560: They're All Rectangles
09 Nov 2023iPhones as pro video cameras, the politics of base configurations, and the knob-microwave lifestyle.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco has discovered knobbed microwaves
- 🗣️ THE ATP HOLIDAY STORE IS HERE 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- Apple Event was “shot on iPhone”
- David Steer in defense of the M3-plain MacBook Pro
- Base configs make a difference, according to Ewan Makepeace
- Still no Face ID (via Tomer Shemesh)?
- 8 GB RAM has been the MacBook Pro baseline since 2014
- Dynamic Caching (via Nitesh Singh)
- The small-capacity SSDs are better now?
- Apple Silicon packaging and a potential M3 Ultra
- AnandTech confirms odd memory quantities (via Cameron McKay)
- More thoughts from Jonathan Dietz, Jr
- A new
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGEDerror report has entered the chat
- MacBook Pro order updates
#askatp:- How do we manage our physical photos? (via Steven)
- Why should we care about hardware AV1 decoding? (via Jack Johnson)
- How do we convince our loved ones to upgrade hardware? (via Christian Heile)
- Post-show: Humane’s AI pin leaks
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
- Hatch: Devices to help you sleep better.
- Kolide: Ensuring that if a device isn’t secure, it can’t access your apps. It’s Device Trust for Okta. Learn more and watch the demo today.
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Chapters
- The knob-microwave lifestyle
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Shot on iPhone
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Plain-M3 MacBook Pro
- No Face ID?
- The 8 GB MBP era
- Dynamic Caching: which memory?
- Sponsor: Hatch
- SSD speeds
- M3 MBP vs. M3 Pro MBP
- M3-line chip packaging
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED news
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Our new MBPs
- #askatp: Scanning old photos?
- #askatp: Why AV1 decoding?
- #askatp: Push people to upgrade?
- Ending theme
- Humane Ai Pin leak
The knob-microwave lifestyle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have either of you been told the good news yet, or do you preach the good news?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about knob based microwaves
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’ve heard the good news, which is the phrase you’re looking for. Have you heard the good news? I have
⏹️ ▶️ John Microwaves I am not convinced at all. I don’t have one I have my ancient
⏹️ ▶️ John microwave that doesn’t really work, but I am not convinced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. Hold on What are you talking about? So my recollection is one of my grandparents, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t remember which side it was, had a truly ancient microwave wherein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would spin a dial to get a gross approximation of how much time you would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cook the thing in the microwave. And you could set it to five, that could mean anything between three and a half and seven, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it said five, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, we’ll go with that. Is that what we’re talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the original like old microwaves from, you know, before digital stuff was super commonplace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all just had knobs and it was like, you know, like a kitchen timer, you turn it and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go, chhh, and then ding when it was done. And then, you know, everything got digital keypads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout like the 80s and 90s and, you know, that’s what we knew and that’s what all microwaves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are for the most part. And then I think only recently I started hearing people say like, oh, you gotta try one with
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think you missed the middle period. After the digital, where you had a bunch of numbers and you would type in the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was this fairly dark time that extended until very recently, which was,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, okay, maybe there’s number pads, but also there’s 17 other buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John with obscure pictures of things on them. Chicken, popcorn,
⏹️ ▶️ John frozen food, meat, like just random pictures of stuff. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ John real best one is the corporate microwave. This isn’t really a trend, but just a thing that exists
⏹️ ▶️ John that companies buy. I think two or three companies that I work for had these microwaves where there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no number pad, so you can’t type in the time. There is no dial. What is there?
⏹️ ▶️ John A set of numbered buttons from like one to nine, just vertically. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think like a space to the right of each number, where I suppose you could write something. And I think the idea is you could program
⏹️ ▶️ John nine preset times into each of the buttons. And so what you would do is you’d put your food in the microwave and you press
⏹️ ▶️ John the number three, which you had programmed to be two minutes and 50 seconds or something. Is this like for food service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for corporate offices?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m guessing it’s like, there’s some context, but I saw them in offices. They were in our kitchenette type
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but I’m guessing it’s like that space to the right was like if it’s kind of a food service thing or an industrial
⏹️ ▶️ John setting where you’re only ever gonna cook for these five preset times and you don’t have to type them in and it’s faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John but why they were put in the kitchenette areas of offices, I have no idea. But anyway, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John now the dial has come, but it’s not the dial that you described, which is a mechanical dial that goes tick, tick, tick, tick,
⏹️ ▶️ John and goes back to zero. But of course it’s a, what are they called? Knob? The things that spin forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Knobs. Not a potentiometer. There’s a word for it. Someone in the chat room will have it. What
⏹️ ▶️ John is the name of those dials that spin forever? Eh, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, for most people, I don’t know how many microwaves we get to buy in our entire lives. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they tend to be pretty long lasting appliances. And so I think in my entire life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have purchased something like two ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sold and strong at zero. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you inherited yours,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I inherited one with a broken screen. The screen has never worked. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. Wait, so can you not tell how much time is left?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco gosh. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. So every time you cook food, it’s a little surprise. It’s a little gift every
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Well, I mean, I type in the number, so it’s not really a mystery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it at least beep every key press, so you at least know, like, did it recognize the key press? So you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John never, I’ve never had a situation where like it’s, it’s still clear that it’s actually working and you can type of things
⏹️ ▶️ John beep, beep, beep. It’s fine. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, how many, how many icons are on your computer’s desktop? Just a ball, just ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit messy. Now I’ve got a little cluster to the right, a little closer to the left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I, I, I’ve been in your house, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been there, which is a, which is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should solve, but that’s a discussion for another time. I’m having a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrapping my mind around you being this okay with non-functional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. I know this is not new news,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but just sometimes…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can’t be a surprise. I know you are frugal, and that’s coming from a frugal person.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was inherited from my grandparents, and it really is a very good microwave. We thought that
⏹️ ▶️ John the door opening thingy might be broken, and so I did do a little search for new microwaves, but the door opening thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John cured itself. but I’m on the lookout, so I’m interested in hearing Marco’s experience about the knob microwaves, because I did
⏹️ ▶️ John see them in my research.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve actually never used one before, because they don’t seem that common anymore. Certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the modern knob-based ones I don’t think are very common. I’ve never seen one, I’ve never used one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but sometimes you read something on a social network or an online review or a blog post and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of sticks in your head. I remember that I had heard, oh, you’ve got to try knob microwaves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re so much better. Well, I had an opportunity to buy a microwave because the house we’re selling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came with like a, not quite built in, but like a microwave that kind of like they built a cabinet around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So it like fits perfectly in there. So it felt only right to then sell it to the people who are buying the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also like to leave it with the house because it fits so perfectly. So for the new house, I need a microwave. At the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beach, I had to buy one a few years ago. And at the time I had read that Wirecutter article about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how every microwave is the same microwave made by Madea. There’s this one company called Madea that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guts of almost every microwave on the market. And they’re all almost the same,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s why you can get a pretty decent microwave for like $75 basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very similar to every other microwave on the market pretty much. And that there’s not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variation in quality between them, because they’re all using the same very small number of guts made by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two companies at most. In the article, they pointed out, oh, except for the Panasonic Converter Microwave, that’s its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different thing. I had to buy a microwave for the beach back then, and I bought the Panasonic converter microwave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The gist of it, I believe, is to achieve different power levels rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pulsing it on and off at full volume in different segments. So, you know, on for a second, off for a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on for a second, off for a second. Instead of doing that, the inverter microwaves are able to just like literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just lower the power output directly. And so it’s a continuous stream of lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power output instead of bursting high off, high off. That’s, I think, the gist of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Forgive me again if I, you know, if there’s other details that I don’t know or if that’s not quite right, but that’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be the gist of the difference between inverter and non-inverter microwaves. And so I thought, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Panasonic inverter one was only like a couple hundred bucks. Let me try it. This is supposedly really good. I, again, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then, how many microwaves do we buy in a lifetime? I might as well try to get a good one when I do. And we use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microwave a lot because, you know, as much as I respect people who do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steam vegetables on the stove for some reason I am NOT that person I love steaming bag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I steam mine on
⏹️ ▶️ John the stove it’s really not that
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t put you just don’t put it you put a tiny little bit of water and then you put another thing it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then you have to wash the steamer and the pot and it takes longer like you put it in the microwave for like five
⏹️ ▶️ John my vegetables don’t come in plastic bags that are microwavable sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you have other ones you put them in a glass thing with a lid and you put in the microwave for five minutes with a little drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of water that’s it
⏹️ ▶️ John control five minutes that seems like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have enough control because you have a screwed up microwave
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same microwave my just got done going through it’s all the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microwave yeah they’re all well I don’t know back then they might have been different but now they’re all the same anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the I got the inverter microwave for the beach a few years ago it performs decently in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I like the way it microwaves things but it was the buggiest piece of crap I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever used the the control panel was buggy it would occasionally like you’d have to like hit the off button to reset it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t reset on its own after a cycle, it would frequently trip its breaker. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sent me on a goose chase for months, like, okay, why does the breaker always trip when I run the microwave? Is it overloaded? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there something weird on it? What else was plugged into that circuit? It drove me nuts for months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I read a couple online reviews like, yeah, a bad microwave can do that. I don’t know how. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all the other online reviews of the Panasonic inverter microwaves all cite similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy problems with them. So it seems like they’re all that way, Not just like I didn’t just get a lemon. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so wait, let me play this back you decide instead of getting the same piece of garbage microwave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that every other human has You need to get the fancy lads bespoke microwave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and end up regretting it because it’s a piece of trash Even though it’s four times the cost just want to make sure we’re all on the same page
⏹️ ▶️ John here Well, I don’t want to push back on the they’re all the same microwave. Yeah the microwave Producing thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same but the things you care about are some of the things that you’re complaining about which is is the UI Do I gross?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do the buttons feel good? Does the door opening close nicely? Is it gonna break? Does the little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John turntable thing turn or does that break? Like, there’s those type of things that sort of make the product,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if the microwave guts are the same in all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. Right, and it’s, you know, simple things. Also like aesthetics, like we wanted a white one because it was going on the counter next to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other white appliances. So like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco can happen to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it does. Nice. Anyway, Panasonic one, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re driving me nuts. And meanwhile, we’re getting this new house and that needs a microwave. I’m like, let me try a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Um, and I, I found somehow that Breville, the company that makes John’s
⏹️ ▶️ John he found one that’s even more expensive than the Panasonic. Good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Uh, Breville makes inverter microwaves now. They’re almost no one makes them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Panasonic makes them and Breville makes them. I don’t know if anyone else does. I wasn’t able to find the other ones and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew they, they made generally well-regarded appliances. They seem to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only knob based ones though and they advertised a couple features that sounded nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a soft closed door which I’m a sucker for that kind of thing so I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what what the heck let me try it let me actually just try this weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally different microwave that has knobs and by a company I didn’t even knew made microwaves until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two seconds earlier let me give it a shot and I’ve been living with this knob microwave for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about three weeks four weeks now something like that and I got say, not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vegetables. I cook a lot of stuff in the microwave. You know, lunches, we usually have, we have these like frozen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meal things from this company called Daily Harvest. Yes, I know. I don’t care. Just let me enjoy it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have like, so a microwave, I microwave lunch almost every day. I usually microwave some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco component of dinner, like a frozen vegetable or, you know, something like that. At the beach, we have a lot of frozen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food because there’s no grocery stores all winter long. So we have like a lot of frozen vegetables and frozen meatballs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So we do a lot of microwaving. This thing is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have been totally converted to the knob lifestyle. First, I thought, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way I’m going to sell knobs to the family. Like, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to fly. Secondly, I don’t even know if I’m going to enjoy the knob-based lifestyle. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using keypads my entire microwave-using life. So first let me tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the soft close door is really nice. The other parts of this microwave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really, really nice too. The sounds that it makes are nice. The UI is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The things feel nice on it. The inside is very well lit for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. Inside’s not white though, is it? I think that was one of the things that turned me off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s all silver inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t like the silver inside ones. That’s a trend. I’m not a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t feel strongly about it either way. I mean, my insides have always been white or like that kind of creamy color before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those, you know, everything shows sauce flecks just as well as every other color in a microwave. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s not really a big deal either way.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have a microwave little thing that you put over stuff so it doesn’t spray stuff all over the inside of your microwave?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’ve had those, like I had those growing up. They were always a pain in the butt. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never thought that was worth it. I just try-
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, I can’t live without them. But it’s another one of the things that if I lose mine, I’m gonna be like, oh no, where do I find this thing? because I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John where to buy it again. It’s probably 20, 30 years old. Just a little piece of plastic you put over your dish, sort of exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John fits over our dishes, keeps stuff from splattering, makes a microwave not get as gross as fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they still sell them. They’re made of silicone now, but they still sell them. It looks basically like a cake dome that you stick in the microwave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine. No, I just, whenever I’m microwaving something with tomato sauce, I’ll just drape a paper towel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over it when I set it in there. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John know. What’s your objection to things you don’t like cleaning them?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco First, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I don’t like cleaning. First of all, I don’t think adding more plastic to the inside of a microwave is a great idea. I also don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cleaning extra things that I, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re microwaving your vegetables in a plastic bag.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Not all of them, some of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see, you know. That thing is designed to go into the microwave. If anything’s gonna be safe in the microwave, it’s that. It doesn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John hot at all either. Like, I don’t, whatever it’s made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of. What could possibly be less safe than a bunch of ancient plastic that you’ve inherited from somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t inherit the plastic thing, but anyway, like, this thing doesn’t even get hot somehow. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John made of microwave-resistant material. I don’t know what it’s made out of, but I think it’s pretty safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chemicals. Yeah, it’s made from petroleum and other weird stuff. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the knobs, I actually think it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you walk up to the microwave and you wanna cook something for two minutes and 30 seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin to get to two minutes and 30 seconds? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think 230 is that many spins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so you’re both correct. I do have to spin to get there and it’s not that many spins. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also the main, there’s two knobs here. The top one is time, the bottom one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is power. The time one, the button in the middle is start and it also adds 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds. So if you want to put something in for 30 seconds, it’s one button press.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you wanna put it in for 230, one way you could get there is just hit that five times. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are different shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ John available. Have you had to do like a 30 minute microwave and see how many spins it’s gonna take that knob?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m not like cooking whole chickens in there or anything like I don’t know what you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes if you’re doing like a long defrost cycle or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no, it has auto defrost. And so the Panasonic one also, we do again, as mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a lot of like frozen meat that we have to defrost. Don’t defrost
