563: Drain the Attic
28 Nov 2023Chip-packaging advances, modern ECC, iPhones adopting RCS, satellite-SOS pricing options, Thunderbolt 5, the joy of moving, and our fitness journeys.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Moving is not fun.
- Follow-up:
- Apple fixes worn keycaps (via Ezekiel Elin)
- OpenAI
- Tip for buying smart thermostats (via Neil Weinstock)
- Marco’s many-taps Ecobee
- Chip packaging
- Introductory videos on packaging
- ECC RAM in Apple Silicon (via Grady Borders & Joe Lion)
- Green bubbles get slightly less 🤢?
- Apple extends free 🛰️ emergency services
- Thunderbolt 5
#askatp:- Can John take us on a tour of his recommended TVs? (via Gary Owen)
- Sony A95L
- LG G3
- RTings.com OLED burn-in tests
- Sony X95L
- Sony X90L
- Digital Trends best TVs of 2023
- Have we ever had iCloud randomly revert a file? (via Stephen Towler)
- Which apps should be blocked from refreshing in the background? (via Marcos Vinícius Petri)
- Can John take us on a tour of his recommended TVs? (via Gary Owen)
- Post-show: Moving is fun.
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Chapters
- Moving != fun
- Apple fixes worn keycaps
- OpenAI changed again
- Thermostats
- Sponsor: Hatch
- Chip packaging
- ECC in LPDDR
- iPhones will support RCS
- Satellite SOS still free
- Thunderbolt 5
- Sponsor: Notion
- #askatp: John’s TV recs?
- #askatp: iCloud Drive flakiness
- #askatp: Background Refresh
- Ending theme
- Our fitness journeys
Moving != fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we didn’t go until super duper late tonight, that wouldn’t be so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah? What do you think’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey happen? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey waking up early. Well, no, it’s just I’m waking up early to FaceTime with Jelly. Time changes mean that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no convenient time for me to talk to Australia. And so I’m waking up early after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having gone to bed late because I’m a big baby and an old man. That means it would be lovely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we ended before 10.30.
⏹️ ▶️ John How early is early?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5.30 I’m gonna be on the FaceTime call.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh wow. I remember those days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forgot that you had all that time with, what was that, East Asia? Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTiming with India, yeah. I mean, there was lots of overlap times, but sometimes the overlap times are, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, 5 a.m., 5.30 a.m. local time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My reason for waking up early tomorrow morning is to meet the movers. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally, we’re moving out of the old house, and oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, this has been a process. Fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a couple of family members who, over the years, we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, why doesn’t he move? He’s unhappy where he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lives. Why doesn’t he move?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re talking about other family members? Yeah. So like Joe and Susie or whatever? Right, right. Okay, right, I’m with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now that I am moving as an adult for the first time, like I moved, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we bought a house, I moved between apartments here and there every few years, like most young people do. that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also a terrible process, but moving a house that has accumulated like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 13 years of stuff. Wow, what a process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has been. I no longer fault anyone for not wanting to do this process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you’re somewhere and your family is like, you should move and you don’t wanna move, you are right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you probably shouldn’t move because moving is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, is it bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, momentum is a mother. It’s a lot. Momentum is a lot. And the thing is, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, if you don’t happen to live in a house, and I don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean a standalone dwelling, like a townhouse or like a place where you have lots of nooks and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crannies for things, let me assure you that no matter how clean your house is, you have put,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your case, 13 years of miscellaneous detritus all over that house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the easy answer for you, Marco, is to just throw money at the problem have movers collect all the detritus and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the other things and pack it up and move it to somewhere else. But if you’re smart, and I know you are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and certainly Tiff is, you will try to figure out places or, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, cull and get rid of some of the detritus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we’ve done all of these things. So we have culled, like we filled a whole dumpster, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned on the show like about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a year ago. Oh yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have culled, we have gotten rid of lots of stuff. There’s lots of stuff that we are not taking, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new buyers of the house, like they’re taking some of our furniture from us because we don’t need it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, you’re in a house for so long, you’re like, oh, I’ll hang a shelf here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then that shelf collects stuff. Now you have more stuff, and it’s just there forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until move out day. So we have gotten rid of stuff, we have cleared out stuff, we have given away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. We have given away lots of our possessions and furniture and things that we don’t need in the new house to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends, relatives, neighbors, some of them to the new buyers. just trying to minimize stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still so much stuff because behind and under and around and on top of all the stuff is more stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s ridiculous how much, and by the way, like the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shameful part of this is we probably need like 10% of the stuff. Like most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff we really don’t need. Oh man, there’s just so much. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the easy state when you have a house, the easy state is to slowly fill it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so when you are somewhere for 13 years, and especially this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is where we’ve gone through a huge change in our life in this house. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first got a dog, then we had a kid, and the kid has grown up here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ve grown over the last 13 years. So it’s just been all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different phases of our lives and different people and members of the family, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going through all this stuff and collecting all this stuff, going through different ages. Oh my God, it’s so, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. And I’ve read the books that Merlin recommends to get rid of your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know about Marie Kondo. And it just, there’s still so much stuff. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe it. So anyway, so we did everything. We got rid of stuff. We called stuff. We gave stuff away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for the first time, we have hired packer movers. Like they pack and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move your stuff for you. I don’t know how that goes. And I’ve never used that service because any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous time I have moved, we couldn’t afford that kind of service. So this is a new thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’ll see how this goes. But also, of course, we care a lot about certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So a lot of our stuff, we’ve packed ourselves anyway, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s literally gonna be people here tomorrow who we are paying to do this for us, but in advance of them coming-
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to pack some stuff yourself. Not only do you have to pack some stuff, move some stuff yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, my car is full. Yeah. Again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, I think we’ve talked many times about how my dad has a multi-hundred album
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vinyl collection. And for years, we moved every couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because my dad worked for IBM and it just so happened that part of his role, we moved geographically, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, many hours away from home every couple of years when I was growing up. And early on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this process, mom and dad found it happened to be a Mayflower moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company, a Mayflower truck driver, owner, operator, whatever, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they explained, all right, we’re very particular about this, that, and the other thing, you know, please treat this, that, and the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a respectful way and so on and so forth. And the guy was really, really great about it, right? Well then they moved to Connecticut, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is where I went through middle school and high school, and both of my younger brothers went through effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their whole schooling. So they were there for something like 20, 25 years. And then when he came down to Virginia, I think they either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lost contact with their beloved Mayflower mover, what have you, and they had Mayflower the company, but a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operator, go ahead and do the move. And among the things they did, despite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure having been instructed otherwise, is they just randomly threw dad’s multi-hundred album vinyl collection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into random cardboard boxes. So we get to Virginia and Aaron and I start unloading it and realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my God, these have been effectively randomized. And my dad, whom I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dearly, does not deal with that kind of thing well. So Aaron and I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we tell my mom quietly, here’s the situation. The vinyl is completely out of control. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to alphabetize it all. Don’t tell dad. And he was running around like a crazy person doing other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that’s what I ended up doing with Aaron and I, re-alphabetize this several hundred album vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collection. And I think that saved all of us potential heart attacks because he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have been beyond had he had to deal with that. So yeah, I don’t blame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you for wanting to pack your own stuff, at least for the important stuff and I concur with John’s assessment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though John, you haven’t moved in like 20 years yourself, but still, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but when we moved from Georgia up to Massachusetts, my wife’s work paid for the move and we
⏹️ ▶️ John had those packer movers. And so that’s how I know, like, you know, from experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do, they did an okay job, but if you really care about certain things, can you guess which things
⏹️ ▶️ John I packed and moved myself. Keep in mind that I had a 1992 Honda Civic DX with one side mirror. That
⏹️ ▶️ John for anything that I, anything that wasn’t gonna go on the truck was gonna go in there. And I had a wife and a dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s gotta be your mat collection and maybe the dog.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm-hmm. The dog was in the car. Mat collection was not, no way it would fit. It was books. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know me and my books. Because you cannot let, because they don’t care about like the corners of
⏹️ ▶️ John the books or the spines of the books or the dust jackets. They don’t care about any of that stuff. So they will just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’ll try to do an okay job, but books are heavy. I mean, you get a bunch of them in a box and they’re sloshing around with each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially dust jackets are easy to tear, corners are easy to pinch. It’s really bad. So yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John carefully packed my books in liquor boxes, you know, like a very thick
⏹️ ▶️ John cardboard boxes meant to hold a large glass bottle filled with liquid. So they’re very heavy duty
⏹️ ▶️ John and pack them in the car. There’s no way anyone I’m asking. Remember this was the CRT. I had a 17 inch Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s it called, cinema display? The big 17 inch CRT. The box that thing came in probably
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t have fit anywhere in my Civic except for maybe in the backseat if I could have got it in, but definitely not in the trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it makes perfect sense. Given your unique
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perspective on keeping your books extraordinarily pristine and perfect, I’m not surprised now that you say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that that’s what you chose to do. So what time are you waking up then, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s early, but that’s not completely obscene. Well, good luck. And so the move is hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just tomorrow, or is this a multi-day affair in theory?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in reality, this is a multi-month affair because we are, we are moving into the new house, which is not currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco livable yet and still does not have a bathroom yet or interior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doors or other requirements to make things livable. Um, and so we are moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff into not a storage unit because we did that already and it’s full.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We did that with like an earlier culling of stuff, resulted in us getting a storage unit and putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, stuff that couldn’t tolerate like temperature extremes in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rest of our stuff is going into the new house’s garage for a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the new house is livable, at least for stuff, and then we can bring the stuff into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house. And know that while the stuff does not require a bathroom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t bring it in the house yet because we are sanding the floors next. And of course, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not something you want your furniture around for. Sounds fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would strongly suggest not renovating houses. And if you do renovate your house, I would strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggest never moving. Just don’t just never move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Moving is terrible. Get the right house the first time and then never move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you love your house so much. John is definitely the right house.
⏹️ ▶️ John We got the right house and we haven’t moved. Oh my god. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, leaving aside the whole house falling down thing, or so you claim.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that’s the way you keep throwing money at it and it stays up and you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John move. So, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you’ve discussed in past podcasts, you’ve discussed like your plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your family was basically like your deal with your wife was that at some point you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retire and move back to Long Island. Is that still the plan?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, do you plan to actually do this? Because I’m telling you, I have trouble believing that you will do it now that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing what it takes to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the good thing about that plan is it presupposes retirement. So that gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you several years to do the process you’re trying to cram into like a few months here. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will take several years just to drain the attic. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, who knows, if I die before then, my kids have to deal with it in the grand tradition of parents
⏹️ ▶️ John dying and leaving all their crap to their kids to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. For what it’s worth, you are not allowed to retire from this program. You can retire from everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say you could retire from your blog, but you’ve never really been unretired from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your blog. But you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not allowed to retire from this program. That is part of the deal.
Apple fixes worn keycaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some information about keyboard wear. Ezekiel Ellen writes, note on keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wear, I experienced this too, especially in my 2014 and 2016 MacBook Pros. In every case, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple store would do on-site replacements for free, including on the butterfly keyboard. Oh, sorry, trigger warning, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even when not under warranty, they just took it in the back and clicked on a new key cap in five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder if that’s a policy or if they just got lucky, because I actually went back and forth. Was your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John under warranty? Because under warranty, yeah, sure, they’ll replace it, that makes sense. but not under warranty, they’ll just do it for you. That sounds great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think everybody with a warrant key You should take advantage of that.
OpenAI changed again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talked last week about OpenAI and as predicted, everything changed at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six more times since the time we had recorded. And as we sit here right now, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like the dust is settling, Sam Altman is back as OpenAI’s chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executive. It seems like basically the board has mostly gotten ousted and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sam is back and the king has returned. So reading from a New York Times article, Sam Altman was reinstated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, the company said, successfully reversing his ouster by OpenAI’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees, and investors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company’s board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman. Adam D’Angelo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chief executive of Quora, will be the only holdover.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, I think, John, you put in the show notes, there’s a pretty good overview article called Five Days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Chaos, How Sam Altman Returned to OpenAI. And we aren’t going to go through the minutiae
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how this happened, but you can go ahead and read. That’s a pretty quick and easy summary. So check that out. We all have links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes.
