’t think that’s the most likely outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the most likely outcome here is they’re going to make a bunch of money from doing things themselves in a way that’s worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for consumers, but we have not enough leverage over them in this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then other automakers will follow. And I think we’re going to look back on this time as, wow, wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it great when every car had CarPlay? And in the future, it’s going to be a lot more fragmented, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so GM is playing it safe here in that that they’re allowing the Tesla and Rivian,
⏹️ ▶️ John the two big, highest end, most high profile, most, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say most popular, because Rivian’s not selling that many cars, but I don’t know, the best reviewed
⏹️ ▶️ John EVs, let’s say, they’re allowing them to be the anchors, because the two best reviewed EV makers, Tesla and Rivian,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t allow CarPlay or Android Auto. And so GM is not doing this on all their cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John GM is only doing it on their EVs. and they’re using the other popular
⏹️ ▶️ John EVs as an anchor and say, well, this is just the way EVs are. When you have an EV, you know Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t do this. You know Rivian, they don’t do this. Well, with our EVs, we don’t do this. But with all the other GM cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John still CarPlay and Android Auto. And I don’t know how many EVs GM sells compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ John other ones, but it’s presumably a minority of the cars that GM sells.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re still kind of like dipping their toe in with this thing. And in this scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not at a competitive disadvantage if you’re comparing EVs against EVs, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re shopping for a GM EV, maybe you are looking at other EVs more than you’re looking at just other cars
⏹️ ▶️ John across the industry, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but I think almost every other EV, or at least off the top of my head, every other EV other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than Tesla and Rivian, and we probably shouldn’t even be mentioning Rivian because their sales volume is so low,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much everyone but Tesla, including Lucid, which, By the way, I happen to see Lucid Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, Lucid just changed. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I happen to see one today for the first time. It looked pretty good. I was pretty impressed. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much everyone else is including CarPlay, to the best of my knowledge. I might not have that exactly right, but effectively.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the best EVs are Tesla, Riviera, and Lucid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, man. I don’t know if that’s true anymore. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s say the best reviewed is the best way to sell it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very different, first of all. That’s an extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re the best. They are the best vehicles, so that’s they’re the best reviewed. I don’t think there’s any debate there. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think anyone is looking at, you know, Chesley, Rivian, and Lucid and saying these are not the
⏹️ ▶️ John classes that they compete.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Obviously, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think anyone’s looking at Lucid.
⏹️ ▶️ John agree. Well, I mean, Lucid, Lucid only has Lucid doesn’t have any cars that people want to buy. They just have a sedan
⏹️ ▶️ John and who wants sedans, right? But among the sedans, they make literally the best four-door sedan EV. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also you’re I think you’re underselling GM’s existing EVs because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always get it backwards. It’s either Bolt or Volt, and I always say the wrong one.
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they probably sell a lot of them, but it’s, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they’re actually really nice. Like, my parents have whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, other than the fact they had to recall all of them because the battery’s catching fire. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John that happens to everybody eventually. I’m serious. Every EV maker is going to have some recall. Like, Toyota
⏹️ ▶️ John had the wheels falling off with their stupid EV, which is not well-reviewed. Bolt had the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John catching fire, which, like, you know, that’s on the battery manufacturer. Like, those are growing pains, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, everyone had the Tesla had those. You don’t have any recalls I have for my Tesla? A lot. And I didn’t even, and mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, by the time I bought my first Tesla, it was already out for like four or five years before that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Rivian had like the bolts, like something in the suspension components, they had the bolts retightened or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that. Yeah, something like that. Everyone has those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But hold on, we’re getting off track here. What I’m trying to say to you is, I do not accept your assertion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Tesla is still the only good option. The Bolt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my, I have driven my parents’ Bolt Mini, this is the prior generation, but now they have a different looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. like the GM has a different looking one, but my parents’ Bolt, it is not as nice as a Tesla. I’ll be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first to tell you that. But given that it was like half or maybe a third the cost, whatever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is actually surprisingly nice. The Mustang Mach-E, surprisingly nice. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not personally, and I’ve driven one of those very briefly. I’ve not personally driven the new Kia and Hyundai
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EVs, but everything I’ve read is that they’re really, really good. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, up until maybe a year or two years ago, it was basically Tesla or nothing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re a fancy lad, like arguably the three of us are, it’s Tesla, Rivian, or nothing. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular people, I think there’s a lot of really, really good options out there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think GM is going to be cross-shopped with the Kias and the Hyundais
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all the other ones that are of roughly similar financial pain. They’ll also get cross-shopped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Model 3, for sure. But I think there’s a lot more options out there than you’re giving them credit for, and that are
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like I said, I was just picking the, the reason I’m picking the best of the best is because that’s GM’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cover, right? So what GM’s cover is, see, we’re being like the best of the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though you’re not cross-shopping against the Lucid Air, because it’s way too expensive, being like Lucid
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of like the companies that copy Apple, even though they’re not really competing with Apple, because their cover
⏹️ ▶️ John is, like, it’s kind of like a value signaling. Like, we’re like the good ones that you can’t afford.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re like Tesla, we’re like Rivian, we’re like Lucid. We’re not like those other lesser things,
⏹️ ▶️ John Ford, Mach-E. I know you think it’s a good car, but don’t you see how we’re, it’s a value statement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like pricing is a value statement. This is a value statement of like, it’s giving them cover to say, we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t offer car play because those expensive guys don’t offer car play too. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I get what you’re saying, that they’ll be cross shop with cars that are in similar market, although I guess the Tesla Model 3 does kind of ruin that because it
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of down in everybody’s business in terms of pricing. Although a little bit less so now because the Model 3 keeps
⏹️ ▶️ John creeping up in price as Tesla goes down the tubes financially with some problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t they just drop
⏹️ ▶️ John again? Yeah, they had to drop the, they were creeping up, but then they had to drop them again because