⏹️ ▶️ John your meat in the microwave, please, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s well, I should clarify, it’s frozen pre-cooked meat, stuff like frozen pre-cooked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meatballs that there’s a place here that makes these amazing chicken meatballs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, you’re really giving a Casey run for his money with your plastic bag vegetables and your frozen pre-cooked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t forget frozen pre-cooked chicken meatballs. It’ll anger even more people. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delicious. Anyway, it has auto defrost, where you just tell it what type of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meat, you pick it with a scroll wheel, and then you tell it roughly how much it weighs, like a pound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, and then you hit go, and it uses the sensor. I tried the sensor reheat. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I never trusted microwaves to do, is just heat my food and tell me when it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It actually seemed to work. It heated it, I think, a little more than I would have. It took a while because it did it on lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. And it was pretty darn hot when it came out, but that worked pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so the great thing about the knobs, first of all, adjusting the power level is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier than on any other microwave. Because before it’s like, all right, you’ve got to type in the time, then hit power level, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit seven, or do you type in that first, then the time? And what if you clear it? It was always very unclear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to use it, and it was a lot of button presses. And as Merlin has evangelized for years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becoming a microwave power user made things really nicely and it often requires changing the power level. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s also amazing about the knob based lifestyle is you can change the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the power level while it’s running. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. So as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s running, if you want to add some time, just turn the knob. Or if you want to subtract time to turn it, that’s it. And it adjusts the live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time as it’s counting down. You want to change the power level. You just turn the power level as it’s going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great. Like it’s, I gotta say, I it was a huge risk. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the first time Tiff saw it, she’s like, oh, is this the new microwave? OK, that was it. She figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out in two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should get the one with the get the one with the one through nine numbers on it and see how she reacts to that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this one actually on the inside of the door, it does have a series of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little buttons that are for like rarely used stuff, like setting the clock. I haven’t really explored any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them, so I don’t really know what they do, but I don’t need them. It’s like just having the two knobs. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was going to be really weird and maybe not as good. It’s way better. The speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at which you started up and the ability to adjust things while it’s cooking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially and how how easy it is to change power levels. That really is a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changer. And this thing is awesome. I’m super enjoying it. So anyway, this is a very long ad for a microwave that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not paying us for a sponsorship, but I love this stupid microwave from your stupid toaster company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when I was looking at microwaves to replace mine, the things keeping me away from that one was the power level was a little bit below
⏹️ ▶️ John what I have and the like interior like dimensions were a little bit low because it’s kind of small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ish. They make a smaller one, but this is the bigger one. This is this is a, you know, full size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American microwave.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Now, even the bigger one was is a little bit smaller than mine. My microwave is pretty big. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my old one’s still hanging on, but that’s definitely on my short list of things to look at if and when this one finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, try it. Like, you, I feel like you would be grumbly for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first couple of days and then you would fall in love with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna grumble about it at all as long as I can fit everything in it. I don’t wanna like buy something and it feels like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too cramped or whatever, but I think it’d probably be okay. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anyway. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you putting in there out of curiosity? If it’s not vegetables.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to like measure our plates and say like, hey, do the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fits plates just fine. I mean, maybe not like, I mean, depends on how old your plates are and whether you inherited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them from the Queen of England, but if they’re like typical American dinner plates, it fits just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’ll say it’s on the list. Like I said, I kind of wish it was white. It’s silver on the outside too,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, it’s silver everywhere. Yeah, I kind of wish it was white everywhere. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, I’ll check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would prefer white as well. But hey. And the only weird thing about it, I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s one weird thing, is that it keeps the fan running for about a minute
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like a turbocharger in a 1980s Nissan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why it does that. Like if it’s cooling off some component, I’m not sure why. I’ve never seen a microwave do that before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if that’s the one weird quirk to make this thing happen, that’s fine. I’m in love with this stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, as much as you can love an appliance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very glad that we spent roughly 20 minutes essentializing the microwave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that nobody else is going to want to spend the money on. But we have done it. Marco feels better for having put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that happy thought to the world.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so now, apparently we’re continuing the advertising portion of the show. This time we’re doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a completely self-serving manner because guess what, baby? The Holiday ATP Store is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. It is back and better than ever, or something like that. This is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time-limited sales. So now is the time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make your move and go ahead and buy some stuff. On
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday, November 26th, Sunday the 26th, you will not be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy these shirts and other assorted items, which John will take us through here in a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you are driving right now, if you are walking, particularly if you’re in a place like New York, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to walk with a purpose, pull yourself over to the side of the road or wherever you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and go to atp.fm slash store and take a look at our wares. That’s wares with an S not wares
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a Z. Uh, take a look, see if there’s anything you might be interested in or in or maybe somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you love might be interested in one of these things. And we have some pretty good stuff. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, not to imply that the other stuff is bad, but we have some interesting new entries this year, which I would love for John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take us through, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. So, uh, in our typical, uh, ill-advised product
⏹️ ▶️ John creations, we have a doozy this year, uh, ill-advised and that we make these
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that have, that have have really, that have the worst possible margins
⏹️ ▶️ John for us and are also extremely difficult to manufacture. And we’ve done it again, we’ve reached new heights. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an idea that the designers at Cotton Bureau have had this idea for, I think, several
⏹️ ▶️ John years now. We’re always like, nah, I don’t think so, it’s not gonna work. And their idea was this, their idea was simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, wouldn’t it be great to have the ATP logo, but do it in like pixel art? That makes sense, ATP, computers, pixels, it all
⏹️ ▶️ John fits, right? The problem with this idea is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP logo has a bunch of slanted lines in it, the slanted six colors plus the slant
⏹️ ▶️ John of the A and everything like that, and those lines are not slanted at 45 degrees. Anyone who’s ever done pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John art knows, hey, if you want to do pixel art, 45 degree angle lines, real easy. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John go up and over one, put a dot up and over one, put a dot up and over one, put a dot, makes a nice smooth line.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can change the size of the pixels to however chunky you want them or however fine you want them.
⏹️ ▶️ John looks good. Whatever angle the lines are in the ATP logo it is not 45. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John make the pixels big and you try to draw those slanted lines it’s like up one over
⏹️ ▶️ John one and then two more vertically then over one and then a single one and then two and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite right and it looks ugly and uneven and so you’re like okay well
⏹️ ▶️ John how do we fix this? We can fix this by making the pixels smaller. So then
⏹️ ▶️ John the line that’s not at 45 degrees won’t look as weird and jaggy. But if you make the
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels really small, they’re really hard to print on the shirt. And if you make them small enough to make the line not jaggy, now it just
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like a bumpy logo. It doesn’t look like pixels anymore because from a distance, you can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John see the pixels along the edge. And now it just looks like a low resolution version of her regular ATP shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the solution to this is obviously to try something even more difficult, which is okay, how about
⏹️ ▶️ John we put we put space between every one of the pixels like when you go into fat bits mode on Mac painter
⏹️ ▶️ John when you zoom in really far into graphics program and it stops showing the pixels touching each other but starts
⏹️ ▶️ John showing like the grid between them so you can see the individual pixels how about we do
⏹️ ▶️ John that and then we tried that and the problem there is okay well
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a limit with t-shirt printing to how fine a detail you can put without
⏹️ ▶️ John you know all the colors just smushing together. So we have walked that delicate line. The pixels are small
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that the angles in our logo are rendered nicely, but large enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can still see them with spaces between them that are small enough so that the logo still
⏹️ ▶️ John shows up, but large enough so that you can see the individual pixels. You will see the struggle we face when you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to atp.fm slash store and look at the little rotating animated graphic, which shows the
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt, and then from a distance, the shirt just looks like the ATP shirt with like a dim dimmer logo.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I have two levels of zoom showing you what’s really going on. Oh, and by the way, to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it not just look like the ATP shirt, we put a little drop shadow underneath it. And of course the drop shadow was a
⏹️ ▶️ John different color than the rest of the shirt. So now you don’t just have the normal like seven colors that you have, the six color
⏹️ ▶️ John stripes and gray, but now you have seven additional colors, which are all those colors, but slightly darker to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the shadow. So, this is what we’ve done. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John our most difficult to manufacture, most difficult to explain, most difficult to display on a webpage shirt that
⏹️ ▶️ John we have ever made. We call it ATP pixels. It is our ATP logo as the tagline says, one pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John at a time, it is not retina. You’re supposed to see the pixels. That’s the point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the regular shirt is the retina version.
⏹️ ▶️ John regular shirt is retina. You can’t see the pixels. This one, we’re trying to let you see the pixels. I actually, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the only times we’ve actually pre-printed sample shirts. So I have a sample here to see, can we pull this
⏹️ ▶️ John off? Will it work on a shirt? and I have the shirt sitting right here on the desk and I can say, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is possible. Now I didn’t run this shirt through the wash 800 times. I really hope these pixels don’t smear together
⏹️ ▶️ John or come off in the wash or whatever, but we’re pushing the limits where this is our version
⏹️ ▶️ John of three nanometer, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is N3B. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the best we can. ATP pixels, that is a new shirt we have. It is our headliner for the holiday season.
⏹️ ▶️ John Next shirt. This was also another Cotton Bureau idea and I thought it was funny and good. It’s much simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ John thankfully. It’s called ATP Space Black. And like another computer with that same color
⏹️ ▶️ John that you might’ve heard about recently, it’s not really black. The logo is just a really dark gray.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. That’s the shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s a black shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John with a dark gray logo on it. The twist here is that for this and
⏹️ ▶️ John one other product, we also are doing sweatshirts. It’s the same logo. It’s just the ATP logo in
⏹️ ▶️ John really dark gray. Don’t call it black. It’s space black. But it’s a long sleeve crew
⏹️ ▶️ John neck sweatshirt. Well, I’m wearing one right now. I wear them like all during the winter and I figured this is a winter sale.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should do it as a sweatshirt It’s the same product. It’s just called a TV space black when you pick the product You can pick t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John or a sweatshirt and you know, so anyway, and also there’s a solid color black tri-blend I think which is a new option for
⏹️ ▶️ John that one Next we have our crop just like Apple introduced their crop of m3 processors.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have our crop of m3 shirts We have an m3 shirt an m3 pro shirt and an m3 max shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John and just like Apple the pro is a little bit more than the M3 and the Max is a little bit more than
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pro. Unlike Apple, it’s not like a $500 difference, we just added a dollar, but we think it’s a good joke. So there you go. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back of these shirts, no more chip design on the back. I know a lot of people didn’t want anything on the back,
⏹️ ▶️ John but honestly, we didn’t have time to make them even if we wanted to put them there. So it’s just the M3 logo
⏹️ ▶️ John on the front. If you have an M1 and M2 shirt, you know what these look like with the Pro and the Max badges
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Pro and the Max shirts. Then we have the ATP six color shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you’re probably familiar with. It’s a bunch of different colorful shorts with a white ATP logo on them. Only now we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John also thrown in crew neck sweatshirts in varying colors into the same mix. Again, it’s the same products. It’s just called ATP6 colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got the shirts and the sweatshirts in varying colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, wait, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Hold on. The ATP6 color shirt, and I think this name has been here for a long time. It just may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have occurred to me. The ATP6 color shirt is monochrome white. Or at least the logo is monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white, despite the name ATP6 colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, the shirt. That’s why it says colorful shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying we probably should workshop this a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, that’s what it’s always been called. There’s more than six colors now, by the way. But anyway, that’s what it is. Then we’ve got a
⏹️ ▶️ John regular ATP logo shirt, which we always sell. We’ve got the ATP hoodie, which we always sell, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I highly recommend I think people underestimate the hoodie. My kids all have them. They love them. We’ve got the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John polo, which if you’re looking for something more formal for the holiday season, there’s that. We have the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John mug, which we sold many times for. But this is an entirely new appearance for the mug. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a black mug with either red or gray inside. It’s a white mug
⏹️ ▶️ John on the outside with a cobalt blue interior. It can just happen to you, I tell you. That’s right. Cobalt blue
⏹️ ▶️ John interior and a cobalt blue logo. It looks really cool. I think when you see
⏹️ ▶️ John the, it definitely looks different than the other one, but I’m excited to get these. A lot of people in my family have been requesting them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a totally new look for the mug. Check that out. And we have our pint glasses, which are the same as they’ve ever been. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the holiday season. And as Casey mentioned, the sale only runs until the 26th.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re listening to the show. Maybe you want one of these things as a holiday gift. No one is gonna know that. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be subtle. You’re gonna have to just take atp.fm slash store and message them and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like something from here for the holidays, for a holiday gift and the sale ends on
⏹️ ▶️ John the 26th. Your friends and relatives are not gonna find this on their own. You really
⏹️ ▶️ John just, if you want to be more specific, you’re like, I want this specific shirt and this specific color and this specific size. Don’t be shy.
⏹️ ▶️ John People want to find something that they can get you if you like you’re a nerdy person and they want to get you something
⏹️ ▶️ John nerdy for a holiday gift. It’s not just like socks or something, something that you think you’ll actually like. Send them
⏹️ ▶️ John a link. Otherwise, they’ll never find it. Same thing if you know a nerdy person in your life and you’d like to buy something
⏹️ ▶️ John for them. As for buying these things for the holidays. Keep in mind, anything that has multiple colors of
⏹️ ▶️ John ink on it, including the pixel shirt is going to be more expensive, which we why we included the six color
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt and the I know it’s confusing because it’s only one color for printing. But anyway, why we include the six color shirt and the space
⏹️ ▶️ John black shirt, both of those are cheaper because the logo, the printing on them is just a single color. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re significantly cheaper than the other ones. I look at this list.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like every single product is like 17 different printing passes. And then we have the stupid pixel shirt. So bad on us for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that. But hey, it’s the holidays and some of these shirts, you know, who knows if we’ll ever
⏹️ ▶️ John sell this pixels thing again? Same thing with the mugs. You know, depending on how popular this style is, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the only time we’ll ever sell it. So if you want one of these things, I suggest either buying
⏹️ ▶️ John it, buy it for yourself or buy it for someone nerdy in your life or get a link
⏹️ ▶️ John and send it to somebody and don’t be sire shuttle subtle. Say, here you go. This is what
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like for a holiday gift, please. And thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we don’t make any explicit guarantees that this will be there by the holidays. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is obviously the goal. That’s why we set the timing for now, but no guarantees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have our full permission to print out a picture and put it in an envelope and say, this is forthcoming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that with an iPhone one year for my wife, she got a picture of an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is an approach. Um, especially if you are overseas, um, that is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it won’t work, but it’s, uh, I wouldn’t necessarily bank on having the show up if you’re in, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Europe or somewhere elsewhere. Um, but we are certainly trying, we’re going to give it the college try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and Cotton Bureau’s gonna give it the college try and hope to get everything there by the Christmas holiday. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no guarantees. But a couple of other points of administrivia very quickly. If you are an ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey member, new or old, go to your member dashboard or whatever you wanna call it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is your bespoke discount code. Since this is a time-limited sale, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get 15% off anything you buy in the ATP store. So go and get your code, plug that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, and you will save 15%. And if you aren’t a member, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what could you do in order to get yourself this 15% off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP.FM slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, now Marco, do you need to cancel your membership subsequent to getting your 15% off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, in fact, canceling membership is totally optional. You can totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to and just continue to be a member afterwards for all the other cool member perks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such as the ad-free version of the show, the bootleg feed, access to various other minor things things throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the year, but mostly those two big things. And also the exclusive content that we do, which is sometimes very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sometimes nauseating because we haven’t done ATP food in a while and there’s a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so yeah, atp.fm slash store. Thank you, John, for putting all of this together. You’ve done an excellent job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as always, and to our friends at Cotton Bureau as well. Check it out. We really think you’ll like it. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until the 26th of November, and Literally every time. Literally every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people say, oh, I forgot. Oh, sorry. 26th of November. You’ve got,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, three weeks? You’ve got time.