Thermostats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Neil Weinstock was one of a couple of people, I think, who wrote in to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remind us of something. So Neil writes, Anyone thinking of buying a new thermostat should check out their energy company to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they have deals on these things. Look at the bonkers deals on the store page on Jersey Central Power & Light,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of which blow away anything you’ll ever get on Amazon or Best Buy or whatever. Yes, that’s the cheap nest for one stinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollar. They really want you to have these things. I briefly looked into this for my power company, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is called Dominion Virginia Power, and the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium, they’re selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for $190, which allegedly is down from 250, if you believe Dominion’s own website. And it looks like the Fancy Nest is down from $250 to $144.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, that’s a thing. You should check it out. I think that’s what I did for
⏹️ ▶️ John mine. But I got a, when I bought mine, I don’t think I bought it through the power company, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the Massachusetts has something where they’ll give you a rebate. So you just got to send them the receipt. And I think I got like $100 back on mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You do have to check though, sometimes there are some strings attached. Like a lot of utilities will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these programs where somehow they are able to control your thermostat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If say for instance, like they’re overloaded during a peak summer hour, everyone’s ACs are on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they need to like raise you a few degrees.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re gonna turn off my AC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you don’t have that problem. But yeah, so anyway, it’s worth like make sure if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting one of these discounted thermostats from your energy company, make sure either there are no strings attached or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you are okay with the strings they are attaching. Yep, fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, a lot of people were either confused or grumpy about your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ecobee slander, I tells you, slander. So do you wanna talk to me about how many taps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it takes to change the temperature, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so everyone, I was complaining last episode that my Ecobee-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I think it was two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episodes ago actually, wasn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ah, whenever, yeah. I was basically complaining how like, I’m tired of how clunky it is and they redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI, I think earlier this year, there was some kind of software update sometime recently, redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI to make it even clunkier. And a bunch of people wrote in, some of them said, you are right, it is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of them said, you are wrong, you are terrible, which is a good summary of most feedback that most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts get about anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the gist of the I am wrong people is that apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one that I have is an older generation of the hardware. And so when I bought them about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years ago, they were transitioning between two models. I bought the best one that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a microphone and a voice assistant built into it because I thought that’s kind of weird. I don’t need that in my thermostat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what that actually meant was it was older hardware too, like older guts, maybe slower processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guts. Well, that was fine under the software that came with them, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never, look, the UI was never great. And I had lots of problems getting them set up with HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had lots of problems overriding their dumb smart behaviors that they wanted me to keep doing and they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco override HomeKit and HomeKit would override them and they would fight and HomeKit would say it was holding but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostat wouldn’t be holding or it set it to some ridiculous temperature that would make the thing go full blast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the way up to 80 degrees or whatever. So they took a lot of babysitting and a lot of weird setup stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were never great but at least with the original software they were slightly usable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the software update that they did earlier this year, whenever that was, made them substantially slower and less responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for me to change my thermostat temperature actually requires walking up to it, tapping it to wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up, it doesn’t wake up on its own for some reason, tapping it to wake it up, waiting a second for it to wake up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then tapping the little zone of changing the temperature, which is a very small tap target now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason, waiting for that to activate because that’s not responsive either, so that’s another second gone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then tapping the actual temperature up or down or whatever. So in practice, I hardly ever do it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will instead prefer to do it via Siri or whatever through HomeKit. But still, that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was annoyed about. Apparently, the newer model with the newer hardware is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster and more responsive, and most people say when they walk up to it, it wakes up reliably before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even get to it. So that saves them one of the taps and one of the animations and wake up delays. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the new EchoBees that I don’t have are less crappy than the ones I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know what’s even better? The Nest. I also, I was told by a bunch of people over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many months actually, about this product called the Starling Home Hub. And this is this little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like $100, basically what appears to be like a pre-configured Raspberry Pi kind of box,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s like a bridge product, a self-contained automatic bridge thing, that bridges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all Nest products into HomeKit. Nest cameras, Nest thermostats, whatever, it bridges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them into HomeKit. And a bunch of people wrote in over the last few months to basically say, I have one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and it’s great. And it bridges Nest into the HomeKit world perfectly. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordered one of those. I’m gonna see how it goes. But everyone recommended this thing. We’ve been hearing about it for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Now that I just bought some new Nest stuff, I figured I’d give it a try. So I’ll report back once I have some time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to see how it goes. But it comes very well regarded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No snark, why buy this thing and not like a Raspberry Pi? You just wanted the problem to go away?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, the last thing I wanna do is try to monitor like various,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, things like home bridge or whatever. I was like, I don’t, I don’t want to be dealing with that stuff. And for a product that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of just is like a self-contained version of that, that someone else manages and make sure works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very appealing to me. And plus it was, I think it was only a hundred bucks and like to get a decent Raspberry Pi set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up these days, you’re not looking at that much less than that. So, you know, that was, it was a no brainer to me.
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Chip packaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve got a whole bunch of feedback about chip packaging. I can read it. You can talk us through it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you want to do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can read it and I’ll just stop off at each point to give you a rest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Anonymous rights. Stop one on our journey, everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m stopping you already.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m stopping you already. Really? Yeah. The fact that I meant to
⏹️ ▶️ John make this point later, but here we are. This is an anonymous bit of feedback, okay? One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you have to keep in mind when getting an anonymous bit of feedback is usually these
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t going to tell you anything secret, but they know secret
⏹️ ▶️ John things, and they’re going to hint at them. And I will point out at various times when this
⏹️ ▶️ John anonymous person tries to do that, and I will translate from anonymous podcast feedback to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m excited. Anonymous writes, for anyone interested in the topic, I would like to highlight two excellent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos by Asianometry, I think I have that pronounced right, which is a YouTube channel on packaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that should be very accessible to a tech enthusiast audience. And I did watch two of, or both of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yes, I think they were pretty accessible. So they’re, I think a sum total of like 20 to 30 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey altogether, and they are worth checking out. When Gelsinger, which is the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head, and Sruji, who is the chip head for Apple, talk about packaging, they are mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about the increased level of integration, where components that used to sit on a shared PCB are now much closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together and integrated into one unit. Apple’s Ultra Series chips are the result of state-of-the-art packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The trend is to increase integration and go from 2.5D to 3D architectures,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from chiplets, to use AMD’s terminology, that are mostly packaged side-by-side, to packaging solutions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where chips are also layered on top of one another. Components that used to be in different locations on the motherboard are put closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and closer together. I see a few main drivers that are behind increased importance of packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so this is like topic number one, beating the reticle limits. The reticles the area that a lithography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machine can expose in a single shot. Currently, the reticle measures 858 square millimeters. Are there? Yes. Some Xeons are close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 700 square millimeters. NVIDIA’s hopper chip has a die size of 818 square millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The next generation of ASML lithography machines, high NAEUV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet, have a reticle that is half as big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That means NVIDIA will not be able to fab a chip the size of Hopper on a 2nm process. Even about 400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey square millimeter chips, such as Apple’s Mac series chips, are close to the reticle limit of a high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NA EUV tool, and will be less economical as a result. Technically, you can expose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to half reticles and get back to the old reticle limit of 858 square millimeters, but this will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey significantly more expensive. Moreover, wafer output is decreased. I doubt many customers will opt for this route
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will choose the chiplets instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so when Siruji was talking in his interview about how
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re interested in different approaches to packaging and how changes in technology are going to essentially change
⏹️ ▶️ John the way chips are made, he didn’t mention the reticle limit, but I have to think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a Probably the biggest factor like Apple makes chips that are bigger than the radical limit
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s gonna the new radical limit after Three nanometer, right? It’s half as big.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean even right now the m3 max could not be fabbed
⏹️ ▶️ John at five nanometer because it’s too big for the radical limit of Five nanometer it can
⏹️ ▶️ John only they can only get that onto a single die because it’s three nanometer The feature sizes are a little bit smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John So if they’re gonna have the reticle limit next generation, all sorts of stuff that Apple already makes
⏹️ ▶️ John will no longer fit. So what do they do? The two half reticle thing sounds expensive and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has in the past chosen, you know, N3B a very expensive way to get out of a problem like this. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like one of the reasons that everyone has suddenly becoming super interested in chiplets and different
⏹️ ▶️ John packaging things is nobody wants to have half the area that they had in the last generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet that seems to be the case. So everyone’s like, I guess we make smaller chips and stick them together.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that, you know, it’ll be mentioned later with that. Well, what is it? The EUCI
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, the interconnect standard for, you know, putting a bunch of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, UCI, yeah, I was close. The UCI interconnect standard that we talked about in the last episode, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John different manufacturers are getting on board so they can all agree on how these chips are gonna talk to each other. Everybody is motivated by
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing because nobody has some secret technology that can fab at two nanometers with the old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The next topic, producing chiplets in optimized process nodes. There are process nodes specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to DRAM memory, which are developed completely independently from process nodes optimized for logic. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have completely different names, such as Micron’s one beta process. Caches could be manufactured with cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process nodes, since there’s little or no gain in terms of memory density by using a smaller node, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go even further. Cell radios and other components with analog circuits need to be manufactured with yet other
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what we talked about last week of, you know, some RAM doesn’t benefit from these processes, but of course, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all in the same die and you’re talking about your L1 cache or L2 cache, that’s all in the same die as your SoC and you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole SoC at three nanometers. So that means you’re doing the RAM at three nanometers too, and that’s just a waste because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no benefit to using that super expensive node. But once you’re breaking things up and if you wanna have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re breaking up into little chips anyway, if you can get some of that cache memory onto an entirely different process
⏹️ ▶️ John that is optimized for memory that may even be better than trying to do in 3nm. And it frees
⏹️ ▶️ John up space on your actual die. That’s interesting. And then the cell radio thing. Obviously Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been trying for many many years now to stop buying Qualcomm cell radios. Recently they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t give up but they delayed their triumph even further by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John by signing a new deal with Qualcomm that says yes we’ll buy your cell radios for another whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John years because Apple’s attempt to make a cell radio themselves using Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ John old cell radio business that they bought has not been going well and there’s been many delays.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is just as far as I know as far as any of us as far as I think we know from the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re trying to do is just make a chip to replace the chip that they buy from Qualcomm. But it would be even better
⏹️ ▶️ John if the cell radios could be shoved into the same package with the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John using some technology like this. And those cell radios and other sort of analog components, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to be or need to be, and maybe some of them can’t even be manufactured on these very
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny processes because they need to be little radio chips. So having them manufactured on whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John is the appropriate process for them, but also shoved inside the same package, Apple would love that. Tune
⏹️ ▶️ John into it in 2027, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Next topic, integrating components from different manufacturers, especially memory. While TSMC might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make Apple’s SoCs, memory is supplied by someone else, the big driver’s integration of memory though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AMD has versions of their last two generations of chips that feature an extra cache chip on top of a CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chiplet, for example. Hypothetically speaking, you could integrate a modern chiplet with other components into a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SoC. The UCIe interconnect standard should make that easier and cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when an anonymous source is hypothetically speaking, they’re telling you about a thing that exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone, maybe not Apple, but someone is integrating a modem chiplet with other components in a single SOC.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know who that is. It might be Apple, might be somebody else, might be, you know, whatever, but, and they’re probably using UCIE
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. And I think in the videos that Casey mentioned earlier, one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them talks about how iPhones have been doing the thing where they, it’s not the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John here because they’re talking about things being kind of, you’ll see in the video, like in the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I should say in the same package, but like if you take two chips and slap them on top of each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what’s in iPhones today and has been for a long time. But they’re basically two independent things that are manufactured
⏹️ ▶️ John independently and shoved on top of each other. So there’s kind of like a sandwich of crap between them. Actually layering them without
⏹️ ▶️ John that middle stuff saves space because you don’t have to make two independent things that are sort of, you know, weather sealed. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John using the wrong terms here, watch the videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t really called a sandwich of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but putting two chips on top of each other without
⏹️ ▶️ John encasing each one individually saves you depth essentially. and that would be useful for a phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever Apple can do that, I’m sure they will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Next topic, leveraging economies of scale. Chips made up of chiplets are cheaper to produce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for more reasons than just yield. AMD can produce the exact same chiplets for a vast array of products, starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from its consumer desktop CPUs to its server parts. The only thing that changes is the IODy and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the number of CPU chiplets. AMD can dynamically and flexibly change what products it makes based on demand, margin, and other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey considerations. Whether it makes more server or consumer chips is up to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, obviously Apple hasn’t gone this route, but they have tried to do things to save money, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in the M1 and M2 generations, making the M1 and M2 Pro and Max basically the same chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Pro had a bunch of GPU cores chopped off. That’s a way to save money and
⏹️ ▶️ John time because you don’t have to design a whole third chip. This generation, they did design a whole third chip. The M3 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is different than the M3, which is different than the M3 Max. And none of those things are sort of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing modular about them. There’s modular things in the design, but they’re still all done on one die. In a chiplet
⏹️ ▶️ John world, Apple could pull an AMD and try to break out
⏹️ ▶️ John the parts of the chip and reuse like the IO component across all the pro chips, for example, instead of having to
⏹️ ▶️ John design each one to the dies. But we’ll see, like I feel like AMD did a lot of this stuff, not just
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily because it’s the best, but because of the economies of it. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John do put everything all in one die, it has advantages. It’s more expensive and it’s more of a pain, But that is an advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has. They can pay for the more expensive thing and endure the pain that
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD couldn’t. So we’ll see how this goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then final topic, cross-pollination of key technologies. I have to be vague here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a lot of the technologies that enable new process nodes for a single chiplet also enable better integration of different chiplets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and vice versa. For example, finding another quote unquote boring application allows companies to develop a tool or technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the years until it matures and entirely new applications suddenly become possible. Other times, the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processing step can be used in very different ways. I’m very excited about what is around the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One last thing, often the buzz is all about the fabrication of CPUs and GPUs but many forget about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the other product categories. When Apple’s Vision Pro was announced, I was fascinated by the displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a lot of this manufacturing of sticking stuff on top of stuff, using more technical terms, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John The sensors for cameras, for example, use some
⏹️ ▶️ John of that technology of putting stuff on top of stuff, mostly to make sure that the light sensing stuff takes up
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the area of the chip, even though there’s also circuitry kind of behind it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John screens, obviously, are a kind of reverse version of that where you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to put a bunch of control circuitry behind a bunch of things that produce light. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John what this person is getting at with the Vision Pro and the displays. I mean, we know, we saw the stories about Sony making
⏹️ ▶️ John those really fancy displays that are used in the thing, I’m not sure how that connects to the things we just discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ John like chiplets and boring technologies and older process nodes, but maybe we’ll find out with time. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John make a mental note of this.
