558: Multilevel Pizza Oven
26 Oct 2023Another Apple Pencil (?!), a surprise Scary Fast announcement, and finding a Sonos oasis after years in the HomePod wilderness.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: ATP Membership changes
- Follow-up:
- Rivian sounds are based on nature
- Updating iPhones in-box
- iPhones can be charged through the existing retail box
- What if the update is downloaded, but not applied?
- Relevant Apple patent?
- On M2 vs. M1 Efficiency (via Jonathan Dietz, Jr.)
- iTunes Match, Apple Music, and DRM
- It’s all Panzer’s fault
- Apple Music gives you iTunes Match, DRM-free (via Sylvan Germer)
- Getting music onto an iOS device without a computer
- Custom ringtones (via tact)
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGEDrumbles on
- Apple Pencil (USB-C)
- October event
- Everyone talks about their Sonos experiences (this is not #sponcon)
- Roam (aka John’s Toblerone)
- Amp
- Sub (Gen 3)
- One
- Era 100
- Era 300
- Move
- Five
- Move 2
- Giancarlo Esposito
- Sonos Voice Control Capabilities
- Post-show: ATP membership changes
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Chapters
- Membership updates, briefly
- Follow-up: 20k on Rivian SFX
- In-box iPhone software updates
- M2 is more efficient than M1
- iTunes Match and DRM follow-up
- Adding music to iOS
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
- Sponsor: AdBlock Pro
- Now we have three Pencils
- Scary Fast event next week 🖼️
- N3B (A17 Pro), N3E (M3?) 🖼️
- Sponsor: Notion
- Marco’s Sonos journey 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Membership updates, less-briefly
Membership updates, briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have to talk about the ATP membership and pricing. And I really wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple did not raise their prices on the day that we’re talking about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, you know, there’s something, something headwinds. So we have some pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey updates to talk about for ATP membership. John, can you give us like the bullet points at the very least? Maybe we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk longer later on.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should actually talk about foreign currency exchange rates. Like we know. What kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Foreign currency
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange rates, they affect us because we do accept memberships in different currencies. And anyway, Oscar
⏹️ ▶️ John winning performance, Casey. Very
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So we do have some
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP membership changes to announce. We’re going to ask them briefly, just the bullet points. For now, we will talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about them more in the after show if you care about that type of stuff. If not, here’s the deal. ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John membership, if you buy an entire year’s worth of membership, the price is decreasing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, if you buy a whole year, you get a discount that’s equivalent to getting one month free. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we did this all wrong. We’re supposed to be raising prices, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John be increasing prices to match inflation. I don’t know why we’re not doing that, but we’re not. If you are an
⏹️ ▶️ John existing annual member, don’t worry. Your subscription will renew at the new lower rate. There’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Second item,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a membership FAQ or FAQ, depending on how you want to pronounce it. It’s a link will be in the show notes. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John at the FM membership slash FAQ. And it hopefully answers a bunch of questions
⏹️ ▶️ John you might have about membership. And if you have other questions, send them to us and I’ll add them to the FAQ. And then the final thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is the weirdest thing, and again, we’ll talk about it more on the after show, but not now, as part of our recent survey
⏹️ ▶️ John of listeners about membership stuff, we got some feedback where some
⏹️ ▶️ John people, not many people, but some people said they wished there was a way they could
⏹️ ▶️ John pay us more money for membership. I don’t think Apple got a lot of those things about Apple TV+, but we got them
⏹️ ▶️ John about our program. And so we figured that’s a thing that we should do.
⏹️ ▶️ John we now have a way for people who want to, to pay more than list price for ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John membership. We will provide a link in the show notes And of course, it is described in the FAQ.
Follow-up: 20k on Rivian SFX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We gotta start with some follow-up as always, and the entire internet wrote to tell us about something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually already knew. I was very excited that I was first to report this in. One of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really favorite podcasts is 20,000 Hertz. You can sort of kind of think of it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 99% invisible, but specifically around audio and audio-related things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was literally the day after we recorded, or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the day after we released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week, Dallas Taylor and team did an episode called Auto Tone, which I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a play on auto tune, which is all about automotive noises and things like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t you guess what did they feature prominently in the episode, but Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sure enough, the Rivian sound engineers or whatever we’re supposed to call them said, yep, they are based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on nature. Just as I think John had, had theorized last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John episode. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John theorize. I was just telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John I heard this from the Rivian people for many years. I mean, as you would imagine, the PR push for their electric trucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been talking about this a lot. But yeah, I listened to the episode as well. So I’ll link it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s genuinely really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, you know, first of all, I love the show. It’s a great show. This is a great episode. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a new Rivian owner and a sound nerd, I can tell you, they have twisted and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turned these sounds so far from the natural sounds. Like, listen to the episode. They’ll play you like, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it was based on. Here’s a wolf howling or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was weird that you were saying like, oh, it doesn’t sound like nature sounds to me but like I think the the one that sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John a bird chirp yes it’s it’s messed up as you’ll hear in the episode like it’s pitched up or whatever but it still sounds like a bird
⏹️ ▶️ John chirp like are you not getting that I don’t know it’s going over your head
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that sound I never hear I’m just talking about like the whirring sound and the turn signals those are the ones I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear it does sound very nice I I really enjoy the sound design of Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s like well we started with this owl noise and then we stretched it and pitched it down and added this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco river and tweaked it up. And like, when you hear in on the episode, they’re like, here’s the sounds we started with. And then you hear the final
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound. You’re like, there is no part of that that sounds like an owl. Like, you just got to
⏹️ ▶️ John feel, you just got to feel the nature. It’s in there. Yeah. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So anyway, that’s the deal. Rivian confirmed sounds are at least nature inspired,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not nature-like. So here we are.
In-box iPhone software updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a lot of feedback many of which was quite inter many pieces of feedback were quite interesting with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to this whole Updating iPhones while they’re still in the box and a lot of this was anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we have a couple of people that we can cite Ryan Eminecker writes I tried a quick experiment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to charge my iPhone 14 Pro Max through the original packaging the 14 The 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 14 lines packaging did have the back of the phone facing up It didn’t work with a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey puck, but it did work with two large multi-device charging pads And I don’t I don’t think Ryan was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only one to try this and I don’t have any other examples in front of me But I feel like at least a couple of people said yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it might take a little bit of effort But it definitely does work as is which is kind of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes what Apple is most likely to do is just stage the updated software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the device Which would mean transferring the installation image and having the onboard firmware verify its integrity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then, once the customer unboxes the device and turns it on, it will perform the rest of the installation process. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the device arrives without enough battery juice for this process, the firmware could prompt the user to plug it in before finishing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the installation. This is one of those things that as soon as I read this, I was like, oh, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that didn’t even cross my mind, but it makes perfect sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I heard that, I thought, no way. Cause like, it’s like, that doesn’t really, that only half solves the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if the problem is these phones take too long to set up in first run, Like, it’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really be that huge of a time savings if they’re only going to download the installation image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not actually install it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And based on the first feedback, the whole idea is if you can charge it when it’s in the box, you don’t have to do this staging thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s an interesting solution if you’re like, well, we can’t figure out a good way to charge them while they’re in the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we can. They probably have enough juice that we can just shove the image on there. That would shave some time off, but it seems like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get electricity through to them, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have to do it this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like most of our speculation last time in discussion based on, we were I think assuming that they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t get enough charging power to them, but with all this information and experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have done in the meantime, it turns out, yeah, actually it seems like they have plenty of power available. They can charge through the box, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. They don’t even need to change the packaging from where it is now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Different anonymous person writes, I work in an Apple store. Updating iPhones in the box would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really useful for the setup process. If a customer uses iCloud and their existing iPhone is an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version that’s newer than what’s in the box, An update has to be performed before they can restore. This extends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their stay and their frustration. If 20 minutes can be shaved off anywhere, that’s a huge plus. Yeah, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That to me, you know, when we, when we were, again, we speculating about, about this, we were saying like, how could this possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in the stores? It seemed like it would be, you know, not enough volume, uh, or not, not, not enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity to deal with the volume and everything, what would this possibly be worth, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the part that I, I w I was not thinking of because when I I buy new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones, I don’t do in-store setup. A lot of people do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you can imagine, and you see this, like if you’ve ever been to an Apple store on launch day, a huge part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what’s going on in the store is just massive quantities of in-store setups,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as, you know, anywhere there’s a table and an employee, there’s somebody doing an in-store setup. And it’s a huge bottleneck, because it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time. And so anything they can do to speed up in-store setup times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually is a pretty strong incentive for them to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think, remember last time when I got, like, my camera was bad and I got a replacement iPhone and I had to sit there in the store because
⏹️ ▶️ John at that time Google Authenticator didn’t sync, right, so I had to manually transfer all my Google Authenticator
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff? I think I was there, go back and listen to the old episode, was it two hours or three hours or something? It was a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge amount of time because as you can imagine, my phone is chock full of stuff and I had to run an OS
⏹️ ▶️ John update from the one that, you know, the new one they gave me. So, I mean, 20 minutes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John 20 minutes being saved would be great, but like, it’s not like you’re taking it from, you know, 40 minutes to 20 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was there for hours. So yeah, please, anything to make this shorter. And you know, obviously this is not something I
⏹️ ▶️ John normally do. I don’t set up in the store, but I had to in this case, so they wouldn’t let me leave with the new phone without giving them my old one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do see it as a common experience, but especially on, you know, iPhone launch week or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Another anonymous person writes, your recent episode triggered my memory of an old Apple patent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey application. It was about charging and transferring data to devices while still in the packaging in the retail stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I read the, or I skimmed the actual patent application
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I didn’t look closely at the date and it was very weird because I’m looking at this and first of all, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diagrams all have home buttons in them, secondly, they’re talking about like USB connections and like wired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network connections and all sorts of wired this and wired that. I’m like, what is going on? Turns out it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from December 12 of 2011, so 12 years ago. And that explains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why all this text seems so old. But nevertheless, a US patent application for active electronic media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device packaging. And again, we’ll put a link in the show notes. A couple of poll quotes from here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The active packaging may provide power data or both power and data to one or more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electronic media devices housed within the packaging. The data signal may include promotional information,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, advertising or media content, for example, digital audio or video content for presentation on the electronic media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device while inside the active packaging. The data signal may also include firmware or software updates, bug fixes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or application customizations to be applied to the electronic media device. That’s fun because
⏹️ ▶️ John this bit, you know, it’s an old patent and obviously companies patent everything. It doesn’t mean they’re ever going to make them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this patent was not just, hey, we can do updates or charge them while they’re in the box. The idea with this is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be able to see the thing in the device and through the active packaging,
⏹️ ▶️ John put in like video signals basically, you know, advertising or things. They’re not going to run ads. It would be
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, you know, what do they call it? A track screens on a video game thing, showing like Apple advertisement
⏹️ ▶️ John or like the screen savers on some of the Macs in the stores. You know what I mean? Obviously they never did this,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But it’s not just, yes, we can do software updates and bug fixes, which is what we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also it would make the packaging, like we could have the phones in the box and they’d be playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a little video telling you how great the iPhone is. That definitely does not fit with Apple’s current,
⏹️ ▶️ John or not current, Apple’s years long move to make the packaging smaller and simpler and made of more recyclable
⏹️ ▶️ John material. So back in 2011, someone thought this was a good enough idea to patent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple other interesting bits that I read. The encasing may allow for at least the display portion of the electronic media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device be viewed from outside of the encasing. This is what John was describing. The backing may be printed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in molded with one or more wire traces to supply power, ground and data to the device. So they’re talking about actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having wiring within the packaging, which is kind of funny. And then finally, in some embodiments, the wire traces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are routed to the appropriate pins connectors on the electronic media device through the hooks or clasps that hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the device onto the backing. For example, one hook or connector may interface with a dock connector interface on the electronic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey media device. So this was talking about how do you hook the iPhone or what have you into the box. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re saying, oh, well, the physical thing that hooks the iPhone into the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might also provide the data or power or both, which I thought was quite fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is all pre-MagSafe, pre-ubiquitous wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John power and data and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar idea. Yet another anonymous person writes, I was an Apple employee for nearly eight years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I remember how much of an operations headache it was to have hardware tied to its corresponding software RC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Millions of iPhones have to be manufactured only to be stored on the side, waiting for the RC, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is release candidate in this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right? Release
⏹️ ▶️ John candidate of the operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. From Cupertino to be delivered. Once signed off, there’s a gargantuan effort to flash all these devices, box them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ship them all over the world. If the RC turns out to contain a late ship stopper, all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones need to be unboxed, reflashed, and reboxed, which is an utter catastrophe as far as ops are concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve personally attended a meeting where one of these bugs was discussed. The estimated cost of halting production, unboxing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflashing, and reboxing millions of iPhones at this stage was mentioned by someone in the know. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was mind boggling. Operations would like nothing more than to completely eliminate this risk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is well worth the cost of designing such a system and having every Apple store in the world follow a hopefully simple process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the iPhone goes on sale. Moreover, software teams would also appreciate such a system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would remove a huge weight off their shoulders and allow them to deliver the release candidate with a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more flexibility if the need arises.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is something people usually don’t think about. Like, they think like, oh, if there was a bug, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John phones haven’t shipped yet. So they’ll just put the new bug fix version on all the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess they imagine there’s some magic robot or something that does that. or like, but it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the bottom, like someone has to take those phones and connect them to something
⏹️ ▶️ John to, and then wait for the thing to put the new OS on it. And that can be automated a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, but especially if you’ve already got them all boxed up and sealed up and you thought they were gonna be ready
⏹️ ▶️ John to ship and you have to unbox them and then reseal them without making it look like every
⏹️ ▶️ John single new iPhone is basically used at this point. So you can, it’s not like you can just do it in a haphazard way. It has to be done carefully.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I love the idea of they manufacture millions of phones and they’re just sitting in big piles somewhere, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t put them in boxes yet because they don’t have an OS on them because the software isn’t done.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s always the way with these things. You’re always waiting for the software. So yeah, it seems like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as ridiculous as this idea sounds, there are lots of parts of the organization that would love for
⏹️ ▶️ John this to be a thing. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, an anonymous Apple retail person writes, the pad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like a multi-level pizza oven that can accommodate multiple devices at a time. It charges devices while updating software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are super excited about this innovation as it makes the experience much better for those excited to get started with their new device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are most excited about the charging capabilities, especially with all the SKUs for watches. If you buy a watch and it’s dead in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the box, it can take up to 40 minutes on a charger before it even turns on, causing skepticism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the watch will even work in the long run. To be clear, it will support new phones first, then watch, an iPad, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully, eventually, Genius Bar service parts, like when you swap a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, see, if this is true, if this is actually what this thing is, like the multi-level pizza oven thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to all these different small products that they have, that makes this make a lot more sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why I’m choosing to believe this anonymous report, because with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco final details of what form it is and how it would work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it both plausible and very sensible and kind of impressive to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, because I was concerned last episode about like, again, can they handle the volume? How many iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and watches does a single store sell in a day? It’s I think it’s a lot, but if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can have these like, you know, stacked things that can do a whole bunch of these things at once that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts to become plausible and and it does seem like there’s pretty good reasons from the stores perspective to
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s five anonymous bits bits of feedback in a row that may be a record. I mean, obviously we pick which ones go
⏹️ ▶️ John in here, but yeah, a lot of people didn’t want to go in the record. A lot of anonymous feedback here, but yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John also choosing to believe that bottom one because the original source of this rumor was fairly reliable and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that has been said so far sounds at least plausible to me. And the idea that if the watch is dead in the box, it takes 40 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John on a charger. You know some Apple retail employees like has had this conversation where the person’s looking at them saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John do I really want this watch? It seems like it’s a dud. Am I getting a lemon? Is it supposed to be this way? we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John all kind of experienced this sometimes, like an iPad or whatever that’s totally drained, Marco in a drawer,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco drained its battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John And how long does it have to be plugged in before it will like boot the OS? Right, you think it would boot immediately because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what laptops would do. You plug them in and they’ll boot immediately. Nope, not a battery powered device like an iPad or something because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to be ready for you to yank the cord at a moment’s notice. I guess in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop does. But anyway, it’s having to wait for 40 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John while the Apple store employee, you know, assures you this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a working product. This is normal, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I swear, it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. That’s terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the first time it’s ever happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder too, like, if this actually might occasionally cause returns for Apple Watches, that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system will like reduce the number of watch returns they get. Because if somebody gets an Apple Watch home, they don’t do the in-store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup, and they get it home and they plug it in and it doesn’t work for 40 minutes, maybe they give up and bring it back to the store. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very well could be.