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to sell cars. Like it’s not a great situation over there, but no, but the Model 3 is very affordable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla’s prices have never stayed the same for more than a few months. Like they’ve always changed wildly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but like, you know, I’m in Westchester for the moment and I’m looking around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is like ground zero for new medium to high end adoption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of electric cars. And I see there’s still a ton of Teslas around, still by far the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but I’m seeing a lot of the Ionics. Is that Kia or Hyundai? It’s a Hyundai.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hyundai, yeah. Ionic 5, you’re saying, the SUV one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ionic 5, tons of Mach-Es, tons of Teslas. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now two Rivians within a block of my house. There is tons of them. And even, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this is not still even made, let alone was ever mass market. But like I was driving around, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving around Tiff’s little BMW i3. I freaking love that stupid car. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so stupid, but so good in so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ways. Do they still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think they stopped last year or the year before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause all of a sudden I’m seeing that car everywhere. And it’s not just because you mentioned it, cause I’ve known you’ve owned it for years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years, but there’s so many i3s and I’ve seen it. Maybe it’s I’m seeing the same three over and over again, but like, where are you getting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I guess they bought them used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the great thing was you could get a great deal them because nobody wanted them. So we got an amazing deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on ours. There are so many good electric cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s more coming out all the time. The market is big and growing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you can kind of tell, now that the more modern ones are required to make weird noises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they run for pedestrians to hear, as I’m walking around I’ll hear something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird drive by and I’ll look and it’ll be something I don’t even recognize, but it’s with clearly an electric vehicle, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of weird mid-sized SUV crossover thingy that’s some brand, I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing, they’re everywhere. There’s so many and they’re all different. And by most reviews, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much all really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you pointed out before, electric cars, just having an electric drivetrain is just a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade in so many ways from gas cars that you can have an otherwise fairly mediocre car, but people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will love the thing because electric cars are just good overall.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re the SSDs of the car world. Right? Everyone loves their first SSD, and everyone loves their first electric
⏹️ ▶️ John car, even if it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks. Right. But it might suck in some ways, but it’s so much better in other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways that you just love the thing. TIFF’s i3 is like an ancient platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only has like 150 miles of range. But the thing is great. Like, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey great little
⏹️ ▶️ John And people love the things. They didn’t love it at the price that BMW tried to sell it for. That was the main problem with the i3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it was it was very early to the market. It was very ahead of its time. I think it’s carbon fiber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tub design was extremely expensive. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why it was so expensive. And also it’s a form. It’s a shape of car that Americans don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know what? It’s an amazing shape. We have fit so much in that car and it’s such a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. It’s very practical, but Americans do not like that. It’s basically a tall bubble like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It is very it has no footprint. You can fit in every parking spot. You can do a u-turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a street without doing a three-point turn. Just turn around. Like, the turning radius is amazing on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so small, but because it’s tall, you have a pretty good… you have great visibility out the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can fit anywhere, and it actually holds a surprising amount of stuff given its size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the thing, and no one’s making that anymore. And, like, no one’s making anything close to that size right now in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American market, which is kind of unfortunate. But anyway, there are so many good electric cars, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forgot even what we’re arguing about, but your assertion that…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John they were using the better brands as cover for their decision. Let
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me finish because, like I said
⏹️ ▶️ John before, there are ideas like, and we’ll make more money from this. The reason I don’t think they’re going to, and the reason I think this is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong decision, and the reason I think that even if the entire industry goes the way you said, Marco, and they all realize, hey, we can do
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, like, basically it’s a chain of using the higher-end brands as cover, and it goes all the way down, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John all get rid of CarPlay and Android Auto, It will be a terrible mistake and that will eventually be reversed. And here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why. These car makers do not have software platforms. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have app stores. They don’t have APIs. They don’t have operating systems. They do not have a software platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of them do. None of them have a glimmer of a hope of ever having one and none of them currently
⏹️ ▶️ John have one. We can name all the software platforms off the top of our head. Windows, Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John Android, iOS. That’s pretty much all the ones that matter. There’s some tailing off with the TV OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and the watch OS and the stuff like that. That’s it. What does it take to have a software platform? You gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John have APIs, you gotta have developers, you gotta have a developer program, you gotta have support for them, you gotta have an
⏹️ ▶️ John SDK, you gotta have an IDE, you gotta have a platform that you do development on, you have to revise
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. Bug tracker, documentation. Yeah, well, less so with Apple, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know. We know what it takes to have a software platform. None of these car makers have that. Nor
⏹️ ▶️ John should they, because that is, it’s such a huge business. There have only been a small number of those in the literal
⏹️ ▶️ John history of the world, and making new ones has proven to be extremely, extremely difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John after the sort of Cambrian explosion of the early PC days and the subsequent consolidation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why does that matter? Because software platforms allow developers
⏹️ ▶️ John to produce software that has not existed before. Waze at one point didn’t exist, and then somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John made Waze, And it turns out Waze is a good thing to use in a car. If those platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t exist, iOS, Android, or whatever, no one is writing Waze for the BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John platform or any other single car platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I almost wrote Overcast for the BMW platform, just whatever it’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. It’s just not economically feasible for individual car makers to have their own platforms that are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have innovation. We know where people are writing applications. They’re writing it for the popular platform. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John someday they’ll be writing for somebody’s headset or whatever. We’ll find out at WWDC. But right now they’re writing them for iOS, they’re writing them for Android,
⏹️ ▶️ John and to a lesser extent, Mac, Windows, whatever. You know, like, those are the software platforms. So if these
⏹️ ▶️ John car makers kick software platforms out of their car, which is what they’re doing, if they don’t let car play, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Android, those are ways for those existing software platforms to allow applications developed
⏹️ ▶️ John for those platforms to get into the car. If car makers kick them out, if they think,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, we’ll just write all the applications ourselves, no, you won’t, you suck at this. And even if you didn’t, nobody can write
⏹️ ▶️ John all their own applications. Even Nintendo can’t get by only with first party games. And Nintendo is Nintendo.