ECC in LPDDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now let’s go into ECC corner. So the context here was, I think it was an AskATV, where we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked, hey, how come there isn’t ECC and Apple Silicon stuff? And Grady Borders wrote in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey historically, the only way to add error detection or correction to a computer was to add more DRAM chips to store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the data plus the parity information. These implementations covered both errors in transit and errors in memory. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey implemented by the chip set independent from any coordination with the memory outside of extra DRAM chips on the DIMMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I remember these on my Mac Pro, like there’s some more detailed feedback on this, but like when you would buy
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC memory for your Mac Pro or for your Xeon PC or any sort of, you know, Intel architecture that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote supported ECC memory, what you got was a memory dim that had
⏹️ ▶️ John one more chip than the ones without ECC. And they were all just the same type of chips. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like there was like eight regular chips and then a parity chip. It was just nine chips. I don’t even know what the number was, but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it was. And they were all the same and they were treated all the same. It was just a dumb bucket of memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was the circuitry that talked to them and filled them with stuff that use that
⏹️ ▶️ John extra space to store parity information. Um, but the interesting thing about it is obviously those
⏹️ ▶️ John dims are more expensive, even more expensive. You brought them from Apple, obviously, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, they were practically speaking, they were more expensive because they had one more Ram chip on them than anything else. They were also bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were also hotter. Uh, everything about them was more, you know, pro year
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey enterprise, you or however you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Great. He continues. Today, these two error paths are covered in different ways. Communication errors are covered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via some type of link CRC or ECC. Link coverage is optionally supported by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DRAMs on DDR4 and LPDDR4 and subsequent memories. Implementations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey require both DRAM and chipset support. In addition to taking a small amount of bandwidth, the chipset has to implement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a buffer to hold transactions until it is sure no DRAM chip will send back a link error. The next generation of memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standards will likely require more link ECC as the data rate keeps increasing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Starting around LPDDR3, the low power memories began to implement internal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory array ECC. Then different feedback from Joe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lyon, continuing on that idea. With array memory ECC, instead of the system having additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DRAM chips to account for parity data, each DRAM chip itself has additional quote unquote array space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built directly into the chip. So a one gig chip has one gig of addressable memory, but about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1.13 gigs of physical storage, obviously at the cost of a larger chip, fewer dives per wafer, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, the ECC logic is built directly into the DRAM chip and at the interface between the DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey array, where the data is stored, and the DRAM data path, how data moves from the array to the chip
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is in contrast to the old sort of dumb bucket of bits approach with the DIMMs, where it was the chipset
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the stuff. This is why the separation of
⏹️ ▶️ John link ECC and memory ECC are two separate things here, because the chips themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John have some ECC circuitry built into them, but that’s just for the data when it’s still on the chip. It hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John left the chip yet. So there needs to be a second form of ECC for once the validated
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC corrected data leaves the chip, it could still be damaged on its way to the thing that’s receiving the
⏹️ ▶️ John data, and that’s why there’s this separation that didn’t really exist before, because before it was just a big dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John bucket of chips and then the chip set would fill them with data and parity data and the memory controller would do all the ECC
⏹️ ▶️ John calculations when it received the data from the big dumb bucket of chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M1 Pro and beyond all use LPDDR5 or LP5. The M1 SoC used LPDDR4X or LP4.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All LP4 and LP5 chips have On-Die ECC built in, which is always on and always working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On-Die ECC will capture and correct DRAM array related failures, which are historically the vast majority of memory-related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit flips and memory corruption problems. As with any ECC, there are limits on the number of bits that can be corrected per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access. All the LP5-based SoCs have the option to enable Link ECC to provide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey additional ECC protection for channel-based corruption. From a system perspective, I think we have no way to know if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M-series chips use Link ECC or not. It can be enabled or disabled in real time, so it’s possible that the SoCs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always use it, never use it, or sometimes use it. But all the LP5 SoCs are capable of it. The combination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of OnDi ECC and Link ECC is effectively equivalent to the traditional system or module
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level ECC that servers and high-end workstations use. So you could say that basically all M-series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems already have better ECC protection than any consumer level Intel Mac ever did, and potentially equivalent to the ECC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protection on the high-end Xeon E-Mac, or Xeon Macs. So boom, how’s that feel, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s pretty good. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m kind of surprised that the Link
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC can be turned on and off in real time. Like, that’s so weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we had a bunch of people speculating like, Maybe the Apple only turns it on for the Pro Max or maybe they only turn it on when it’s above
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain temperature. I have to think it’s either on all the time or off all the time. But the other thing to consider is the path
⏹️ ▶️ John from the RAM chips to the CPU is really small
⏹️ ▶️ John in the M series processors. The RAM chips are right, you can see them in the package. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the SoC and there’s the RAM chips that are like millimeters away from it. They’re not going across a bus
⏹️ ▶️ John on a motherboard. They’re not going through a bunch of connectors that a DIMM slot thing goes into. So I wouldn’t be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John if in Apple’s testing they said, you know what, link ECC is not worthwhile because
⏹️ ▶️ John the link is two millimeters in length and most ECC based corruption errors happen
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the chip and not on transit. But then if you’re able to turn it on and off in real time it makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John think you basically get it for free. Like I know there’s supposedly a bandwidth cost to doing that or whatever, but maybe you’re paying that
⏹️ ▶️ John price all the time. So if you’re getting it for free anyway, maybe they have it turned on. I guess we need someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the know at Apple to tell us whether link ECC is enabled or not on the LP5 based
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple SoCs, but yeah, this is sort of a much more concrete explanation of the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had heard way back when, when they went LPDDR4, that LPDDR4 had
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of thing inside them that was effectively the same as ECC, but not quite. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a detailed explanation. Like the thing they have handles it on the chip, errors that
⏹️ ▶️ John happen within the chip, but then you still need another form of ECC to make sure the data that is safely
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving the chip makes it to his destination without corruption.
iPhones will support RCS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Breaking news from I think last week was that Apple announced that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will support RCS, which is what is it? Rich Communication Service, something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is sort of kind of, and don’t jump on me yet, but sort of kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage, but not strictly for Apple stuff. Basically, it would allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from an Apple user’s perspective, it would allow you to send images to Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users that are not potato quality and presumably receive them in good quality as well. I believe it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has an affordance for typing indicators and read receipts and things of that nature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a lot of very cool and interesting features that would improve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the messaging experience between iPhone users and Android phone users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, we got confirmation that these messages would remain green, so it’s not like they’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different color. They’re certainly not going to be blue, but they will remain green, so they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still second class citizens. I mean, they’re still not iMessages. And it is worth noting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RCS does not have any official spec for end-to-end encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is allegedly why Apple was sticking its heels in and refused to implement it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t know what their change of pace is, but I’m sure it had nothing to do with increased regulatory pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically everywhere. Surely that had nothing to do with this whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I think Apple just switch anyway, because here’s the deal, especially with the way they’re handling it. iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple’s messaging service, but there’s also the messaging service that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not owned by any of the platforms. It’s not owned by Google, it’s not owned by Apple, and that in ye
⏹️ ▶️ John olden days was SMS, because it was owned by the, it was part of the cell network, it was sort of shoved into the
⏹️ ▶️ John cell network in a clever way. It predates the existence of these big smartphone platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that was kind of like the messaging system that nobody But of course, SMS is terrible, very limited, very
⏹️ ▶️ John old, not secure in any way whatsoever. So Apple from day one,
⏹️ ▶️ John not day one on the iPhone, I guess. Well, I don’t know. Do you remember when did iMessage come? Was that before 2007 or after?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was after, I think it was iOS 4 or 5. Steve Jobs was alive for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, in the whole history of time that Apple has had iMessage, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John its better messaging service that uses encryption and Apple owns it and controls it and uses the
⏹️ ▶️ John internet, it’s built in. that’s Apple’s thing. They’ve also always had to support
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that everybody else uses, which back in the day was SMS. I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ever going to go away. There’s a huge explosion in things like iMessage, WhatsApp,
⏹️ ▶️ John Line, WeChat. Those are giant platforms, but still they
⏹️ ▶️ John have all those combined, iMessage, or maybe it’s because they’re separate, iMessage, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, all those
⏹️ ▶️ John things have not yet been able to eliminate SMS. SMS is still the lowest common
⏹️ ▶️ John denominator. So many things that you do online or whatever essentially expect
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest common denominator. I need to be able to send you a quote unquote text message with SMS, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US. Obviously in other countries, things like WeChat are just so dominant that maybe they have
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially eliminated SMS, but globally SMS has not been expunged. Like smallpox, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still, not like smallpox maybe. What was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that thing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John polio they recently almost entirely got rid of, right? Anyway, the US, we still
⏹️ ▶️ John have SMS and a little bit of polio. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because of vaccine deniers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s worth building on that just very briefly, because if you’re a European or basically any other developed country,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is extremely weird to think that SMS is still a thing. But truly, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re in the United States, the only common denominator that you can pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much guarantee that everyone can communicate with is SMS. We don’t have a de facto standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between Line or WeChat or… What’s up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you, WhatsApp, I couldn’t think of the name of it. I know that each country or region tends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of settle on one of these third-party apps that’s not by a platform vendor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey America never really did that. And so the closest we have to everyone being on WhatsApp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is everyone can send SMSs. And so if I were to send a text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey message to the people in my life that have Android phones, that’s gonna be an SMS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like John said, that technology is ancient as crap, and it’s creaky as crap, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it stinks for everyone involved. But that’s what we’ve got. And real-time follow-up iMessage was 2011. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing, not only is like, oh, well, they have this lowest common denominator, businesses and websites and other things,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t just do the lowest common denominator, they do nothing else. They’re not like, oh, well, if you have iMessage,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll send you an iMessage, and if you use WhatsApp, we’ll send you, no, They’ll never do any of that. They will only send you SMS,
⏹️ ▶️ John which sucks for so many reasons like, you know, SIM cloning and other security things like two-factor stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is very often SMS and only SMS. They don’t give you an option to use iMessages. They don’t give you an option
⏹️ ▶️ John to use WhatsApp. They don’t give an option to use Signal. No, it’s just SMS. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, like so many other things, you know, the metric system or whatever, it’s like, well, it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John US and a few other weird things, but we’re pretty big and, you know, Apple and Google are here so sorry, we apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the problem, right? So RCS, right? RCS is not
⏹️ ▶️ John as terrible as SMS. It is not as good as any of the modern end-to-end encrypted systems or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in theory, RCS is not controlled by any of the individual platforms. It’s not controlled by Apple, it’s not controlled by Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of controlled by all the carriers together, but they’re so technically incompetent, we don’t worry about them too much. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when the lowest common denominator changes from SMS to RCS, of
⏹️ ▶️ John course Apple was going to support it. They’re not in a big rush. They’re not enthusiastic about it. They’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, oh, RCS is great. Everyone should use it. No. But Apple hates SMS just
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as all of us do. And I think one of their complaints about RCS is like, you made a new standard
⏹️ ▶️ John and you didn’t deal with encryption? That seems like a bad move. And I agree. But it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, if it’s better than SMS, it was inevitable that Apple would support it. It remains to
⏹️ ▶️ John be seen whether RCS will supplant SMS. Like, I know that’s kind of the plan. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like SMS is old and this is the new carrier supported thing. That’s not owned by Apple or Google. So blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. Well, of course, Google has its own proprietary encryption extension on top of RCS
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s not going to use. Cause why would they use a thing made by Google? But I’m not entirely sure that RCS will
⏹️ ▶️ John come and slowly, but surely everyone who’s getting SMS messages will start getting them through RCS.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s successful, you know, people who live in our world where
⏹️ ▶️ John when people say text message, what they mean is SMS and MMS. People will continue to say text message,
⏹️ ▶️ John but oh, they don’t know it’s actually arriving through RCS, the new lowest common denominator. So I’m not surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John by this, but Apple will always, you know, as long as Apple continues
⏹️ ▶️ John that policy of supporting their thing and also the lowest common denominator, they will track the lowest common denominator. They will,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it really should be greatest common denominator, I know, the mathematical foundation of that expression in English does not make sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sorry. People from other countries who don’t like the math, but that’s what we call it here. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we use literatively to mean figuratively and vice versa, it’s a mess. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that this is a straightforward thing. Like, you know, unless Apple decides,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, we’re just gonna go all iMessage and that’s gonna be that, and maybe we’ll expand iMessage to other platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just gonna be a fact of life. If and when RCS comes up with an end-to-end encryption thing which
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is trying to contribute to, like not Google’s proprietary extension, but a thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the standard for encryption, I think Apple will support that too. Apple’s job
⏹️ ▶️ John with iMessage is to continue to make it better than the lowest common denominator.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they’re currently succeeding. And even if RCS gets standard end-to-end encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think iMessage will still be slightly ahead of it due to the integration, due to the probably additional security
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. So I give a Apple thumbs up on this move. I was never quite sure why they were
⏹️ ▶️ John so cranky about RCS other than trying to to highlight how much better iMessage is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not surprised to see it’s supported, and I’m not surprised to see them continue to be green bubbles, because that’s what RCS is, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s behind your green bubbles, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was sat on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until very large regulatory scrutiny came about. Look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple means well, and they don’t usually hold stuff back artificially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true in almost every way, but Apple knew and knows as well as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that those blue bubbles and the iMessage functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not only very strong lock-in to iOS, but also it creates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peer pressure. When you have that one friend who turns all your group chats green and makes them suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everyone else because they’re on Android, when it comes time for that person to replace that phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know their friends are telling them, just get an iPhone, please. Like, for the love of God, stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco greenifying all of our group chats.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the other part of that dynamic is another reason Apple is doing this. All right, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that dynamic we’re all familiar with. Oh, you green-bubblified it, you feel like that, because you don’t have a bubble. The flip side of that, which I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey has experienced, is you’re in an iMessage thread, and
⏹️ ▶️ John someone is a green bubble, right? And yeah, so they get the pressure of like, oh, why don’t you have an iPhone or whatever? But
⏹️ ▶️ John then what happens is that thread becomes unreliable. People are missing messages. You can’t tell what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what things are going out of order. You only see it on one device. And when that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve already been angered at the green wall person. I go, I have an iPhone. Be like us, get iPhones or whatever. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s already happened. Now what happens is why don’t we use something other than iMessage? Because it’s clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that the iPhone, quote unquote, or your iPhones or our iPhones or iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot are not up to the task of communicating in this group of people that we need to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John with. So why don’t we go to WhatsApp or whatever, right? Because WhatsApp
⏹️ ▶️ John is available on Android, WhatsApp is available on the Mac, and oh, now the thread doesn’t lose messages anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is what Apple absolutely does not want. So one of the things that is touted about RCS is,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, now you can have group conversations with those green bubble people, and maybe they’ll actually
⏹️ ▶️ John work better. That’s the promise. I don’t know if that’s actually gonna happen, but that is, I think, becoming the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ John factor. And I see a lot of my, you know, people I know in my life and my children,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting off of iMessage and moving to something like WhatsApp because it is cross platform
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m sure that plays a role, no question, but I think the regulatory pressure here, it played a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco greater role in the timing of this. You know, I think what Apple is going for here, strategy wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, you know, places like the EU are looking at iMessage as this major,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, abusive monopoly kind of lock in thing. And a couple angles about it that I think Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to minimize in the eyes of regulators. Maybe they want to say iMessage isn’t its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate network, but it’s part of SMS or part of messaging or whatever. So that might be part of their argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think a bigger thing is, there is this perception, which I think is backed by,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, pretty solid evidence, that the iPhone makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SMS, or like makes messages from other platforms worse. It makes the experience worse. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, if everyone else, if all of Android supports RCS features and Apple’s sitting here with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the limitations of old ancient SMS, I can see that argument. That Apple is maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, artificially holding back non-iPhone chat capabilities to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them look worse and to make people wanna buy iPhones more or whatever. And if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes to the level of RCS and not Google’s variety of RCS, but just says, we’re gonna support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this standard and we’re still gonna color them green so that that way, you know, they can say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people wanna know whether they’re secure or not, or whether they support the full feature set or not, but we’re gonna rise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the standard of the industry cross-platform standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features. We will support those just fine. So therefore, we are not holding anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. We are not artificially penalizing Android people. We’re gonna support this industry standard just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And also, if the message is blue, you know that’s more secure. Like I think that’s gonna be more their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argument here. I don’t think they really care that much about having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience actually be nicer for Android people in this particular case, because this is a very powerful thing that sells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones. So I think ultimately this is 100% regulatory defense. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t ascribe, you know, less than good motives to Apple with a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, because I know it’s usually not true. In this particular case, the strategic and lock-in value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iMessage is so massive to Apple’s most profitable and most important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform and product, it would be, I think, foolish to rule it out as a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is absolutely regulatory defense, probably on those angles.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s more like USBC, where Apple was gonna do it anyway, it’s just a question of the timing. And yeah, regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure can rush along the timing or dictate the timing. But you know, USBC, they did it a year before they had to.