M2 is more efficient than M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on from that, M2 versus M1 efficiency. Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at any point where their power curves overlap, the M2 delivers higher performance than the M1. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means the M2 is more efficient. Given the same fixed workload, the M2 will always finish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in less time, use less power, and dissipate less heat than the M1. The M2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has two additional GPU cores and a more dynamic power envelope than the M1. This means peak power consumption is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed higher for the M2 than the M1. This does not alter the statements of the previous paragraph in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It simply means that if you push an M2 to its limit, it can do considerably more work in the same fixed time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey period by using more power and dissipating more heat than the M1 is capable of. Anand Shimpi, the founder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Anand Tech, who joined Apple’s hardware technologies team back in 2014, made an appearance on Andrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edwards’ YouTube show and explained the dynamic power situation with the M2 generation. We will, of course, put a link
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Jonathan Zietz defending the honor of the M2. He says, yes, it uses more power and gets hotter, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does more stuff than the M1 in the same amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John given a fixed workload. Yes, that is true. I would say that the M1 is more efficient than the M2, but
⏹️ ▶️ John really what we’re saying is it gets less hot, but it also does less stuff. So let’s be fair to the M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I still think the M1 is the more impressive piece of technology than the M2, but that’s just because the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John came before the M2 install a lot of his thunder.
iTunes Match and DRM follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, can you give me some context behind iTunes Match, Apple Music, and DRM, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about it last week, and I had tried my best to describe what the caveats
⏹️ ▶️ John are. If you had iTunes Match and you cancel and you just have Apple Music when you’re done, what does that mean for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was mostly going off a very recent Threads post by Matthew Panzarino
⏹️ ▶️ John that seemed authoritative, and he has good sources, so I basically just said what he said. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out that Sylvan Germer says that wasn’t entirely true regarding DRM on
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes Match versus Apple Music. Since 2017, Apple Music has also been providing DRM-free
⏹️ ▶️ John access to songs you have in your personal library. And we’ll put a link to an iMore article from, I guess, 2017
⏹️ ▶️ John describing Apple rolling this out. So the difference that I had said that Matthew said last week was
⏹️ ▶️ John if iTunes Match is your song and you have iTunes Match, you will get a DRM-free version of it if you
⏹️ ▶️ John download it on some other device. If you just have Apple music, you would download the DRM version and I think that was true at
⏹️ ▶️ John one point But apparently not true now Well, nothing I want to clarify that people were asking about is what if I have
⏹️ ▶️ John something in my iTunes library But iTunes can’t match it because iTunes doesn’t have it some obscure thing. They just don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah Then you’ll get Essentially your file because what else could they give you like whatever your file was they got uploaded and synced
⏹️ ▶️ John into your library from? You know, whatever thing that you ripped it from that Apple has never heard of you will get that file
⏹️ ▶️ John back down But if they can match it, that’s where the question comes in if they match it, will they give me their
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the file? And will that version have DRAM or not? So apparently you
⏹️ ▶️ John are, I haven’t actually tested this, but these are the two warring theories. Matthew Panzerino
⏹️ ▶️ John versus Sylvan Grimmer.
Adding music to iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Tact writes, regarding the Ask ATP question about adding music to an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device without a Mac or PC, I went through the same struggle trying to add custom ringtones to my iPhone. I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it so frustrating that I wrote up a blog post half for myself as documentation and half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoping it would save someone else a week of searching. I quickly read through this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it is something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is utterly nuts. And it involves a lot of tapping about in GarageBand, which is not where I
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple really needs a better solution to this. Like I really wish they would sort of rationalize their whole music situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but talk about something with historical baggage. Just that whole thing has so much
⏹️ ▶️ John baggage from so many years. I mean, there’s been a bunch of articles going around this week about the sun setting of the iTunes brand
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fact that iTunes still exists for Windows, although they’re breaking that up too. And the iTunes store would be going away and folding
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff into the existing, you know, TV app and everything like this. Just there’s just so much baggage
⏹️ ▶️ John there and they’re still trying to rationalize it. For a while we were talking about they were going to break up iTunes on the Mac and split
⏹️ ▶️ John it into its separate apps and they did that and it’s still cumbersome and confusing. And a part
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is the fault of Apple Music. Apple Music was kind of a chance to rationalize all of this but
⏹️ ▶️ John that chance was only partially realized. ways to go.
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then, John, your favorite, well, one of your favorite bugs of late,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still a thing. Tell me about error network changed, please. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a Chrome or the Chromium web browser engine pitching a fit with
⏹️ ▶️ John its net double colon or underscore network underscore changed error that appears
⏹️ ▶️ John when it thinks something has changed about the network and then it kills all outstanding HTTP requests, which really
⏹️ ▶️ John ruins your day. I had said that I thought this was happening because I was running Docker.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have gotten some additional feedback from people that are not running Docker and it’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ John to them as well. So here’s the Jesus fish saying, I have the same issue from Chrome. Mine stems from
⏹️ ▶️ John being connected to Pi VPN. If I’m connected to the Pi VPN, Chrome will throw error network
⏹️ ▶️ John change constantly, even though it’s not changing. It’s not just Docker, Chromium is just overly sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John to network stuff. It drives me up the wall. A fellow named Steven Hackett sent
⏹️ ▶️ John a screenshot, which is of Discord, the app which uses Electron
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever under the covers, saying a JavaScript error occurred in the main process, uncaught exception, error,
⏹️ ▶️ John net, error, net, error network changed, at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anything that uses the Chromium browser engine under the covers is apparently susceptible to this error network change. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you might not think of Discord, you say, I don’t use Chrome, but do you use Discord? Well, then you’re susceptible to it too. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Stephen Hackett was also not running Docker when he did this. final bit here from Mort.
⏹️ ▶️ John That Chrome or network change issue is so damn annoying. We had an embedded Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John computer running Chromium in kiosk mode for the UI with a local web server. We got bug reports from
⏹️ ▶️ John users where Chromium and randomly failed to load the HTML from local host because the 4G connected
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Wi-Fi disconnected. It’s the most puzzling engineering decision for our browser engine. We eventually replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromium with native code for many reasons, but this was absolutely among them. So that’s Chromium loading
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff from local host. I mean, I don’t know if they were loading it off the local disk or connecting to the local host network
⏹️ ▶️ John interface, but again, this does not seem like socially acceptable behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey browser engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what is it about the network that’s changing that’s upsetting it? I mean, maybe, you know, when
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was Docker, because maybe it was just a timing coincidence, when I thought it was Docker, I’m like, okay, well, Docker does weird stuff with networking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, like, whatever, this is an edge case. But so many people are reporting, they’re not running Docker, they don’t even know what
⏹️ ▶️ John Docker is, and they have this problem. And in fact, I stopped running Docker here And I see the error too,
⏹️ ▶️ John not as much, but I have seen the error when not running Docker and not running the engine, not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t know. So here’s the thing. So what is it then? I’m still tracking this down and
⏹️ ▶️ John my typical years long bug hunting things. I think it mostly started
⏹️ ▶️ John happening around Sonoma, but this is one of those things where I’m just trying to go based on my memory. Like maybe this was happening before
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t notice. And then when I ran Docker, I noticed it more because I was looking at the JavaScript console.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m here to say that this error network change thing is real,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a Chrome slash Chromium thing, it is affecting people who don’t run Docker to varying degrees,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has been around for apparently years based on you know the the stuff that we read last week. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John they fix this because again even if you don’t run Chrome you’re like I don’t run any of that stuff you might run an Electron app that uses
⏹️ ▶️ John the same engine under the covers and it could be dying for the same reason. And like I said when this error occurs it kills
⏹️ ▶️ John the outstanding connections and unless the application is very resilient against that it can get angry and throw up
⏹️ ▶️ John scary error dialogues and just fail to work and there’s seemingly nothing you can do about it. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John so many solutions by the way since last week I’ve been like disable ipv6 enable it disable ipv4
⏹️ ▶️ John enable it enable wi-fi disable wi-fi like just everything that you could possibly imagine you know change your
⏹️ ▶️ John dns uh dump the if config to see if the network really is changing like so many different commands
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a bunch of commands that i’d never even heard of that someone was sending me to try to debug the problem eventually they exhausted
⏹️ ▶️ John their their ideas and said they couldn’t figure it out either. Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoever chromium people like just be like Safari. Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t get upset when apparently the network changes. It just keeps doing its job. How about you do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is having read the the bug reports before we recorded last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. This seems like one of those things where if you take a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers like purely academic view of the world. I slightly understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the, what the Chromium developers are saying, Hey, you know, something happened with the network. It changed. You know, we,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we don’t know what the state of the world is now. Maybe we should tell the user and do something about it, which again, like academically or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the surface. Okay. I mean, I, I’m not sure I agree, but I can understand that. But the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think about this bug pragmatically, it is so clearly completely freaking busted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s, this is like the most frustrating kind of developer to to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when, and all of us do this at some time or another. So we’re all guilty, myself included,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but when somebody is too focused on the, what is the way things should work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than what is the way things actually do work or in this case don’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know if you’re a younger developer, this is perhaps a lesson for you because it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frustrating to users. And if users are frustrating, I are frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess you could try to educate the users and explain to the users how they’re wrong. But in my experience, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t often end well. So you should probably think about meeting the users where they are and just fixing the darn
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see, the thing is that we don’t actually know what the cause of this, like if it is Sonoma related, it’s the type of thing, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to talk to Apple and say, hey, did something change in Sonoma where something that we detect as a network change
⏹️ ▶️ John is happening much more often? Like, you know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John looked in the Mac OS console, there’s so much stuff going on there. And one of the, it’s kind of like a medical student disease
⏹️ ▶️ John and you learn about all the different things that can go wrong with the human body, you start thinking you have all of them. If you ever look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS console and you see all the lines that are going in there, you’ll believe that whatever line jumps out at you, like that must be my
⏹️ ▶️ John problem because I don’t know what that is and it looks weird to me. So like, this is what happens. You have a problem with your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you go to console, you see just so many messages and you latch onto one of them that you think is like, that
⏹️ ▶️ John one looks funny. That seems like it’s probably causing my thing. And you get obsessed with whatever that message is. And that message
⏹️ ▶️ John may be totally unrelated and totally benign, but you don’t know, You’re just looking for a cause. And so there are a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John those that, you know, that I’ve looked at and chased down to say, is this related to it? It’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to say. But anyway, if something has changed in macOS, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the Chromium people,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m not saying it’s like something that they need to fix. They’re like, well, it worked before, now it’s not working. That’s not our problem. Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John stop changing the network, right? But maybe the thing they’re looking for to detect network changes
⏹️ ▶️ John is not what they should be looking at. It’s like, well, you know, what is the intent? Are you supposed to look, Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John only care if like the default route changed? If that’s the case, you should be looking here and not there because in Sonoma
⏹️ ▶️ John X and Y change, right? So it’s not even clear where the bug is, but you’ll never find out where the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John is if you don’t investigate it and you just think, well, this is just an edge case and yes, it’s happening to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but tough luck, it’s the only sane thing we can do when the network change. But if suddenly people can’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John your product and there’s no workaround because requests, you know, 50% of your requests fail,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a problem that you need to get to the bottom of, even if it’s not, quote unquote, your fault.