⏹️ ▶️ John You are not Nintendo, right? If you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have none of those
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, like you will just have a lesser platform. You say, okay, well, everybody does that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then just everyone will have crap applications. Ah, but if everyone has crap applications, some, the singular
⏹️ ▶️ John of the car company, singular with a C, the singular of the car world will say, you know what? Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else kicked all the other software platforms out, but you know what, Apple, Android, we’re gonna invite you back
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And suddenly, it’s their unique selling proposition for whatever brand of car this is
⏹️ ▶️ John that decides to do this, like the last place competitor, Singular, right? Says, iPhone, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can come on our platform, and suddenly, people are looking at Singular again. No one was looking at Singular before, but hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what, if you want the iPhone, the literal only place to get it is on Singular, which will eventually be called AT&T,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was never a fan of Singular slash AT&T before, but they have the iPhone, so I’m going over there. That’s what’ll happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll just reverse and ripple back through, because there is absolutely no way that any of these car makers
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to make a successful software platform, and they’re delusional if they think that you can either make
⏹️ ▶️ John one of their own, which will never, never, never work, or we don’t need a software platform, we’ll just write all the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John in-house. Go ahead, do that, you’ll get singulared. That’s what’ll happen. And it may take two decades of pain and suffering, to Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John point, it’ll suck for us the whole time if this reverses and goes through the whole industry and we gotta wait for a whole other
⏹️ ▶️ John decade-long cycle for these idiots to get their heads out of their butts, but inevitably it will happen
⏹️ ▶️ John because there is no fighting against software platforms. that’s where the innovation happens that wherever the platforms are
⏹️ ▶️ John popular, where developers are making software, that’s where it happened. And look at ways. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, that’s software innovation for like cell phones, we want software innovation for cars that also happened
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone phones aren’t cars. But that’s where all the good applications for cars came from on
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest people can bring their phones into their cars. So there’s just, there’s literally it’s like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John decision ever to decide. I don’t want any of the world’s most popular software application
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms to be able to use their software integrated into my car. We’re not saying like you gotta let them take over
⏹️ ▶️ John everything like Apple wanted to do, where they take over the instrument cluster and the climate controls or whatever, like by all means, car makers,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep the car stuff to yourself. All we’re saying is carve out a little place on your dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John for Android and iOS and whatever the hell future platforms, but you know, the headset thing, who knows whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John for that app ecosystem to be in your cars. You should be thanking them
⏹️ ▶️ John so that they allow their apps to be in your cars because they add value to your cars, value you can
⏹️ ▶️ John never make yourselves because you’re never going to make a software platform as good as any of those.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if you did, it wouldn’t matter because you’re just one car company. If you’re like, well, I’ll make a platform for all car companies and
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody will use Ford OS. Yeah, good luck with that. Well, I’ll make a platform that’s independent of any car company. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s called iOS or Android for now. For now, iOS is independent of any car company and so is Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once Google starts making their cars and Apple starts making their cars, it makes things more complicated if that ever happens. But GM,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a terrible decision. I know you think it’s defensible. And I’m sure like, you know, if it
⏹️ ▶️ John works the way Marco says for the next decade, you’ll make those billions of dollars of revenue. And then the executives who were in charge of that will
⏹️ ▶️ John retire and tell their grandkids how successful they were as executives. But then when they die some point
⏹️ ▶️ John later, you’ll have to reverse course because this is a bad decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Two counterpoints. Number one, Tesla. Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very successful, despite what we think of their stupid leader. They are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very successful car company that makes overall…
⏹️ ▶️ John First mover advantage and they have good cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, overall very good cars. And people are very happy with them for the most part. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have never supported CarPlay or Android Auto. And it doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards for them. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to feel pretty strongly about not doing that. And they have all their own built-in stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is not great, but it is, first of all, it’s the best I’ve ever used that wasn’t Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed. Like it’s it’s there’s lots of issues. I have with tesla’s ui and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially that the weird redesigns that they did over time and I hold that when I own those cars, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there in car ui was the best I’ve seen until rivian rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is a little bit nicer, but it’s overall very similar in terms of quality and design work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas everyone else is well below the two of them as far as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen, but the point is tesla shows that you actually don’t need CarPlay, that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be a wildly successful car maker making cars that people generally love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are willing to keep buying, even though you don’t have CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So that’s a pressure on them,
⏹️ ▶️ John though. Everyone always wants Tesla to integrate CarPlay. And the more competitive Tesla gets in terms of, hey, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty decent EV, you can say, well, it’s not as good as Tesla. But the counterbalance
⏹️ ▶️ John is, yeah, but this one has CarPlay or Android Auto. That is a competitive disadvantage. And I understand Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ John run by a stubborn child who’s can do whatever, like there’s no reasoning with that or whatever. But it’s still,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m not saying it’s a fatal decision for Tesla, but it is a disadvantage. It’s increasingly a disadvantage
⏹️ ▶️ John because if everybody else has it and you don’t, that’s a disadvantage for you. Now, again, if the whole rest of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John goes the way of Tesla, then that ceases to become a disadvantage. And then Tesla looks even better because they have decent
⏹️ ▶️ John software. But you know, there are there is pressure on them right now anyway, to
⏹️ ▶️ John integrate Android Auto and CarPlay. The fact that they’re just not giving into it because again, they’re run by a
⏹️ ▶️ John stubborn child who doesn’t really listen to reason. That doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. Like they’re very successful because
⏹️ ▶️ John they made really good cars and they had a first mover advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, and they can, and that’s a perfectly, that’s not like, oh, well, it doesn’t count. It counts totally.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a way to have an advantage. But in the disadvantage column is no Android Auto or CarPlay. It’s just that their advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John column outweighs that, right? So I don’t think they’re proof. Like, again, if you had some company that
⏹️ ▶️ John could make cars as good as Tesla and as cheaply as Tesla, and also had a CarPlay and Android Auto, that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be better for them. Again, I think that why did Lucid backslide? Because Lucid was also out of the gate without
⏹️ ▶️ John supporting either one of them. And very recently, Lucid added support. I think Lucid’s doing it because they have
⏹️ ▶️ John many disadvantages against Tesla and that nobody knows who they are. And this is their very first car and