⏹️ ▶️ John RCS, I’m not sure how much this is actually going to defend them. I mean, it looks good and it’s a little bit of cover, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if the complaint is that the platform owns a messaging service that they privilege, they will continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to privilege it, right? Yeah, RCS exists and you can say, oh, see, look, we upgraded from SMS,
⏹️ ▶️ John so now it’s not as bad, but yeah. The interoperability angle though is actually a problem for Apple’s customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they’re not thinking this, they should be because not being able to have a group conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ John a quote unquote heterogeneous group conversation, meaning people from Apple and non-Apple platforms, not being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John have that reliably makes Apple’s phones worse, right? And it makes people
⏹️ ▶️ John not wanna be on iMessage because very few people can sort of purify
⏹️ ▶️ John their life by ensuring that everybody they communicate with is going to have an iPhone. I certainly can’t. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably like 50, 50% of the business text messages I send and text messages
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, you know, other parents or like other school related things or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody like people coming to my house to do work, Are they gonna have blue bubbles? Are they
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have green bubbles? Am I in a group conversation with multiple parents in a school thing or what? You just can’t, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way to say they’re all gonna be blue. So what actually happens is you buy an iPhone, you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna use iMessage, you find yourself in heterogeneous conversations and they’re just not reliable. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating and it makes you think your phone is broken. And in this country at least, you can’t say to the whole parent
⏹️ ▶️ John teacher group, hey everybody, let’s get it on WhatsApp. That does not work. No one knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what that is or wants to do it. or they just say, I just wanna use texts, and so you’re the problem now.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re the blue bubble person is the problem because it’s working fine on my phone, I don’t see what your problem is. I’m not missing any messages
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Again, I’m not saying that’s why Apple is doing this, but it should be part
⏹️ ▶️ John of their motivation because they actually have a problem. And if adopting RCS
⏹️ ▶️ John can make heterogeneous conversations more reliable, that’s going to be a, perhaps surprising to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, It’s a huge win for them whether they know it or not.
Satellite SOS still free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then another quick piece of, I guess this could have been follow-up, but we’ll treat it as a topic. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has kicked the can with regard to the iPhone 14 satellite features. So this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year-ago iPhones. They had said on launch that you would get free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey satellite 911 or 999 or whatever your particular equivalent is. You would get that for free for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple announced sometime earlier this month, they’re going to extend it for an additional year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iPhone 14 users. And for the 15 users, well, you get it free for a year. So we don’t have to worry about that yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, the words can kick that can and hope for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this, this is so, so basically to summarize, since launching emergency SOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via satellite, um, Apple has not yet announced what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plan will be when your free coverage period of that runs out. So, because so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, no products have, have lapsed into that, you know, out of the free state yet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at this, It’s like, can you imagine what a, just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PR and just a human nightmare it would be if someone dies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and could have been saved by this feature, but their subscription expired. Like, I don’t see any good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way out of this PR wise, except just make the feature free for the lifetime of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these phones. Like, and ultimately, I think that’s probably what Apple will end up doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. When they launched it, I think they set a time bound in part because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably didn’t really know what their usage of this feature, and therefore costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this feature, would really be. I mean, I’m sure they had some kind of estimates, but until you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this out into lots of people’s phones in the real world, it’s hard to really know. Well, now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. They have a year of usage from the iPhone 14 line having it. Now the iPhone 15s, of course, also have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By now, I think they have a much better idea of what this feature is actually costing them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practice. And that allows them to do two things. You know, number one, it allows them probably to go to the satellite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vendor that they’re doing this through and maybe negotiate better rates over time because now they have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco predictable usage. And then number two, this allows them to better account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it and control their costs in terms of how are they accounting for this in the purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price of the phone. And I just don’t see any other outcome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than they just keep picking the can down the road until they finally just say, all right, you know what, it’s just free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever for these phones. Because I don’t think it’s being used so heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they would need, cost-wise, that they would need to limit it too much. Because the feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself, it’s already limited in terms of like, you can’t do a lot of chatting or data usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the satellite. It’s engineered to do extremely low data usage kind of preset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and not cost that much in terms of satellite usage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I bet it costs them little enough that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will eventually choose just to make it free for the last time of these phones because the alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having to, like asking people to pay for this or only including it in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud Plus plans or whatever, if they ask people to pay for it, they know most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people won’t pay for it. And Apple is, especially like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard Tim Cook in particular has apparently in multiple occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used the phrase, Apple products don’t kill people. Like really, like he believes very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco firmly, Apple products don’t kill people. In
⏹️ ▶️ John parentheses directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, now, and that by the way, like and I heard that was in the context of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the old car project, like you better make sure you don’t mess this up because Apple products don’t kill people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll get, and that’s a whole, the car project. I think if it wasn’t dead already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think their carbon neutral plans killed it because there is, you talk about like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how would you make that product carbon neutral beginning to end including the energy it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses during its lifetime? Good luck. So anyway, I think that project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is well and truly dead at this point. But anyway, going back to the satellite SOS thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple loves that feature. they I think feel very proud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they should, that it really is saving people’s lives. You see these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news stories pop up all the time now from some car accident victim or hiker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something that was saved by this particular feature in an area where they wouldn’t have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any or many other options. So that is a great thing for the world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a great story for Apple, it’s a great thing that sells iPhones. And it really is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helping people greatly and in many cases saving people’s lives. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the probably very minimal cost it is costing Apple in satellite usage relative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the overall margin on these phones and everything, I think they will probably conclude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever the time comes that they have to make a firm decision, they will probably conclude it is not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risking, losing people’s lives who could have had this feature, who have the hardware to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and just didn’t buy the $5 a month extra thing on their plan
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, because it’s so inexpensive, the easy way to still get money for this is you just charge per usage
⏹️ ▶️ John retroactively, right? So no one signs up for anything, no one pays for anything, but oh, did you use it to save your life? Guess what, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John charged 10 bucks. And once you’ve been saved from the wilderness, you’ll pay that $10 happily. It’s the best $10 you ever spent
⏹️ ▶️ John in your life, right? You’re never gonna be stopped from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sending SOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John You never need to sign up for anything, right? But like, again, they know how low the usage is. the usage is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John low. And you only charge them retroactively, right? And they just eat the cost like
⏹️ ▶️ John what if someone’s on an iPhone, and they don’t even have an Apple ID to then just do it for free, right? But in the common case where someone
⏹️ ▶️ John has an Apple ID, Apple knows who they are, Apple probably already has their credit card, charge them retroactively, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and charging retroactively a small fee, you know what I mean? And that’s like, oh, it’s gonna discourage
⏹️ ▶️ John people from doing it. If you’re trapped in the wilderness, you’re going to use it, you’re not going to care that you’re going to get charged two bucks, like you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy that extra iCloud space. But when you’re or freezing on the mountain, you’ll use the SOS feature, despite the fact that you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that in your next month’s bill from Apple, you’re gonna see a $2 charge or whatever. Doing it for free would be great, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, once you start going that route, you say, well, you know, it would be great if Apple gave you like two years of unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud storage with each phone that you bought, because that would encourage people to get new phones, and then people would actually save their photos. I just had this conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John with my sister, where she said, hey, I need you to help me set up the iCloud thing for my
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, and it made me realize she still doesn’t have iCloud photo library enabled, so all her photos are only on her computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is she, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Oh, I have it enabled now, you big jerk. She doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a cloud backer or anything. Why? Well, who pays for storage? Like, it doesn’t, you know, but she’s finally
⏹️ ▶️ John succumbed to this after years of being my sister and hearing me complain about this. Now she’s finally willing to pay, but she
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t quite know how to do it. But anyway, yeah, people that won’t pay to save their photos. And when the photos are gone,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you told them, hey, retroactively, if you give me $100 for every year that you use this phone and I give
⏹️ ▶️ John you all your photos back, they’d throw that money at you, right? because then their family photos are gone. But before it happens, like, I’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not quite the same as dying on a mountain, but it would be nice if Apple built into the cost of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John enough money to give Apple its margins for two years worth of iCloud storage. But of course, if you look at that, well, how much does that iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John actually cost? They make so much more money from the tiny number of users that actually pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, you know, what is, like, you buy a 256 gig phone, what does 256 gigs of iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John storage actually cost you per year? It’s not like two extra dollars. So anyway, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the topic that we probably won’t get to this week about when you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John more for a product, how do you deliver extra value for the extra money?