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Now we have three Pencils
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So since we recorded, uh, some things have happened. No, Apple did not buy Nintendo, not this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, but they did release a third Apple pencil. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, what the hell is going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the best thing about the new Apple pencil is that it appears to replace either of the existing pencils.
⏹️ ▶️ John of their capabilities. Yeah. I very careful distinction there. Third Apple pencil, not Apple pencil three.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, because the rumors were Apple Pencil 3 is coming, but what we got instead was a third Apple Pencil and its place
⏹️ ▶️ John in the line, despite the feature set, which we’ll discuss in a moment, its place in the line is clear. It’s the cheapest.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s $79 and the Apple Pencil first generation is 99 and the Apple Pencil second generation
⏹️ ▶️ John is 130. So this is the cheapest pencil, but it is not the Apple Pencil 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, or the Apple Pencil third generation. No, instead it’s called Apple Pencil USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Such a good name. Which makes perfect sense because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s got USB-C. But the other, but the Apple Pencil second generation works with all USB-C iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it does not have USB-C. I know. This is all very confusing. Oh, and the Apple Pencil first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation has a, an adapter that you can use with the new USB-C 10th generation iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this, this, this Apple Pencil is the perfect Apple Pencil for the current iPad product line
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John as confusing as the product line. It fits right in. It is an absolute mess. So this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, this, this cheapest Apple Pencil doesn’t have pressure sensitivity, wireless pairing
⏹️ ▶️ John or charging, double tap to change tools, which is so weird. Is the accelerometer that expensive? But anyway, no double
⏹️ ▶️ John tap and also no free engraving. That just seems punitive. How much?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco little laser.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can’t get Casey Apple pencil put on it, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco does have hover
⏹️ ▶️ John support. Deep cut. It does have hover support. And, you know, and the compatibility matrix
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, so, okay, if you have an Apple pencil, this should be a question. If we had like a quiz show, like asking
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple pundits who like follow the company tell me what the Apple Pencil 2 is compatible with. It’s like they
⏹️ ▶️ John would not get this grid. So the Apple Pencil 2 works with iPad Air, iPad Mini, and iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple Pencil USB-C works with all iPad models with a USB-C port, and the Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John 1 works with iPad 10, iPad, and iPad 9, and a USB-C to Apple Pencil adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John is needed for pairing and charging with the iPad 10, but it’s included in the box. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And iPad 10 and iPad 9 are both still for sale, so that’s why they have to clarify. I mean this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been a lot of good stuff said about this I upgrade this week was very good on this but good for them for making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pencil that is cheaper and more people buy I guess but this I mean you look at the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad lineup and like this pencil is just a microcosm of the entire lineup where like you know they currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell six different iPads four of which are about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same size but not quite they have wildly different like details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and capabilities between them, it is a really weird and messy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product line. They have been updated from all different times of updating, have all different accessories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work with each of them because they’re all subtly different sizes. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these different exceptions. Well, this one has this, but this one has this, this one doesn’t have this, even though this one’s new, or this one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it is a confusing mess. Meanwhile, they seem to be slated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go all of 2023 without releasing a single new iPad of any line. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad’s in a really weird place hardware wise right now. And it’s not necessarily because the hardware is bad, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contrary, most of it’s actually very good. It’s just like, it’s a weird place in terms of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when are updates happening? What has been half updated?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What certain features have come to some of them that like some of the best features are on some of the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end models. The iPad Pro, the highest end model, hasn’t been really touched in a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are still selling both the 9th gen and 10th gen low end iPad, both called iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re both about the same size, but both very different machines. The low end iPad that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still selling still has not only a lightning port, which on the iPad is pretty old now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has a home button, and the old screen shape, and the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case shape. The whole thing, the whole lineup is just a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Different parts of it seem like the people who make different iPad hardware decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t talk to each other. Like, and I know that probably isn’t the case, but that’s how it looks because everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in, like, certain ones, like, like the, the 10th gen iPad, which is the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the, the current generation cheap one, even though it is not the cheapest one, because they’re still selling the old cheapest one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it wasn’t, the cheapest one wasn’t cheapest enough. So the current, the 10th gen cheap iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some of the best features in terms of like it moves the camera to the side, but they move the camera to the side and that means it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t charge a pencil over there, which is part of the reason this new pencil has to exist. Well, why wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a new pencil designed with that in mind? Like I just, oh my God, there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it just seems like one hand’s not talking to the other here. In the entire iPad hardware lineup, one hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not talking to the other. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’ve learned from the Apple Pencil, by the way, it’s not like they’ve learned nothing because like the Apple Pencil 2 learned a lot from
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Pencil 1. No more cap that you can lose, no more sticking it in the port magnetically. Like the Apple Pencil 2
⏹️ ▶️ John was just a clean win. We saw that came out, it’s like, great, you learned from the Apple Pencil 1, you made a better pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody loved it, no more ports, beautiful device, has lots of cool features, sticks to the side of your iPad Pro, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was then new at the time, thumbs up. This new one, I mean, obviously it’s the low-end one, so it’s not gonna be super
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy, that’s fine. It learned some stuff, no more cap that you can lose. This one instead has a little slidey-uppy thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t come off, hopefully. But underneath the slidey-uppy thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is a sideways USB port. So you spear this thing kind of like the mouse to
⏹️ ▶️ John charge it. And why does it need to have a port? Well, because it doesn’t charge magnetically despite the fact that I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John it does have magnets inside and it does have flat sides and does to attach to the iPad, but it doesn’t charge or pair
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. It is just a physical connection type thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying this is the wrong feature set of the wrong price like balance. And by the way, this new Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the same size as either of the existing pencils, because of course it’s not. Why would it be the same size? That’s madness.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like 7% shorter or something than the Apple Pencil second generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they’re not talking to each other or if this is just fallout from the edict that you must never
⏹️ ▶️ John make a new product when you can conceivably continue selling the old one, which is why the Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John first generation is still hanging around. They still kept making products that not only used it, but required
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You know, it’s like, well, we already have that. We already paid for those machines. We already know how to make this thing. Like, it’s cheaper to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why wipe the slate clean and upgrade everybody to Apple Pencil second generation? Maybe Apple Pencil second generation is very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s, you know, it’s, it costs more to manufacture. I don’t know. It’s just, there doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a coherent division. Or if there is a coherent division, their schedule got messed with really badly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, maybe they wanted these all to come out at the same time. I mean, this, this Pencil to the Game come out at the same time as the, the iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is the best match for. You know what I mean? But let alone like
⏹️ ▶️ John fixing the whole line. So anyway, we’ll be watching for this. I don’t think it’s terrible that the iPad line is updated and parallel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think there’s so many transitions going on. The transition to USB-C, which as you noted, Marco, is still not over in
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad line, despite going on for years now. The transition from the round pencil to the flat, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is still not over because they’re still selling the round one, but at least this one is also flat. The transition
⏹️ ▶️ John away from the home button, also still not over. Like there’s just kind of this long, slow motion.
⏹️ ▶️ John we see the finish line, we see like, they’ll all have flat sides, they’ll all have magnetically attached pencil where they charge and pair with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll all have the camera and the landscape orientation, like we’ll get there eventually. And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to progress. Like, if we ever get to a homogenous line, still probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John pros will be the first and only ones with the OLED screens for a long time because they’re expensive, right? So it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John we expect them to always be exactly the same, because why would you have to have some differentiation? But we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gone beyond differentiation and now it’s just like this long trail of
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware history that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continues to sell. It’s just remarkable. I mean, the Apple Pencil 2 came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the 2018 iPad Pro five years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it was good. And we liked it. Yes, it was great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still good. And yet today, they had to introduce another pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Apple Pencil 2, which we still need, is not still compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all the iPads in the lineup, five years later. That’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what they need, obviously, is a much simpler iPad lineup in a large sense, on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of different levels. You should be able to go to an Apple store and there should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a consistent line of iPads of different sizes and capabilities. And look, yeah, you’re right, differentiate on like screen size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on screen type, you know, OLED, you know, HDR versus non-HDR, fine. That, those are all easy things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to differentiate on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the SoC and RAM and all the normal stuff that you, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that’s all fine. They should all have the same port on the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They should all be a small number of total sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There should only be a very small number of keyboards and pencils that should work with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them. Ideally, the number is like, you know, one keyboard per screen size and one pencil total across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole lineup. That’s ideal. If they really have to have these like differentiated features for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pencil for cost reasons, have a pencil and a pencil pro and that’s it. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this life, God, it’s so far from that right now. I’m, I’m hoping, you know, again, there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there have been no new iPads in all of 2023 so far and there seem like they’re not going to be. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that its own oddity. Uh, but I mean, geez, can you, who, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were you guys in a minute? Can you imagine telling us of a couple of years ago during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the bad days of the Mac telling us that in 2023 there would be zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads released but possibly two generations of MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not have believed you
⏹️ ▶️ John zero chance. You know, you mentioned like having a pencil and a pencil pro like if they did this right and at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to have to come out with the Apple pencil third generation because apparently the Apple pencil two is not going to work with landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John camera due to the way they arrange stuff. So you know bad on them for not thinking of that in 2018 but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had a pencil on a pencil pro, ideally, both those pencils
⏹️ ▶️ John would work with every single iPad. You just, you know, the pro would have more features, it would have the pressure sensitivity, it would have whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the pro pencil would be better, but it’s not like, oh, well, you have an iPad pro, you can’t use the non-pro pencil and vice
⏹️ ▶️ John versa. No, all the pencils should work with all the things. It’s just what’s inside the pencil is fancier if you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the good one. Imagine, imagine that world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This whole world is such a mess. And it’s so unnecessary. Like again, hopefully this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transitional. Hopefully we’re nearing the end of this massive, weird number of transitions in the iPad lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if it took, if we’re five years into the Pencil 2 and it still doesn’t work with everything, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like look at the iPad lineup. They obviously don’t care about consistency or simplicity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything. It’s kind of hard to tell what they do care about with the iPad hardware choices across the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this looks like a Samsung lineup. It looks like spray and pray. Like it looks ridiculous, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And except that Samsung will at least keep them up to date.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least the iPad operating system situation is well sorted out, right? Oh God. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t feel like we need to belabor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this any further. It’s just too bad because the iPad hardware, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve said this a thousand times, the iPad hardware is so good in general, but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strewn in so many different directions. And we don’t need to open the software can worms one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more time, but. Yeah, I don’t use my iPad heavily and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t use it for particularly computationally intensive things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do still really like my iPad. It’s one of those things where if you asked me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make like a pros and cons list or like, you know, charts about why I like it, I don’t know that I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or do a convincing job of explaining why I like it, but I really do. I really do like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that iPad available to me. And yet, I just, I feel like this is such a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know, they talked a lot on Upgrade about how this is, I think in no small part, an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after effect of Apple’s penchant, or however you pronounce the word, their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love of keeping old stuff around in order to make it cheaper. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your cheaper stuff. Rather than bespoke cheap things, it’s just old things that they can now make cheaply. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that eventually can lead you to this situation, and it’s a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, unlike the laptops before, like you mentioned, you like your iPad. I like my iPad too. That’s the thing about the
⏹️ ▶️ John line. I think the individual products are probably well-liked by the people that buy them. This is not the same problem as when
⏹️ ▶️ John they were making like bad laptops that had no ports and crappy keyboards that didn’t work. Like the individual products are mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. It’s when you step back and look at the range of products that they’re offering. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a customer saying, which one should I buy? That’s the problem. Eventually when you get down to an iPad and
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy it, you’ll probably be pretty happy with it because in general, the iPads are pretty good what they do and what people ask them to do is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. And maybe the pro users are cranky at this point because the iPad Pros have been updated. But the individual products are not
⏹️ ▶️ John disasters. Again, setting aside the software. But the line, the line is a mess. And now the
⏹️ ▶️ John peripherals are actually a mess. Again, not that any individual peripheral is bad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re so expensive and so limiting and so unclear about which one, which peripherals it can even work
⏹️ ▶️ John with your thing versus which peripherals you like, which versus which iPads they work with. It makes the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of selecting which product you want or upgrading your existing product to a quote unquote better one, way
⏹️ ▶️ John too fraught, even if the individual product you end up getting you end up being satisfied with.