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth. And they’re like, we need a little bit more in the advantage column, what can we do? Easy, CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John integration. Tesla doesn’t have it, we do. You know, it’s a little thing, but I’m saying industry-wide,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, deciding that the whole industry doesn’t need popular software platforms is just a big mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Second counterpoint, what GM is doing is not just making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own OS from scratch. What they’re doing is switching to Android Automotive. Now, Android Automotive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not Android Auto. And it’s a quick recap, we covered this a few months back, but basically Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auto is like CarPlay, show a projection of your phone on a screen in the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android Automotive is an entire real-time OS that takes over the gauge clusters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else in the car, and it is the car’s UI. And the car makers can work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Google to customize Android Automotive to be the underlying OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the entire in-car system, the entertainment system, the screens, everything else. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Android Automotive, there are apps for it, like there are third-party apps for it, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s like a very, very small selection, and it’s very different requirements and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s never gonna be like, you know, a healthy ecosystem by any means. It’s always gonna be like a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subset, but there at least is a path. But what I think is going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Android Automotive, because it’s like, you know, the new baseline,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be like Android in kind of, you know, in a bad way where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the manufacturers are going to eventually switch over, over the long haul. I think they’re all gonna switch over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android Automotive as their like base OS for their tech stack. But they’re gonna customize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and limit it and restrict it like crazy because they can. The same way that carriers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to heavily restrict Android, then customize it and they would build their own, you know, special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience on top of it that had only their apps and required only their, you know, subscription stores and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that other crap. Like, that’s what- it’s gonna be like old carrier branding on phones, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the Verizon Motorola phone or whatever was running Motorola’s OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was full of Verizon garbage and you couldn’t change it. and you couldn’t install whatever you wanted. Like that’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens here, I think. Where it is Android Automotive underneath and I think it’s gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I think it’s gonna be a very popular choice over time for car makers. But it’s not gonna give you the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of freedom and flexibility that CarPlay and Android Auto do where you’re just running apps off your phone and it can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much whatever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it comes out like the cell phone market though, say that becomes the Android of the automotive world, which would be fitting
⏹️ ▶️ John given its name. The money in the mobile phone market is not so much on Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though iPhone has minority market share, it has majority revenue and profit share.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if these car companies want to make a lot of money, following the Android route is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to be as lucrative as following the iPhone route. And also, Android being massively successful in the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile phone platform in the world did not eliminate the iPhone from existence. Also, it didn’t take money, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t make the iPhone have a minority of the profits or revenue either. So that’s a problem for these companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the high-end ones, because as long as Apple still exists and still has the customers with all
⏹️ ▶️ John the money and still makes the most money on its platforms and still continues to have CarPlay as a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, some singular is going to take them up on that offer and say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody else has got Android Automotive with that limited selective Android Automotive things and the carrier drunk all over
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and so on and so forth. And it’s the most popular automotive platform in the world. It probably already is, by the way. Android Automotive is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the most popular. Tons of car companies use it. I think even Casey’s Volvo uses it at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the most popular in the world, But if you want to make money, you got to support the Apple thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where the money is, right? I think car makers, if they think this will play out just like the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John market did, that is not a positive scenario for them because they pick the one that doesn’t make all the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And nobody is apparently picking the one that does make the money. So we’ll see how it goes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, by the way, building on top of Android Automotive is the same thing that these car companies give lip service
⏹️ ▶️ John to. Oh, why are we letting some other company own the platform that runs our cars? Well, you’re already doing that. And you know
⏹️ ▶️ John why? because you suck so bad at it that you just said, let’s just go to Android. A lot of car companies tried to make their own
⏹️ ▶️ John and did such a bad job that they said, you know what? We changed our mind. We’re just gonna use Android Automotive and brand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but you know, I think there was a lot of like, you know, random middleware being sold, you know, QNX based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever is like going on. Like they weren’t writing their own OS’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because in the car industry, the car companies don’t make the things themselves. Like suppliers do. I forgot who
⏹️ ▶️ John the big supplier was of infotainment before Android Automotive swept through the industry, but they didn’t make good software either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and by the way, an Android automotive is CarPlay compatible. One of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can do is show a CarPlay window and it’s fine. So it’s really just down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like, they’re going to like, as the carrier in this model, they’re going to just disable that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’re gonna just not allow
⏹️ ▶️ John that to run. I mean, like I said, when you say a car supports CarPlay, it’s probably running Android automotive
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just showing CarPlay in the little carve out for it that Android automotive provides. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John either of you recall if BMW switched Android automotive recently too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. That would surprise me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think they were so proud of their software platform, and I think they wanted one of the last holdouts, but I think I recall a
⏹️ ▶️ John story where they finally gave in. I don’t know. Someone from BMW will write it and tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll have to see. I know the newer stuff, like the iX, I think might run a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new software stack, so maybe some of the newer stuff might be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, when you’re running Android Automotive, you don’t know it. That’s the point of like, it doesn’t look, there’s no-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought the Volvo, we don’t have Android Automotive in our Volvo, but the Polestar ones do run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the newer ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I haven’t seen a screenshot, I’m not gonna look it up while I’m talking, but I thought it was at least slightly obvious that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Android, but I may be wrong about that. Well, it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks different, right? Maybe if you know what to look for, but they’re heavily branded. Like I think the Hondas
⏹️ ▶️ John are Android automotive at this point too. Like the Hondas look like Honda, right? The Kia ones look
⏹️ ▶️ John like Kia, the Hyundai ones look like Hyundai, and it could be Android automotive under the covers. It is a lower level
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and to Marco’s point, the carriers, quote unquote, can customize it up the wazoo. That’s the point of that
⏹️ ▶️ John platform. I think that’s what Apple was trying to do with their thing. Who knows where that’s going, but they have the same idea. Look, we’re just like
⏹️ ▶️ John Android Automotive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, Apple would never in a million years allow any kind of customization like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was their pitch was you can use our thing and you can customize it with your look and feel, but you’re right that they would allow less customization.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’ll be like, give us a tint color.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll be more than tint color, but less than Android Automotive. Not much more
⏹️ ▶️ John than tint color. I don’t know where that effort is going. I remember it was in like a presentation, an event
⏹️ ▶️ John presentation, and I haven’t heard much about it. But things move slowly in the automotive industry, so we’ll see where it goes. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, Android Automotive has taken years and years to like, for every car company to eventually give in and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we give up trying to give money to, I wish I knew what the manufacturer was. There’s a bunch of infotainment manufacturers that took
⏹️ ▶️ John on this, hey, we’ll make the interfaces to your things, and they made them in the 90s, and they made them with bitmap displays, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then they just, they couldn’t keep up. And so Android Automotive has kind of taken over that type of thing. Entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, even though it seems like it’s technically related, it is business model independent