⏹️ ▶️ John JG Get your holiday shopping done early. Like, don’t wait. Like, this sale ends basically just after Black Friday, so you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have one final frantic reminder, like, three episodes from now, and we’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it! You gotta do it now,
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, just do it now. Get it out of the way. It’ll, you know, the peace of mind is worth it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John totally sign up for the membership. It’s pretty easy if you order a couple of things to make up that membership amount in discounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. All right, let’s do some follow-up.
Shot on iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Apple event video, we, I don’t know how we didn’t get a chance to mention this, but we didn’t. It was shot on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone. It was in the show notes, I will point out. I think we just didn’t have time. I think we just blew it off. Yeah, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ran out of time. Yep. So anyways, it was shot on the iPhone or on several iPhones, I guess I should say. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very short and very cool behind the scenes video, which I love this stuff. I’ve been begging for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years now. I want to see a behind the scenes like this for Fitness Plus because I find that fascinating. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a behind the scene video about it. If you miss the discourse on the nerd,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like Mastodon and other nerd-centric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco things— JSL Consider yourself lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey JSL Yeah, consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yourself lucky. A lot of people were very grumpy about the fact that there were other devices next to the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like lights and drones and cranes and people. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that invalidates the fact that it was shot on the iPhone. I don’t know. I find it very whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there’s a short Verge post, which even though I do like the This is kind of a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encapsulation of the discourse that was going around. I think it’s very silly, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, we have a link in the show notes for that. And there is also, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, a post from Stu Mashwitz that talks about this, which I did not get a chance to read. Cause this apparently showed up since I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was prepping for the show. Uh, John, was this you that, that put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this in? John Greenewald
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a list of like, well, the title is what doesn’t doesn’t matter about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting their October event on the iPhone 15. 15 Pro Max. And it’s basically saying like, what, what should and shouldn’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John be impressed about? You know, the fact that they did this, right? And so it goes through
⏹️ ▶️ John the different items. The whole idea that, that, you know, oh, they shot an iPhone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they use all this expensive equipment does. I mean, it makes a like intuitive gut
⏹️ ▶️ John sense and like, oh, I thought you were saying that I could make a video like this, which is silly if you think about it for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do see how people could have that idea in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they think about it for one second and they say, but wait a second, look at all those lights. And they think about it another second. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John they thought about it a little bit longer, they would say, okay, but look, here’s the deal. If they take, you know, take a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple video that they shoot, you know, they make these videos all the time and just replace the camera part
⏹️ ▶️ John of it with a different camera, I think that’s a fair substitution. Like they didn’t, it’s not like, well, normally they don’t use all
⏹️ ▶️ John the lights, but when they had the iPhone, they had to use all the lights. No, they always have lights. Everything there is the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just swapped out the camera part. Whether or not you find that impressive, I think it’s pretty good. Let’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John change one variable situation. It’s just the sort of the, you know, initial impression
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, are you saying I could make this? I don’t have a crane. I don’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco director of photography
⏹️ ▶️ John and huge lights. It’s like, yeah, right. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a fair test, which is like, we kept everything else the same, all the super expensive equipment we always use, we
⏹️ ▶️ John just swapped out the camera. So anyway, the Stu Mashwitz article is good. They didn’t explain like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s impressive about the fact that they could do that? Is it impressive that it looks good? Is it impressive? Like what,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, are there technologies or features of the iPhone 15 that are specific that makes this possible
⏹️ ▶️ John that they couldn’t have done with the 14? So I think that’s actually the useful article to read because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Apple’s point. That point, Apple’s point is we’re now at the point where we can swap this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, $50,000 camera for a $1,100 iPhone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks so good that nobody notices it was shot on iPhone. And to that, you know, to that degree, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John their publicity stunt for this was successful and the backlash is mostly silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we as nerds, we tend to obsess over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overemphasize the importance of the central piece of gear about creating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some new thing, whether it’s a camera, whether it’s a microphone, a computer or a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we tend to obsess over that. Like, oh, what kind of pen do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use to write down your thoughts? that will, if I use that pen, my thoughts will be better. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, what kind of camera did you use to take that amazing photo? If I get that camera, I can take amazing photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we tend to over place the importance of those things in our mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we love gear and we love, you know, the idea that, oh, I’m just one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good camera away from being a great photographer. But the reality is, making great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff does not usually, first of all, doesn’t require cutting edge and the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical specs on those things typically. But also, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more to it than just the piece of gear, that one central piece of gear. Making great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video always takes way more than a great camera. The great camera is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a start, but what great video takes more than anything is people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Making great video usually takes a team of people. And the reason why is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much to do to make great video. You have to think about the lighting, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound, how the camera is moving, the writing. Like, I mean, there’s so much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much goes into it. So the fact that you can drop in an iPhone to replace, you know, some $5,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and up professional video camera. Much, much more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Well, yeah, I’m thinking like, you know, it’s gonna also, not only is it gonna replace, like, you know, some Reds on some of these heads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, it’s probably also gonna replace some Sony A7 series video cameras and stuff like that. that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing. It’s going for that kind of market. Most, you know, I don’t foresee a lot of people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using like the really, really big stuff on like professional movie sets and stuff. They’re not gonna use iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But smaller productions that are currently using basically DSLR video cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those can probably, many of those could use this either as their main camera or as a secondary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera if they wanted to now. But they probably wouldn’t because-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They probably wouldn’t, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those other cameras are better for the purpose. Apple is just showing that it is possible, which is what the Stu Mashowitz article
⏹️ ▶️ John is about. And people have shot feature length videos on iPhones many, many years ago when phone cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John were way worse. And I’ve watched some of these movies. I think it was a Steven Soderbergh one that I watched. And it’s like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, why is this a good movie? Because he knows where to put the camera and how to make a movie and the script
⏹️ ▶️ John was good, right? And like the video quality, I don’t remember how long ago it was. Maybe it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John many years ago. Like if you look at the camera technology then compared to what it is now, you’d be like, no one
⏹️ ▶️ John could have made a feature length movie with an iPhone back then, but they did, and people watched it, and I bet most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people who watched it didn’t even know it was made on an iPhone. They just thought it was a grungy-looking indie movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the impressive thing about the shot on iPhone thing with the event is that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just touched it at the end on that little ending card, and everyone’s like, wait, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t know, the whole time you didn’t know. And this is not saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single feature presentation of anything is always gonna be shot on iPhones from now on, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that they could do it and it didn’t seem like it was that big of a problem or that big of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a challenge to do it and they didn’t seem to be leaving much on the table by doing it. That’s impressive and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it doesn’t replace anyone’s professional film set cameras or whatever, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t need to. The fact is it is now good enough to do that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally it will be used for things and that’s great. And all of us who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gearheads, we now can’t say, man if only I bought this other big camera then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could make great videos. No you could I mean that’s one of the great things about the democratization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of amazing technology being put into our phones and you know regular people computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that you can do with just a you know admittedly the iPhone is not like the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smartphone on the market but it’s a mainstream smartphone that lots of people have across all different demographics and places around the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and different abilities and different financial situations. Anything that you can enable people to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with just their iPhone, that’s incredibly powerful. And that enables so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people in the world to do so many great things. They’re not all gonna have these big crews or anything. Sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course not. But the fact that they have a camera in their pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they didn’t even have to buy separately, that they were buying the phone for other reasons, they kind of already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s amazing to have that kind of capability. That’s what Apple was showing us. And at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, they succeeded. and you don’t have to dive too much into, well, they were putting it on a gimbal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using lights. Yeah, of course they were. They were making a professional video commercial for their company with a massive budget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not what most people are doing, and that’s fine. It’s still ridiculously amazing that the phone can do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John A more convincing thing that they could have done is picked out some of the famous YouTubers who shoot
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of stuff on just plain iPhone. Like Doug DeMuro famously just skips out on, it just shoots
⏹️ ▶️ John everything on iPhone, not that his videos look great or anything, but no one cares that they’re on iPhone. even
⏹️ ▶️ John MKBHD who’s got a gazillion dollar red cameras that he loves. Very often when he’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John an outdoor thing, going around a car or whatever, all iPhone. Sometimes he mentions it, sometimes he doesn’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, people watching the videos, can you tell if this was taken on a $15,000 red camera or on
⏹️ ▶️ John his own personal iPhone that he’s holding in his hand? And sometimes either you can’t tell or
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t be able to tell unless you’re really looking for it. And that I think is much more relevant to people’s lives than,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, well, at least to people of a certain age. what do these famous YouTubers who have,
⏹️ ▶️ John in some cases, basically unlimited money for their short little video that they’re making,
⏹️ ▶️ John why are they choosing to do it on an iPhone? Because it’s good enough and it’s there and it’s just easier.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s as big as an advertisement as the fact that Apple can spend millions of dollars to pay a production
⏹️ ▶️ John company to make their latest infomercial.
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Plain-M3 MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, David Steer writes, I’ve been hearing quite a lot of slightly negative commentary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the tech press regarding the new plain or vanilla M3 MacBook Pro. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you start specking it up, I think it becomes quite a compelling machine for those who previously might have opted for a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M2 Air. An eight core M2 Air with 25 gigs of unified memory and two terabytes of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage costs 2349 dollar or excuse me pounds in the UK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I priced it earlier today and I believe the bill that David is talking about is $2,300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whereas in a 10 core m3 MacBook with the same memory and storage costs 2,700 pounds or $2,600 so again 2350 pounds versus 2,700 22 or $2,300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Delta of about 300 bucks. With the M3 MacBook, the 350 pound difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets you the latest chip, a bigger, better screen with promotion, higher quality speakers, longer battery life, and a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of extra GPU cores. I wouldn’t be thinking of it as a substandard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro, I’d be thinking of it as a beefed up Air. Obviously, if size and weight is your biggest consideration, then the Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still the best option. Luke Miani has a good video about the M3 Pro pricing, we’ll put a link to that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes. I see both sides of this. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, the vanilla M3 MacBook Pro, it seems a little bit light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the pro for my tastes. And I feel like it kind of, degrades isn’t the word I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, but kind of makes the, I can’t think of the word I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for, but makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the- What part of it did you think is light on the pro? Cause I’ve been thinking the opposite the more reviews I’ve read, because it does have
⏹️ ▶️ John all the same stuff, except for the, it’s M3-ness, which exposes itself in lack of ports and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But everything else about it isn’t skimped. Like I think this is the point of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John David’s feedback here is true with a lot of Apple products in that it’s very often, especially if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a tech nerdy type person, you’re like, okay, you get it in your mind, which product you want, but then because you’re a tech nerd, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, now I gotta pick which one of these, I’m gonna go through the configurator, I’m gonna bump up the specs that I care about. Maybe you need a
⏹️ ▶️ John big disc, maybe you need a lot of RAM, whatever. And what you don’t notice is that as you’re cranking the dial
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the spec for the thing you’re configuring, you’re pressing up against
⏹️ ▶️ John like the next higher machine. So you’re like, oh, I wanna get an Air cause I can’t afford a Pro. But then you go into the Air and you keep turning
⏹️ ▶️ John up the dials and you may not notice when you’re starting to press really hard up against the next higher end
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which is the M3 MacBook Pro. And I mean, again, the Air has
⏹️ ▶️ John a size and weight advantage, but that Pro screen just destroys. No matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how high you spec that Air, the screen’s not getting any better, right? And so when I look at the M3 Pro, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John of it as like, if you’re making a really expensive M2 based MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and you want a faster computer with a way, way, way better screen, you know, take a peek at the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 MacBook Pro. The benchmarks of that plain M3 are as impressive as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m feeling pretty good about it at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also keep in mind HDMI, SD card slot, better speakers, like there’s a number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of significant advantages to it over the Air. I mean, and look, I love the Air. The Air is a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, But once you are in this price range, where you, like, once you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speccing up the air to have more resources and stuff, it is actually pretty competitive with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing. You know, the M3 MacBook Pro, it would be nice if it were higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specced. For instance, I really, I do agree with a lot of the commentary around these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days that, like, a machine called MacBook Pro really should not start at eight gigs of RAM in this day and age. Like-
⏹️ ▶️ John It should support more than one external monitor, which is the other real limit. Maybe you don’t care about it, But if you do, boy, you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John real disappointed if you didn’t know about that and you bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think the limitation of one external monitor is probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if you’re gonna complain about one thing about that machine, that, I think, is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to hit more people than, for instance, having less memory bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or only having one fewer Thunderbolt port, you know. Like, I think the external monitor thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more buyers of this computer would be surprised about a limitation, I think, than the other limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that limitation, again, there are ways around it with those USB-C display port hub thingies or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But those solutions are always a little bit more, first of all, it’s annoying that you have to buy an extra thing. And second, they’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit chanky. There’s not an Apple branded one, and you never know if you’re getting the right switching thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having dealt with those type of external monitor expansion things for laptops for many years
⏹️ ▶️ John in my various jobby jobs, they’re not particularly satisfying. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another sort of, you know, we were talking before, like, you know, Apple dinging itself and sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John brand reputation by forcing his customers to cobble together a solution that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John up to Apple standards. You don’t have to worry about that. If you get the, you know, M three pro or M three max,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can just plug in more than one monitor directly to your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. And yeah, to answer your earlier question, the thing that I don’t love about it is the eight gigs is the only one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey external monitor like that. It’s not wrong. it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icky. Like it doesn’t feel like a pro machine with those kinds of limits, but what are you going to do? And actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t get a chance to go back and look into this, but apparently somebody who works on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac team or excuse me, the iMac team was like, Oh, eight gigs for us. It’s like 16 for PCs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, Bob Borcher, right? Yeah, that was, that was, uh, that’s going around today too. A lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are complaining about that. I don’t think that was Bob Borcher’s best moment in the press, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think it was enough weasel words in there to make it actually true because he was comparing it to like Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John or something Yeah, right So like I mean it could be that the Windows operating system and the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Similar applications take up more RAM or they’re less free. Like it’s just it’s so not apples-to-apples Haha
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s hard to invalidate it, but it’s not what people care about like here with the 8 gig
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I mean on the one hand, it’s good that you can upgrade it. Unlike the external monitor There’s nothing you can you can’t add,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you have to go up the next uh, the M3 Pro to get the extra monitor, but you can get more RAM if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But the reason people complain, and I meant to look this up, maybe I’ll look it up for next week, is that we know
⏹️ ▶️ John that in the technology world, component prices go down over time. Uh, if you go back 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years in the past, MAX did not come with 8 gigs of RAM. They came with way, way less.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the prices were in the same ballpark because RAM used to be way more expensive than it is now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So over time, we have some expectation that, that you’ll get more RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John for the same amount of money. And Apple holds the line on that so long and it’s incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating. Like we don’t expect to be like Dell where when the price of RAM drops by a dollar, it’s reflected
⏹️ ▶️ John on Dell’s website because their margins, they’re always like cutthroat competition, we really need to be the cheapest possible option.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if our component prices go down, we pass it on immediately to the customer. Apple passes none of it on.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much does five gigs of iCloud storage cost, right? So how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco long have we been
⏹️ ▶️ John at eight gigs of RAM as the minimum? And how long, like, component prices go down. We
⏹️ ▶️ John know they go down. It costs Apple, and I’m not saying Apple has to pass on all of that. Like, I understand the longer the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the same machine, the higher the margins go. Like, we’re not begrudging Apple with their margins. Like, by all
⏹️ ▶️ John means, reap the margins, but you can’t hold the line forever. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like when we get closer and closer to the point where we’re like, oh, come on, Apple. Like, for the past
⏹️ ▶️ John however many years, You’ve been saying just eight gigs, eight gigs, eight gigs. We know that eight gigs is getting cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John At some point, the dam has to break and you have to say, okay, we’ll give you more. And does it go to 16?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it go to nine? Like we don’t, but whatever it is, enjoy your time when you keep the
⏹️ ▶️ John price the same and your component costs go down, like enjoy that time. But there has to be a point where you
⏹️ ▶️ John move off of eight gigs and when we get closer to where like collectively we tech nerds think they should be starting
⏹️ ▶️ John to get close to the point, especially when, at this point it’s not like, oh, eight gigs is too little for a minimum.