Scary Fast event next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So there is indeed an Apple event. It’s going to be on hell night as it was called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was a kid. On October 30th. Yeah. This was a thing. Or devil’s night sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey never heard that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an East Coast thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Well, I don’t know if it’s an East Coast
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but anyway, we’re both from East Coast and we both know it. Well, it wasn’t an Ohio thing. You said H-E double hockey
⏹️ ▶️ John sticks there. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done. Anyway, there’s an event on October 30th, the night before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Halloween. It’s at eight o’clock at night Eastern, which I don’t have a problem with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is very, very unusual. What is going on there? It’s spooky. I guess so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. It’s, you could say it’s scary late. I mean, scary fast, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this because first of all, the rumor mill has been very consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few months saying no new Macs for the rest of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there were some, there were some naysayers, you know, but as we, as the date approaches, there’s always somebody who’s willing to put
⏹️ ▶️ John their stake down and said, actually, no, before I said there wasn’t, but now there is going to be. And I think I forget who it was that says that, but they were
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Here it is. And they even said it was going to be, I think it was German who said, no, actually there’s going to be an event. It’s going to be October 30th
⏹️ ▶️ John or 31st, despite what people, you know, so it’s been confusing, but yeah, there was so many consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors that there either wasn’t going to be event or nothing good would be announced in it. But so the invitation, the little
⏹️ ▶️ John invitation image that you get, it says it’s got a spooky black Apple logo and it says scary fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to Apple’s website to their Apple events thing, you can see a little animation where the Apple logo turns into,
⏹️ ▶️ John I love seeing people describe this. Some people say it’s the Finder logo because of course it is the little face
⏹️ ▶️ John that you see in the icon for the Finder on the end of your dock. It was also the, originally
⏹️ ▶️ John the macOS logo back in the day in classic macOS. Now it lives on as
⏹️ ▶️ John the Finder icon. But either way, both of those things say Mac. So if you’re wondering what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to announce at the event on the 30th, they’re gonna announce Mac stuff. Maybe there’ll be other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John too, but this is straightforward. Like there’s, you know, and reading into the graphic, it’s dark
⏹️ ▶️ John and spooky. That’s all we get from it. It’s happening at 8 p.m. that’s spooky and Mac. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that leaves us in a weird place because as you know, DeMarco, everyone’s saying, yeah, all the M3 stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that you thought was supposed to come this year, not only did it not come in the spring or summer, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John even gonna come in the fall. Forget it, it’s all pushed to next year. But this Mac logo says, some of
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not pushed to next year. They’re gonna announce something with the Mac. And here’s the second thing. It says scary
⏹️ ▶️ John fast. I don’t think that Apple would use the phrase scary fast
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were only releasing Mac stuff that have existing M2 whatever processors in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that means they’re announcing Mac stuff with M3 something
⏹️ ▶️ John in something. And I think when they originally released the M2 Max and
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Pro, they also use scary fast. They said scary fast for the M2 Pro and scary
⏹️ ▶️ John faster or something for the M2 Macs. That doesn’t mean anything because they’re just reusing marketing terms or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m actually kind of excited because they can’t put a scary fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, call it a scary fast event and say Mac stuff is coming and not have M3 something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had, because of the rumors, pretty much resigned myself, oh, no M3 stuff this year. We’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John wait until next year. So I’m kind of excited. No, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very excited. I’m really curious to see like, what is this? because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much about it that is surprising so far. We don’t even know what it is yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the suddenness of this being announced out of nowhere is surprising. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timing is surprising. The time of day being 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s surprising. And then the fact that the rumor mill was so sure until two seconds ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that none of this stuff was coming this year. Now all of a sudden we have pretty strong indicator that something about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fast Max is happening. And so we can think about, like, you know, what does that mean? And, you know, so the latest quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors at this point, who knows whether this is leaks or speculation or whatever, everyone thinks this might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be about an update to the iMac and possibly the MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that I think would make sense. Some people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speculating might be gaming related. I was getting my hopes up. Like maybe this is going to be some kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, new product size or shape or whatever, whether it’s like a new laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe a 12-inch or whatever, there was a loose rumor about that. But this doesn’t seem to have any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-person invitations going out. It seems like it’s virtual only. I haven’t heard of anybody in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press getting an in-person invitation to go out there. And that means no hands-on. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lack of a hands-on experience, seemingly, probably suggests no new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form factors of products, no new shapes and sizes. that we can probably rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out things like, are they gonna do a 12 inch MacBook Pro or whatever, or a 12 inch MacBook or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that might also rule out a giant iMac, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a replacement for the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, I don’t even think there’s good rumors about that. I mean, the only rumors about that is that’s still a thing that Apple’s gonna eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John make to make me win my $1 bet with Marco, but not imminently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the safest bet here is probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, I’m with you John, I think they probably wouldn’t emphasize fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they were using chips they’ve already launched. Like Gruber’s guess was, maybe this is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 update to the iMac. And I think one thing that… The most conservative guess I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this could be maybe they are bringing, not only the M2 to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iMac, which still has the M1 as we discussed last week, maybe they’re going to offer like an M2 Pro configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the same iMac case that we have now. There is some precedent for that. Obviously, it’s a bigger power envelope than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1, to have like the pro configuration with the more cores, but it doesn’t go as far as the Max. And they did that with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini, you can buy now with the M2 or M2 Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not M2 Max. And it’s still the same size. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re taking an existing product line that is currently M2 only, and giving it an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 Pro option. That would enable them to still not mess with TSMC’s nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity and everything for the M3 or whatever else. That I think is the most conservative approach and that could be, I’m thinking either the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac or maybe the 15-inch MacBook Air. Because the 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air seems to not be selling well by a lot of reports, which is honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprising to me. I think it looks amazing. But maybe that product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has slightly missed the market and maybe they’re going to juice it up with the higher-end config
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the M2 Pro chip. Who knows? maybe that replaces the weird 13-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro with the touch bar that is still being made. No, they’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John replace that. That’s like whatever the last Mac was with the optical drive or whatever. They’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John keep selling that forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the MD101. That’s gonna be around for, and oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the existence of that computer makes me so upset on so many levels because from what I’ve heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do sell a ton of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason they sell a ton of them is because it’s called MacBook Pro and it’s way cheaper than the 14 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people who don’t yet know that they’re not interested in the Touch Bar. Or people are, fine. People who are legitimately interested in Touch Bar, but
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s be honest, there’s not that many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. No, I honestly think if it was not named MacBook Pro, the sales would drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to almost nothing. I think that, I literally think that’s the reason people buy it, and that’s not a small reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it drives me nuts. On the Scary Fast thing, here’s the confusing part of this, because, you know, we agree that Scary
⏹️ ▶️ John Fast, it’s gotta be something more than a chip that they have already released, probably be M3 something or other. This is why
⏹️ ▶️ John a show or two ago, I had mentioned the possibility of like, can you imagine if
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 based MacBook Pros came out before plain old M3 based
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops? Like that’s not the order of days on it with the M1 or the M2, and it’s generally not the order as we’ve discussed in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John The CPUs go, they tend to, you know, do the lower power, smaller ones first before you make the more complex higher power ones
⏹️ ▶️ John just because that’s how manufacturing works. It’s easier to make the smaller, simpler chip when you’re first getting started on the
⏹️ ▶️ John process than to jump to the big one. But I mean, part of what we’re getting at is like the M3,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the schedules of when Apple released the M1 and the M2, the M3 quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ John should already be here by now, but it’s not. And there are vague rumors that like, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 has been canceled. What does that even mean? Are they not gonna make an M3? No, of course they’re gonna make an M3.
⏹️ ▶️ John But whatever they were planning on making and calling the M3 didn’t arrive when we thought it would.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that leads into a lot of questions with this event. Obviously, 24-inch iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John is a great candidate and that’s one of the strongly rumored ones. Government is flat out saying there’s gonna be a new 24-inch iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And case is the same, although he said some stuff about maybe the colors are different and maybe how they attach the stand is
⏹️ ▶️ John different or something, but anyway, that product. That could be with an M2-based thing, but then what would be the M3-based
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? M3 Pro and M3 Max-based MacBook Pros, same form factor, no need for a hands-on.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re scary fast, fits the bill. But the difficulty of figuring all this out is like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened to the M3 again? Like why do we have that? It’s gonna be three nanometer. We have the A17
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, which is three nanometer. And we keep talking about the various TSMC processes
⏹️ ▶️ John and not being able to remember the names. So I wrote them down this time so we can discuss them. So here’s the deal. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hold on though, before you get there, I don’t think an M3 is going to be three nanometer necessarily because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M2 is based on the A15, not the A16. So that means the M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be based on the iPhone 14’s A16. God, there’s so many numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but they did the same thing with the M2. Like I think it will, you’re right about the core base, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU is gonna be the new Ray Tracy GPU, I think. So that’s that. And I think it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John on the new process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, I mean, a lot of people assume that like, oh, because, you know, the M1 was based on A15 or whatever M2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, but the A series chips for the iPhone come out every single year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a very fixed 12 month cycle. The Mac chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to follow that. Max typically follow more like an 18 month upgrade cycle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve followed exactly an 18 month cycle for the M1 and M2, which is why we all expect the M3 to be here, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when you consider that the M1 and M2 spanned like the onset of COVID era when everything
⏹️ ▶️ John was madness. You would think things would be getting more and, you know, they’d be getting more regular. But of course, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to three nanometers, which is the big wildcard here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So basically, they’re going to skip some of the A-Cores to make M chips. Like they’re just they’re not going to use them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all and that’s fine.
N3B (A17 Pro), N3E (M3?)
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so I do think that they’re going to be 3 nanometer, but the 3 nanometer thing has been a source of confusion
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the different processes. So here they are from TSMC’s website. I’ll put some links in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. The one that the A17 Pro is using is their very first one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s N3B. It’s TSMC’s baseline N3 node. I don’t know if the B stands for baseline,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a nice way to remember it. And here’s some description of it. It uses up to 25 EUV, which is extreme ultraviolet
⏹️ ▶️ John layers, with some expensive EUV double patterning allowing higher transistor density but
⏹️ ▶️ John at higher costs and fewer customers. So this is what the iPhones are using. It’s their very
⏹️ ▶️ John first run at this. It’s very sophisticated. It’s very expensive. And
⏹️ ▶️ John people have been speculating that the only chip that they’ll ever make with this process
⏹️ ▶️ John is the A17 Pro because Apple’s bought all their capacity for this process and it’s their first
⏹️ ▶️ John baseline process. And the reason they think that maybe the only A17 Pro will be the only one, or at least the only one that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ever buys from them using this process because the next process is more attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John to more customers. So that’s N3E. And this is again from an article like the show, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more clients have opted for the more cost efficient N3E process technology with up to 19 EUV
⏹️ ▶️ John layers, no EUV double patterning, offering lower logic density, but better yields and a
⏹️ ▶️ John wider process window. So this is actually worse than N3B, but
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper, better yields, like worse, as in you can’t do as many layers, it has lower logic density,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s easier to manufacture, so it will be cheaper, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is C.C. Wei, the chief executive of TSMC on the October 19th
⏹️ ▶️ John earnings call, I think it was. He says, N3E has passed qualification and achieved performance
⏹️ ▶️ John and yield targets that will start volume production in the fourth quarter of this year. Fourth quarter of this
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Right. And so N3E seems ready for
⏹️ ▶️ John someone to make a chip that doesn’t require as much logic density,
⏹️ ▶️ John but is cheaper. And when I look at that, what I think is like, so was the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John originally going to be on the N3B process? But N3B
⏹️ ▶️ John ended up either not having as much capacity or being too expensive. And so that’s why we didn’t get the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John chip on schedule. But now that N3E is here, the Mac can handle
⏹️ ▶️ John a chip that is a little bit bigger, you know, lower logic density means there’s fewer transistors per unit area.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac can support that because you’re not jamming into a tiny little phone, there’s a little bit more room there. And if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper, that means, okay, if we manufacture an M3… I’m sorry for the enunciation,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope the audio compression doesn’t kill this. If we manufacture an M3 processor using the
⏹️ ▶️ John N3E process, then that will be cheap enough to put
⏹️ ▶️ John into a 24-inch iMac based on the M3. There are two more processes out in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is N3P, I know this is so bad, E-B-P. N3P,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is an optical shrink of N3E, offering enhanced performance, reduced power consumption, and increased
⏹️ ▶️ John transition density compared to N3E, all while maintaining compatibility with N3E’s design rules. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not entirely clear to me how much design tweaking you would have to do between these processes, but at least N3P is explicitly saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, if you design for N3E, when we go to N3P, you don’t have to mess with it too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should be able to manufacture it. And then finally, there’s N3X. Yay, a different number that doesn’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ John same vowel sound in it, a different letter,
⏹️ ▶️ John N3X, as you would imagine from the coolest letter, is for high clock speeds, higher voltages, for
⏹️ ▶️ John high performance CPUs. Maybe someday the M3 Ultra will be based on this, or maybe Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John never use it. But anyway, that is the roadmap. N3B, shipping now, it’s in your phone. If you’re interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, N3E volume production in the fourth quarter, and I don’t know about schedules for PNX.