⏹️ ▶️ John And historically, lots of expensive products have been very expensive, but have given you something that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get for less money, whether it’s buying clothes from an expensive store where you get easy, hassle-free
⏹️ ▶️ John returns, or back in the day, you’d buy very expensive luggage and they would be high
⏹️ ▶️ John quality and last a long time. I remember those days. You used to get things for
⏹️ ▶️ John the money. Not proportional. You’d pay two times as much, but it would be 20% better. Or you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John pay 17 times as much, and it would be 15% better. But it would actually be better. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be better in ways that are perceived to be more valuable than they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, well, you know, I don’t have to deal with hassles of returns. If I don’t like it, I just return it, no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John long it’s been. Or what was the story about that Merlin tells about it? Some returning snow tires at like Nordstrom
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, They don’t sell snow tires, but you just take the return anyway because that’s how you keep rich
⏹️ ▶️ John customers happy, right? Apple is not in the same class as that, but they also sell very expensive phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it would be nice if paying that extra money got you some stuff that people consider valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And free SOS satellite service for every iPhone customer definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John fits that bill. So would free storage equivalent to the size of the phone that you bought
⏹️ ▶️ John for the life of that phone. And if you only did it for two years instead of for the life of the phone, It might encourage people to upgrade as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple is not yet on that page, so we get five gigs for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Two more little quick things on the SOS thing before I forget and before people write in about it. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of cellular Apple devices. I don’t know if iPads do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know phones do it, and I think watches might do it too, where even if you don’t have a cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan activated, you can place free emergency 911 calls from those devices
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a legal requirement in some places too, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would yeah probably and I’m sure there’s some deal with the carriers where like, you know, maybe Apple doesn’t really have to pay for that, but but there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is some precedent for you know, for like free cellular 911
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access for the life of the device and again, I’m sure it works differently with satellite providers and legality and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that is something to think about as like a possible parallel or precedent to set here and then secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a rumor that breeze through this fall rumor season that Apple might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking to expand the satellite SOS feature into what sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like from the rumor, basically free text chatting. Like free form, full texting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just sending kind of canned messages or locations. I wonder if maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plan here, and maybe they just haven’t finished it yet, but maybe the plan here is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch a paid satellite messaging plan where maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current thing that we know of as emergency SOS, which is just like location and 911 basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that remains free, but then they have like a premium tier, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separately or part of one of their bundles, maybe that is, you can text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wherever you are and that might be useful for people who frequently go outside of cell phone coverage areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so maybe the plan here is this free thing will remain free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will be partly funded by this premium thing that we’re gonna launch as an extra bonus at some point
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that would be small potatoes to Apple, but maybe if to the satellite companies, they would like those custom, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lucrative for them because they can charge Apple a lot, which then Apple can charge their customers even more because so few on
⏹️ ▶️ John the grand scheme of things, percentage wise, iPhone customers need to be able to text messages from
⏹️ ▶️ John SOS, but the ones that do, you can probably charge them a lot because they live in the mountains and it’s worth it to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, that’s a tiny, tiny percentage of iPhone users, but a tiny, tiny percentage of iPhone users is a large number
⏹️ ▶️ John of people and absolute values to these satellite companies maybe. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like there already are, like Garmin sells these products called InReach satellite communicators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of hikers and stuff use. And they’re literally just like little tiny smartphone-like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that just have satellite mode built into them. And they sell these plans, and I think they’re like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 50 bucks a month like for the plans. I have one buried somewhere for like super emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, but I have like the bottom end plan that allows almost nothing. This is a whole market of the satellite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco communicator things that allow text messaging at certain plan levels and stuff like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is clearly a market. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Apple get into this market with their new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SOS feature and to just have it be like a five or ten dollar a month add on or part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple one premium plus whatever, you know, I think that’s probably where this is going to head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I still bet that the SOS feature set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have now, like the emergency 911 calling and stuff, I bet that remains free forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it was designed from day one to be as minimally intrusive, to use as little bandwidth as
⏹️ ▶️ John possible, just basically to be as cheap as possible, essentially. And to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in more places, you know, because like a lot of times, like, you know, if you don’t have a very good view of a satellite,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like suppose you’re like stuck in a, you know, Canyon or something, like if you don’t have a great view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a satellite, you might, it might take you a very long time to reliably transmit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough bits to even communicate what you need to communicate. So the protocol that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sends the satellites is very simplified and uses very few bits of actual data transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has to get through some pretty severe not only very long distance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also like some severe conditions and like very low signal or high noise ratios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. It’s made to be extremely resilient and simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what I need to use when I’m picking my daughter up from her school because her high school of course is in a cell phone dead
⏹️ ▶️ John zone. So when you arrive and you want to text your child and say, hey, I’m here to pick you up, you can’t. You get to see the
⏹️ ▶️ John little blue bar iMessage go almost all the way across the top of the screen and then just sit there.
⏹️ ▶️ John so frustrating. You’re just waiting to see that word delivered. And they’re trying to text you. And of course, they’re on school Wi-Fi, so they
⏹️ ▶️ John think all their messages are going through, but none of them are reaching me. and why they don’t just stick a gigantic cell tower
⏹️ ▶️ John in the center of the school’s campus, I don’t know. But by the time that happens, my kids will have all graduated. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, maybe I should try satellite next time. Help, I’m in a canyon slash outside the high school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like when people used to like bit pack their messages to their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parents when you’re calling on the pay phone from school. Come pick me up into the collect calling name
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you accept the charges from, hey, pick me up at the high school?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John explained to my kids that not only could I not text message my parents went to get me, I would just sit outside of the high school and just
⏹️ ▶️ John wait and assume at some point a parent will realize I’m not home and come to get me. Could be hours, just could be
⏹️ ▶️ John hours. I was just there for hours. Other people are getting picked up by their parents. The late bus has long since
⏹️ ▶️ John gone, I miss that one. I’m just gonna be at the school, it’s getting dark now. Now I’m inside because it’s cold. The janitors
⏹️ ▶️ John are cleaning up. And you know, and your life is, if I don’t immediately respond to your text
⏹️ ▶️ John message to come and pick you up, it’s like, where are you? Kids these days.
Thunderbolt 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve had something in the show notes for months at this point. I don’t even know. But we’ve had a heading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt 5 and a link to an Intel announcement announcing Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will deliver 80 gigabits per second of bidirectional bandwidth. And with bandwidth boost, it will provide up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 120 gigabits per second for the best display experience. Built on industry standards, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB 4 version 2, because how could that be more confusing? I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John USB 4 V2? USB for all caps, no space, then a space, then a capital
⏹️ ▶️ John V and a number two, because why not? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different ways has the USB consortium named versions of USB?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the joke about, you know, you know, term paper, a final, final V2,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for real this like they have, they have gen numbers, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John version numbers with dots in them, they have two X two, now they’ve got V, but then they took the
⏹️ ▶️ John number and shoved it against the thing is just I feel like it’s a contest to see how they like they wrote down
⏹️ ▶️ John at the beginning they had a brainstorming meeting they said here’s all the ways we can think of to version something and they’re just going down to listen checking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed well anyways uh built on industry standards including usb4 space v2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thunderbolt 5 will be broadly compatible with previous versions of thunderbolt and usb why do we care john
⏹️ ▶️ John well first thing i think is fun about this is the bandwidth boost thing so it’s 80 gigabits per second which is twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast as our current Thunderbolt 4. So yay, because Thunderbolt 4 didn’t get any faster than 3. It just like
⏹️ ▶️ John upped the USB 4 compliance to crap, but it was still 40 gigabits. Now they’re going to 80. We
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Great. Double speed, right? But it also has 120 gigabits
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth boost. It’s like, where did the extra gigabits come from? Why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use them all the time? Does it come from a turbo button that you have to push to make it go faster?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, it comes from
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS. So the reason they have it is basically to support big displays with lots of pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John at at high frame rates. Like that’s why that feature exists. And I’m assuming they’re not doing it for
⏹️ ▶️ John data because it’s like, well, this is the display mode and we trust that you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have really long display cables. Like I’m not entirely sure how they can build the standard so that it supports
⏹️ ▶️ John this for high bandwidth, high frame rate displays, but not support it for data, but whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they’re doing. It’s part of the spec. And I’m glad because if you look at, you know, 40 gigabits is not
⏹️ ▶️ John really enough to do like an 8K display or even a 6K one at like 120 Hertz and stuff. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so we need a new standard, the new display port standards that will tunnel over this. We’re also
⏹️ ▶️ John having, you know, so now let’s go to 80, but no, let’s not just go to 80, because if I do the math on 80, what if you have an 8K
⏹️ ▶️ John display and you want to do 240 Hertz? Oh, we’re out of bandwidth again. How about 120? And of course you have display stream compression
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff. So I give this a thumbs up and I like the fact that it has
⏹️ ▶️ John extra bandwidth for display purposes. But the one small thing that I want to say about this, other than
⏹️ ▶️ John yay, I can’t wait for Thunderbolt 5 to be on our Mac someday, is whenever we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt, USB, setting aside the stupid versioning number things, we always complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about the same thing, which continues to be an issue, because this one, as I say, will be quote unquote broadly compatible with
⏹️ ▶️ John previous versions, which means the connector will be a USB-C shaped plug.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s a good connector, but our complaint is always, I have a bunch of cables that have that
⏹️ ▶️ John connector on them and I can’t tell which ones support which things. Is this just power? Is this Thunderbolt one,
⏹️ ▶️ John two or three? What version of USB does it support? You know, it just, you can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John by looking at the cable and it’s annoying. And I agree with that, but I feel like with Thunderbolt five is a
⏹️ ▶️ John time to at least recognize the thing that we never talk about, but
⏹️ ▶️ John still exists, which is the advantage of doing this. And I thought of it related to, when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking about dynamic caching, where they’re like, oh, we used to have three buckets of memory in the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you didn’t use them efficiently, One of the buckets would be going to waste and the other one would be full. That’s the problem we
⏹️ ▶️ John used to have on the side of laptops or on the back of desktop computers, but laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John space is tighter. You would have to divide up your connectors into buckets. Here are the connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John for this purpose. Here’s the connectors for that purpose. And here are the ones for this purpose. And especially as Apple reduced the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of connectors, if they only gave you two from this bucket, one from this one and
⏹️ ▶️ John one from this one, you’re like, oh, I really need three from the middle one, but I just have one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having all of the holes in the side of your MacBook Pros or most of the holes be USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped and on the good computers all support Thunderbolt or whatever lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you avoid having to do the other analogy I use is the Linux partitioning thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta figure out ahead of time how much I want for user, how much I want for slash and how much I want for swap. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John all uniform. And again, on the good fancy computers, they’re all Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ John your cables, you’ve still got that problem. But it solves a real problem on the side of laptops is we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to guess how many display connectors do you need? How many
⏹️ ▶️ John networking connectors do you need? How many storage connectors do you need? Storage, display,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the, what was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the other one I just said?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like everything that you can do, it’s all the same shaped hole and all the same capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, on the high-end computers. Even on the low-end ones, they’re all USB-C or whatever. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John an advantage. It’s better than the bad old days when Apple would come out with a new laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d have to get all new cables and all new devices sometimes because this one comes with FireWire 800 and all
⏹️ ▶️ John your things are FireWire 400 and you can try to get a dongle and it was just, we don’t have that problem anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 4 to Thunderbolt 5, you won’t need to get a new Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John drive. You won’t need to hopefully get a new monitor that all your old stuff will continue to work. It
⏹️ ▶️ John will fit in the same size and shape of hole. we still just have the problem of, you know, you can’t tell what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John the wires support or what the devices support. But I think on the whole, I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John this world where we can’t tell what the heck the wires are, but the holes are all the same, than the old world where all the wires were
⏹️ ▶️ John easily distinguishable, but every time we got a new laptop, we had to get all new wires and sometimes all new devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. It’s gonna be a mess, as always. The USB
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not my point. My point is not it’s gonna be a mess. My point is we should appreciate, we should appreciate Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John and USB, and all the USB-C things. We should appreciate the good that’s about them. If we have Thanksgiving is not, but we should give thanks. Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than the old days. It is silly that that, that is still a problem, but we should appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John the important advantage that Thunderbolt and USB-C give
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey us, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John now that our phones have the same shape hole in the bottom of it, it’s a better world. Could it be better still? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is better than it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s better, but it’s still going to be such a mess. I just, I keep coming back to the, the very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oddly named thing. I’m gonna have to look it up and put it in the show notes. It’s like cable QC or something like that. I forget what it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a Kickstarter that I, that I backed forever ago that has two USB-C receptacles in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and a crapload of LEDs that light up based on whether or not individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines within the cable are connected or not. Because if you have a USB-C shaped cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can have like USB-2 compatibility, USB-3 compatibility, Thunderbolt compatibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this at least gives you some notion as to what that cable can handle, but it’s just nuts that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a thing that we have to worry about. And yes, I agree with you that it’s better to have one connector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally, but it’s bananas that we have to go through all this to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out what the hell this connector or this cable can handle. It just drives me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and then by the way, my proposed solution to that would be if they had, as part of the standard,
⏹️ ▶️ John come out with a tasteful— this is the problem with Apple, why Apple reject this— a
⏹️ ▶️ John tasteful standardized labeling policy for connectors. Because if they came out with a
⏹️ ▶️ John standardized labeling policy where like the spec requires you to have this symbol on it if it’s Thunderbolt 2 and this symbol, it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John so ugly, Apple would hate it and they would put it in really light gray ink on their white connectors and no one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey would be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John see it. So it would have to be like, in cooperation with Apple, come up with some kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John preferably some kind of like inset or raised thing that you could feel. Like, it’s a hard design problem, I admit, because these
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors are small. The quote unquote good connector companies do do that. They
⏹️ ▶️ John put some kind of thing on them where you can tell Thunderbolt 4 and it’ll say TB4 on it or it’ll have a little lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John bolt in a four, like, or say USB gen, or put a gigabit rating or the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John have the little LCD displays in them, which is a little bit over the top or whatever. But like, that’s where the solution to this problem lies.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like, let’s make all the connectors different again. It’s, let’s solve the actual problem is I can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John what this cable does. And yes, a cable tester solves it, but that’s stupid. like just we have room
⏹️ ▶️ John on the cable to print or emboss something. It’s just that everybody does something different. There’s no standard,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if there was a standard, it would be solidly that apple refused to use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever it’s worth. I first of all, I would love if there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a not a kickstarter, but like just a regular product you could buy that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a cable tester that would that would actually tell you not only like physically what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines are connected, but like tell me what consumer facing standards this cable supports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to know if it’s connected to the to the G positive three line. Like just tell me like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this support USB 3.2 2 by 2 speeds or does it support Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like tell me that and and one thing I’ve seen from a couple of people have suggested on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mastodon. I’m sorry if I forget who so sorry, but a couple of people I’ve seen suggest that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t it be cool if you plugged in the two ends of a cable to two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB C ports on your MacBook and Apple told you what the cable supported?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that would be amazing. Like that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John so cool. They could just test it to run the data. I think I also saw a message on one company is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, we know people don’t know the names of the standards. So they just put a gigabits rating on them. Even better. Yeah. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard again because the print printing has to be small and embossed and you know, like it’s It’s a little bit tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John and standardization would help. But if you’re interested, you can find cables that are labeled in
⏹️ ▶️ John a sane way. We all own ones that aren’t. I mean, look at the image in this diagram or in
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes. It’s from like an Intel presentation that we’ll link. Even in their thing, they have a Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John and a four and a Thunderbolt and a five. So in the picture, we can tell, oh, that’s the Thunderbolt four one. They
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise are identical. But hey, a number four and a number five. I bet though, when Intel sells
⏹️ ▶️ John their connectors, they don’t have the four and the five of them or the Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing also, like I, you know, as we’ve been lamenting how weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and broken this world tends to be, the weird and broken area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this world is much more in the USB neighborhood than in the Thunderbolt neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A while back, I think it was at the 2018 Brooklyn event that we went to, Casey, with the Apple press event that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new, new at the time MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Air and the 2018 11-inch and new 12.9 iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros. At that event, I had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefing afterwards and I probably shouldn’t say who, but somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple who was fairly high up. I was complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how, look, you’re leaning so heavily on USB-C here with all these new products, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of USB-C dongles and hubs and everything is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, this was 2018. You think it’s terrible now. It was way worse then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what this person said has stuck with me. They said, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of Thunderbolt stuff, if you get Thunderbolt certified stuff that actually…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That has passed a number of tests from Intel and certification and everything, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt products that actually bear the logo and are tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are held to a much higher standard than most of the USB products. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yes, Thunderbolt products are fewer in number, they are more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sure. They usually have like less graceful things like the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation, like they usually require these giant external power bricks because Thunderbolt can supply a lot of power to its ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, Thunderbolt hubs and Thunderbolt equipment, there’s less of it and it’s more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it usually tends to be really rock solid. Like, this is what this person said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2018, and I’ve remembered that ever since. And whenever there’s a Thunderbolt version of something I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, I choose that. And that is not very often. But whenever there is one, I choose that. And sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, they’ve been right. Like, the USB hubs and dongles and docks and stuff I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years have all been flaky pieces of crap. the Thunderbolt things have all been solid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is unfortunate that like, this is the more technically complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocol that therefore brings a lot more cost and limitations to it and everything, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of USB-C shaped equipment is much, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better on the Thunderbolt side than the USB side. So if you need something to be really reliable and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a Thunderbolt option and if you can afford it, that it really is better. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that area of this world, I think is fine. It’s just limited. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the USB side of things, on that side of the wall here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s been where I’ve seen the most problems.