⏹️ ▶️ John of this decision. Because you can use Android Automotive and choose not to support CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John or Android Auto at all. And that’s what, I mean, I’m assuming GM is using Android Automotive
⏹️ ▶️ John and is also choosing not to support CarPlay or Android Auto with it. But they are choosing to support things like Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, so they’ll do deals with Spotify, just like they did deals with Sirius, you know, all the car makers did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You see the dollar signs in that, and it is a way to make money. Like, oh, we don’t have an app platform, and we’re never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make one, but you can get Spotify, and you can get Audible, and you can get Sirius XM if they still exist, and you know, whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John we partnered with, and we’ll take your money for that, and it’s like, you know, it’s OnStar, and all the, it’s the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John version of OnStar and Sirius Radio. This is just these type of deals, but that’s not a software
⏹️ ▶️ John platform. The next time the next really good car app comes out, again, for all we know, it could be a glasses slash
⏹️ ▶️ John headset car app or something, that’s, they’re not going to have it, But the CarPlay ones will,
⏹️ ▶️ John because CarPlay is like, look, we don’t know what’s gonna be in this little rectangle. I just decide where the rectangle is and how you
⏹️ ▶️ John navigate to and from it, and it shows what’s on your phone platform. And that is an entire platform that we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John own, that we don’t control, but that we don’t have to support, and that somebody else, you know, fosters innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John in, and somehow developers make these amazing applications, and then voila, they get to appear in our car,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes us have an easier sales pitch versus Tesla, which doesn’t allow that to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I think it’s more likely that they’ll do a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals, they’ll have like Sirius and Spotify, and that’ll be it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people will say, okay, I guess that’s enough. Like for many, if you look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people actually use on CarPlay, it’s not a large number of apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s Apple’s built-in stuff, and maybe a third-party mapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, which is almost certainly Google Maps or Waze, Like that’s just two. They’re even both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned by the same company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even Apple Maps, because I mean, I feel like Apple Maps is at this point better than the in-car navigation of any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it is, but again, like, but this is like, when you look at what people actually are using, it’s like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map app that might already be Google Maps, and therefore already might be included in Android Automotive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then also, you know, whatever their streaming music app is of choice, which is most likely Spotify for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people. And so all they have to do is make a deal with like one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music playing services and that’s it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that changes, that’s the whole point of the platform. You don’t know what’s gonna be the next popular app. Right now it’s Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ John Years ago it would have been a different set of things. Like you don’t know where the next Waze is gonna come from. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know where the next Spotify is gonna come from. You don’t even know that Spotify is gonna be on the top of streaming audio forever because
⏹️ ▶️ John at one point it wasn’t and right now it is. That’s what a platform is. It’s a place where no matter who ends up being
⏹️ ▶️ John on top, if we’re running our platform right, you can get that on our platform because we have the customers with the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so here we are. Again, we may have been in for a decade of very dark times where you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use these things on any platforms, but I think inevitably it’s gonna have to come back around because there’s no defeating software
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms. That’s where the innovation happens. And that view you have is exactly the right view of a short-sighted
⏹️ ▶️ John executive who’s gonna retire soon, which is like, look, for the next 10 years that I’m working, we’re gonna do this deal, we’re gonna make tons of money
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m gonna retire. Success. But on the long view, if you’re not supporting a software platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually all those deals that you made with those companies for those individual car things, they will not
⏹️ ▶️ John be on top anymore. And the ones that are gonna be on top will rise to the top, not on the market of things
⏹️ ▶️ John that do special deals with BMW and GM, but on whatever the popular platform of the day is, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still mobile phone platforms or headset platforms or whatever the heck it is, that’s where the new things come from.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where they rise up. Instagram doesn’t rise to fame as a Windows application. It rises
⏹️ ▶️ John to fame as an application on a platform that Windows didn’t even worry about until it was too late. that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what will happen in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope you’re right, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John don’t think probably be dead, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t think it’s a four hour conclusion. I hope you’re right, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think there’s a couple of interesting things here. I see both of your points and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I think there’s more to truth to what Marco saying than I want to admit because I really don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to lose car play in the cars, whatever cars I buy in the future, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I think a lot of the justification that a lot of people, particularly the EV manufacturers are making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, hey, we want to be able to do a really good job of helping you navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and charge your car as you’re on a road trip. I genuinely don’t have the faintest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea if there’s one or several apps that do a good job of this. And honestly, it doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the point I’m trying to make, but what happens if there is like a ways for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or hell even ways itself for mapping and charging where it is able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out Electrify America, Tesla, whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s already exist. Doesn’t Google Maps do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, no, but like there’s already apps that do this. So, you know, there’s like PlugShare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and a bunch of other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But do it incredibly well to the point that like Waze is the de facto standard for most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that commute. Is there something, and honestly, yes or no, it doesn’t really matter, but what if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a Waze for EVs, not in terms of traffic, but in terms of like route planning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. I think that GM particularly was citing like route planning is one of the reasons that they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control the whole widget is because, oh, we’ll do route planning better than anyone else. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think if there becomes a de facto standard or maybe there again, if there is one, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t matter. But if and when that time comes, then it’s gonna be a real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey competitive disadvantage not to have Waze or the route planning thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with charging on your electric car. And that’s going to make all these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-car play, non-Android Auto electric cars seem real bad. That’s just one path to where it can become a real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, at least for now, all these other makers, Kia, Hyundai,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of these other ones, Chevy at the moment, they’re all offering Android Auto. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all offering CarPlay. And I think people are turning to them more and more. I’m seeing more and more of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular people EVs over time. I also wanted to point out, this was linked from Gruber’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post, There was an interview between the Rivian CEO, RJ Skerringe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is how you pronounce it, and MKBHD. And MKBHD specifically asked him,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the deal with the lack of CarPlay? And the quote from the CEO was, the thing about controlling the software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stack is we get to continually make it better. So you’ve had your R1T, you’ve hopefully seen this every few weeks. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new software release that either adds features, addresses gaps, we listen to feedback, and our head of software development is on Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time hearing what people are saying. And he continues later, it drives our software roadmap and make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that we’re delivering what customers want. Well, first of all, if you were delivering what they’d want, you’ll give them fricking CarPlay. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving that aside, I think the one advantage that the good EV, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the software-friendly EV makers, which is basically Tesla and Rivian, the one advantage that they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially compared to Apple, is that they can innovate and deliver fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I would also argue that it’s not as big a deal for Apple because CarPlay itself doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to innovate as much when you’re offloading the mapping to another app, when you’re offloading the charging to another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, when you’re offloading the listening to podcasts to another app. But it is an interesting counterpoint,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I am 1000% team CarPlay slash Android Auto, it’s an interesting counterpoint that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least these software heavy car companies actually deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a speed that certainly, I can’t speak for Android, but certainly Apple is not delivering at that speed right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, yeah, they are fine, but that seems like an independent concern. They should do that
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the things that their software controls, which is the whole rest of the car. Like the climate controls, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the features of the car, the instrument cluster, the automatic self-driving driver
⏹️ ▶️ John aid things, like, yeah, that’s their job. And the fact that they innovate, that they’re iterating better than
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, I mean, we know that’s not Apple strength, right? But still, on terms of the platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John every year Apple has a new iOS, and in general, they get better and have more features. CarPlay itself
⏹️ ▶️ John may be a much slower rate of innovation there but I feel like the main job of CarPlay connectivity, which
⏹️ ▶️ John they have done at least something they went from wired to wireless, you know, I feel like there’s still room for improvement there, but you know, they did
⏹️ ▶️ John something there. It’s mostly just about make a place on the dashboard where our
⏹️ ▶️ John software ecosystem can have a foothold. And then, you know, exposed to that software ecosystem will be all
⏹️ ▶️ John the applications on iPhone or on iOS or on Android that
⏹️ ▶️ John are, that want to be useful in a car. So even something like a podcast player, for example, might have awareness
⏹️ ▶️ John of that CarPlay exists and provides support for it that’s different than when you’re holding your phone. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John can use Overcast while you’re in your car. And certainly mapping applications like Waze are motivated to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though you can also use it by just having the car, the phone mounted on your dashboard, right? I think the whole idea of like
⏹️ ▶️ John sticking your phone to your dashboard is a weird thing that we have to do during this transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if things go the Marco way, and we have these dark days where everyone kicks off Android Auto
⏹️ ▶️ John and CarPlay, people will go back to sticking their phones in the dashboard. We’ve already proven that we’re willing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That’s what I do. Right. You know, that’s, you know, you do it in your Tesla, right? Or you’re, you would pro
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll probably end up doing in the Arabian, right? I do it in my car that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carplay. Why? We’ve gone over this cause it’s better. Like that’s cause carplay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, carplay is nice to have, but it’s actually not that good in certain ways. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it admittedly it’s better than not having it. But, uh, but you know, Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to actually see the phone for something like like ways in CarPlay is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of buggy and sometimes you have to do stuff on the phone. You know sometimes you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like enter stuff on the phone. It’s not great. You know ideally you don’t do that while you’re moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and what’s great about a like you know dashboard clip for your phone is that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to worry about all this crap that they’re doing you know with disabling CarPlay or whether your car has it or not. You can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put your phone there. Done. And then it’s the same and you can use ways the regular way that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most reliable way to use ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John People are familiar with their phones. Like that’s the main advantage that it has. It’s like, you know, it’s not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not learning a new thing. You already have your phone, you already use it all the time. It is a familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John interface in place for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which in many ways I think makes it safer, honestly. Like, you know, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John car play, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously the, you know, the way it’s less safe is if you get tempted to like start texting people, that’s obviously worse. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with car play, You have a learning curve and you have to kind of you know futz with stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more But it has bigger targets in car play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know and there’s less you can do so like you know it the advantage of car play is like if you go if you try To do something that you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be doing in your car. It just won’t let you like you just can’t the downside is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You actually might spend decent amount of time Scrolling around the screen and there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly having your eyes partially off the road when you if it was just using your phone in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dock right next to the steering wheel you could actually be faster and have your eyes off the road less time but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s it’s kind of a complicated you know balance there it’s not it isn’t you know entirely on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one side or the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know we will always have that option as long as they keep having Bluetooth that exists you know ideally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have better options but you know we might not
⏹️ ▶️ John and some scenarios you don’t even need any car connectivity like I’m kind of amazed this hasn’t happened I I know car makers
⏹️ ▶️ John have done this stupid, incredibly stupid thing, which I think we’ll look back on and laugh. I laugh at it right now. Where
⏹️ ▶️ John very high end luxury cars in the backseat, like in the center armrest, they’ll have an Android tablet that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with the car. It really happens all, like a literal Android app.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be branded and it’ll be like hidden that it’s Android, but it’d be an Android tablet and you’d be able to put it on your lap and adjust
⏹️ ▶️ John the climate control. All sorts of silliness, right? But like, and we’re talking about holders on the dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John where we stick our phones to, which is made way easier and cooler by MagSafe. I’m a convert now that I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a stupid clip. I use the MagSafe, it’s great. But it’s kind of amazing that no one has, as far as I’m aware,
⏹️ ▶️ John said, you know what? You know, we’re gonna do the instrument cluster, climate controls, you know, driving controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John cruise control, all that stuff, right? But in the place in our dashboard where normally
⏹️ ▶️ John there would be a, you know, a big, like a big touchscreen, we’re not gonna put that
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Instead, just stick your iPad there. It’s basically an iPad mount. And you don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John need any connectivity to the car because if you want to run a cool mapping application on a huge screen, just use your iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, or the luxury brands are like, our car comes with an iPad, but no one’s willing to do that. They all come with junky Android
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets. No one has been willing to say, guess what? The center touch screen on our dashboard, it’s an iPad. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously Apple would do that, right? If anyone’s going to do that, Apple would. But no car maker has done it yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you see just how many times, like we were talking, you know, how many people use cases on their phone? Look at,
⏹️ ▶️ John go through a parking lot. And next time you’re in a big place with a big parking lot and look in all the cars and see how many
⏹️ ▶️ John of them have a place to mount a phone. And then account how many of those cars already have
⏹️ ▶️ John CarPlay, but like Marco, choose to mount the phone anyway. It is a really common
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And I think if Android Auto and CarPlay ever go away entirely, people will just continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to mount their phones. And I would hope that car executives would be like, same thing. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason a lot of people integrated CarPlay is they understood, as drivers of cars themselves and as observers