⏹️ ▶️ John So given all of this, it makes sense that eventually when the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and Macs come, whether that’s on October 30th or in the future, they will use N3E.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think N3E also makes sense for a plain old M3 to go into an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still don’t understand why, what happened to the M3-based MacBook Air? Is N3E
⏹️ ▶️ John not good enough for the MacBook Air? Have they decided like we did last week that the 24-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac is more desperately in need of an update than the MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ John As the MacBook Air has been updated kind of recently and it’s fine with the M2. These are all the mysteries that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be revealed. It’s not like Apple’s gonna put up slides and say, our new M3 whatever processor uses the M3,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they’re not gonna mention that, but we’ll be able to figure it out eventually. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if M3B like really is just too expensive and no one wants to pay for it, probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John even Apple, except for the iPhone that just, as you know, DeMarco must ship on a yearly basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s probably like, we don’t like this, it’s expensive, and we wish it wasn’t, and we want everything to be on
⏹️ ▶️ John M3E as fast as we can, but it’s the only thing available to us, so we’ll just get it. It is kind of disappointing to me that M3E is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially worse, like not as good in many ways that you would care about, but
⏹️ ▶️ John cheapness is a feature, so. I think, you know, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John not be shocked if MacBook Pros came out with M3 Macs and M3 Pros. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be shocked if they came out and there was still no plain old M3. Like the very first and only M3 chips
⏹️ ▶️ John that they would ship would be, we’ve got the Pro and the Macs, and they don’t even mention a plain old M3.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be surprising to me. Despite the fact that I can kind of understand the rumors of the plain old M3
⏹️ ▶️ John being quote unquote canceled because maybe they wanted to do an M3B and it just didn’t make financial sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the rumor about the 24-inch iMac, by the way, is like, oh yeah, they’ve been manufacturing them since June and they’re all ready
⏹️ ▶️ John to go. What? They’ve been manufacturing them since June? Well, that doesn’t mean they’re M3E
⏹️ ▶️ John because M3E is just going into volume production now. June is not the fourth quarter. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very confused by the set of rumors that we have. Again, I’m glad last week we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John what machines should be updated or need to be updated. The MacBook Pros are not on that
⏹️ ▶️ John list, but I’m not gonna complain about M3 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max MacBook Pros if they are released.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let me try to tie this together. There’s a few little tidbits that I think might make this make more sense. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, there was a rumor recently that next year’s iPhones will both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use A18 based chips. So in other words, that they won’t drop the A17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro down to the non-Pro phone next year. That was a recent rumor. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the A17 Pro appears to be the only A17 series chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that may exist. And maybe that’s why it’s called Pro. that might also indicate that, for instance, it doesn’t go into iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree that they’re gonna brand it as A18, A18 Pro. Well, I don’t know, I shouldn’t agree because that makes too much sense for Apple’s naming,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that would make sense for the naming. It doesn’t mean that our earlier speculation about
⏹️ ▶️ John like a cut down version of the A17 Pro, that may be what the A18 is. It’s just A17
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro with like some cores missing or whatever, but they’ll call the A18, and if you look at it, you say, well, it has a different
⏹️ ▶️ John number of cores. Of course it’s not the A17 Pro, it’s a totally different chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing N3B process, the one that the A17 Pro is made on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iPhone 15 Pro. I’m guessing the iPhone 15 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the only Apple product to ever receive that process in a chip. I think the N3E process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what they are using for the M3 based things. Cause it wouldn’t make sense to put M3 on N3B. God, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, as long as we have these Macs that have the Pro Max in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if that process is kind of a dead end and is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive. Apple doesn’t wanna be using that for years. The M series chips are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used for years. Whatever chip is in the pro iPhone is used for one year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least only needs to be used for one year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and by the way, that phrase dead end, like every one of the TSMC’s processes and also looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at manufacturing, like the five nanometer had a bunch of these little names that we couldn’t remember as well. And I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John seven nanometer did as well. Like when you go to a new process node, at least with TSMC and probably the other companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re always climbing that ladder. Yeah, once they make a quote unquote better process, you stop using the other one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it makes perfect sense that N3B, the first one, would be left behind as soon as there’s something better. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit odd that the one that is supposedly better is not better in all ways. It’s better in yields
⏹️ ▶️ John and manufacturability and that’s good, that’s why people are gonna go to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But N3B is no more of a dead end than N5P. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what the hell the letters were, There were five nanometer ones that Apple used and then moved
⏹️ ▶️ John on from them because better five nanometer processes came out. They weren’t dead ends, they were just a stepping stone
⏹️ ▶️ John on the way to better five nanometer process. In fact, I believe one of their five nanometer processes was like N4
⏹️ ▶️ John something, kind of like the 5G that wasn’t really 5G. 5G. Nevermind the fact that by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, but as many people point out when we discuss this, I think we talked about ages ago, the number
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re talking about, three nanometers, five nanometers, what does that refer to? And the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ John not anything sane anymore. It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco used to refer to something that made sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, it’s not entirely a marketing term, because things are getting smaller, and you can fit more transistors
⏹️ ▶️ John per unit area. But there’s no good measurement, which is why you can get away with the 5G in quotes
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, or like the N4 process that’s a lot like the N5. Is it still 5 nanometer? Well, it’s N4. Is it 4 nanometer? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, what do those terms even mean? It’s complicated because of the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John arrange all the things in the little transistors space to actually say what the number means. So all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things are essentially marketing terms for real technologies which is like how good are we
⏹️ ▶️ John getting at building chips with this process technology? And yeah, N3B, its whole deal is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good but expensive and it doesn’t, wouldn’t surprise me if only the richest technology
⏹️ ▶️ John company in the world could afford to buy all of their N3B capacity for the must
⏹️ ▶️ John ship, cannot miss this date, iPhone. And you know doesn’t bode well for Apple if it really
⏹️ ▶️ John did cost a lot But although I think the screen is still more expensive than the SOC so n3b
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a dead end N3b is the baseline and we will move on from it. Just like we did from the baseline and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Think what we’re most likely to see in this spooky event is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IMAX and MacBook Pros because I think it is it is totally plausible when you look at the timing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these if the if the you know the the cheaper, higher yield N3E process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is shipping in fourth quarter, which is now, that would line up with a few things. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would make sense why they can start deploying the M3 now, because they would want the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 based chip family, which will last for years in various products. They want that to be on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high yield, lower cost process that seems to have a brighter future. Number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would line up with Ming-Chi Kuo’s thing originally saying, this isn’t gonna happen until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year, and now saying, well, it can happen now, but it would be very low volume to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start. That would make sense for a process that’s just coming online this quarter. They probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t make a lot of them, and I think that is why we won’t see the M3 yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the M3 that goes in all their higher volume products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not gonna wanna spend the yield on that. If they only have low yield on the N3E process to start in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quarter, they’re gonna wanna put it in high price, low volume products like
⏹️ ▶️ John The 24 inch iMac is also a low volume product. In fact, I think it’s lower volume than the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros. Look, maybe we still won’t even get the 24 inch iMac, who knows, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John made them in June and August, Marco, they’re sitting there waiting to be shipped. I love those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I call BS on that. That’s it. Apple does not keep stock that long of giant things like iMacs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows, things are so weird, but like the idea, If they had said they had already started manufacturing, then like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, I buy that room or whatever. But like, they made them in June? What chips did they put in there? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, maybe if they sell so few 24-inch iMacs that what they put in them was just like the very
⏹️ ▶️ John first run of N3E, because the thing was like, we’ll start volume production in the fourth quarter.
⏹️ ▶️ John But those iMacs, that wasn’t volume production.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But why would they do that? The iMac still has the M1, and no one cares except us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s not this big rush. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that we’ll talk about after the event is the main thing that I care about with the iMac is SSD space and RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t actually care whether it has the M3. I just wanna see them update those things in a sane way.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see if they do that. But I also believe that it’s gotta be the MacBook Pros because they’re the only thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John scary fast. There’s not any ultra stuff coming. They’re not gonna say the scary fast Mac mini or with the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro in it or something. It’s gotta be the MacBook Pros. And I know those are much lower volume than the cheaper laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re Apple’s most popular pro products. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, it just, I’m excited by new Macs. If the 20 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac comes out and has an M2 in it, I won’t care if it has reasonable RAM and SSD. And the MacBook Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re in a place where we’re not, there’s nothing that desperately needs to be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John about them if they just have better SOCs, capable of higher performance and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John more RAM capacity with better GPUs, in exactly the same case that no one needs to have a hands on a bat,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s great. I mean, the big question mark is still the whole thing of like, what are we getting out of three nanometers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are we getting the gains that we thought we’d be getting in terms of power efficiency and all that? And so maybe Jonathan Dietz
⏹️ ▶️ John will write in to tell it to defend the honor of the M3 when it comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So yeah, it gets hotter
⏹️ ▶️ John still, but you can get your work done faster so the hotness lasts less time. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John burn your battery much faster. It’s not true, but the efficiency is saying like it’s like race to sleep, right? You actually get the
⏹️ ▶️ John work done faster so it is better for your battery. That’s what higher efficiency means, but using more power
⏹️ ▶️ John means there may be a higher peak temperature for all those YouTubers who point their thermal guns at their laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think gets lifted first? The base eight gigs of RAM on most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs, or the five gigs of free iCloud storage? Base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John eight gigs of RAM. Oh, 100%. If I was gonna have five gigs of iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John forever, Banner is up somewhere at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. What happens if, this is a Mac Pro announcement, I know we just got one, but what if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they did something fun to the Mac Pro, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John What could they possibly do to the Mac Pro that would be fun?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The very first M3 series chip available is the M3 Mega that it’s like, it’s the quad. It’s the only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John make. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s built on M3B, so it costs $70,000. Yeah. Can you imagine? That would be scary.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not the way these things work though. Like you have to make the simpler chips first. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, and the A17 Pro is a good, it’s small. Like it’s not simple, but like it’s, in terms of how many transitions,
⏹️ ▶️ John have the billions and billions and billions of transistors that the Ultra is in, let alone the Quad. So yeah, no rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. Maybe we’ll get that in N3X in five years on the typical Mac Pro upgrade
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Marco’s Sonos journey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, I don’t care what either of you says. The time has come.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has been decreed. I want to know about your Sonos experiments as long as they were positive. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re negative, I don’t want to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some negative Sonos experiences for you, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, why do you got to do this to me? I’m so excited. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to bring me down? Because I am apparently the king of the bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the Sonos Toblerone, which I really enjoy. I take into the shower with me listen to listen to podcasts great love it
⏹️ ▶️ John the room what I don’t love about it Is that every single time I do that I’d you know take my iPhone hit the little thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John and I pick the output device To be so nice. I think it uses airplay I don’t know But like it’s not a little menu that you get pick
⏹️ ▶️ John where you want the sound to go from your phone and I that’s airplane My I picked my sonos thing And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I hit play and what I hear is something out like it Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that happens to me, but I feel like if I just pause the iPhone give it a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two count and then start again It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, you know, this has been going on for a while now and it’s like well Maybe I pause it and start it again. It’ll work
⏹️ ▶️ John I have come up with the procedure that I now just do blindly every time this happens, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John Turn off the Sonos device by holding on the power button which is very hard to press for way too long until
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes the I’m turning off sound and and then power it back up and then reconnect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it works. If that doesn’t work, restart the phone. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think I’ve ever had a situation where restarting both of them didn’t fix it, but yeah, restarting the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes restarting the Sonos fixes it. Sometimes I have to restart both the Sonos and the phone. Ugh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Madness. I don’t know whose fault this is. Is it Sonos’ fault? Is it Apple’s fault? It’s been happening for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m annoyed. Anyway, Marco, how much are you enjoying your Sonos experience? All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Well, actually, before you get into that, can we set the stage a little bit? So I genuinely don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we left things. So the last I remember you were considering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially embracing the home theater lifestyle in terms of, I’m sorry, in terms of audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the main room at the beach, but, but I might have that all wrong. So what, what problems did you set out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to solve, which knowing you are very different problems than you actually ended up solving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it all was said done. So can you give me a lay of the land, if you don’t mind, from before you dipped your toe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the Sonos pool, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. So where I had been was in my kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a stereo pair of HomePods. This is, and it’s kind of like a great room. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a larger space. We hang out at the island all the time. So these are very frequently used speakers to play music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both while preparing food and also just while kind of hanging out. I do have a Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp as my TV receiver kind of, powering two passive speakers that are not Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, and I have the Sonos sub for my TV. I love that combination. But for the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is for the kitchen really, and this is where HomePods go to die, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the area that I have most of my HomePod use, most of my voice assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, and a large portion of music listening that is not in my office and headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am no longer using my HomePods. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, oh God. So I was at an appliance store and I found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this little Sonos booth that it’s just like this little demo table with a whole bunch of current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos products on it. This is the best executed demo table of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio gear in a store I have ever used. They had all these different speakers. They were all on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready to go, and you could, using the little screen thing, switch audio between them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seamlessly. It was fantastic. Whoever at Sonos designed this, you should get a raise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was by far the best store demo table I’ve ever seen. So anyway, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to test out a lot of these speakers, and some of them I have had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Sonos One, that is the little-ish speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of, it’s about the size of a full-size HomePod. It was Sonos’ entry-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker for a number of years. I had a pair of those before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like years ago when the Sonos One first came out. I frankly hated it, and I eventually gave it away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone would say, oh you gotta try the Sonos One, it’s cheaper than the HomePods or whatever. And yeah, there was a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was cheaper. It sucked. It sounded way worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it integrated the Sonos ecosystem, but like the sound quality, it was, it was like an old computer speaker. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So very quickly in the set that I have in the living room, I have two Sonos Ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, they’re used as rear surround speakers, which is a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey application than what you’re talking about. And for that purpose, I think they’re pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re fine for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would, I would not be surprised if as standalone music speakers, these probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not have the oomph that you really want to play music with just these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So yeah, those not the Sonos one was, you know, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not up to the task to play music to my standards. And, you know, I know I know it can be a picky jerk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some things, but it just it was not good. It was not good. Anyway, so Sonos recently launched a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new products. They have the Aera 100 and Aera 300, these two new smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers. And I was able to hear these on this display and I was able to compare immediately the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One to the Aero 100, which is kind of the Sonos One replacement now. And the Aero 100, they’ve done a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more sophisticated stuff. There’s more speaker drivers. They have two different directions. They fire tweeters now, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the front third of a home pod. And so they’ve amped things up a little bit, no pun intended, in the design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and the processing. And the Aero 100 in this display sounded way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Sonos One. And so I thought, oh, okay, let’s talk Sonos. I’m interested now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also had the first gen move, which has since been replaced with a move two. The first gen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move was seemingly based on the speaker guts of the Sonos One and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounded crappy in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know people like the move. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love, I have the original move, the one that they just replaced, as you mentioned. I think this thing sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent for what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is it in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the back left. Yeah, it’s the back left. It’s the other portable wireless one, but it’s massive. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is portable and it is massive. You are not wrong about either of those things. But I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this thing sounds phenomenally good given what it is. And I don’t think I’m grading on that much of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curve, but it is surprisingly willing to play decent bass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for something that you can just pick up willy-nilly and move around. Like I really have been impressed by the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move. But this, so the one you heard was the move one or the move two?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, now I’ve heard both. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey get to why. Okay, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this one was the move one. So again, I was able to compare and say, you know what? No, I’m not nuts. I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not remembering this incorrectly. The move really did suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You… I will give you, it did have good bass. It’s the rest of the sound that was the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was interesting to compare, and I… The Aero 100 sounded very good. The Aero 300, the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big one that has like Atmos support and has an upward facing driver, that’s the one in the back, back center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. The Aero 300 sounded really interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit weird, but really interesting. And then finally, the Sonos 5, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much older model, but it’s still for sale, because it’s the giant one in the back there. The Sonos 5 really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounded fairly basic. It sounded like, you know, an old speaker design, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not that interesting. It didn’t sound bad, but it didn’t sound good. It was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I thought, this is interesting. The Era 100 and Era 300 deserve a greater look. And at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this time, my HomePods were degrading again. My brand new, second generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-size HomePods were doing similar things as the first HomePods always did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, which is just being unreliable. Just, you know, things would be slow, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wouldn’t respond, or Siri would fail, or they would take forever doing AirPlay because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’d be trying to do the AirPlay handoff instead of just freaking playing the stream from my phone. Like, all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of behavior with HomePods that just annoyed me. And this is at a time in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life when, again, we got a lot going on, we’re very busy, you know, moving our house and everything. It’s been a huge thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to deal with tech problems if I don’t have to. I don’t want to deal with a million paper cuts with my speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not working right and not playing music or giving me weird errors or delays or anything like that. You know, forgive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, I grew up with like regular music playing devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you just pushed buttons and music would come out and it would be fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantaneous and like a hundred percent reliable. I know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high bar with technology these days but I want things to be instant and reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that to me playing music is not a sophisticated thing it’s a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just do and technology these days has allowed us has allowed this process to become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much better in certain ways. Voice control is amazing. Having access to the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library of the vast majority of published music from any major label by just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking something into the air is incredible. But when you just want to play an album that you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, that you already know that you play every week and it takes forever to do it or plays the wrong track, plays some weird live version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco etc. Like it’s like, what are you doing? Like just why is this work worse than the cassette deck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had in 1991? So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very quickly, to interrupt one more time, and I apologize. So, are you looking to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of shout-into-the-air style dingus with the Sono setup? Because that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something I don’t personally have an overabundance of experience with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can shout into the air to any of these speakers. Don’t they all listen to you? All the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern ones, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but the experience I have had, and this is partially because I just haven’t asked very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much of them, you can ask for, you know, play this or play that or turn the volume up or turn the volume down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t used them though, as general purpose, like knowledge engines, like you would a, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing from Amazon or a thing from Apple or a thing from Google. And so I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal experience with that. I use these, I use the shouting to the air to move from one room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to another or join a room into something that’s already playing to turn the volume up and down to stop and start and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on. But basically outside of media control, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to set a timer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on any of these things, for example, or an alarm or anything like that. So I’m just curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, is that one of the things you’re looking for these to do? Because I know you can add like the Google Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think you might be able to add the Amazon one too, I don’t recall. And I’m curious to hear your experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it depends on the model and the timing. Right now, current Sonos models don’t have Google Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an option anymore, as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. They’re in some sort of legal battle, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can only add Alexa and you can add Sonos’ own assistant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I will get to in a little bit. Anyway, I’ve been annoyed with my HomePods and their unreliability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like the HomePod is a product made for conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and expectations that I don’t have in my house. I am kind of done with them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of breaks my heart to say it, because I still love the way they sound, but I’m just done with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I decided, let me try the new Sonos products since the Aero 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounded so good in the store. I got myself a pair of Aero 100s that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco living with for about a month now, maybe a month and a half, it’s been a while now. I took the HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I unplugged them and I put them in my office and just put them in the closet. And so I was living only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Sonos Aero 100s for a while. In the intervening time, the Move 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out and I happen to want and have wanted for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. That’s why I bought the first one and returned it because I hated the sound. But the Move 2 came out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looked like it was based on the Era 100’s guts. So I got one of those as well. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m borrowing from a friend two Era 300’s, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big new one. It’s still a countertop speaker sort of, but it’s bigger, that’s the one with the Atmos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, those ones are really focused on home theater. That’s why they have the upward-facing driver for the
⏹️ ▶️ John Atmos stuff, like I know there’s music in Atmos as well, but those, every single review I’ve seen of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Aero 300s has been in the context of connecting it to your TV to be a sound system. They just don’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like they would be good, from the size alone, that they would be good kitchen countertop speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they’re definitely not made for that, and I’ll get to that as well. So, I have some impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, the easy one, the Move 2. It’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not the best sounding speaker. It has all the wonderful conveniences of the Move 1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s portable, it’s battery-powered, and it supports Bluetooth and AirPlay. It is really big and heavy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like the Move 1. The Move 2 does sound better than the Move 1. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly based on the guts of the Aero 100, but it does not sound as good as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Aero 100, and I’m kind of surprised by that. I would have thought they would sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively identical, and they don’t. The Move 2 is good. It is the worst sounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker in this test, which is disappointing for its price and size. Does it have a handle?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it’s kind of in the back. You like scoop under it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. There’s a cutout, an ovular cutout in the back, and you can there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an area it’s hard to describe it, but there’s plenty of room for your fingers to come up inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ovular cutout. So it is designed to grab. It’s very, very easy to grab and it has a base,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I believe the move to the base can be disconnected from the cable, which is really nice because you cannot do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Move One. The base and the cable are all one piece. But anyways, you basically just walk by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and grab this thing. It’ll pop right off the charging base and come with you. And it’s really quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convenient. I really like the Move Two. It’s what I have in the office
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I wanted to listen to something with a little bit better fidelity than the studio display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I would say actually quite a bit more fidelity than the studio display speakers. And then we also use that as an outdoor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaker for the far side of the yard. You know, our porch is, you know, obviously close to the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that has a couple of regular non-Sonos speakers, but connected to a Sonos amp.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s an amp. I forget which model it is, but anyways. And then the Move, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Move 1, I will bring and put on the far side of the backyard. It’s not a very big backyard. And between the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of them, you’ve got pretty much much 100% coverage of our like one quarter acre, whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and it actually works really, really well. And, and I, again, I quite like this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not perfect sound, but I actually think it’s, it’s better than the, the, even the move one is better than you’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it credit for, but Hey, that’s why everyone’s ears are different.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think one thing from the pictures of the move, one thing I think the move has going for it in Marco’s testing scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ll get to his next photo in a moment is the move, just the move to and move one, just have speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John facing a single direction? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outward? The Move 2 has two angled tweeters, so they kind of fire at 45 degree angles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One big woofer in the middle, I think. Same as the Aero 100.
⏹️ ▶️ John The HomePods have them in all directions, obviously, and the Aero 300, I think, has them front,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s a whole bunch in the Aero 300. There’s like, yeah, there are like front, sides, up. Like it’s, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the Aero 300, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So putting on a kitchen countertop, especially your kitchen countertop, I would not want any drivers firing
⏹️ ▶️ John towards the wall. because the wall is like an inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fair, I don’t think the Aero 300 has one that fires behind it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I’m just looking from the shape of the thing. I haven’t seen a cutaway, but it looks like it would have speakers firing backwards, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the whole rear section of that mesh, it has speakers firing out the sides and up, but I don’t think it has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, the Aero 300, I’ll start with that one. The Aero 300, being used for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music is really weird. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they had, just like all the other speakers in this test, including the HomePods, they have like an automatic tuning thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they listen to your room and you walk around and you wave the phone around and it plays weird sounds and it measures the response and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before I did that tuning, the Aera 300s sounded awful. Really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. Very muffled treble,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco booming bass, it sounded really bad. It was very strange. But after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Trueplay tuning, it was radically different. So the Aera 300s, of all these, they have the best bass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the group by a mile. That makes sense, they’re the biggest, so they have an advantage there, they’re also the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most expensive, but best bass of the group by far. The weird thing about the Aero 300 is that, as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned, they’re designed to be home theater surrounds. They aren’t even designed to be your front speakers, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos, as far as I know, Sonos has no way to make them your front speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I believe that’s right. They want you to use their soundbar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they want you to use the soundbar as the front, and these as the rears or sides. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of an odd product from that point of view. But anyway, using them to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music as a stereo pair, Dolby Atmos tracks sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic on them. Significantly better than on the other speakers. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of this is when you’re comparing an Atmos version of a song to the regular version, it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a different mix. So it’s hard to compare, it’s hard to say like this one’s better sound quality. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it’s more pleasing. It’s different though on some, you know, some songs. So and then when you play non-Atmos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracks on the Aera 300s, they mostly sound okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them sound bad. It was a weird set of speakers to use for music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For some songs, the Aera 300 was the best speaker in this test by a mile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for others, it was the worst. It was really weird. If you’re going to listen to Atmos tracks, and even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, I could not get Apple Music to send Atmos to the Aera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 300s. The only way I could get Atmos to play, actually the Apple Music app, the only way I could get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play Atmos tracks for Apple Music is to call up Apple Music from the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, because Sonos can connect to Apple Music and whatever. So use the Sonos app as the playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app to the speakers, using Apple Music as the backing service. Then, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sending to a group that only contains the Aera 300s, then it will send Atmos. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, if you don’t like listening to Atmos tracks, or you don’t have a way to listen to them, or you don’t like using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sonos app to control your music, these are not good music speakers. Do not buy them for that. But again, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t what they are for. So let’s move to the speakers that are designed for music, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Aera 100s. These are the ones that are HomePod sized, near the HomePod’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price, and seem to be direct competitors to the full-size HomePod. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aero 100, I am extremely impressed by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as sound quality goes, it’s in the same ballpark as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-sized HomePod. There are certain tracks that I think sound better on the HomePods. There are certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracks that I think sound better on the Aero 100s. It’s really a toss-up on a lot of stuff. The Aeros have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better bass than the HomePod 2. The HomePod 2 is just, we know the HomePod 2 is kind of weak on bass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Aero 100 has much better bass. Also, you can control it because they have EQ settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app. Shocker, oh my God, you can control how a speaker sounds. Somebody send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple the message, but until they get that, if ever. So yeah, so as you can tweak it, you can tweak bass and treble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this thing called loudness and whatever else. So that’s very good and I’ve tweaked it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My final EQ is very, it’s just like a very, it’s like treble plus two, everything else default.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big Marco energy there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, right? But overall, the Aero 100 sounds great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing I can give the HomePod the edge on is HomePod still makes the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best, smoothest sounding vocals, but the Aero 100 is very close, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better bass, and it has the controls and everything. So I really enjoy the Aero 100.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say that all of these modern Sonos products have really good touch controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the top. They have, there’s more buttons, they’re labeled, shocker. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more intuitive to use. They are faster and more reliable to respond. They are less error prone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense of like accidentally brushing them. And it actually like, when the Sonos speakers are playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music that is not being airplayed to them, and it’s just like when they’re playing off their own services, so basically the speaker’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it directly, those buttons are instantaneous. You hit pause, it pauses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly. You hit play, it plays instantly. You hit next track, it goes to the next track instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is rock solid, reliable. It is everything I want music equipment to be that it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often now isn’t, and that is a huge advantage. Now, with AirPlay, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an Apple-designed protocol being sent from Apple hardware. You would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect the Apple HomePod product would have a better AirPlay implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would be a better experience than using a third-party product that uses AirPlay like Sonos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d be wrong. Everything about AirPlay gets worse when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a HomePod is involved. Even when I would have, when I was testing, I would often have a group