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#askatp: John’s TV recs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And it is the holiday season. In fact, as we record this, it is the end of Cyber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still can’t believe people use that term.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gary Owen wants to know, now that we are seeing the new crop of TVs, is this the year I should splurge and upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my bargain bin 4K LCD TV to something better? John, I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should probably handle this. So what’s the situation? What is the landscape these days?
⏹️ ▶️ John First, I want to apologize to Gary. His question is from January 2023. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John to these questions for a while. He was talking about CES. I removed the CES part, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I did put this in here because this is my last chance to do this and people are very often ask about this very topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to tell you what the best TVs of this year are to buy. First answer to Gary’s question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, this is a good time to buy a television to get rid of your crappy old bargain making 4K LCD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, if I could have waited until this year, I would have, I couldn’t wait. I waited, already waited
⏹️ ▶️ John too long, but Gary, you’ve probably already waited too long. So if you haven’t already bought a new TV, you should. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John people ask me, what TVs should I buy? Or what are the best TVs? You have to first understand
⏹️ ▶️ John where I’m coming from. When I’m looking for quote unquote, the best TVs, what I want from my television
⏹️ ▶️ John is a TV that shows the image as accurately as possible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John accurate, what does that mean? What does accurately mean? Well, when video content is made, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John various standards for every part of the process, but also including the coloration
⏹️ ▶️ John of the video that the people making it adhere to. They have very expensive monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes upwards like 30, $40,000 that adhere to these standards. So they can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to look like X and they look on their $50,000 monitor. And if it looks like the way they want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John look, That’s how they want it to be. What I want is when I see it in
⏹️ ▶️ John my house for it to look like it did on their $50,000 calibrated monitor. Because otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making it a certain way and they think, all right, I’ve made this scene so it looks kind of this tinge
⏹️ ▶️ John with this color and it’s this dark and it’s this light in this area. It looks the way I want it. People whose job
⏹️ ▶️ John it is to do that, the various colorists and the people who control the lighting on the show, like they want to look a certain way. They’ve made
⏹️ ▶️ John it a certain way. If they send it out into the world and it gets into people’s houses and their television is just
⏹️ ▶️ John screwed all up and it looks weird. They’re like, oh, that’s not what I made. I made, I wanted it to look like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then all these people are seeing it this way. And that is the difficulty facing anyone who’s making video content.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanna make it a certain way and have control over the process. Ideally, it would look that way in people’s houses.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how I’m picking TVs. That is not how most people pick TVs. Most people, as we’ve discussed in the past, pick TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John on whichever one is brighter, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John like you pick whatever stereo is louder, pick whatever TV is brighter, whatever colors are the most
⏹️ ▶️ John garish, the most oversaturated. Like people just want things they think look
⏹️ ▶️ John startling, look, you know, they look dramatic, but that’s not what they’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to look like. So if you don’t care about that, then don’t listen to any of my TV recommendations, right? Second
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is I’m looking for the best. The best also is going to mean
⏹️ ▶️ John the most expensive. These are very, very expensive TVs. You should not buy one of these expensive TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you care a lot about the television looking as good and as close to
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote correct and accurate as possible. If you don’t care, don’t spend this much money on TV. Spend it on something you
⏹️ ▶️ John do care about. So with that aside, in case you’re wondering, given that
⏹️ ▶️ John framing, what TV should you buy in 2023? The answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Sony A95L. For the second year in a row, Sony has the best television
⏹️ ▶️ John by a nose. It’s an OLED display, comes in 55, 65 and 77 inches. We’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ John links in the show notes to reviews from my favorite YouTube channels about this TV, including Bunny Limb, which was a blind,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the channels has a traditional blind viewing test where they invite a bunch of people from the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John in and TV calibrators and stuff to judge televisions with a bunch of test footage, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John disguise the televisions. So you can’t see any part of the bezel or any part of the stand. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, put cardboard and black stuff all around it just because otherwise you’d be able to tell which TV is which and then your
⏹️ ▶️ John biases of like liking a particular brand might come in. And for the second year in a row, the Sony won that
⏹️ ▶️ John contest as well. It’s a quantum.oled television. It is much brighter than it was last year
⏹️ ▶️ John and it now comes in 77 inch size and it is horrendously expensive. But that’s the answer, Sony 895L.
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer next year may be different. So don’t hear this and think you’re gonna buy next year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John best Sony, because maybe it won’t be the best next year. maybe things will have changed, but for 2023, if you want a TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want it to be the best, it’s the Sony A95L.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which for the record is $3,300 on Amazon on Cyber Monday. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a 65 inch, right? Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John 77 is even more expensive. That is five grand for a television.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can’t get it bigger than 77s.
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs do come in bigger than 70s. Anyway, so the runner up is the LG C3. LG has
⏹️ ▶️ John traditionally been the leader in OLED televisions. They don’t have a quantum dot television, but they do have these micro lens array things
⏹️ ▶️ John where they put the tiny, tiny microscopic lenses over the front of them that makes it super duper bright. It does
⏹️ ▶️ John have some advantages of the Sony A85L, but it has more disadvantages. One of the advantages it
⏹️ ▶️ John has is it comes in 83 inch size. It’s also way less expensive than the Sony. It’s less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John because LG in general is less expensive than Sony. And it’s probably less expensive because the
⏹️ ▶️ John LG makes the panels, the OLED panels, and the quantum dot ones are made by Samsung. So Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John has to buy them from Samsung and has to repackage them. LG C3 is great. If you care about gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you’ll notice I didn’t mention before, the LG televisions support more high bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John ports for like PC gaming. If you wanna connect a gaming PC to this and play it like 120, 140 Hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John the LG supports more better gaming related standards. So
⏹️ ▶️ John not that the Sony is bad for gaming, but if you are connecting a gaming PC to it, or even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re connecting, you know, an Xbox Series X and you wanna run that, really high frame rates with HDR and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything the LG TVs are a better bet. Speaking of OLEDs the the final
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I’ll tell you about the best televisions this year is since they are both OLEDs, OLED burns
⏹️ ▶️ John in. It just does. If you have never had an OLED television or you
⏹️ ▶️ John leave CNN on your television all day for hours at a time, don’t get an OLED. You’ll be sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you are going to play a game with a permanent opaque HUD on this screen for
⏹️ ▶️ John hours and hours and hours hours every day for years at a time, you will burn in your television. Don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get OLED. We’ll put links in the show notes to our RTINGS, uh, many months, this
⏹️ ▶️ John might maybe years long, uh, burn in tests of OLED. So you can just hopefully it’ll be like one of those scared straight videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they show you to try to keep you off drugs in school. When you see what these televisions look like, if they’re left tuned to CNN
⏹️ ▶️ John all day with a news ticker at the bottom, you will maybe think twice about leaving the room with the television
⏹️ ▶️ John pause to go to the bathroom. I know you, these TVs all screensavers and they have all sorts of features to mitigate this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the bottom line is do not leave static elements on your OLED screen for long periods of time. They will
⏹️ ▶️ John burn in, you will be sad, it will look bad. Don’t do it. That’s also part of the price you’re paying for the
⏹️ ▶️ John very best picture quality. It means you can’t play a video game with
⏹️ ▶️ John a permanent HUD on it for hours and hours a day. You cannot watch CNN for seven
⏹️ ▶️ John hours a day on these televisions. It will ruin them. Don’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Watch movies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and definitely don’t play Minecraft unless you want to see the heart bar on everything you ever watch forever after that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah That’s why I was so excited about tears of the kingdom Because I don’t I forget a breath of the wild this but tears the kingdom has
⏹️ ▶️ John a mode with no HUD Yes played the whole game hundreds of hours on my television. No HUD
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also more immersive experience. It’s great Although the Hallmark Channel is now putting a stupid bug in the bottom corner
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen half the time Which is really annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the Hallmark Channel usually specify in very immersive experiences?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just like what they have in the bottom is like, you know, I don’t know what that the branding is for like Hallmark home
⏹️ ▶️ John for The holidays is like I get it. We know we’re watching a Hallmark movie You don’t need to put a red text and lower right corner of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John for two hours It’s annoying So what if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t deal with an old that what if you plan on leaving it on CNN all day? What other options do you have they do make
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions that are not all ads that are almost as good but not quite And my recommendation there is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony X95L, which comes in 75 and 85 inch sizes only. So this is a really big TV. This is an LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John television with LED backlights.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony does a really good job with these of controlling the backlights and controlling bloom while still,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, Sony’s big thing is still having accurate color. And all of these things, you have to actually go to the settings
⏹️ ▶️ John and turn them into whatever the accurate mode is called. I forget, I think it’s called like custom
⏹️ ▶️ John or professional on the Sonys. It’s called filmmaker mode on the LG, which supports filmmaker mode, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a branded thing to basically say, just show it how it’s supposed to be shown. Setting up the televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John is complicated and it’s beyond the scope of these buying recommendations. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other option for LCD televisions is the Sony X90L, which is, as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as I can tell, it’s like a smaller size version of the X95L. It comes in 55, 65, 75, 85, and 98.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s probably older. It comes in really big size. It’s older than the
⏹️ ▶️ John X95L. I just don’t understand why the X95L only comes in 75 and 85, but it does. But both of these televisions are good choices
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t care about gaming, because you should just get an LG something if you do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t handle OLED because you’re just not gonna deal with that burn-in stuff. So Sony X95L, Sony X90L,
⏹️ ▶️ John these televisions will not have OLEDs burn-in issues. They will not look as good as OLEDs, but they’ll look pretty darn good. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John good, I mean pretty darn accurate. And the final thing that I’ll say is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanna hear about televisions that are not horrendously expensive, because you don’t care about any of this accuracy
⏹️ ▶️ John BS, watch the Digital Trends Best TVs of 2023 video that we’ll put a link to in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. It shows you televisions that regular people buy for way less money that are also really good and that are
⏹️ ▶️ John also way, way better than Gary’s bargain bin 4K LCD television. Because technology
⏹️ ▶️ John has come a long way and for reasonable, pretty low prices, you can get a really
⏹️ ▶️ John good looking TV that is way better than the television you bought like five years ago. Especially if what you bought
⏹️ ▶️ John five years ago was not a horrendously expensive television.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That actually took a lot less time than I thought. I think that might’ve been quicker than your Thunderbolt 5. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve also gone through, I’ve been advising a friend about buying fancy televisions this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to, not that I’m not usually on top of this stuff, but I had to go through the list and find
⏹️ ▶️ John what all the best televisions are. And for a little while it was touch and go because the A95L was released after all the other televisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for a while, it was like, is the Sony gonna be the best one this year? But the answer is yes. So that’s kind of a shame because 2024 is
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be here and the 2024 TVs, guess what? They’ll be better. So you have to do what I did, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John at the time you buy, you just look at what’s available and buy the best choice. If you keep
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting till next year’s model, next year’s model will always be better. So there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John no getting off that treadmill and that’s how you end up replacing a plasma television with an OLED like I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Out of curiosity, what part of the year does the model year typically turn over
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a good question. It used to be more synced up to be kind of like spring after CES,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Sony barely came out in the fall. I think some of that might’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John delays with the second generation QD OLED panels. So at this point, it’s like, I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still mostly spring, but because the best TV this year
⏹️ ▶️ John is out in the fall, it spreads it over the whole year. So like the views have kind of been staggering out. It’s like, oh, the LGs
⏹️ ▶️ John are out pretty soon because they’re not too different from the ones that came before. And then Samsung’s QD OLED comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out because they make the panel and they give them self-source dibs. And then finally Sony’s comes out. So they’re smeared
⏹️ ▶️ John across kind of the whole middle of the year which kind of sucks, but it’s just, that’s something you have to, you can’t like, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, buy now and then there’ll be a year turnover. If you buy the Sony 85L now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Sony comes out with a new TV in the spring, you’ll have a very short window when this was the best TV available. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s the way it is. You can’t wait forever. And honestly, I think the jump
⏹️ ▶️ John from the first generation QD OLED panel to the second in terms of maximum brightness and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is bigger than whatever the jump will be next year from the second generation to the third. And who knows, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John there won’t be a new panel and maybe it’ll just be a new chip set. That is the one annoying thing that I should mention here, which again, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do anything about. But the reason LG is good at gaming is because they make their
⏹️ ▶️ John own chips for handling like the HDMI crap and everything. I think they’re the only company
⏹️ ▶️ John that supports full bandwidth, 48 gigabits per second HDMI 2.1 on all their HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John ports. Every other TV in the entire world supports it on like two ports. And why? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to buy their chipsets from I think MediaTek or whatever, there’s a couple of other companies that do it as well
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe. And these companies only support full 48 gigabits per second on a small number
⏹️ ▶️ John of ports. Their chipsets just don’t support it on. So they put four HDMI ports, but only two of them are the quote unquote good ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this only matters for high frame rate, meaning like 120 frames per second, high
⏹️ ▶️ John bit depth stuff. So it really only matters for PC gaming or high, you know, high end console gaming, but really PC gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ John So most people don’t care, but it is disappointing that like we’ve been, you know, HDMI 2.1
⏹️ ▶️ John has been out for many years now. And still when you buy a television, you have to look in the manual and say, which one is
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI one or two or three? Like which one of these are the quote unquote good ones? Or, and do I care for
⏹️ ▶️ John the device that I’m connecting it? There was a rumor back before CES, speaking of CES, that
⏹️ ▶️ John MediaTek was coming out with a new Pentonic chip set that was gonna have HDMI 2.1 on all four ports. But that was marketing BS
⏹️ ▶️ John lie, because as we discussed before, you can call yourself HDMI 2.1
⏹️ ▶️ John if you support like any subset of the features. So yeah, only two of the ports were 40 gigabits per second, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that was disappointing. So, you know, it doesn’t make that much of a difference, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, next year, the year after, at some point, all the HDMI ports are gonna be the good ones. Kind of like if you bought a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and there was like one Thunderbolt 4 port and the rest of them were USB and you had to remember which one it was. That’s what televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John have been like, I don’t know, for many, many years now. And we’re just all waiting around for