⏹️ ▶️ John of the car industry, hey, you know, I look around and I see a lot of people with their cell phones
⏹️ ▶️ John mounted to their car dashboard. Can we make them not do that? Because it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re trying to design interiors of our cars, but now all of a sudden we have to account for where they’re gonna try to mount a phone. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t we just let them see their phone display and then Apple’s like, hello, CarPlay, we’ve been out here yelling at you for a month. Like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’ll do that. For me, I think that’s one of the main reasons that CarPlay even exists is because people
⏹️ ▶️ John voted with their dashboard mounts and said, we want this in
⏹️ ▶️ John our cars. And if you don’t put it in our cars, I’m gonna block your carefully designed
⏹️ ▶️ John instrument panel or center stack or whatever. I’m gonna block your climate control vents.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna put, I need to use this while I’m in the car if you don’t let me. And so I feel like that’s part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that cell phone sort of projection interfaces even exist. And we’ll just go back there again. If they take them all away,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people will just go back to it again. I don’t think, the Rivian message here about like, or
⏹️ ▶️ John we wanna control the whole stack, we wanna do the whole thing. Like that’s what they all say when they’re trying to be like, they have delusions
⏹️ ▶️ John of grandeur into thinking that they are going to make a software platform. Like we’re as good as Apple, we can make a full
⏹️ ▶️ John software platform. We can do everything ourselves. Kind of like Steve Jobs saying, here’s the iPhone, Apple’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John write all the applications itself. That’s tenable, right? Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not tenable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they had stuck with that, it would have been a terrible decision, right? So I feel like the car makers
⏹️ ▶️ John are kind of in the same situation. Whether they’re lying to themselves or lying to us, It’s hard to say, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I say by all means, iterate, listen to feedback, do a great job on your interior interfaces,
⏹️ ▶️ John consider physical buttons, they’re really important. But people want
⏹️ ▶️ John the current popular platform, which right now is cell phones, in their cars in some form or another. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t give it to them, they’re gonna stick it to your dashboard with a piece of tape or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already ordered the Rivian mount for ProClip USA. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John god. You’re preemptively just blocking it. I mean, the Ravion’s so big inside, you have plenty of room for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And sometimes they go out of stock for certain vehicle models. So I’m like, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in case, I should probably, I’ll take the $20 risk, and I’ll order this now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I bet some people have had iPads. Thinking of the whole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’ve seen iPad minis in Ubers and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was going to say Uber, Lyft, their whole business is based on that type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like Square, you remember the Square iPad, paying the square, that type of thing. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ John have been places where iPads have appeared, but just the phone is so much more ubiquitous, or any kind of phone, not just the iPhone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John phones are so much more ubiquitous that it’s much more common. But I bet there are people out there who have iPads, especially iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John minis, mounted to their cars as just basically bigger phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they totally do. I’ve seen it like more than once. Yeah, and for the record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, that I watched that Rivian interview with MKBHD. I didn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take the CEO’s answer as we will never do car play.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of took it as like, we’re not doing it now and we will see like that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how it read to me. Like it didn’t, it didn’t seem like an out an outright like, no, we’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not going to do that kind of thing. Like it just kind of seemed like we don’t want to be pressured into doing that right now, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this second. That’s kind of what it sounded like.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like lucid making that move because most of these, they’re the most desperate I imagine, but lucid making that move
⏹️ ▶️ John is also kind of like, you know, Rivian’s kind of looking around, right? Tesla, again, just ignore Tesla because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John run by a maniac, right? They don’t apply logic to what they’re going to do. But Rivian is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at Lucid and going, hmm, I don’t know. I mean, they’re so underwater in terms of like, they’re trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, a new cheaper platform. They’re trying to build the cars that they’re trying to sell. Like, Rivian is
⏹️ ▶️ John a million things going on at once, right? So I don’t blame them for depri- you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll worry about CarPlay if we’re still in business next year. Like I give give give everything some runway here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like in the current climate, despite what GM is doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian is in the position now where if they if they rolled out Android auto and CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who already own them would be very happy and the people who haven’t yet decided to buy them
⏹️ ▶️ John this would be in the plus column for them right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel like I feel like with Rivian, it’s it’s it’s felt more like, you know, we just haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten to it yet. And we don’t have a good answer for that yet. So we’re just gonna, you know, kind of punt in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird vague way. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John kind of felt like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, because look, I mean, it’s not look, we know, the actual implementation of, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, supporting CarPlay and Android Auto is, for the most part, pretty straightforward, because the phone just sending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a video stream, you are literally just showing a video
⏹️ ▶️ John stream, but you have to find a place within the UI that you made where where that goes, and that’s the tricky part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, you basically, you make a window and you say, here, you’re gonna have this, you’re gonna have control over this window. That’s how everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else has done it, and it works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you have to sort of bend your UI around that, though. You have to say, okay, well, when that goes there, what controls
⏹️ ▶️ John from our stuff does it hide? Do we have a little sidebar that we show that’s always visible with our car stuff? How do you navigate between them? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying it’s difficult. Yeah, that’s what everyone does, it’s fine. I know, I know, I’m not saying it’s hard, I’m just saying it does take some
⏹️ ▶️ John thought to do. So if Rivian was planning to do this, it’s gonna take a little bit of effort, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re probably in the middle of whatever the next major revision of their, you know, their own software is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to really incorporate that into the design to have it work there. So what even if they’re currently
⏹️ ▶️ John planning to do it, I wouldn’t expect it for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, at least a year because obviously, like, you know, they’re, they’re still in pretty early days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like, just getting stuff out the door, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff shipped, getting stuff built, getting stuff sold and working like, obviously, like they have a lot more on their plate. And so that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of felt like that’s like, like you know a 2.0 or 3.0 feature and they’re just not there yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it would not surprise me if they add that sometime and it’s like okay now we support it that’s it like you know no no big fanfare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just boom now it’s there and at some random time in the future like no no warning just oh there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is you know because it doesn’t seem like it’s a principled stand to not do it whereas you know with Tesla it’s instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of giving you like the one feature you actually want of showing this window with with CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it that we have plenty of space for on our screen instead of giving you that one feature we’re going to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 17 games that you will never play and this fart simulator and whatever else you really don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your car and the one thing you need in your car we’re not going to do because we’re run by a child. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsors this week Memberful, Collide and Pork Bun and thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Accidental, accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John tech podcast so long.