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with AirPlay sending to more than one speaker. One of which was HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of which was a Sonos set. The second a HomePod is in an AirPlay group,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything about it gets worse and more buggy. It’s slower, you have weird bugs with volume and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commands that get sent. When AirPlay touches a HomePod, everything about it sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s a shame! And this has been a problem with every HomePod I’ve ever had. It’s a problem with the Minis,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a problem with the Ones, it’s a problem with the Twos. Every HomePod, everywhere I’ve ever used one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay is really buggy and slow. And Sonos AirPlay just works. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. It connects faster, it disconnects when you’re done faster. It sends commands faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stays connected, it’s more reliable, they don’t fall out of sync. AirPlay on Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works the way AirPlay should work everywhere. and it’s kind of amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much better it is on this third-party product than it is on Apple’s own products. So love that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because AirPlay is usually the most common form of playing for me. So that I like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t want to always talk to my stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I should get a waterproof move too for my shower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, it’s a little big for a shower.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want it to play my podcast. I don’t ask much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s really good at AirPlay, like really good. So, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about voice control. There’s two options. There’s the Sonos voice control. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own voice agent thing, voiced by the guy who plays Gus Fring. What’s that actor’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey name? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Giancarlo Esposito, I believe. And yes, Gus Fring is who you’re thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the chicken guy from Breaking Bad. It sounds, he sounds amazing. I love this guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I love his voice. And it’s so funny, like when someone’s in the room who hasn’t heard this before, and you hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him respond, everyone’s like, whoa, who’s that? If you point out like, oh, it’s so-and-so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone’s like, oh my God, that’s amazing, and then everyone starts asking it questions. So it’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing is, Sonos voice control, the agent they’ve made with him, it’s a very basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voice control agent. It is not very sophisticated at all. It only handles music, does not handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general knowledge queries. It is fast and responsive to things like play,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pause, and volume and stuff like that. I have found it is not quite as good as HomePods at hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me when loud music is playing. HomePods hear you like crazy. That’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing about HomePods, is how well they hear you. And the Sonos products have not been that good. They’ve been close,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not that good. And their own voice agent is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco primitive, not only can it not answer basic questions about knowledge or start timers or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but any kind of non-trivial query about music. So for instance, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named playlists and I have Apple Music connected. I can’t say, play my best of fish playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it play. That works every time on a HomePod. Well, every time that it responds. So like-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’ve done this and it’s worked, but I haven’t tried it in a while. Now I can try it live right now if you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, but I don’t think that’s going to make for great programming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I could have sworn I have tried this in the past and it has worked for me, but I also only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a handful of playlists in Apple Music. So it’s not choosing from very much, very many of them either. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Neither is mine. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it was just a temporary failure. Maybe I’ll try again. So the other option you have is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alexa. Now, I had Alexa stuff in the past, so I know roughly what it’s good at, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s bad at. I will say, again, back to music queries, I asked both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alexa and Sonos a question like, play the first album by the Cranberries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, both Alexa and Sonos, when I said play the first album by the Cranberries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simplified that question to play the cranberries and just started playing random cranberries hits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I asked Siri, play the first album by the cranberries, it got it right. So I think Siri’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing to be better at music related queries than the other ones, in my experience at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least. Back to Alexa integration, it is exactly as annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Alexa is everywhere. You have to authorize it in the Alexa app and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll try to upsell you on a billion different things. please give us access to all of your data everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. By the way, did you know we can do all these other things that you give us more money and more data?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to say no to a lot. You have to be very careful what you give them permission to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Alexa always is, it is shockingly fast and reliable. That’s what Alexa is good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. It’s always fast and reliable. And it’s fairly accurate. The general knowledge questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it are actually pretty good. It slaughters Siri on general knowledge questions. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even close. as good as Siri is at music, that’s how good Alexa is at knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have that kind of usage pattern, it’s very good for that. So overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been extremely happy with the Sonos ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I’m trying to do here, in my life in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is better for me, it’s better for the show, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s better for Apple. for me to start avoiding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s, like things they call hobby projects, whenever better alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist by more motivated companies to succeed. So you look at something like the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they neglect it, it has a lot of shortcomings, but I’ve used the competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products and I still prefer the Apple TV, I still think it is generally the best streaming box out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s saying a lot because they really don’t put much into it, it seems. But, you know, the others
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just worse. But there’s a lot of categories that I’ve been kind of carrying water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple, and I feel kind of like I’ve been had. And the HomePod is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those categories. It is actually pretty good at certain things, but it seems like Apple really couldn’t give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of a crap to really make it great. Apple has a lot of products that are great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m happy to focus on those. I’m happy, like, my iPhone has never let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. My Macs, generally speaking, recently especially, do not let me down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even the iPad, which we complained about the weirdness in the product lineup, but the iPad is a great overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product that is reliable and while it doesn’t have a lot of effort put into it from a power user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perspective, it does have a lot of effort put into it in general. Their core products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great and pleasant and they make me very happy to use and they rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me problems. Where I get into trouble with Apple’s products are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I like something more than it seems like they do, or when I use something more than it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they do. And the HomePod has always given me that impression. And unlike the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV, what is now the case is there are better alternatives in this area. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff and I, in our marriage, we have a general principle, whoever cares the most wins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if there’s some decision that has to be made, or some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor policy argument that we’re having, If someone cares a lot about it and the other person really doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever cares the most, let them win. Like that’s generally better. And I think I can kind of apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to a lot of tech products as well. Like Sonos cares a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about speakers because it’s all they make. This is their entire company. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos is, this is what they do. And the Aero 100 is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their most important products because it’s like their main entry level and probably highest volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker that they sell. So yeah, they’re gonna put a lot of effort into that. If anything’s wrong with it, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care a lot about it. That’s the experience they’re gonna polish. That’s their iPhone. So that makes sense. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are super focused on making speakers. This is like one of their high volume products that they’re gonna make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good and they do. Google’s phones, you know, Google makes all these Pixel phones. Google’s phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are usually not amazing and they don’t really take off in the market and they have a lot of shortcomings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In part because that’s not what Google’s main business is. Google’s main business is ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can bet anything about Google’s ad system, they put a lot of effort into that. They put a lot of effort into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube. That’s another major Google project. That’s like a huge important product for them. Google doesn’t put a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of effort into their phones. It’s just not that important to them. The HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a total afterthought for Apple. Apple couldn’t possibly give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of a crap about the HomePod, and it shows. So I have found that I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happier now getting away from Apple’s hobby projects, where there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other competitor that’s their main thing. You know, and whether it’s, you know, smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home stuff sometimes, or these other like various accessory things they make, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does a really great job at their core stuff. That’s what I’m gonna spend my mental effort on and a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my money on. And, you know, I am very happy to have found the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apple of speakers who cares a hell of a lot more about this. And I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I love the way these work. They aren’t perfect. They aren’t better in every way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of wish I could have, I hate to say this. I kind of wish I could have Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Sonos 100 or the Sonos era 100. Um, because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri for, for the use as a music, uh, voice assistant is, is the best voice assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for music. But otherwise, I like them a lot better than the HomePods. They make me crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less. They make me angry a lot less. They make me happy a lot more. That’s what I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of my speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John You let me know if they just start cutting out every two seconds and you have to reboot your phone to make them work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, John. Now, just very quickly, because this has gone on longer than intended, but I’ve been fascinated by every darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment. I know, right? And I’ve been fascinated by every moment of it. And I’m glad that your experience, by and large, maybe the particulars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a little different, but by and large, your broader experience, I think echoes mine or vice versa. I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really overjoyed with my Sonos stuff. It is not flawless as you just said, but it is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging reliable. It almost always works, unless your name’s John Syracuse. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot speak highly enough about how great the Sonos ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interacts with itself. You can absolutely use AirPlay. That’s not something I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do often with the exception actually of shower podcasts. But once you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have something playing on basically any Sonos speaker in the house, it is incredibly easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via voice, via physical controls, via the Sonos app, any number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ways. It is incredibly easy to start picking and choosing what other Sonos speakers to play that same content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it can get to the point. And I know I belabored this when we first were talking about the Sonos stuff that I had gotten, uh, you know, like a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, you can walk all around your house, including outdoors, varying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distances from your wireless access points, and the music is perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in sync, just flawlessly in sync. I don’t understand how I can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my office with my Move One, walk down the stairs, through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the living room, out through the porch, and go to the far side of my admittedly small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot, and the music is in sync through all of these spaces. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal. I don’t know how they do it. And if I want to remove one of the speakers from that group,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can say, you know, Hey Dingus, remove, remove office or Hey Dingus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play this everywhere or whatever the case may be. It is incredibly, incredibly good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really love this stuff. This is not sponsored. They have not given us a dime. It’s just, we, the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, maybe I guess sort of three of us just really, really like their stuff. It is expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not cheap. And I was able to get a discount through a friend of a friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John when I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the overwhelming majority of my stuff. So consider that, that my value for money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computation might be a little different than yours because I got a really steep discount on my stuff, which I’m incredibly thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for. Um, but honestly, it’s one of those situations that now that I’ve lived it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I would, if I were to do it all over again, knowing what I know today, I would have been willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pay full price for it because it’s that freaking good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s like there is there are markets for good stuff, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it is expensive. Like if it’s expensive because it’s good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that, you know, there’s a market for that. That’s how most Apple products are. Apple does not make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of products that are super price competitive with their competitors. Apple is almost always the higher priced option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a market. And yet, we are usually not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing, but almost happy to pay the Apple prices. That might be pushing a little far, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we accept the Apple prices on things in so many categories because we want the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best. And usually, Apple’s products are the best. So it makes sense. It’s worth it to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want the best computer, you get the Apple computer. You want the best monitor, you get the Apple monitor. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just certain products that occasionally are not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best. But I, again, going back to Sonos, their stuff is solid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve had quite a history. They’ve always been pretty solid with the audio stuff, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a while, I didn’t really like the way their speakers sounded, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I love the Sonos amp, because it’s a product that lets me just use my own speakers then it powers them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But their recent stuff now, like the AeroLine, is really interesting and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds way better than what was going before. So I am really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited to see where they go and this is an ecosystem that I’m happy to be in now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes me happy and it works well. And that is something that again in technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes the tech that we expect to be, you know, improvements to our life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes causes more headaches than it actually provides benefits. And oftentimes like, you know, the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work 85% of the time can be really frustrating. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, oh, this is really great. 85% of the time, 15% of the time it is slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it does something weird or breaks or have to reset the whole thing up from scratch. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, see all smart home stuff ever. It’s with the exception of Caseta, which I still love.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, like, you know, so, so rarely in tech do we find a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a product line that actually delivers on its promise well. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why on this show, again, like oftentimes that’s an Apple product. And so that’s why we are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy to evangelize for those products to say, this Apple thing works fantastically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have this kind of problem in your life, get the Apple thing, it’s amazing. And in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, the Apple thing’s not, but the great thing is the Sonos thing is. And there are not that many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides to it besides the price and whatever your choice of voice system might be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re willing to get over those things, they really work
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanna point out that I have two Sonos Roams. I have one and my wife has one, and they both do this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, the Roam is not one of their stellar
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, well, Casey has one too, but he hasn’t had this problem. But here’s the thing, my two ROAMs I’ve had across multiple iPhones, many
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of iOS, across multiple years, right? So it’s just weird to me. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when you don’t mean bugs, it’s gonna be bedeviled by this bug that I have a workaround for, but the workaround is annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time, I always go to that Sonos app, I’m like, is there a software update? Is there, you know, because I just want a software update to the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to fix this problem. But I mean, iOS has been updated. My phone’s been updated. My wife’s phone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been updated. They both do it. Not all the time, just enough of the time to be annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bummer. That’s why, I mean, seriously, I would get a more expensive Sonos because I do like the experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like having a little waterproof thing. I like playing, you know, I just need it to be small and fit on a shower shelf.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the move is not that. Nope, it sure isn’t. All right, thanks to our sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week. Sonos, no, just kidding. Thanks to our sponsors this week, AdBlock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and Notion. And thanks to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atv.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
Membership updates, less-briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John you’ve been busy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no no no no no don’t I suppose this John has been putting in a Tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of work making all this possible. I was barely involved and Marco was also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely involved This is almost all John and I genuinely appreciate all the work You’ve been putting into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this because this was a not insignificant amount of work
⏹️ ▶️ John We might we might discuss all of that work in a future members only episode but I want to talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ John like the changes we made and why we made them which goes all the way back to when we were discussing the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John ad market for a podcast like ours. And we said we were
⏹️ ▶️ John going to send out a survey to our listeners to ask them a bunch of questions. And we did that and we got a bunch of responses.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you didn’t hear anything from us for a while, partially because we were deciding what to do, partially because it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John time to analyze the data, partially because of scheduling stuff. But anyway, we did
⏹️ ▶️ John look at those server responses. I tried to analyze them as best I could. It is tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John because we had a couple of constraints here. One was I didn’t want to ask a million questions in the survey.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are so many things that we could do. I didn’t want to send people a 500 question survey that no one’s going to fill out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I really tried hard to make it as short as possible. There were multiple paths to the survey, but I think it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John less than 10 questions for each one. But that also meant the data we were going to get was only going to tell us about the few
⏹️ ▶️ John things that we asked. And we didn’t ask. There was like an open ended. There’s a bunch of open ended things where people
⏹️ ▶️ John could type anything they want. And I read through those. So that was kind of like we could get like any feedback people had, but we asked
⏹️ ▶️ John some very targeted questions as well. And obviously, a lot of the targeted questions
⏹️ ▶️ John were relevant to the one big change we did make, which was lowering the price of annual membership.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, obviously, people write it and say, I wish everything was less expensive. Yes, everyone wishes everything was less expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Is that the right move
⏹️ ▶️ John for your business to lower your prices? Apple seems to think, no. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing about lowering prices, of course. Oh, I would be a member if you just lowered your prices. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John number of people said that. In fact, we asked this very specific question, was one of the questions that we asked. If we