⏹️ ▶️ John We, because they put it in something with pro and it costs $1,600, we’re saying in this scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re really highlighting the fact that you’re being stubborn about, you know, not passing on any
⏹️ ▶️ John of your component cost reductions to us, which, you know, I mean, we talked about it last episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the reason the Touch Bar one was sold for so long, because of margins. And so now it’s like, okay, fine, you get the new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the new whizzy stuff, but we’re still holding the line in eight gig and it’s frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s that unreasonable. In my mind, of course, this is my little nitpick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there should be anything called MacBook Pro that is an inadvisable purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If one of your relatives comes to you and says, hey, I just bought a MacBook Pro, you should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no dread, oh no, did they buy the wrong one? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John ideally, you’d have that same feeling about all the computers, but-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ideally, yes, but I recognize, you know, the thing, you know, the lower end models in this, you know, currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Airs, you do have to have low-end models to hit certain low price points, I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are, and I’ll get to this in a second, there are certain buyers where that would be okay. I’ll get to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a second, please. But, I think something called a MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the minimum standard should be 16 gigs and 512 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they did increase the SSD to 512.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, thank God for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that to me, I think that is, if you are at all a power user, 16 and 512
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is your minimum baseline. and ideally 16 a terabyte, but, and it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re mad about RAM prices, don’t look at how inexpensive SSDs are right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is shocking how inexpensive, good, fast SSDs are right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ones that are faster than the ones that Apple is putting in its laptops, you can get for just a pittance, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the fact that they went up to 512, like that’s a relief, because they were holding 256 for so long, but still 512 seems a little tight.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all the pros should be 16, one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte, at least at minimum, but they’re not. and okay, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll get there, yeah, yeah, Apple’s profit. But Bob Borchardt’s statement, first of all, I mean, look, he didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to cause a press hubbub with that, I think it’s just one of those situations where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to the tech press, or to any journalist, really, is like talking to the police. Ideally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, but if you have to, be very careful what you say, because it will be twisted against you in some headline posted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on social networks. And so, what he said was a whole paragraph that basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gist of it was basically, The RAM quantity is not as important as you think because there’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons why modern Apple Silicon Macs are super fast, and they’re faster than you think. Go try one, you’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it’s faster than you think. And that’s all true, and when the Apple Silicon Macs first came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very first ones, the M1-based ones that were the only ones for something like 6 or 9 months, they maxed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out at 16 gigs of RAM. And those of us who bought them and used them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was one of them, We had to go, oftentimes, down from 64 or 32, down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 16, to use them from our previous computers. But they were so much faster that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t as big of a problem for a lot of work. Some work, it was still a problem, but for a lot of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t, because the entire computer was faster. So that’s not wrong, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco untrue. The whole computer is faster, but it is also held
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when you don’t have enough RAM, And it could be so much faster if you gave it enough RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, the processor, you know, the processor’s speed and the architecture with the unified memory and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does make a lot of things faster. So the overall system does feel very fast, even with 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs, when you’re not doing that much with it. But when you do start getting into a lot of multitasking and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything involving, if you ever use Chrome for anything or anything that uses Chrome, like a lot of Electron apps, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a lot of apps are super RAM-hungry, including many of Apple’s own apps now. And so it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a modern computer, eight gigs and anything less than a terabyte, I think is inexcusable for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything marketed towards any kind of power user at all. On the air, if you have to get a super low price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point for entry, that makes more sense. Nothing called pro should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really stingy specs, even at the base. And I think that’s a relatively new thing. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros, years ago, like most MacBook Pros, the base model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was respectable. And it wasn’t super top of the line, of course, but it was always like respectable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This, I’m not, the eight gigs really hurts this. Another angle that a lot of people are saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like, well, these users over here, these casual users, or the people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just use business computers, they don’t need it. They don’t need more than eight gigs, or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need more than 256 or whatever. And I think we have to be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful as power users and as nerds, what we assume other people don’t need or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t appreciate. Honestly, there’s a lot of gatekeeping that is kind of under the surface there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of elitism under the surface there, and a lot of condescension
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the surface there. And so we have to be very careful when we’re making assumptions about what other people would need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or wouldn’t need, or would or wouldn’t appreciate. In many ways, the computers that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we use, that many people around the world use all the time are way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over spec’d in certain areas for what they need. All of the modern Apple Silicon chips are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way faster than what people need to do like, you know, word processing and, you know, fill out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forms in web browsers for their job or whatever. But we give them to them anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The phones in our pocket, as I mentioned earlier, are way, way better than what most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote need or would notice the difference between. but we keep making them better anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s what we do. That’s what we do as technologists. We make things better and faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nicer and more capable over time. Whatever we think someone won’t need or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t appreciate or won’t notice, that might be true a lot of the time. But not all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. There are those times when people notice and they appreciate it and they use it and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it. And who are you to say what someone is never gonna need or is never gonna appreciate? Computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes have long lives. you don’t know what someone’s gonna need now or five years from now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give people the most you can give them with whatever resources you have available, give them good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools and let them decide what they do or don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I agree with you. Building on a little more about the base configs, Ewan Makepeace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, with regard to the penalty of quote unquote unusable base configs in Indonesia and presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other countries, there are zero official Apple stores while the standard Mac configs are available from stock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in stores, custom builds take months and months to arrive. So when Apple ships laptops with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight gigs of RAM or 256 gig storage, that’s what many, many, many customers end up with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. All the more reason why the base configuration of something named Pro should be pretty decent.
No Face ID?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tomer Schmesch writes, I am absolutely shocked that they didn’t announce Face ID on the new MacBook Pro. At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this point I’m starting to feel like there’s a specific reason they are not doing it and they don’t plan on it But at the same time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is that not so freaking huge if all it has is the camera? Well, it has camera and a light.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I I really wanted Face ID for the longest time I don’t have any particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems with Touch ID, especially since we now have external keyboards with Touch ID. In a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world I agree that yes, I would prefer face ID, but I don’t know. This is not one of the things that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actively bothering me. Am I wrong about
⏹️ ▶️ John this? Yeah, well, whether or not it’s actively bothering you the reason I put this in here is because you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we’ve spent many months praising the new MacBook Pros mostly because they
⏹️ ▶️ John undid the mistakes of the past and got back on the right track and because obviously Apple Silicon is amazing and laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John form-factor But it may lead some people to think okay So are the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John are they done now and now we’re just quibbling over like what the configs are and how much they cost like Have they have they perfected
⏹️ ▶️ John it and my answer is no there are still obvious things that they should do and my number
⏹️ ▶️ John one Slash number two depending you know this in cellular is face ID. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Think touch ID is great. I enjoy it. I Think face ID would be as big a game-changer
⏹️ ▶️ John as it is in the phone just because the act especially of laptops like that are sitting on a desk the active
⏹️ ▶️ John the act of sitting down in front of something and having and just unlock without you having to do anything. Is that still
⏹️ ▶️ John one step better than having to put your finger on the little spot on the keyboard? Not a big deal, just like it wasn’t a big deal to put
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing on Touch ID, but I’m a big proponent of Face ID on my phone. I would love it on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not on laptops. There’s kind of a goodish reason. It’s not the fact that the notch is plenty wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that the screens aren’t deep enough at this point to fit the Face ID stuff, I believe. If you took like the Face ID component
⏹️ ▶️ John out of a phone and tried to like, you know, disassemble the screen and tried to shove it in there, I think it’s still kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John tight and Apple doesn’t want to have a weird bulge or whatever, but like, but yeah, that’s on my list. Like, oh, are they just
⏹️ ▶️ John done? They never have to do anything to the laptop skin? No, they should be working towards face ID. They should be working towards getting rid of the notch
⏹️ ▶️ John and they should be working towards face ID. And those two things could be combined if and when they figure out how to do under the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or getting rid of the dynamic island. We’ve talked about this in the phone, yada, yada. All this is to say is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the laptops are not perfect. They’re not done. There’s always, to Marco’s point, there’s always ways that we can make them better
⏹️ ▶️ John with technology. in a good period now where there are no glaring errors anymore, no unforced errors,
⏹️ ▶️ John no stupidity, but like, thank God for that. Why they’re not have cellular, why they’re not have face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, they have working keyboards, and they have a reasonable complement of ports. And the processes are amazing. So we will enjoy this period.
⏹️ ▶️ John But let us not forget, there is always more that they can do. And those I think those are obvious ones, put cellular and do
⏹️ ▶️ John face ID, right. And you know, I’m sure there are other obvious ones that you can think of, like, we’re not demanding them this moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not saying that laptops are bad, because they’re they’re missing them, it’s what we’re looking forward to for the future. So hang in
⏹️ ▶️ John there, Like, I believe it will happen someday.
The 8 GB MBP era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, some real-time follow-up. I just did some quick research on every Mac, because I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 2015 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the base RAM was 16 gigs. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I wanted to look up. How long, how far do you have to go back?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re looking at the cheapest 13-inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has been 8 gigs standard RAM since the mid-2014 model. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nine years ago, which sold for the price at the time, 1299. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John say RAM prices have dropped in the past nine years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nine years. That’s the thing, component prices, like they go, and now I understand it’s not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM because RAM gets faster, SSD gets faster, but like same thing with- But it also gets cheaper. Yeah, the SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have now are cheaper than they were before, they’re also faster. Like that’s the march
⏹️ ▶️ John of technology, right? And again, I’m not saying every, you know, from month to month as RAM prices fluctuate, Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust the prices of their laptops and pass all the savings onto us. Like, but nine years? RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John prices have gone down in nine years, Apple. Like, just please give
⏹️ ▶️ John us, give us, like, and to be fair, Apple might say, well, like the most expensive component in
⏹️ ▶️ John this laptop is actually the screen, and the screen we’re making zero profit on because we were
⏹️ ▶️ John basically selling it to you at cost. And to make up for that, we have to charge, you know, like there’s always some reason
⏹️ ▶️ John why, Like the sum of the components in this laptop adds up, you know, we demand our margins because
⏹️ ▶️ John business, business, right? They have to be this amount, otherwise our stock price will go down and we’ll lose our employees
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re retained by their, you know, the promise of the stock price. Like I understand all the reasons behind
⏹️ ▶️ John it. What we’re saying is like the balance they have struck with holding the line on eight gigs of RAM and Pro laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John for nine years is perhaps not the right balance. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, and by the way, it’s not inflation either. I just figured that out too. So this was $1299 in 2014. In current dollars, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s almost the same price that these laptops are now. So they’ve accounted for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inflation, and it’s still eight gigs of RAM on the base, small MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro nine years later. listen
Dynamic Caching: which memory?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Natasha Singh writes dynamic caching is tripping up almost everyone talking about it. And in fairness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way Apple presented it wasn’t clear, but they did specifically say quote on chip memory quote, which is SRAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple silicons RAM is on package, not on chip. And john, I think you had some other
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve also said I’ve rewatched the video to see what did they actually say? They didn’t say on chip, but it was written
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen in a slide and they said local GPU memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple was taught this is this is Natasha continuing Apple was talking about maximizing the use of on-chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SRAM to maximize GPU utilization, as the chart shows. Basically intensifying its use to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increase GPU hardware hit rates and utilization.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would still like to see like a white paper from Apple or I don’t know why they would have a WWDC session because it’s totally transparent to the
⏹️ ▶️ John developer. So like I don’t know why they would do it other than to just brag. But I would like to just for instance for all like I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe this, I think this all makes sense like this. I think this is what it is too. But I would like to see the technical details involved just
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m curious, not that it matters. But if they’re they’re gonna brag about it or whatever. You don’t, you know, obviously don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go into detail in the presentation, but do link to something on your website that brags about the cool
⏹️ ▶️ John technology. I don’t know, is it a secret they’re trying to keep from everyone else? But, you know, looking at the benchmarks and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John of the GPU on the new MacBook Pros, I don’t know if it’s dynamic caching that’s helping with
⏹️ ▶️ John it at all, but the GPUs do look pretty good. So, you know, now I’m doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, this is marketing at work. Is it good because of this dynamic caching thing? Who knows, but the GPUs are
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SSD speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are apparently no half-speed SSDs on the new MacBook Pros. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Luke Miani has a video about this. And John, I think you’ve done a copious amount of research. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many figures in the show notes, in our show notes, many of which are bolded. So can you walk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us through this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So what we’re talking about with the half-speed SSDs is that on the previous generation, the M2 generation, if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got the base config, speaking of being punished by the base config, would only use one SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John chip instead of two. I don’t know, because of component costs or whatever like so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you got it with 256, you just get one 256 gig chip. If you got the 512, your inside would be two 256 gig chips. And you’d be like, Well, why
⏹️ ▶️ John do I care how many chips the storage comes in, I get, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, 256, 512, whatever. When you have the two chips, you would get literally twice
⏹️ ▶️ John the speed reading into the SSD because it would do both chips in parallel. So this wasn’t like a 1%
⏹️ ▶️ John difference or whatever. So the base config, in addition to having very little storage, obviously you only get 256, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be half the speed. And that was one of those things where you’re like, oh, you’re buying a MacBook Pro, wait a second, or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, whatever, don’t buy the base config because the SSD is half the speed. And again, maybe it didn’t make a difference, maybe you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care, but you’d want the consumer to be informed. Like, do you do something where you’re waiting around for large
⏹️ ▶️ John volumes of data to go to and from the SSD? Don’t get the one with half speed. If you don’t, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you never do that and don’t care, just be aware that it is half speed, and if you’re okay with it, get it. But it’s just one of those things where you don’t want have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have that conversation. So the rumor right after the keynote last
⏹️ ▶️ John week was, oh, they didn’t do that this time. Every even the base models, they don’t have like a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John one SSD chip when the other ones have to, they’re all they all have two chips are like there’s no difference or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So someone did some benchmarking, and they found the basis, Luke did benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of other people did as well, that the base 256 gig M2 MacBook Pro was like 1400 megabytes per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s like the bad one that we’re comparing it to. And so let’s try the
⏹️ ▶️ John base 512. Again, they bumped the storage for the base 512, M3 MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that gets 3000 megabytes per second. So like, yay, the old one was, the old bad one was 1400 and the new
⏹️ ▶️ John good one is 3000. So the old bad one was half speed and the new good one is twice
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So we don’t have to worry, there are no bad base configs. The base config is twice the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John of the bad old M2 with just a one SSD, thumbs up, right? But then people
⏹️ ▶️ John tested the one terabyte M3 Pro MacBook Pro, and that one gets 6,000
⏹️ ▶️ John megabytes per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think the truth is that the base model
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, so here’s the thing. The base model is half the speed of the next one up, right? It’s 3,000 versus 6,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s double the speed of the old bad base config. And this is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is with the march of technology, right? And to be clear, by the way, the PlayStation five, which came out
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years ago, had a minimum spec where if you bought an off the shelf SSD, like an M
⏹️ ▶️ John two SSD stick and shoved it in there to expand the storage, it had to be able to be capable
⏹️ ▶️ John of at least 5500 megabytes per second read, right? I think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John the one I have in there, I think is like $75 now. And a terabyte, just FYI. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, consumer console, you know, PlayStation five and many
⏹️ ▶️ John year old console, you can get something that’s 5500 megabytes per second. But to get something
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than that in a MacBook Pro, you got to go up to one terabyte. Anyway, technology marches on, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John money you spend, the faster it will get. The one that costs more money is indeed faster. This year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote slow on is twice the speed of last year’s slow one. I don’t know how to feel about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like the fact that they didn’t, if you look at the logic board, you can see there’s no like empty
⏹️ ▶️ John spot where there could have been an SSD. But that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the type of thing people might not think about when they’re buying this. They’d be like, I should just pick up based on the amount of storage
⏹️ ▶️ John that I need. It’s not obvious until you benchmark that going from 512
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs to one terabyte in your SSD is going to double the speed of your thing, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since they both use two chips apparently. So I don’t know, like do with this
⏹️ ▶️ John what you will. I give Apple kudos for not making the same mistake they made last time. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t begrudge the more expensive one being faster, but boy, that seems like a big leap.