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these third-party companies that does the chipsets say, all the ports are good.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all support all the things and we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s one of the reasons, by the way, one of the reasons Sony is expensive and one of the reasons it wins is because Sony puts its own additional
⏹️ ▶️ John processing chips inside there to help out the crappy MediaTek one to make the television
⏹️ ▶️ John look better. It also adds a little bit of input lag, which is another reason you should get an LG if you care about gaming.
#askatp: iCloud Drive flakiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Teller writes, ever have a file stored in iCloud Drive randomly revert to an earlier version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a large PDF stored in iCloud Drive on my up to date MacBook and iPad, I found that iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive suddenly reverted back to a version of the file that predates the most recent edits by four days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey losing around 10 sets of edits that happened over those four days, I had no time machine backup because I’d been away from my time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey external drive and assumed I was safe because I was editing a file live synchronized with iCloud Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple support escalated to Apple Engineering and engineering replied that no forensic data was available and the recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the most recent version would not be possible. So, in other words, apparently piss off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Teller. That’s not fun. I use iCloud Drive extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sparingly, so I can’t say I’ve witnessed this. Marco, have you ever had anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this happen? Are you even using iCloud Drive for anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it, again, like you, extremely sparingly. I only have a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small number of files in there usually it is you know it’s the handful of documents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have in like numbers and pages and stuff just for ease of cross device use from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those apps but for the most part I don’t really use it I still use Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the backing store and the maestral client app to access it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my Macs and so yeah basically I use Dropbox and with a third-party app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And that’s it. So I’ve never seen this problem. And in part, one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use iCloud Drive for more things is that we occasionally hear about problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are in this ballpark, some kind of data integrity problem or data loss problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it just makes me. I know lots of people out there using iCloud Drive just fine and never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having any problems. And in my very light use of it, I haven’t seen any problems like that as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I’m aware. because we’ve heard occasional things like this from people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes me hesitant to ever dump Dropbox and go all in on iCloud Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, one thing to emphasize here is, once again, cloud storage is not a backup. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, you know, like, trippy. Oh, he’s away from his time machine drive, like, okay, do whatever. But like, you know, you think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re safe, because it’s safely in the cloud. That’s not a backup. That’s a live that’s the live place where you’re messing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the data. And if that service messes it up, that’s when you need your backup. And if you don’t have one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bad. iCloud Drive, I’ve always been wary of it. In the beginning, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was super duper buggy. And even though it’s supposedly gotten better, you know, regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of what you think the reliability is gonna be based on anecdotes that you hear from people or on podcasts or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing we do know is it has very limited user control. There’s not a lot of knobs and buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can press. We’ll put a link in the show notes to some articles from Eclectic Light Company, which is a website
⏹️ ▶️ John where, that delves into lots of these nitty gritty details. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive on Mac OS has changed so much since it was introduced. It’s always been the same service
⏹️ ▶️ John and you like you pay for it and it has like a branded name or whatever, but what has implemented that? The actual code
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs on your Mac and probably also as far as we don’t know, but it’s the code that runs on the servers that
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed so much over the years. But through all of it, it has never been a time where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been like Dropbox where there’s like a button you can press and say, sync everything now, or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like do the thing, like Dropbox, it would just, in the olden days, you just launched Dropbox and it would, when it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John up, it would look at all your files and it would look at everything into the cloud and it would synchronize them and do something. And if you wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the thing again, you could quit it and relaunch it, which is a crude type of control, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not even having that type of control in the Mac has always been a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John People will be like, I’m getting on a plane, I wanna make sure these three files are synced. Which little
⏹️ ▶️ John icon in the finder do I click? How can I make it do it now? I clicked the little cloud icon and it
⏹️ ▶️ John should be downloading but it’s not changing, what can I do? Like, Apple has this problem, we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it with photos or whatever. iCloud, it’s part of the design of iCloud. And when I say design, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean like, the way the code is laid out. This is the features that they’ve chosen to expose. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great if it worked 100% reliably, but it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re left reading articles like these like light company ones and doing kill all bird D or whatever the hell they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to find out, where Daemon controls this these days and figuring out what’s changed
⏹️ ▶️ John in Sonoma versus the previous version and whether you’re using the file provider version of the thing or like
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s not what I want out of my cloud storage. Dropbox is
⏹️ ▶️ John also increasingly not what I want out of my cloud storage. Sometimes I look at it and I’m like, I yearn for the days of FTP
⏹️ ▶️ John where you explicitly did operations and when you did them, they were completed. Obviously the best defense against
⏹️ ▶️ John all this is having actually real backups, but I’m personally super duper wary of
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Drive still because I don’t feel like it gives me enough control. And I’m still using
⏹️ ▶️ John miraculously somehow the non-file provider version of Dropbox, which I mean is the version of Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t use Apple’s new file provider APIs and uses whatever the bad old version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Dropbox used where it did sneaky things behind the back of the OS. But that one still for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite all of its nags and annoyances, works reliably and I can, when I quit it I
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s not running and when I launched it, it syncs everything back up again. You know, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John other solutions to, you know, there’s many other companies that are looking to be cloud storage for you. I know iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive is built in. My kids use it for all their stuff. So far, they haven’t come crying to me
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell me all their stuff is gone. And practically speaking, most of their stuff is not backed up. My son is at college.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s not getting Time Machine backups onto the Synology like he would when he was back in the house. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just iCloud Drive or nothing. In my experience, Google Drive is more reliable,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the Mac version of Google Drive, but Google Drive as used through the web, which is a lot of what
⏹️ ▶️ John both of my kids use for their schoolwork, because schools, as we’ve discussed in the past, like to use the Google family
⏹️ ▶️ John of products. And I have faith in Google Drive as used on the web. I say this at the night that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a story about Google Drive files disappearing, and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. So no cloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ John is perfect, right? That’s why you have to actually have backups. Cloud storage is not a backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have a backup in cloud storage, but if you’re like, I don’t need a backup, My files are in Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John My files are in Google Drive. My files are in iCloud Drive. That’s where your files are. That’s what you need a
⏹️ ▶️ John backup of. That is not a backup. That’s what you need to back up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Make another copy of that, put it elsewhere. Not in iCloud, take the stuff that’s in iCloud Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it someplace that’s not iCloud Drive. Take the stuff that’s in Google Drive and put it someplace that’s not in Google Drive. You can cross back
⏹️ ▶️ John up them to each other. Hell, my photos are also quote unquote backed up to Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John as a backup of last resort in addition to the 700 other places they’re backed up just because it’s another place,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And what you’re hoping is they don’t all get a hose at the same time. So yeah, anyway, moral of the story is
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally would still stay away from iCloud Drive, but I know lots of people use it and it does come with
#askatp: Background Refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marcos Vinicius Petri writes, considering that push notifications are unaffected by disabling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey background app refresh, which apps should we allow or block from refreshing in the background?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What kind of convenience will I lose by disabling it, and how much more battery will my phone consume if I leave everything turned on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So just as a single data point here, with CallSheet, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sync a handful of things like search history and spoiler settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stuff like that. I sync that via iCloud or via Cloud Kit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is done, as far as I can tell, that works by Apple sending push
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications to your phone to say, hey, go update yourself. And I’m not explicitly requesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. That’s just, you know, based on the fact that things have changed in Cloud Kit, Apple will say, oh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to go and fetch these updates. And that all happens through this, you know, background app refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism, as far as I’m aware. And so if, for example, you turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that off the call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet, is that not true? Okay, so correct me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, background refresh for apps is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API that apps can register with the system and say basically like, wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me up six hours from now and let me know when I can update my data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems to be kind of a separate process. But background refresh, there’s a framework called BGTask.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it used to be done via a few older methods, but that’s the current way to do it. And it’s literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you request that the system wake you up sometime in the future so that you can then have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a short time, usually like, you know, maybe a minute or half a minute in the background that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like fetch news data from your server or, you know, update your widgets or whatever else. There’s a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other mechanisms as well. There’s a background processing task, which the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone will only let your app do if it’s plugged in, but that allows you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a bunch of CPU power in the background, which normally you’d be terminated for doing. But so if you need to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Overcast does its search indexing with that process, where if you plug your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in overnight, it’ll probably wake Overcast up at some point in the night and Overcast will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure the search index is up to date for all your downloaded podcasts. The other method of background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refresh sort of is you can send from your servers, you can send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a silent push notification that simply wakes the app up. It’s called a content available push notification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that wakes the app up in the background and gives you a few seconds really to like, you know, kick off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network tasks or try to try to do something in the background. And those are not guaranteed to wake your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app up. They’re kind of like a best effort thing and the system can throttle them if it’s not really a good power state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if it thinks you’re sending too many of them. And so all all those mechanisms are throttlable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actively throttled by iOS, depending on the power state,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether there’s Wi-Fi or not in some cases, but power state’s the most important. So in low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power mode, I believe it does almost none of these things, or none of these things. That’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that changes when you turn on low power mode. Normally, in other cases, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor the battery level. So if your phone is plugged in, it will allow these things to run pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever they want to on some responsible, non-abusive interval.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If your phone is not plugged in, but you have like, you know, 75% battery, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna let these things run. Now, yes, you can go in there and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manually toggle off all these switches and everything, but my hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take on this is you’re wasting your time. Don’t bother. Let the system manage it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the system’s really good at managing it. Like it isn’t, when you have background app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refresh enabled for an app, the system is not letting the app continuously run in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is still doing a kind of like, you know, wake up periodically, do something quickly, and then we will suspend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you again, kind of a mechanic there. So the app is not running continuously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as mentioned, you can only do the super CPU intensive tasks from the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing task type that only runs when the phone’s plugged in. the regular background app refresh when you’re out there on battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is also enforcing certain CPU usage limits so that you’re not burning too much battery power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then. And it only lets you run for a certain amount of time. So you can’t be doing that much for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that long. The other side of it is like, if you turn off background refresh for an app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes you are making things worse for yourself. There is precedent like, you know, when a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, we’ve talked about this before, a while back, if you would quote force quit an app, if you’d remove it from the multitasking switcher,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t allow background refresh. And Apple, in a later iOS version, changed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to no longer affect background refresh state, or at least, maybe it acts as an input to how frequently to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, maybe, but probably not even that anymore, because people were disabling background refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unintentionally by, quote, force quitting the app, and then the apps weren’t working that well. They were not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates, the apps were not working the way the user expected them to work. When you go mesh with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings, you think you’re achieving a certain gain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you probably are not achieving that much of one because the system’s automatic behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really good at managing this stuff. I mean, again, see also force quitting apps. There’s a lot of overlap when I’m saying here. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, force quitting an app because it is stuck on something is one thing, but force quitting an app just because you think it’ll save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your battery power, that’s a little squishier and a little bit harder to prove and oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing what you think it’s doing. So same thing with disabling background refresh. Generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should leave it alone, unless there is a specific problem you’ve identified with a specific app that is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of control in some way, but it’s very unlikely to be due to background refresh because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system manages it pretty tightly.