⏹️ ▶️ John gave an annual discount equivalent to one free month, would you become
⏹️ ▶️ John an ATP member? And we could divide those into the people who had previously been a member and weren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John or had never been a member. And people answered that question. And what we’re trying to figure out is, hey, if we
⏹️ ▶️ John offer this discount, are we gonna lose money? because in case it goes without saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re trying to make more money, not less. So by rolling out this change
⏹️ ▶️ John and having every single annual subscriber renew at the lower price, we’re losing money. The only way we
⏹️ ▶️ John can not lose money is to actually gain subscribers. That’s the whole point. You lower the price, you make it more
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive, maybe more people will sign up. And so we’re trying with our non-business
⏹️ ▶️ John school education to figure out, are we gonna lose money if we do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you think, oh, why is this hard to figure out? You have a survey, you ask people, hey, would you become a member if we did
⏹️ ▶️ John this? You ask them this specific thing was one of the choices. Just add them up and do the math and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can figure out if you’re gonna make money. But people don’t always do what they say in surveys, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Checking a checkbox on a survey says, yeah, totally, if you did that, I’d become a member. Things change from when they answered
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Maybe they changed their mind, maybe they thought they would.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to say, how much do we think people will actually follow through on what they said they were going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. Because when it comes time to spend actual money versus saying that you will are two different things. Second thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is not everybody who listens to the show filled out the survey. It’s not, you know, people don’t want to fill out surveys. They’re boring,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Uh, how representative are the people who filled out the survey? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they nothing like our other listeners or are other listeners exactly like the people
⏹️ ▶️ John in the survey percentage wise? These are questions that you have to answer to be able to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out, Are we going to lose money if we do this? How many people who said they would
⏹️ ▶️ John become a member will become a member? And can we extrapolate at
⏹️ ▶️ John all from the people who filled out the survey to the larger population of listeners? Or should we only consider the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John actually filled out the survey? So anyway, we did all this math.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no, no. We did not. You did. And I say that not to make fun of you, but to thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you for all the work you put in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, don’t thank me until we say how this goes. But anyway, we did a bunch of math. And you participated
⏹️ ▶️ John because we had a bunch of fields that was like percentages of like, of
⏹️ ▶️ John all the people who said X, how many of them said they would do Y, what
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage will do it? 100%, 50%? So we had to come up with those numbers and we mostly just pulled them out
⏹️ ▶️ John of our butt based on our instincts, right? Anyway, what it came out to was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we probably won’t lose money. Like it wasn’t like, whoa, well this is gonna be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you may be saying, well, why did you do this? If you think it’s like, it’s like on the edge, maybe you lose money, maybe you make
⏹️ ▶️ John money. Why did you do this? One of the reasons is that it’s a, not a huge change. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think lowering the price is gonna make anybody angry. So thumbs up to that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not huge risk, like, you know, worst case you lose a little bit of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe you make it up over the longterm of getting new subscribers or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the things that we asked, it was among the more popular options. that didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of huge downsides, right? We also heard from people that they would like more members only content.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know we didn’t sort of talk about this, but I hope people have noticed that we are more consistently
⏹️ ▶️ John releasing members only content. Maybe you don’t notice because it’s like, they seems like they come out once
⏹️ ▶️ John a month or whatever, but it’s been, we had skipped months in the past and now we haven’t recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been like less than 30 days between things and we’re gonna try to keep that streak going. So I hope people do appreciate that because that was
⏹️ ▶️ John something, part of the feedback, Hey, how about more members only content? And we are also trying to do that. That’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John cost thing. You just get that as part of your membership. And then finally, the silly thing that we did,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was not on the survey, I don’t think at all in any way, but people wrote it in. People wrote it in, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John little free form thing and emailed us. Again, not a lot of people, but they said, I love ATP so
⏹️ ▶️ John much that I wish I could pay more money. How many people need to say that to you for you to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John time implementing? It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not that many. Three.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t remember what the number was, but it was not a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like you could count them on appendages on your body. It’s not a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people, but like why, you know, if they want to do that, we should accommodate them. And that was
⏹️ ▶️ John actually the most complicated feature we had to add because it’s kind of weird like. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you insisted
⏹️ ▶️ John on a free form text field for the price. Yeah, pay what you want. We tried to hide
⏹️ ▶️ John it from the UI because like no one wants to do this. We understand, right? five people who do want to do it. We wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be there. It is there. Uh, one of the fact items is how
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you know, because presumably the people who are saying that are already members, so they have to change their membership to be this weird one.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a fact item for it. A d p dot f m slash members, lip slash fact, hashtag
⏹️ ▶️ John patron, I guess is how you would say it in the modern age. The patron is the fragment part of the URL. No one knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that term anymore. I don’t know what you would call it, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it looks like a
⏹️ ▶️ John hashtag. So we hope the five people who said that are listening to this and they do that. And we hope the
⏹️ ▶️ John more than five people who answered the survey and said, Hey, if you give me a discount on annual membership,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would become a member. I hope some of you actually do that because if you don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just lost a whole bunch of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we, we didn’t, we didn’t originally do any sort of discount for the annual plan because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we wanted to make it fairly straightforward and to a degree, I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it, I’m I’m going to say it feels slimy. I think that’s a little aggressive, but it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little icky. Maybe is a better word for it. When we’re trying to coax you to spend more money than maybe you would want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by saying, well, if you commit to a whole year, we’ll give you a little bit of money off and really, I think, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, but all of us wanted a very straightforward exchange, you know, you can give us either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight bucks a month or it was a $96 a year and that you get what you get and you don’t get upset. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now we’re making it slightly muddier, but the results of the survey were fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emphatic that, oh, I’m just really turned off by the fact that I don’t get any sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discount for an annual, you know, an annual price. It really, really bothers me. We got some fairly aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of that statement.
⏹️ ▶️ John on the flip side of that is another way of looking at it, which is also true, is that you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for the flexibility of being able to cancel anytime if you pay for monthly,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco why is monthly more
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive than annual, what you’re paying for is the convenience say, I don’t want to do it this month and just cancel,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Whereas you’ve already paid for the whole year, you don’t have that flexibility. So there are multiple reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John why an annual discount makes sense and is desirable to people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And plus, you know, you’re only getting billed once a year rather than once a month and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. Which saves credit card processing fees, which you don’t care about. And it’s generally peanuts, but like there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is there. The main, the main reason people ask for annual, cause we didn’t originally have any, maybe people ask for
⏹️ ▶️ John annual is that it just didn’t want to see a bill every month, like just the annoyance of it. Right. Uh, and that does make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. Uh, you know, one bill a year is easier to deal with and track
⏹️ ▶️ John than having this thing come in every month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, um, I don’t know how much we want to talk about the nuts and bolts about how this works behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scenes. Maybe we should save that for a member special, but suffice to say, a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was far more complicated than you would expect. But if you are currently an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annual member, and as far as you knew, until you were listening to us tonight or today or whatever, You were paying $96
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year. John, remind us what those people have to do in order to get this new $88 per year price.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re currently an annual member, they do nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do nothing. Like, you can go to your member page right now and you will see it says the new lower amount. And like I said, people have
⏹️ ▶️ John already renewed, so we’re pretty sure it worked. Like they’re renewing at the new lower price. The old prices are gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t buy them even if you wanted to. Everybody’s subscription who was annual is switched to the new prices, so you don’t have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so now slow down, though. I wanted to do the enter my own price. I could put in $96 per year though, correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes, yes. Okay, just making sure. Anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John can, I don’t wanna, if you do this, if you’re one of the five people who does
⏹️ ▶️ John this, someone should do it just to test that it works. No one has ever done it in production. So
⏹️ ▶️ John please somebody be the person to test it in production. It was tested many times in depth. If you do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will get a little badge next to your name that I copied from Letterboxd that says patron.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you get with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The badge is what you
⏹️ ▶️ John get. That little yellow box, that is what, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John no additional anything for patrons. I don’t think it would be a good idea to like have this
⏹️ ▶️ John special tier for that. But anyway, whatever, like five people are gonna do it, who cares? But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not using that language anywhere, but internally I needed things to name the variables and I called all that stuff patron stuff or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So if you wanna become an ATP patron, which is not a term that we use in public facing things, but I just said on the podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the fact, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John whole reason I made the fact. I will add to that fact as people ask questions, because people frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John ask things and I want to put them somewhere. And that’s what a fact is for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and remind me, you know, so if I am currently at the new $88 per year plan, but I’d like to pay $888 per year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I need to do then is cancel my current plan and go in and name my price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and start a new plan at that point. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a new feature that I added as part of this, because it just seemed like, it was always so complicated and weird. The FAQ
⏹️ ▶️ John is one feature of like, how do I do this? And the second thing is like on the member page, when you cancel,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can’t, it’s not like when you cancel it ends immediately. When you cancel it, you’ll still, whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ John paid for, the rest of your term that you’re paid for, you will continue to get that obviously. It’s just that it won’t renew essentially at the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. But right on the member page now, you can start a new one, even though the old one hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John run out yet, which was a big thing that people were confused about or bothered by. It’s like, oh, I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for my monthly membership to actually expire before I can sign up for the annual. And now you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that through some weird sleight of hand that I did with Stripe, where you end up getting like a free trial,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially. So if you end your monthly membership, but the month isn’t over yet, and you start a new
⏹️ ▶️ John membership, the new membership will start when your old one ends. But when you do the checkout
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it will count as a free trial until your
⏹️ ▶️ John old membership ends, and then it starts billing. It’s just to make the math work out. I tried to do it the more sane way, where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John just forward date it or whatever, but apparently you can’t forward date past the end of the billing period.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like past the, I don’t know what language to use. So basically say you had an annual membership and you wanna go to monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the middle of the year, the middle of your year. You cancel the annual, fine, great. It’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John end at the end of your year, right? And you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for monthly right now. The feature that the Stripe has that lets you forward date it to say, hey, start their monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John membership when their annual one ends. It’ll be like, I can’t start a monthly membership later than one month
⏹️ ▶️ John from now, that’s basically the problem. Like it is a monthly thing, and the farthest in the future role that you started
⏹️ ▶️ John is one month from now or less. And so you can’t start a one month membership six months from now, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is dumb. So that’s why I came up with the free trial workaround, which is also dumb, but I explained it in the FAQ
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and on the screen where you
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff. So hopefully people won’t be too confused by it. And it’s better than it was before where you’d have to like put a calendar reminder to
⏹️ ▶️ John remind you when your annual membership ends in six months to start your new monthly one. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very good, very clever. Not clever, it’s a terrible hack, but that’s programmed for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Indeed. Well, I got to say, too, I am so, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m incredibly thankful that John is bored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John has had on his request list for the CMS that basically was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of to-do items that only I could do that John cared the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about by far. Again, whoever cares the most wins.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, only you could do, to be clear, because you wouldn’t let us do them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this has been built up for months or years, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. Look at the date on the document. ATP.fm wish list. Created when?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. I don’t even have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open. I don’t even know where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I know. I know you don’t. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway. Let’s see. What does it say? Created when? Where do I start? 2020. Oh, yeah. That’s about right. June 27, 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s when we launched membership.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to say, not long after or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the time that we launched membership. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, John’s had this wish list for the CMS for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have had no time to do it. Because, you know, also, between all my, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving my house and everything, I’m also trying to rewrite Overcast, basically. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, this was never gonna happen as long as it was on my plate. You did a bunch of stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, recently I’ve done very little. But anyway, so, you know, John’s been caring about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most for a long time, and has all this newfound time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since you quit your job and now your house is mostly fixed temporarily, and you don’t seem to have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dying appliances right at this moment. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this time, and I thought, like this is always gonna be on my plate, because first of all, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad at delegating, second of all, neither of you guys knew PHP, and I figured odds of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being willing to touch it were low. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re bad at delegating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, yes. And but I was so wrong, because not only were you super willing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you, I mean it turns out PHP’s not that hard. So you learned it pretty fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll talk about it in another special.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and then the rigor to which you and Casey treated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this like professional software, pull requests, code reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John staging. I wouldn’t go that far. And in fact, I have some complaints about the QA process because there were some
⏹️ ▶️ John big bugs in there that I fixed. Oh my God, well anyway. Oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s gonna be me.
⏹️ ▶️ John my one person 15 minute QA team of Casey List failed me? Well, that’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John than I ever used. I know, Margo’s the zero person, zero minute QA team. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two of you, the way that you professionalized this process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost like we did this for a living. Almost,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so much more professional than anything I’ve ever done. Which is funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve been a professional software developer for as long as at least Casey has. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, almost as long as John has. But your boss is a weirdo. I’m, yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never did any of this stuff. You really, you did it so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professionally and so honestly, I was blown away. So first of all, I’m very thankful that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did all this because I was never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gonna do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You start worrying when I install Jira.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely not. I quit. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John will not, I will not subject myself to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have PTSD about that. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey worry. Yeah. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really don’t like throwing around that term, but if I was going to throw it around about anything, it would be about Jira. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, yeah. Anyway. So second of all, I am so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, this is so clearly the right choice to put it on you instead of me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re doing such a better job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, thanks. And yeah, we should have done this a long time ago, my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all good. We got there, we got over the hurdle, and that’s all that matters. And yeah, I don’t know if we really need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about it too much more, because I know a lot of people aren’t too terribly interested in, you know, navel gazing and inside baseball
⏹️ ▶️ John And if we do talk about it on a member special, we wouldn’t be talking about the business stuff, we’d be talking about it from like a programming perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John more general type of thing, which is kind of also tech nerdy, but don’t worry, it wouldn’t be about the show, it would be about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Member special, John’s review of PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be in there for sure, but I think it’d be more expensive than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Oh, I can’t wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, I mean, the literal thing we have in the show notes is John talks about working on the CMS and quote unquote, learning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, So yeah, I got it. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to make that we got to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we got to do that. But no, I will take this opportunity before we sign off. Just to thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone. I know I do this all the time, but it really does mean that much to all three of us. Thank you, anyone who has even considered becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a member. Those of you who are members. Thank you so much to all of you. We appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you so very, very much. And who knows what new PHP trick John will pull next time. We’ll all have