⏹️ ▶️ John yep, definitely is.
M3 MBP vs. M3 Pro MBP
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of the differences between these if you’re worried about like a lots of dissection of the plane m3 because the plane
⏹️ ▶️ John m3 is not The it’s not the ugly duckling But it’s the it’s the most interesting and novel one because there
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t one there wasn’t a plane to m2 One in the same case with the same features and now there
⏹️ ▶️ John is but inside they’re quite different So one of the differences is that the plain old m3 MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John just has one fan Instead of two fans that are in all the other better M3
⏹️ ▶️ John based MacBook Pros and you know the M3 is a smaller cooler chip so it doesn’t need two fans
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s that it just has one fan so it goes a little bit higher rpm it’s a little bit louder not not that
⏹️ ▶️ John big a deal you probably won’t hear it unless you’re benchmarking it and interestingly the the plain
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 MacBook Pro has a slightly smaller battery than the next one up even though the case design
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same you know if you look at them that looks like the battery is the same but apparently the plain old M3
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro is 6068 milliamp hours and the M3 Pro is 6269 milliamp hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, the batteries look identically sized, but apparently they’re not. So this is Apple, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to ensuring that the battery life is identical by taking the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John the chip that uses less power and putting in a slightly smaller and presumably also slightly cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s kind of a shame. I mean, so some of the differences here remind me a lot of the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Escape. That was my nickname for the back when in the early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch Bar days, 2016 era, when they redid the whole MacBook Pro line like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they tried to replace the MacBook Air with an inexpensive version, very similar to what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did here with the M3 MacBook Pro. They tried to replace the MacBook Air with a cheaper MacBook Pro that was cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down in a few ways, had fewer ports, a lower spec chip. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like the MacBook Air class of Intel CPUs, So like that old 15 watts chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line, but in the 13 inch case. And they did similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was only one fan instead of two. But in that case, they gave it a bigger battery. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I loved about that computer until the keyboard broke very quickly, but what I loved before that happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that it was a battery monster. Because they had taken this 13 inch size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was made for pro chips, a bigger case that had a lot of room for battery, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had put a MacBook Air chip in there, so it really sipped power. And the bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery that they had room for in that case, because they filled the thing with battery as much as they could with the space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had, and so that thing was great, like for a long plane trip, for instance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was kind of hoping that this base M3 MacBook Pro would be able to take that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role again now, and it seems like they kind of half-stepped towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but didn’t quite push all the way. Like imagine if this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had an even bigger battery than the 13-inch M3 Pro and M3 Max models, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretically it should have the room for, having a bigger battery and a lower powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip should be an amazing airplane computer. But instead I think they have yielded that spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to more likely the 15-inch MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it just makes some sense from that you’re trying to get this thing to get a price point.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the one hand, there may be economies of scale using the same battery, on the other hand, if these are just, you know, standard ish sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just because it’s like, you know, six different individual modules. So maybe they just shrunk a couple of the modules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Yeah. And to be clear, like the need for that is also less now that like now that all MacBooks now get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing battery life. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that was back at the time when like, you know, when I was every year, we’re like when I fly to WBC, you know, flying from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York to California is like five and a half hour flight. And because I was going to or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from WBC, I’d usually be running Xcode for at least part, if not most, of the journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was always great work time. And it was always such a challenge during the Intel days, trying to get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, trying to use Xcode for five and a half hours back at a time when most planes did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have power outlets. That was always a stretch. Like, that’s when I would turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turbo boost with those various utilities, turn off turbo boost, I would like turn the screen brightness way down and like turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reading light, make my seat dark so hopefully I could like like see the screen still, like all these hacks have tried to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just barely stretch it and it would never make it. It would always come close. I would always make it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four and a half hours and then well, I guess I gotta take a nap now. Because like, and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every laptop Apple sells could easily do that even using Xcode and it would be totally fine. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I get that there is less of a need for that kind of thing in the lineup now. But it is kind of a bummer that they like, they came close to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just didn’t really follow through with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would think this one, the M3, still probably gonna have better battery life because the battery is just a tiny bit smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M3 is less than a tiny bit more power efficient than the M3 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and the other thing about the M3 with the benchmarks is people are pleasantly surprised at
⏹️ ▶️ John how much faster the plain M3 is than its plain M2 predecessor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very often there’s these YouTube videos saying, forget about the plain M2, let’s run the plain M3
⏹️ ▶️ John against the M2 Pro, right? In various things. So the M3 looks like it’s pretty,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the M3 is a worthy successor to the M1 with the M2 kind of being in between. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember, I don’t know if these are true, is this just rumors? But all the rumors were that
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 was supposed to have this new GPU. And I feel like if the M2 did have this new GPU and was on three nanometers,
⏹️ ▶️ John according to the supposed original plan, the M2 would have been much more impressive. But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like both three nanometer and the new GPU got pushed back to the M3 generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the M3 reaps that reward the M2 is just kind of in between there holding down the fort
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for the M3 to arrive.
M3-line chip packaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of M3 and eventually M3 Pro and M3 Max, our friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mastodon, F. Haussler, has revised their chip diagrams with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like annotations and whatnot. John, do you want to take us through some of the highlights here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason I put this in here is I was trying to find a bunch of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably real photos from Apple of what these dies look like. So yeah, the annotated
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are sort of colored regions saying here is the CPU cores, here’s the GPU cores, here’s the IO interfaces, here’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, to show where all the different parts are on this thing. And the reason that’s relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John is the whole thing about packaging that I talked about with Johnny Sirugi mentioning the packaging was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I wanted to know was, you know, cause we don’t haven’t seen the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra or whatever. It’s like, is this year going to be a year where it’s interesting packaging or not? And looking at these
⏹️ ▶️ John annotated chip diagrams and the diagrams of what the M1 Macs look like and the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and the M3 Max. I look at these and I think this year is going to be another
⏹️ ▶️ John year where they take two Maxes and stick them end to end. Because if you look at the way
⏹️ ▶️ John the components are laid out on the M1, M2 and M3 Max, all of which were all, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 and M2 were ultra-fied by sticking them end to end, all the same pieces kind of line up. Like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the long rows down the side of, you know, I can’t even see because I’m not zoomed in, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the way the features are arranged, you can see where the interposer is gonna go. It really, really looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like the guts of this chip have been arranged to support the silicon interposer
⏹️ ▶️ John and the ultra will be made by taking two M3 Maxes and putting them end to end. Yeah, if that’s not the case,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will be very surprised. Because if there was gonna be some more exotic packaging for the
⏹️ ▶️ John step up from the M3 Max, I would expect the layout of where the internal components are to
⏹️ ▶️ John be different. So if you were getting your hopes up for an M3 Max, that’s not two, or
⏹️ ▶️ John for an M3 Ultra, there’s not two M3 Macs stuck together. Maybe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John push those hopes off to the M4 generation. That said, two M3 Macs is stuck end to end is gonna be pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m still kind of excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then do we wanna talk more about M3 RAM chip counts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is just to confirm what we said last week. There’s an Anandtech article with photos from Apple that shows
⏹️ ▶️ John the chips and it’s kind of funny looking because we were mentioning like, oh, there’s this many RAM chips on each of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John The RAM chips, first of all, having three RAM chips looks weird, because it’s not symmetrical, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, the size and shape of the RAM chips is interesting. Like, if you look at the ones on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Max, the Max has four RAM chips around it, and they’re kind of more squarish, but then on the Pro, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of rectangular. Like, anyway, just to confirm, two RAM chips on the M3, three RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John chips on the M3 Pro, and four RAM chips on the M3 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes in with regard to TSMC’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three nanometer nodes. Jonathan writes, you can ignore N3X. TSMC’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X nodes, such as N3X, are process variants tailored to higher drive currents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These nodes are mostly for x86 designs and trade higher leakage or power for the highest possible clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speeds. This is for products like AMD’s Ryzen desktop chips and not anything Apple would ever use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N3X offers about 5% higher peak clock speeds in exchange for a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope you’re sitting down, 250% increase in leakage. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s as stupid as it sounds. You didn’t mention N3S, which is scheduled to follow N3E
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by roughly six months and should reach volume production around April, 2024, just in time to ramp the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A-series chips for September iPhone launch. N3S is a higher density variant of N3E, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds like just the ticket if Apple wanted to largely avoid regressions while moving from N3B to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N3E-based family. TSMC has been mum as of late regarding this node, which indicates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that it may well be another Apple-only node. Various ideas have been floated as to how the density improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be implemented, either through library optimizations or the introduction of a higher-density SRAM bit cell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Personally, I believe the simplest solution for TSMC would be to allow Apple to take the 4% optical shrink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slated for N3P six months early.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the question for next year. We’ve talked about how N3B has some density advantages over N3E,
⏹️ ▶️ John but N3E, of course, will be cheaper, so on and so forth. comes time to make Apple’s next phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like the phone is the one where every little millimeter counts and you really don’t want a regression
⏹️ ▶️ John from N3B in terms of density and N3E would be a regression. So
⏹️ ▶️ John N3S to the rescue, supposedly it’s more dense and you know, and Apple’s willing to pay for it or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John tune in next year when we have another series of N3 things with a letter at the end. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting they were writing off N3X of like Apple’s never gonna use this. you’ve huge power increase
⏹️ ▶️ John for a tiny clock speed increase. If only Apple had a case that had a huge amount of excess cooling that’s currently
⏹️ ▶️ John going to waste. Oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, of course. We need a different sound effect for the Mac Pro. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re running out of esoteric instruments, but we gotta figure something out.