Ultracompromise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, this ultra fine is driving me nuts. I’m so close. Like, if there was a Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Display XDR in stock in the Westchester Apple Store today, I might have bought it. Like, I- this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ugh. Why don’t you get a studio display?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. Why wouldn’t you just get another studio display?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean, not another.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. A studio display. Right, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. I- I- I really don’t. I really don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I mean, I guess. It’s not that much more expensive than the LG was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I spend $2,000 on a studio display, that is $2,000 for something I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that into. If I spend $5,000 on a Pro Display XDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate doing that, but the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that I really enjoy. Like I love the Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta hold strong on that one though, because you know, any day could be Mac Pro day. And if they’re gonna revise that
⏹️ ▶️ John display, now would be the time to do it. So you just gotta hold out for, I think another-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of what I’m waiting for. Like I figure like there is probably a revision coming sometime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely confident that there’s a revision. I’m just saying you gotta wait to see. We’re close enough now to something happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that something may, you know, they promised a Mac Pro, I think there’s gonna be a Mac Pro. Will there be a new XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I gave it like 50-50, but you gotta at least wait to see. Because if they roll out the new Mac Pro and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not an XDR, then you’re safe. Just buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, to each their own. I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, but you’re wrong. You really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the XDR is, what is it? It’s $6,000 with a stand, is that right? You really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s $4,500 better than the studio display?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, definitely not. But here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference. My option is I can just keep using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UltraFine, which is, I’m currently doing that. Keep using the UltraFine when I’m in this location and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just suck it up. That’s free. I spent this money in 2016. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, it’s free. No additional money here. So I can do this for free, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can spend $2,000 to get the exact same size monitor, which I now feel is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too small because I’m used to the XDR. So I can get $2,000 for a nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of this too small monitor, or I can just use this for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I can spend more down the road at some point and get something I actually really like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really like the XDR. everything I’ve heard from the studio display kind of sounds like, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comma, but. I don’t know, I wouldn’t say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than the LG. It is better than the LG, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it $2,000 better than the LG? Because the LG is sitting here for free right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, you don’t need it for speakers and certainly the camera’s garbage, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, early on it was a little rough. Like I had some audio playback issues, I was rebooting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco time to time. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had zero problems with the XDR. Never, not even a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. No, no, I understand that. I understand that, but now I can’t recall leaving aside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the garbage camera, which the XDR doesn’t even have one anyway. I haven’t really had any problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the studio display. And I gotta tell you, you know, another thing worth considering, although I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think ultimately you’re right, but I really, really like having my two-up 5K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup because I have my Ultrameh on my right-hand side I have the studio display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco My speakers are too big for that. That’s fair. You got a wider desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or why not just VESA mount the DMXD or the Ultramath? That would fix the stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would fix some of its shortcomings. That’s the thing. It’s like I don’t every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, I wouldn’t say chickened out, but like every time I’ve like overcompromised on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something for logic, instead of like following my feeling on something, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have almost always regretted it afterwards. And I don’t want to spend $2,000 on something that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will regret afterwards. I would rather either spend nothing and keep the crap I have now for free, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend more on the thing I actually want. Again, like, throughout life, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have done the compromise thing many times, and every single time I regret,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, damn it, why didn’t I either, you know, wait until I could afford the bigger one, or the better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, or whatever, or just stick with what I had? Like that’s so many times I’ve had that dilemma and made the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong decision. I can identify it and I see now it’s like, okay, the studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display, it’s nice, but it’s not nicer enough than the LG to be worth replacing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LG for my purposes right at the second. If I was using it every day, maybe it’d be different, but right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. And then the XDR is really nice. And I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s not an iOS computer in there that occasionally has weird bugs and has to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which again, isn’t really a thing anymore. Like literally, it literally is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John like- I have bad news for Marco. If there’s an XDR revision, you know it’s come with the stupid A13 inside it. I know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just, I’m also glad that I got in before they started adding the A-series
⏹️ ▶️ John chips to the thing or whatever. But it’s, I mean, my guess is a revised XDR will be created
⏹️ ▶️ John on, in the image of the studio display, just because, assuming they’re happy with that experience. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have crossed my fingers, have not had any problems with a studio display, but I know a lot of people have. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if, I would be interesting to hear from inside Apple, like how is the studio
⏹️ ▶️ John display viewed? Is like, they decided they were gonna make a studio display with smarts and they
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch, you know, we already have an OS and a chip and everything. Like we have that. It’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John the A-series chips. It’s called iOS. We already embedded in lots of little things. We have, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s inside our HomePods, inside our Apple TV. Why do we have to make a custom chip and put it in our monitor?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s use the A-series. We talked about this before. So now they did that. And from our perspective as consumers,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s had its ups and its downs. How does Apple think it has gone? Do they think this is a great model, we’re gonna use this for all our future
⏹️ ▶️ John displays? Or do they think, hmm, let’s regroup. Was this the right decision?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did we do the right thing here? Or do we regret this? Do we think that the
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR type approach is better where it’s just a bunch of whatever, custom chips
⏹️ ▶️ John in there just for monitor stuff. But compared to the studio display, the XDR is a quote unquote dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor. Not really, because obviously it’s got like a USB hub and some Thunderbolt thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts. There’s stuff in there. It’s not no chips in there, but it’s not, hey, this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John runs iOS and needs to be rebooted and have firmware updates. Although the XDR did have firmware updates,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe. It’s just not like with a progress bar in iOS, a new
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco version of iOS being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just looked at the article from the Verge that was in the show notes with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upcoming Samsung and Dell big monitors. Remember when those were announced? I think it’s CES.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about those, the hideous looking Dell thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, I just scrolled down and saw the Dell again for the first time since, I guess, January. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god, that thing is hideous. Oh, wow. I don’t care how much that costs. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather have the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It reminds me of
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV review things I watch. One of the channels I watch has this thing where they invite all
⏹️ ▶️ John the reviewers in to do a blind judging of all the televisions at the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of the year. And the way they make it blind is they have like this elaborate, you know, like stuff like taped, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, so you can only see the
⏹️ ▶️ John light up portion of the screen. So they try to hide the rest of it. So you can’t see any other portion of it. You couldn’t do that with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Dell. Cause it was like that lumping stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco camera thing
⏹️ ▶️ John could be bulging through. You’d be like, you’d be able to tell that’s the Dell. I can tell without even the screen being turned on. There’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ John you can hide it. Like the only reason the blind test works for TVs is they’re all so uniform now. It’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to hide the bezels and hide everything else in it. But the Dell is like, no, you cannot hide this ugly. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, like at least the Samsung 5K one that they’re doing, at least they ripped off the studio display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pretty closely. That’s Samsung for you. If you don’t, yeah, exactly. If you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good design chops, at least rip off someone else’s good design. Dell is like, nope, we’re great at this. We’re gonna do our own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, and then that comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But hey, the feature set on the Dell is something else. We talked about it before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, I mean, look, I don’t think we have a price for that yet, do we? But man, if that thing ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out, If that’s at all price competitive, it is going to be a pretty big deal. But oh,