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and John, maybe we should get a sound effect for this too. A new error network changed bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report has emerged. Tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we are well into the error network changed era of our lives. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ChromeDigits update, so maybe they fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But anyway, this continues to rumble on. Someone filed a new bug against
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromium open source project with the same complaint. But this person has
⏹️ ▶️ John a new theory that they are putting forward. And generally on bug reports, they don’t just say what’s happening, but they say, here’s why I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. in some respects that useful in other sense, I don’t know if this person is right, but here’s what they have to say. Starting
⏹️ ▶️ John with Sonoma, this is from the bug report. Starting with Sonoma 14.0, Mac OS uses a different
⏹️ ▶️ John way of communicating with other Apple devices, iPhones, HomePods, et cetera, and the smart home, HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John It regularly creates and tears down U-ton interfaces. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be micro, like a U, like
⏹️ ▶️ John micro, but it’s a U-T-U-N, U-ton interfaces, by means of the processes
⏹️ ▶️ John remote pairing D and remote D. This happens several times a minute, as long as a Mac is in a network with
⏹️ ▶️ John other Apple devices, although it can be best reproduced if there is also HomeKit hubs like HomePod and Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever the teardown of a U-ton interface happens, as can be seen in Mac OS console logs,
⏹️ ▶️ John if in that very moment Chrome attempts to load a website, it will abort with er network changed as it detects
⏹️ ▶️ John the changing network setup. In typical frustrating bug reporting fashion, although
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously this did get responses, so they’re head and shoulders above Apple, someone’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, since reproducing this bug requires hardware. I’m tagging this thing with like hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John dependency, basically saying like, no one can reproduce this bug unless they have like a bunch of other Apple hardware or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, look, everybody’s seeing this. It is a problem in the Chromium
⏹️ ▶️ John engine. And is it because a lot of people happen to have other Apple devices? Like maybe they bring their phone
⏹️ ▶️ John close to their Mac when they use it? Like, so frustrating. Like, I don’t know what it’s gonna take. Again, this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug was originally filed in 2019. So here we are four years later, still fighting with them to say, Is this a legit
⏹️ ▶️ John issue or just a esoteric thing? It’s legit. Chromium should not flip out when
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces that have nothing to do with the change. Anyway, I don’t know if this thing about remote parenting and remote D
⏹️ ▶️ John being new and the u-tunned thing, like is that what’s affecting it? My experience has been, I got this when I was
⏹️ ▶️ John on Ventura as well. I just got it way more and I thought it was because of Docker, but it might’ve been because of Sonoma.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either way, Chrome, Chromium, stop flipping out when something about the network change
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t affect you because you’re making your product not work and people continue to send me screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ John of their Electron apps with their network change. Mostly Discord gives us a popular application, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John tune in next week when the saga of Error Network change will continue.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all in one website platform
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco simply the best way to make a website, especially for businesses. This you know, just recently somebody asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, it’s a local local person here who is a landscaper, they asked me like, Hey, I want to start a website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my business. How do I do that? I said, go to Squarespace. That’s it. And I know this, you know, it’s not a technical person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I know that this is not going to result in like, you know, them having to come back to me with questions because it’s that easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Squarespace. It’s just fantastic. And just a couple of years ago, my wife launched her store front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Squarespace where she sells goods on Squarespace, all integrated. And I didn’t have to do anything for, all I told her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, Hey, you know, Squarespace does that. And she went there and did it all herself and you know I never had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be involved as the nerd of the family because it’s just that great and it’s full of features and I now I’ve seen them firsthand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from her using them like all the different you know shipping integrations tax integrations inventory stuff it’s
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco way for any kind of business. There’s so many features there. You know, online storefronts, obviously fully supported,
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Our new MBPs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we should talk about the orders that we have all made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last week or two. Let’s start with everyone’s favorite laptop superfan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has your MacBook Pro arrived?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t order a MacBook Pro. You know I didn’t order one. We covered it last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to be funny, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You got to play in the space with
⏹️ ▶️ John me. You get one episode per joke and we did it last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve reached our joke quota. We cannot make that joke ever again. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a set, it’s in a set, Casey, I’ll put it in terms you can understand. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Marco, where’s your laptop?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the most frustrating thing ever. It is next to me right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is ready to be set up, but because it arrived a few hours before I had to record this podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided I should not try to set this up now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a tremendous amount of self-control that I can assure you I would not have expressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were in your shoes.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have just you could just boot it up and had it running next to you Although I do have to point out now that you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna like transfer everything over like it’s sitting on the screen that’s saying do you want to transfer your stuff with migration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistant? And I’m I’m not ready to click it yet because I have to do this podcast on the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John What you could have done is opened it up And then just put it on your desk, but not actually power it up and just touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it with your greasy fingers a bunch to Test that but we’ll save that for next week But I do have to say like now you have the box next
⏹️ ▶️ John to you You see the cover art where it shows like the the open laptop and it’s got that background that’s like black
⏹️ ▶️ John with like a bunch of wavy gray lines that leaked. Yes. Some of there was I always watch these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always like keep track of the leaks to see if they’re true or whatever. The box art leaked early on this thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ John usually doesn’t happen with Apple products. But someone posted that. I’m like, that looks like it could be real. Guess what? It was 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John real. So kudos to whoever’s leaking the packaging. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco again, it’s pretty boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it’s so I have not used it enough to know how it how it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a computer. I can tell you I have high hopes based on my previous outgoing M1 Max 16-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. But I did get the black. I’ve taken a break from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black over the years because I kind of overdid it for a while. Like I was like wearing a black t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single day, you know for years and years and years. I bought everything in black because of course I was a nerd and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s you know standard issue for nerds. I kind of overdid black and then when I moved to the beach I went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything white and colorful. Like I went the total opposite direction. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still generally prefer the light and colorful lifestyle for most things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided to get black for this one because I’ve had silver now for so long that I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just wanted something new. And so far, in just looking at it here, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks pretty good. The one glaring error is that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason they still have not made a black power brick yet. yet. So the they have a wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black MagSafe cable with the black end.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the MagSafe cable actually black or does it match the dark gray of the computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is darker. I mean it’s nighttime right now but I’m in a pretty bright lit office and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks close enough to black and and the and even like even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USB-C end of the MagSafe cable, the end that goes to the brick, that’s also now black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, back when they first did colored MagSafe cables, I think for for the Air last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember, I think the ends were all white still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the iMac has white ends too, right? I think so, yeah. But anyway, this one, they made the end black, so the whole cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is black. It looks great. And then they still have this bright white power brick. Like, I’m kind of surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if they did like some kind of mid-cycle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update where like maybe in six months, these all start coming with black power bricks. Because it is kind of a glaring thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they’re gonna sell a lot of this color. because the color looks pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still am a little concerned that it’s not going to age as well, not because of fingerprints, but because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little minuscule scratches and rubbing on the edges, because underneath this thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black coating is silver aluminum. So any little scratch or dent and any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge wear on the edges and corners, that will show silver probably pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily. So I’m a little concerned about that over time, but for the most part I treat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my things pretty well so I don’t expect to see a lot of that. It does look very dark in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was, you know, based on a lot of the reviews and the early press photos and the videos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was afraid it would be lighter than I wanted it to be for a quote black laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is pretty dark. I would consider this a black laptop for all intents and purposes under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most lighting conditions that people are actually likely to use it in. Yeah, if you bring it outside, it’s gonna look, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to a dark gray. that’s fine. But in indoor lighting, this thing looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. It looks nice and dark. It looks fresh and new. And it’s a cool look. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot wait to start using it tomorrow. So hopefully I’ll have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to report on the actual use of this thing next week. Fingerprints. What’s the fingerprint deal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, it’s been fine. I have not been able to get a fingerprint to show up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty easily. one exception the touchpad. Touchpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have the coating. Yes it’s a totally, the touchpad is coated glass it’s a totally different surface so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touchpad still does show fingerprints fairly easily just like they always have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s glass it should be easy to clean them off though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know but keep in mind that is also the part that you tend to touch a lot so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something to be aware of because the fingerprints are a little more visible on the black than they would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on say a light color like the silver just because darker colors will show them a little bit more easily. It’s fine. Other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. Everything else seems great so far, but again, I’ve had it for like two seconds. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask me again next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which YouTuber did this, but here is the tip, because you may, if you get one of these and you’re like, you’re gonna review it or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you’re like, oh, I gotta test the fingerprint thing. You’re like, so do I just get nervous and make my hands sweaty? Like, how do
⏹️ ▶️ John I get the maximum greasy fingerprint to test this? And this YouTuber came up with
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultimate solution. I’ll give you a chance to guess what it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do they get like a hot dog and whack it against it or something? That’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John guess. That’s a good guess. But you gotta think a little bit more gross. Oh, grosser
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the greasiest part of your body? Your head. Your scalp. I mean, that’s close.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re in the right area. You gotta go to the T-zone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They rub their face on it?
⏹️ ▶️ John They rub their nose on it. Greasy…
⏹️ ▶️ John grease! Nose grease is the ultimate weapon in the war against it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I only think forehead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be more, but
⏹️ ▶️ John but the nose, like it sticks out, right? So they put a nose, like they rub, they just rubbed it on their nose. You
⏹️ ▶️ John want to get a good old nose line. I, as the producer and owner of copious
⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of nose grease, I have to tell you that is the ultimate torture test because it is in a concentrated
⏹️ ▶️ John area. So you’re going to see it. And this person did the nose swipe on the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, indeed, if you rub your nose in a little line on the Space Black MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, what you will see is a kind of greasy streak, but it does much
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the Midnight one. If you do that same test on a Midnight one, it will show up much darker. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m in the Jason Snell camp, which is that this coding is an improvement, but it is not magic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also don’t rub your nose on your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s not really a common usage pattern that laptops tend to need to accommodate. Yeah, it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Exactly, that’s exactly. And occasionally a phone, maybe, I don’t know. I went to the Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier today, knowing full well that we were gonna talk about this stuff. And I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the new MacBook Pro and, ho, ho, ho, it looks good. It looks real good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I flipped, if you will, I ran back and forth from one side of the table to the other to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Space Gray MacBook Air, which if I had seen that before, I do not recall having seen it before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I went and looked at it and it is bluer than I would have expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John especially- mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, sorry. That’s correct. Yes. It is bluer in the extraordinary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lights of an Apple Store than I than I would have expected. I mean, I knew people were saying it was blue, but it was still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat surprising to see it. But I played with the you know, space black MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro for a little while I touched it a lot, of course, and, and, and I used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the trackpad, I didn’t notice that that was more fingerprint laden than anything else, not to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re wrong, Marco, which I didn’t notice it for what it’s worth. But then I went over to the MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put my finger on the area to the left of the trackpad, and immediately it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey night and day difference between the Air and the MacBook Pro. You could, if you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried, see some fingerprints on the MacBook Pro, but it is not the sort of thing I would notice, generally speaking. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately noticed it on the MacBook Air. It stood out like a sore thumb. Ha ha, I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean that joke. But anyways, oh, I’m sorry, we’re not being funny anymore. My apologies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No more jokes, restart quota.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you made that joke on this episode, now you just can’t make it in the next one. Good grief,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna need a flow chart. So anyways, so yeah, the new laptops, they look incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t do any sort of like tests or anything, I just wanted to see what it looked like. For what it’s worth, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order one. I ordered mine several days later than I presume Marco did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so mine isn’t coming in for another two or so weeks, which is killing me, but it was a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my own creation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, just to give you some hope, mine came in like a week and a half early.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, there you go. That’d be nice. So we’ll see what happens. Mine is due somewhere between the 20th and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 22nd as we sit here now. What I had done, and I’m curious to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear what Marco has done, but what I had done is I took my laptop that I have now, which is the M1 MacBook Pro, 64 gigs. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 Max, excuse me, 64 gigs, four terabytes. I looked at my situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided, I don’t think I need more RAM. It’s extraordinarily unusual for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bump up to anything that even seems to be a RAM related issue. I think money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no object, I might’ve gone 96 gigs, but it just really didn’t seem like for my use, it was worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And instead I decided, well, I’m starting to feel ever so slightly constrained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on four terabytes. So yeah, let’s go to eight, why wouldn’t we? I did have someone get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a friends and family discount on this for the record. So that’s why I could justify getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight terabytes, which is I’m super excited for, since everyone will always, seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to always ask, how on God’s green earth could you possibly use anything near four terabytes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Turns out when you have a one to one and a half terabyte photo library, that’ll do it. And also if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have more than like one Xcode simulator and or version of Xcode on your computer, that will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also make this problem bad. And so I decided I’m going to solve this problem at least for the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two to three years, I’m gonna do it now, and I’m gonna hate my, well, my wallet’s gonna hate me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be one fewer thing, one less thing, whatever the right word is, one fewer thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to worry about. And I’m super looking forward to this. And of course I got space black, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, 14 inches, and an M3 Max. So that’s what I bought. Marco, what’s sitting next to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I maxed it out and I’m not gonna apologize for it. I’m a computer professional. This is my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Like this is my job. This is my life. I got the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of bumping up the terabytes, which you both seem to have done. That, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I’m always wary about doing that is because when you do that, A, you know you’re gonna eventually fill it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and B, that cascades to all of your backups. So now, whatever drive you’re using to clone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can’t be four terabytes anymore. Your backups, your time machine backups. Well, the good thing is they’re really cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out eight terabyte SSDs are really cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just like, oh, they’re not that cheap, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple’s pricing, they are that cheap. Yeah, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John prices are ridiculous, but yes, but they’re still expensive. So just keep that in mind. Like I bumped up to four
⏹️ ▶️ John with my Mac Pro in 2019 and I failed it. So, but yeah, I had to bump everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else up in my whole chain of backups. I would love to go to eight, but
⏹️ ▶️ John with my next computer, we’ll see what the prices look like at that time. Apple’s prices, of course, will be exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same because why would they ever change?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four terabyte external SSD is like 200 bucks right now. Like they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought one. Well, and actually building on that, so I am a devout CamelCamelCamel user,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t remember how I landed on this particular SSD, but I long ago, and I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know why I put an eight terabyte SSD in here but for some reason I did. Like months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put in a Samsung 870 QVO, you know, two and a half inch, eight terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD, and I swear to you, I’m getting like daily, sometimes hourly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emails from CamelCamelCamel saying, Oh, this is below your threshold. Oh, this is below your threshold. Oh, this is below
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John threshold. You’re going to lower your threshold. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course. But my point is just that these prices are absolutely coming down. And if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey graph of some of these SSDs, I’m sure this isn’t true always. But this same drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, this is like two or three years ago. I guess it was mid 2020, which admittedly everything was weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mid 2020, but nevertheless, mid 2020, the same drive $900 right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, according to camel, camel camel $347. Like, yeah, it’s that’s eight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabytes for $347. I assure you, even with a slight discount, and thank you to the very kind person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who I will not name that got that got me said discount. Even with the discount, I paid a heck of a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than $347 for an extra eight, eight terabytes or an extra whatever terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal seven and a half terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like four times as much, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, something like that. I don’t even want to think about it. But But yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am super looking forward to my laptop, which again should hopefully be here in a couple of weeks. I don’t currently have a buyer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my existing one. I thought I might have had somebody locally that wanted to buy it, but I’m not sure if that’s going to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. So if you’re interested in a very, very well loved, and I don’t mean it’s destroyed, quite the opposite, I just freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love this computer. If you’re interested in a old laptop, let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Minus spoken for, by the way, which is part of the reason I’m upgrading.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should wrap things up soon, but we have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take notice of something that never happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we don’t have time for this. We got to go to Ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it for next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing urgent in Ask
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP. Save it for next week because we’re too far into the show and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the top post next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John week, you think? Don’t worry. It’s not going to get pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey off the homepage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, let the record show that John has blogged. John has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco posted a blog post. We’ll do it next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not allowed to talk. I’m not allowed to make jokes, and I’m not allowed to talk about John’s blog posts.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re learning bad lessons from Merlin now. Mm-hmm.
#askatp: Scanning old photos?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently what I am allowed to talk about though is Ask ATP, and Steven writes, you often discuss various digital photo management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and backup solutions, but what is a good strategy for dealing with physical photos? I have hundreds or maybe thousands of five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by sevens from when I was a kid and none of them are digitized. So they’re hard to look through and they’re just one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flood fire or theft away from being gone forever. I know there are services you can ship your photos to to have them digitized.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this something you would recommend? I have a flatbed scanner, but it will really only scan one picture at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I genuinely do not have the tens or hundreds of hours it would take to scan and crop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them all down to reasonable digital photos. Is there a scanner that would work better for this that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would recommend? I have absolutely no advice for this whatsoever. Marco, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you probably don’t either, and then we’ll go to John for the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I do a little. So John’s gonna tell you the right answer, but I’ll tell you my answer, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, already, again, what I said earlier, we always think we’re like one piece of gear away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from solving a problem. And I know, I do the same thing. That’s why I’m constantly buying crap I don’t necessarily need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think it’ll solve some problem in my life, because I like buying gear. In this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, there are scanners that can bulk scan photos, but no, you should not be doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use the services. We use one, I haven’t done photos, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not really the photo possessor in my family, but we did have some family videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a million years ago that we digitized with one of these services, because back then, I did the thing. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when I still had a Windows PC. This was maybe mid-2000s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought a video capture card. I tried it and it was horrendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a disaster. The audio couldn’t sync up right. The software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation was very difficult. The hardware situation was very difficult. The quality was not as good as I wanted it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ultimately, I ended up having these half-assed DVDs the end of it that were not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. And anyway, later on we just sent those to a service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were perfect, it was fine. Like, and so one concern I had that I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco natural is you’re gonna ship off your like precious family heirloom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco videos, what if they get lost or damaged in the mail? We decided at that time to take that risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was fine. I personally haven’t heard of anybody having that happen to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but maybe to reduce the impact of that kind of risk, maybe what I would do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not send them all in one batch. Slice them up into blocks of maybe like a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different batches, send them separately. Send one batch first for service and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how you like the service before you then send your hundreds or thousands of pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all at once. But this kind of thing is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not worth doing yourself, not only because you don’t have the time, but because the places that do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in bulk professionally tend to have better equipment that is better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not only can you get better quality from it, but it’s also usually better set up to handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the realities of people’s family photos, you know, like dust and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They will do a totally fine job that you won’t have to do yourself, and it’ll take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no effort. It’ll take a little bit of money, but probably way less money than it would cost to buy your own awesome photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanner, And you don’t want to be doing this yourself. You want to digitize these ASAP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s the way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there is a flip side to everything that Margo said, but first I’ll tell you some of my experiences here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was in a similar situation where for our wedding, we paid
⏹️ ▶️ John some ungodly amount of money to get the negatives for our wedding photos, which was back in the day with
⏹️ ▶️ John film cameras, was not a thing most wedding photographers would offer you, but so they wanted you to do is buy prints from them at some
⏹️ ▶️ John exorbitant thing. But anyway, if you paid him enough money, you could get the negative. So we have the negatives from our
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wanted to get those photos. Obviously we have tons of prints and everything too, but I wanted to get the wedding photos
⏹️ ▶️ John into digital form. And we’re faced with the same problem Marko just said. Do I really wanna send the one and only
⏹️ ▶️ John set of wedding photo negatives in the mail? Right, because there’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John many of them. It’s not like you’re gonna do it in, you know, because this is again, with film cameras, they didn’t give you 7,000 pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There was just a small number of pictures, most of which were good. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna do it in five batches. So we did send our negatives through the mail to a company to get digital versions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s the first problem with doing this. No matter how you do it, service or yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite what you may think by looking at Apple’s RAM configurations, technology marches on. We got
⏹️ ▶️ John our wedding negatives scanned, like, I don’t know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, right? Shortly
⏹️ ▶️ John after we were married. The technology they had at that time, even the very best technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John the very best commercial place for scanning negatives,
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that great compared to what we have today. That’s always gonna be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever you decide to do this, at some point in the future, 10, 20 years
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, you’re gonna look at those things that you either paid for or made
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself, and they’re gonna look like potatoes. Because you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are these so ugly? Why are they so low resolution? Why this, why that? Why isn’t it not AI super resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah? You know, like there’s always going to be some way to take a second run at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can, if you want, you can take a second run at it later by doing the same thing, spending time or money to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Second thing is paying a service to do it. Obviously that saves you a lot of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John The service will probably have better equipment than you because you’re not a photo
⏹️ ▶️ John scanner scanning service and it’ll definitely have more expertise, but the service
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t have a couple of things that you have. One, no one’s gonna care more about how your photos look than you do,
⏹️ ▶️ John including the service, right? They’re just doing a job. They’re gonna do a job, hopefully do it competently,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not going to care as much as you do. And two, if you wanted to, chances are very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John good that through the application of tremendous amounts of money and time, you can purchase better
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment than they have because they’re not buying their equipment every single year. They bought their equipment some number
⏹️ ▶️ John of years in the past and they’re just making money with it. So their equipment is quote unquote old compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to what you could buy today right now with tons of money. I wouldn’t advise doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can get better results than most places that you pay to scan your photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re willing to spend a lot of money on a thing and also then spend time, not just time scanning
⏹️ ▶️ John the photos, but time learning how to use the equipment you just bought in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that takes advantage of the expensive equipment you just bought. That’s a lot of effort. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John will say having done it a bunch of different ways, I’ve paid for services to scan things and I’ve done a bunch of them
⏹️ ▶️ John myself. Doing it yourself, you can get better results. But man,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the reason we tell you to use a service is like, okay, how many hours are you willing to put in? I’m still working through a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of my photos, you know? And I’m not even using, I talk myself off the
⏹️ ▶️ John ledge of buying the better equipment than the companies have because it’s so much money. Like, what am I gonna do? Start
⏹️ ▶️ John a business scanning photos? No, I am not. So I talk myself on that ledge, but just using the equipment I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus the application of modern technology that’s good at like denoising and upping resolution and getting rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John scratches and everything, the things that I’m making are better than any service I’ve ever paid for, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones I paid for were years in the past, and now I can do better at home. The way I do it is I put
⏹️ ▶️ John them on a flatbed scanner, because I’m doing prints, I don’t have the negative, so I put them on a flatbed scanner,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I put multiple pictures at once, because otherwise I would be here forever. and then I manually slice
⏹️ ▶️ John the individual photos out of the scan. Why? Because apparently no flatbed, this is a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, not this is a big market, but if someone wanted to make this, if you have an app that scans things, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the equivalent of image capture, have a mode where it slices up all the pictures and straightens them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a bunch of rectangles, in between them is empty space. And here I am manually doing it, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of amazing that like, that the process of flatbed scanning for photos like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems to have totally stopped advancing around 1998
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just has not gone anywhere since then. Like this is so this is such an obvious thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re right. Nothing does it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John so, you know, David Chabon, Chairman, was saying that image capture does it also view scan report. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think a couple of apps report do it. Let me tell you, they do a bad job. Yep. Or rather,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do a worse job than I do manually. I don’t know why. It’s like it’s just like we have these amazing AI
⏹️ ▶️ John things and they can’t find the edges of photos. Like they’re all rectangles. Like they should never be trapezoids, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just trust me, like learn that they’re rectangles and rotate them to 90 degrees. They’re just, they’re all rectangles.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re all standard sizes. Anyway, maybe they get confused. Some of them have rounded corners on the older photos. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do that, if you put a bunch of photos on a flatbed scanner, scan them all, slice them up, rotate
⏹️ ▶️ John them, fix them up or whatever, you can get good results, but it takes so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I went through, I went through like, we have like 20 albums, numbered albums filled with photos. I think I’m up to like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, and I just got exhausted and I’m gonna take another run at it later. Maybe it’ll come out better then. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my advice is use a service because, and no, I don’t have any recommendations of good service.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is hard to find a good service. And if you have tons of photos, just send one batch to
⏹️ ▶️ John a service and see how they go. Send the photos you don’t care about, so if they get lost, you’re not sad. Mostly because,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, you just won’t do it if you have too many photos. You just won’t, like even me, Like with my photos, and I like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even that many. And I’ve still on this multi year pause because I just burned out on it. This is so boring
⏹️ ▶️ John and so tedious and so just mind numbing. Let a service do it. They’re not going to be as good
⏹️ ▶️ John quality as you could do yourself if you spend a huge amount of money. They’re not going to care as much as you do, and they might lose all your photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s still better than the alternative. And on the flip side is if you do want to do it, like if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John like six photos, like your favorite photos, do those yourself. Do them on your plane, flatbed scanner, use some
⏹️ ▶️ John super resolution thing like hand perfectly, you know, because there’s probably certain pictures you care about way more than
⏹️ ▶️ John the others. Yes, you may have albums full of photos, but like, I mean, at this point, what my
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy for this going through is doing is I’m not scanning every photo because I would never make it. I’m scanning the photos that
⏹️ ▶️ John I like and care about. And you can narrow that down further and further. To have a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John three inch thick photo album, find the five photos that you care about most, scan them yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do it at like a ridiculous DPI on your flatbed scanner. use your favorite AI program to enhance
⏹️ ▶️ John them, you know, get rid of dust and scratches, denoise them, like, if you can find the negatives, like if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get like a negative scanner or rent one or something, like, do it for the pictures you
⏹️ ▶️ John care the most about, like, you know, we paid as much as we could for our wedding photos, and now they’re like the worst looking
⏹️ ▶️ John scans that we have, and those came from the negatives, why? Because they were done 20 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John We still have the negatives, so we can take another run at it if we want, but anyway. Yeah, it’s more important to have
⏹️ ▶️ John them in digital and to actually have a good backup system use Marcos thousand year optical disc or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more important to get over that hump, because when, you know, Merlin’s water leaks into his garage
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, fuses his giant block of hose into one big thing, they’re gone forever. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John at least you have it in digital. You can do the thing where you just push the digital data from place to place
⏹️ ▶️ John as it slowly bit rots. But it’s more resilient than a bunch of photos in a shoebox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And most importantly, like what John said earlier, the reality is you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. You’ll start doing it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll start doing it if you’re unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll buy the skin I’m gonna do this this weekend, and then life gets in the way, and then you know it doesn’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s not a weekend thing forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, no. It’s a year thing yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and yeah the reality is like when it comes to this kind of thing Look you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it But first send it to a service And then see what you get back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then decide do I really need to also do this myself? because I guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you first of all you won’t and second of all you probably We won’t need to either.
#askatp: Why AV1 decoding?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnson writes, what is the practical significance of the M3 chip supporting AV1 decoding? Is that the future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all streaming video, including Apple TV Plus? How is it better? So my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, which maybe I might have some details wrong and gentlemen jump in and correct me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding is that Netflix, YouTube, I believe Facebook all are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using AV1, which is a not patent encumbered version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not royalty encumbered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey supposedly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a patent mess like every other codec. They’re all patent messes. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks it’ll be not patent encumbered, but the reality of software patents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they hit everything, because they shouldn’t exist and they’re stupid and they’re damaging to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire world, like most patents. But it’s a mess. And so you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in software without inadvertently stepping on some dumbass software patent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are like patent pools and licensing requirements for it just like everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you’re right that the, I believe the intention of creating it was to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a less patent income board or at least, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John low royalty or no royalty. It’s not that it’s not patent
⏹️ ▶️ John incumbent, it’s that they got all the people who have the patents to all pool together and agree, we’re going to let people use this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then others like come up in these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, someone else says, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t you didn’t realize that, but you violated my patent for moving pictures or whatever the hell patents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the more important thing is that this is a video codec that is being widely used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you know when you the reason why we build in hardware support usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into GPUs or something like something near GPU for decoding modern and complex video formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is because watching video is a thing that people do a lot on their modern devices, and they do it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours at a time, and so battery life matters a lot, efficiency matters a lot when watching video. Modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video codecs are very complicated. So if you can use specialized hardware acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to speed up a lot of that decoding stuff, you can make a significant increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in efficiency. Almost every, you know, H.265, H.264, like almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these modern and complicated video formats usually are at least accelerated for decoding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on modern device chips. Some of them are accelerated for encoding as well. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for AV1, for the M3, it does not include encoding support, but decoding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does, and it’s great. And so again, this is mainly to improve efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and battery life when you’re watching Netflix and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and without this, to be clear, you could still watch AV1 stuff, but it would be decoded on the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the energy use is just massively higher. So that’s why this is significant. People were already
⏹️ ▶️ John watching AV1 video on their Macs. They were just burning way more battery to do it. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John having dedicated hardware to do this, it’s just gonna save so much power. That’s why you
⏹️ ▶️ John get like, oh, I can watch, how long can you watch a video? For like 28 hours or whatever, it’s because it’s all being decoded in a little
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated part of the chip that does just this job. And so now if you
⏹️ ▶️ John watch a lot of video sources that have been using AV1, you will save on battery. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like the impact on you if you have a desktop and it’s plugged in all the time, it’s probably not that big a deal, but for laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John folks and soon to be iPad folks, it’s going to make a big difference.
#askatp: Push people to upgrade?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christian Healy writes, how do you convince your family members to upgrade to a new device? I just listened to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a recent segment about people not wanting to buy or use computers. My partner, a teacher,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owns an iPhone 13 and does not want to give it up, even when I offer to pay for it from my tech budget, an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Air and an M1 MacBook Air. When it comes to research, writing an email or other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyday computing tasks, she will sit at her desk with an open MacBook and type away on her phone. I’ve observed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tendency a lot in my wider non-tech family. They’re comfortable with their phones or iPads and don’t want to have to use a complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device that requires updates, typing and passwords, et cetera. I get where Christian’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from here. And if their partner is, is a primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone person, it stands to reason that getting them a newer and better phone would be great for them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the partner. But if the partner doesn’t want a new device, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Like what I think I’m failing to see what the harm is there. And, And I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right. I mean, you can pitch it and you can say, oh, the pictures will be better and it’ll be faster and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so forth, and the battery will be better. But ultimately, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, then that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think, again, going back to some of the problems when nerds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us try to either tell people about their technology or have some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of input as to what their technology is, oftentimes our partners or our family or our friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a minefield out there and it’s mostly our fault. So you gotta be careful. You gotta realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if, you gotta think about it from the perspective of other people in your family, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not nerds and you are a nerd, they might just not wanna mess with stuff because last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time or some other time in the past that stuff was messed with, it interfered with their life in a negative way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, maybe there was, you know, maybe like you or someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forced them to go through with a change or something that you viewed as an upgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that in some way was worse for them. And so they didn’t view it that way. Maybe, you know, and a lot of people, this could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as simple as like a software update and that it changes something in some way that breaks something for them or makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worse or they just don’t like as much. And it goes all the way up to hardware changes. Like, you know, if you like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you one time, you know, replaced your partner’s laptop that they loved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a new one that was better tech spec wise, but maybe it was a different size or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different shape or it needed different ports or whatever. That can mess with people’s lives and workflows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that maybe you as the nerd respect the tech side and you’re like, well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you need this dongle, but it’s so much better in this other way. And to them, they might be like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care about it being better in that way. Now you just added a dongle in my life and took away something I loved. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the path to to happiness here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let people in your family be their own people as much as possible. Let them make their own tech decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can be available to them if they want to ask you questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or advice. But for the most part, let them be their own tech person because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re their own person in life. And let other people make their own tech decisions. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they’re different decisions than you would make, if it was your gear, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s them. And let them decide what they use. You don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to wear the same shoes as your partners or family members. You wear different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clothes, you might watch different TV shows, you’re listening to different music. They can have different tech choices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities. And if someone’s not wanting an upgrade yet, or if they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the same choices you would make, that’s not really your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let people live and let people make their own tech decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco mean, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re it’s not like the part of your partner is listening to fish. I mean, that’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intervention about. But this this is no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there are there’s nuances to this question. So like the simple answer is how to cancel a failure
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade. Don’t like don’t don’t. Why would you do that? Because you’re just asking a trouble. But the thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point, that does flip like, you know, depending on how close the person is, if it’s your spouse
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they’re using a super old thing, and if the super old thing is causing them problems because it’s old,
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point, it is kind of your duty to say, look, I can help you with
⏹️ ▶️ John these problems that you’re having. And they have to be receptive to the help. So you can’t, there’s no way you can like force
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it. If someone’s, you know, if you see their computer super slow and because it’s super old. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re complaining about it and it’s bothering them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you can say, hey, just so you know, if you ever want to upgrade to a new one, the new ones are faster, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, and then leave it. and let them deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John the new ones get better battery life, or they’re smaller, or they’re lighter, or whatever. But you’re gonna know this because if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the tech nerd, and again, the closer they are to you, the more likely they’re already asking you or complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, why does X do Y? Or why is my thing so slow? Or why is it not working? Or can you make this thing work,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? And still, they may be like, I refuse to use your newer thing that you keep offering me, but I’m gonna complain about the old one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just want it to work like it used to, but now it doesn’t work as well anymore, and then you have to explain it with the my battery aging and
⏹️ ▶️ John software updates. and like you’ll know when you’re already on the hook
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with this. Like when is this partially your problem? It’s partially your problem if the person is very close to you and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John already essentially demanding that you fix their tech life, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even just like they’re demanding that you be the sounding board for their tech complaints. At a certain point, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like when is it gonna be time to finally retire the Intel Mac, right? You know?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 10 years from now or whatever, they’re still using it and it’s not working right and the fans are going and it’s filled with cat
⏹️ ▶️ John hair and the batteries doesn’t work anymore and you have to leave it plugged. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John as the tech nerd that is already their personal tech support, who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do better, it is your duty to help them, to guide them to the better life that awaits
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But if someone using an iPhone 13, that’s not that old, right? Like let’s get into specifics
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Like I know you think, oh, why are they using their phone? They should be using their MacBook. An iPhone 13 is fine. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using an iPhone 4, yes, it’s time for you to help them, right? But even then, it depends,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how close are you to them? Is it causing them problems or whatever? But like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 13, just let it lie. Like you want to be seen as a helpful thing, not as someone who’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to coerce them into something that both of you end up regretting. They regret it because all of a sudden their world changed
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t like it. You regret it because now they’re mad at you for making their world change. So don’t be in that situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Hatch. and thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join I mean, we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Humane Ai Pin leak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So breaking news as we sat down to record tonight, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Verge has gotten, I think it was David Pierce at The Verge, I hope I had that right, yes. Yes. David Pierce at The Verge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has an exclusive leak and basically it’s the TLDR on Humane’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI pin. So if you recall, this was a couple of Apple, I don’t know if you would call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them executives, but mucky mucks to some degree, that have gone on to create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this company Humane, which is trying to allegedly like rethink mobile devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’ve been extremely good at talking about how amazing they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and extremely bad at justifying that talk in any way, shape or form.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great way to put it. But here we are. It seems to me that there’s a lot of fart smelling going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on over there, but who knows, maybe they’re right. I’m not sure. But yeah, so apparently this has been leaked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the short, short version is it’s $700. It has integration with open AI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are, you need to have a $24 a month subscription to T-Mobile. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess they’re like an MVNO for T-Mobile in order to, um, in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get data on it, no screen, it has a couple of batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this actually is clever. I guess the way it’s mounted, if you will, or stuck to your clothes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it’s a, you know, like a, not a pin, but you know, one of those things where there’s a, there’s a magnet on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device and you know, you, you slip the other side of the magnet under your shirt or jacket or what have you. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a YouTuber lavalier mic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you, and that’s how it attaches itself, but I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s also inductively powered. I’m not saying that with any particular confidence, but that seems to be what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. And so there’s a couple of different backs to the pin, to the device so that you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically a couple of different batteries. Um, I don’t, I don’t know. I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard time, like, even if, even if you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s something wrong with our addiction to phones, which, okay, so far so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I have a hard time thinking of a device that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only way to operate it is with voice, or I guess there’s some gestures, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the primary means of interaction is voice and a speaker. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want that in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Don’t forget the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like project laser onto your hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I mean, I can get behind that, I guess. But but I mean, one of my favorite things about having an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch is that I never hear my phone as we’ve talked about before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got the iPhone’s 15 or whatever. We’re on now 15. I don’t need a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mute mute switch because my phones have been muted since 2014 a hundred percent of the time since 2014
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the Apple watch came out. So I don’t want something that’s talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. thank you, but no fricking thank you. We’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happens. Allegedly, they’re launching tomorrow as we record this, which will probably be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day or two ago by the time you listen to this. But I don’t know. As impressive as the tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to be, this does not seem to be solving a series of problems that I feel like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to talk a lot about this because we haven’t heard their side of the story. Totally. You know, we haven’t heard like what, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they pitching it? What are the features? What makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it compelling? And I’m sure and you know, when you when you look at you know what the verge has, it’s basically like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, we have pricing information 700 bucks, and it needs a $24 a month service that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses T-Mobile as a back end. Okay, like that’s, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If this is compelling, the pricing is not a problem. Like if this This is a compelling product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This will find its market even with those prices. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product seems to be intended to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of phone interaction. And maybe, and you know, we can look at, you brought up the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replaces a lot of phone interaction. It does that by providing a lot of other value. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the Humane AI Pin does that, and it provides it a lot of other value in some other maybe with the AI-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features or whatever, maybe there’s a market for that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it. I think if there is a world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which this product makes sense, I don’t live in that world. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is one and it’s just not that big, or maybe I’m the weird one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t rule out all those possibilities. But, you know, first of all, as I always say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t bet against the smartphone. People love their smartphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The smartphone is awesome and it will continue to be awesome for lots of good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, both technical and physical and just habitual. It will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to be awesome for most people for the foreseeable future. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is coming along to replace a smartphone anytime soon and it might never happen based on like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, we have to hold things in our hands and our hands are a certain size and batteries are a certain size and things like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the smartphone general idea and form factor, I think are going to be with us for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long time. But there is space in the market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other devices. That’s again, the Apple watch. Great example is this. It’s another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile device that can optionally have cellular service and can do some of the same things as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI pen, the human AI pen. So clearly there is space in the market for other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, some of which cost hundreds of dollars and have monthly service fees. So there is potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. The reason we’re paying so much attention to this particular startup is, as Casey mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of ex-Apple talent working here or having worked here. And that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when a bunch of Apple people go do something on the side, it’s usually worth paying attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. Oftentimes those become very good or at least very interesting startups or products. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is worthy of the attention of like, hey, you know what, whatever they release,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna pay attention to it. I’m gonna look at it. I’m gonna watch whatever their event is, if they have a keynote or a video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, I’m gonna watch it. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not see the motivation for this device. Most of the things that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purports to do, a phone would be way better at. Now, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could say the same thing about the Apple Watch, but most people, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re using their Apple Watch, are also using their phone. And the Apple Watch is providing lots of other benefits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the health monitoring, like notifications, like the workouts. Like there’s so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the watch that’s a reason to buy it. And I would also suggest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet most watches sold are not cellular and just use the phone’s connection and therefore have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no monthly fees and cost less than this by a good amount. So it’s kind of a different category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, just physically speaking, I don’t usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wear clothes where it would make sense for me to clip on a lapel button like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, like, you know, all of the demos we’ve seen and the press photo that the Verge got their hands on, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people wearing jackets. Like, okay, like suit jackets. Okay, look, a lot of people wear suits every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s necessarily the common case anymore. And there’s a whole lot of people who don’t wear suit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jackets every day. So again, I mean, how big is the market?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. The fact that the Verge says it comes with two batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a good sign for battery life. If a device ships with two batteries, that’s never a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That tells you right there, battery life maybe not very good. And you know, there’s features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in, like there’s a camera-based feature as well. Is that the right angle for the camera? Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many physical questions I have about this device. It’s gonna be, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not fashionable, if I had to guess, how it would be received by the world fashion-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s not going to succeed fashionably. So I just think there’s a lot working against it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the pricing is gonna work against it to some degree. Even having T-Mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be their network. T-Mobile sucks. T-Mobile is cheaper in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases, And that’s why they have good business, because a lot of people want that. And if you happen to be in an area where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T-Mobile has good service, that’s great for you. That’s not most people. Most people, T-Mobile does not have great service in their area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they have a lot working against them here for this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t see it succeeding. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, we haven’t heard their version of the story yet. So time will tell. I think it has some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting ideas behind it. This could be a product in a movie,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a fake product in a movie, or a concept that would be shown at a trade show and you’d never hear about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it again. I don’t see this going well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I need to hear their story. I don’t think their story is gonna change anything about this product. The thing I think about
⏹️ ▶️ John is what is their innovation? What are they bringing to the party here?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re using AI stuff that they didn’t make, or at least didn’t invent or whatever, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly commonplace, right? So it is a gateway into, you know, large language model stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that is ubiquitous these days, right? Various companies have it, they’re all working on it, they’re improving all the time, but that’s not what this company
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing. They’re just using stuff that other people did. Hardware, they have a thing that you can talk into that
⏹️ ▶️ John will relay that information to one of these large language models. So are they bringing innovation on the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John front? Can they make a small, low-powered device that’s able to listen to you really well and translate what you say into
⏹️ ▶️ John text and feed it to a large language model and give you the response and do all that stuff. Once you start looking at that
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the innovation equation, like, oh, this is what they’re doing. This is this is, you know, this is the value add they’re bringing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks a lot like they’re, you know, making a phone essentially like, oh, you need a processor and an operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has to know about like who you are and all your contacts and communication
⏹️ ▶️ John and networking and the Internet. And it’s like, all right, well, you’re just making a tiny screenless phone. Are you going to be better at that
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple? Probably not. So to me, it looks a lot like taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of things that already exist, batteries, microphones, large language models,
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and software, and putting them together into this device. And so it’s like, how could they
⏹️ ▶️ John be bringing any value when all the pieces they’re making out of it are essentially off the shelf? Even though, yes, they’re making their own custom
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. I mean, by off the shelf, it’s like all these things have existed before. And a good counter example
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is the iPhone. you know, cellular phones have existed before, even ones with screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and operating systems and web browsers have existed. And it’s like, what are you bringing here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Great, you know, you already had a web browser on the Mac or whatever, like that’s not new. And phones with screens, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not new. And smartphones, that’s not new. But there was something to the combination.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, I’ve browsed the web before and I’ve had a phone before, but have you ever browsed the web
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh, you’re just combining two things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that already
⏹️ ▶️ John existed. People already have phones, people have already browsed the web, what’s the point? It’s like, oh, actually there is something that is sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of more than the sum of its part when you can do quote unquote, real web browsing from a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was one of the hugest wins we’ve ever seen in a product that is essentially cobbling together
⏹️ ▶️ John existing things. And they combine to form this amazing thing that you didn’t even know that you wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s what I’m sure this company is hoping they have on their hands. So like, yeah, we didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John the large diameter models. We didn’t make the operating system and our hardware is not great. Although Apple had that going for them that their hardware actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty great. from the start. But let me just tell you, when you combine them in this way
⏹️ ▶️ John and clip them to your lapel, it’s gonna be an iPhone-like moment. And no story they can tell is
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna change that. Of course, they’re gonna say that, but what is gonna happen is people are gonna try this
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s either going to be like the first time that you realize you could browse the web
⏹️ ▶️ John while waiting online for the grocery store
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Twitter app-like experience or whatever. It’s gonna either be like that or it’s not. I’m voting
⏹️ ▶️ John for not right now, But I’m not willing to entirely discount this concept
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are many cases where combining a bunch of off the shelf stuff in a new
⏹️ ▶️ John way really does break through. And sometimes there really is just one or two companies with this
⏹️ ▶️ John type of idea and like no one else is doing it because they all think it’s dumb and someone does it and
⏹️ ▶️ John shows the entire world it’s not dumb and you never thought about the lapel pin thing, but actually that’s the next big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, like Mark was saying, in the way of the Apple Watch, not in the way that it’s gonna wipe the slate clean and it
⏹️ ▶️ John will all be wearing lapel pins instead of having smartphones, right? But in the way of like, this is a cool
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s actually useful and you might use it. I don’t think it’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s gonna be useful. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s like, you know, it’s more like a combination of Alexa and
⏹️ ▶️ John a watch, right? Which like we kind of already have with the Apple watch, but a little bit dumber because it’s Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna talk to something. I don’t care if it’s on my lapel or not. I don’t wanna project anything
⏹️ ▶️ John onto my hand. I don’t think this is the answer. I
⏹️ ▶️ John applaud the idea of trying some new approaches, but I always wonder with companies like this that
⏹️ ▶️ John surely smart people who are in the company, some, if this isn’t gonna be a big hit,
⏹️ ▶️ John some people who work there already know this isn’t gonna be a big hit because they’ve been using it, they’ve been trying it, they’ve been working on it. Yes, when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John working on it, you can get the tunnel vision and you think this, but this has gotta be a hit. I love it so much and I put so much hard work into it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in their heart of hearts, if you really know you get that sense of like, yeah, this isn’t it, right? in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John that I imagine the people who work in the iPhone got the sense this is it, because they were the first people who got to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a cell phone that you could, you know, you do real web browsing from and use apps and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And if they tried to explain it, they’re like, my Nokia phone does that. I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you don’t understand this. Like, it’s like the Nokia phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s, and you know, they know because they’re using it. I think the people who work at this company,
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them probably know in their heart of hearts, this isn’t it. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’re too early, kind of like, you know, the Newton or, what is it called? Magic
⏹️ ▶️ John cap, not magic cap, general magic, right? Many companies have had ideas that turned out to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John be the right idea, but it wasn’t time yet. And most charitably,
⏹️ ▶️ John this looks like one of those. Less charitably, this looks like an idea that it’s never going to have time because it’s a bad idea.