⏹️ ▶️ John One factor you might wanna consider is if you have a lot of apps installed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a bunch of ones that you never use, like ideally the system would notice that you never use them and not allow them to background
⏹️ ▶️ John think it currently, I don’t think it currently does
⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree of it should. No, it does. Well, I’ll give you an example. I have Flighty
⏹️ ▶️ John installed. I rarely use it, but I do use it. But very rarely, when I’m picking something up from the airport or when I’m flying
⏹️ ▶️ John myself, which is enough to allow Flighty to do stuff in the background, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like, well, he never uses this app. But 99% of the time, I do not want Flighty to refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background. So if I found that it was using a lot of background energy or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it showed up in my battery lists or whatever, I would say, why is flighty on the list? I don’t have a flight that I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to deal with for three months. At that point, you could turn flighty off. You have to remember to turn it back
⏹️ ▶️ John on though, because you’re gonna be like, why isn’t flighty working? To Marco’s point, like, why aren’t I getting updates about this flight?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you want it to, you know. So if you’re not gonna remember to do that, if you’re not gonna micromanage it, then
⏹️ ▶️ John you might wanna deal with it manually. For apps that you, not apps that you never use, but apps that you
⏹️ ▶️ John use infrequently, and flight tracking is a great example because especially things that do a good job,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re constantly checking where is this flight? Where is this, you know, and hopefully the apps are smart and when you don’t have anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in your MyFlights list, it won’t do that or whatever, but like you want the value from that app when you
⏹️ ▶️ John use it, but if you know for sure, I’m not interested in flights for three months, then you can turn it off.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other option is just uninstall apps that you’re not actually using, which might be better for your life for a lot of reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, and if you really want to, if you feel like, oh, I’m gonna do the opposite,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna do opt-in, I’m gonna turn a background refresh off on everything, and I’m only gonna turn it on on the apps that I care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just use low power mode at that point. Low power mode will do that for you. Essentially not allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John things to run in the background except for super duper essential stuff. If you really care that much about your battery, or if you have a phone that like
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery is dying on and you don’t wanna replace the battery, use low power mode. And you’ll see what it’s like to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone that doesn’t really refresh in the background anymore. And then every time you launch an app, all the data in it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John out of date or whatever. That’s if you have apps that are currently disabled,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever launched them and you’re like, oh, I launched it and I just gotta wait for it to refresh. If the app is good
⏹️ ▶️ John and you enable background refresh, it will make the experience better so that when you launch the app, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, all my podcasts are already up to date. I don’t need to pull to refresh them because it did it already when it was plugged in overnight, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a great example because like podcasts, you know, people mostly care about, let me see my new podcast for the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t need to see the new podcast every two minutes. It’ll refresh during the night when it’s plugged in if you allow background
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh. So, you know, consider that for the apps that you do use. Make sure background refresh is turned on for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would even go as far as to say, like, don’t do what John just said, but like, turn it off if you don’t use it for a while, because A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, I don’t know if the current versions do this, but frequency of use and most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent use were factors that iOS would consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when deciding how frequently to allow apps to background refresh. So that’s already kind of being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done automatically for you as far as I know. at least it was. And secondly, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole idea of, oh, I’m going to turn this off now. And I’ll maybe I’ll remember to turn it back on later. You won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you definitely won’t. It will stay off and flighty will just suck for you. Like that’s like, so like you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, this is like, you know, back, back when I worked on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was always kind of frustrating when we would get reports from people saying feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X is broken on your website. And after some digging, it turned out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be, oh, they’re running some browser extension that interferes with the JavaScript that breaks this website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s like, they modified their experience. Then later, something broke,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they blamed us and not themselves and the modifications they made. And that causes support headaches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it causes bad user experiences, and it causes oftentimes bad reviews. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re going and messing with those kinds of settings with, I’m gonna lock down these apps and make sure they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t abuse my system, then what happens is you have worse experiences with those apps, and you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not remember why, or you might not realize why, or you might be toggling a switch that does something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you didn’t quite intend for it to do, or you didn’t fully understand what it did, and so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better off, again, unless you’ve identified a specific problem with a specific app that you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address this way, don’t mess with it, just let it do the defaults, because, again, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does a very good job already at managing background refresh frequency for apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you don’t really need to override it. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hatch and Notion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. and we will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Our fitness journeys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do we have to talk about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the idea of maybe our fitness requirements slash routines because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were talking about that earlier, Casey, and I was kind of, it seems like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be wanting to exercise every day or something like every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought that was kind of an interesting thing to discuss because I think that’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think that has always been the case for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it certainly hasn’t. Near history, yes. Longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey history, no. I’m trying to think when this became a thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was probably, I would guess it was during COVID. I don’t know. I can look at my streak in the health app and see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how long it’s been. There have definitely been days that I have not done a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicated workout, but my streak for closing my exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ring, which is my trends, yes, my trends, which I don’t know if underscore even supports anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I have 870 days of that’s with rest, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which, uh, no, that’s without rest. Um, 870 days of exercise goal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hit and move goal hit. Apparently I missed my stand, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand, uh, uh, ring once a couple of hundred days ago. So I only have 204 days there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess I’m no longer a blue ring stud, but nevertheless, um, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, uh, that’s a deep, that is a deep So whatever 870 days before today was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started getting more serious about doing something that at least vaguely smells like exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every single day. Typically, I’m doing some sort of video-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey workout. Sometimes that’s Apple Fitness Plus, and often but not always it’s lifting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weights. Occasionally it’ll be like a HIIT, what is it, high intensity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey training? Thank you. Um, oftentimes, and I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’ve talked about this on the show at some point, but it certainly hasn’t been recently. Um, a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ll do is I’ll do, um, it used to be called beach body. Now I think it’s called body. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would know them because they’re the P90 X people. Um, and. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their whole service is very interesting. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot of really gross stuff to it about how, you know, you need to take such and such supplement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and otherwise you’ll never get the exercise, the gains that you want and so on and so forth which I don’t pay any attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. But what they do have is they do have a pretty robust library of basically fitness and exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos, not unlike Fitness Plus. One of the things I like about Beachbody is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are programs. So where Fitness Plus in my opinion falls down and I haven’t really used Fitness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus in the last couple of months and I think they’re starting to add features like this. But one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the ways that Fitness Plus falls down to me is that it doesn’t have any concept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a longer-term thing. And so you can go every day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just pick out a random strength training video and you can specialize and say, I’d like an upper body strength
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video or I’d want a lower body one or a full body one. But there’s no real concept of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over time I would like to have some sort of consistency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is externally directed. Whereas with Beachbody, or whatever they’re called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, you can do like a three to six to eight week program where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re doing basically the same moves in different orders and in different combinations and whatnot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the course of that two months or what have you. And so unfortunately, because I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey food too damn much, I don’t know the next time you see me, Marco, I don’t know that I’ll look that different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, for all I know, maybe I’ve gotten bigger. I haven’t been on a scale in a while because that doesn’t really matter to me that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recommend it. No, I honestly, I understand the utility of it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly agree with you that I don’t think that number is terribly useful. But I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unequivocally that I am the strongest that I think I’ve ever been in my life, not to say that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an exceptionally strong person, but I am way stronger than a total complete weakling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is how I spent the first 38 to 40 years of my life. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are definitely bulgy things that vaguely resemble muscles in places that never used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. And I mean, again, you’ll look at me and probably be like, you look about the same to me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s certainly, I can notice some changes. And Erin said something, and this all stemmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Erin starting to take fitness and nutrition. She’s much better with her nutrition than I am with mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She’s taken that much more seriously over the last, you know, two to three to five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one of the things she said to me a couple of years ago now that really rang true to me was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving aside that you want to be there for your kids, leaving aside that it’s the right thing to do to exercise if you have the ability to do so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the three of us now have the luxury that we can do this at basically any time of day. And if I’m completely honest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you, most of the time I work out at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, sometimes after an afternoon siesta. Not always, but sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Hey, whatever works for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever works, man. But one of the things that Erin said to me, which now is less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relevant because both the kids are in school, but she said, you know, I want to see my kids, our kids, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking, I want our kids to see us taking care of ourselves. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to be clear to them that it’s an important part of our lives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is doing some sort of physical exertion and activity. And so, like I said, you know, typically during the week I’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of generally strength or, you know, HIIT training, generally directed by some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of program on Beachbody or whatever it’s called. A lot of times I’ll do an eight-week program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Beachbody, and then I’ll take a couple of weeks and just do random Apple Fitness Plus workouts to clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my palate. Then I’ll choose a different program, an eight-week program or what have you. Then typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the weekends, in lieu of a full-on rest day, Aaron and I will go on a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walk together. We’ll walk effectively a 5K, so three-ish miles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll do that on the weekends, and that gives us our exercise, and we’re not lifting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the weekend. That is probably 80,000 words where 10 would have done. But since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked, that’s where I stand. Yeah, exactly. But you also, you and Tiff both have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also gotten very, and this happened, I think, before the pandemic, because I feel like I saw the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beginnings of this when we last saw each other in 2019. But you guys have also gotten extremely serious. You made mention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your bespoke laptop for fitness and your personal trainer and what have you. So this has also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a pretty serious thing for you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really has. I mean, it started out that it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco geez, probably seven or eight years ago, Tiff started training with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trainer that was in our neighborhood that a few of our other friends here were using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought it was just for all the moms, because that’s what all the groups were. And then one day, Tiff’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, you should really start this. I’m like, I don’t think the moms want me to come into their fitness class.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out that he was just starting a guy class together. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they there was like one guy’s class that was happening like one day I’m like all right you know what I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to that sure and it was hard for me because you know this I was I was in my you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early to mid 30s at this point I’ve never I’ve never been like super overweight but I’ve never been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit in my life before that and and so I never felt good going to gyms like I I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a gym and there be you know all these like big guys and their big muscles going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all the equipment and like I can’t do any of that and I don’t even want to be here seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do it and the last thing I want is for me to try to do that in front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all of you like that yeah so I’d had gym memberships occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before and I it just never stuck because I would go and I would I would be intimidated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not know what to do frankly and and I never really enjoyed it before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so fast forward. So this trainer, I was a little, you know, he’s still skeptical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go, but I finally made myself go and this guy, he has really become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very good friend of our family. We’ve been training with him for, geez, something like seven or eight years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He is very unlike what you would expect a trainer to be if you’ve never had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good trainer. Like, you know, when most people picture you know trainers from from gyms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you picture those her guys or or he’s some kind of like you know drill sergeant. You know come on step it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Don’t be a wimp or you know you picture that kind of thing and I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compatible with that at all, but the good thing is our trainer is wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is nothing like that at all. He is relentlessly positive. He never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes you feel bad about yourself at all. He trains people at all levels like I went to the the first class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to that was a group class with him, there were guys who were older than me, there were guys who were younger than me, there were guys who were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more fit than me, guys who were less fit than me. Like I didn’t feel intimidated and he is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing and positive and awesome. If anybody actually needs a trainer, feel free to write it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened was during COVID, he moved and we switched to FaceTime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so he does training via FaceTime and Zoom now, which you would think wouldn’t work. It surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works. Like he sees everything. And look, the downside of course, I’ll tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, I’ll be honest, the downside is personal training one-on-one is expensive, you know, because you’re paying for someone’s time directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work with you. So of course it’s gonna be way more expensive than most other ways to do this. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantage, if you can swing it, is that for me, nothing ever stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I would be like, oh, you know, I’m really busy today, or I’m feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little low energy today, I’m gonna skip the workout today. when there’s a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who you are going to meet, that changes things. I will make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of excuses to not do a workout on my own. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, one of my greatest personality flaws, it makes me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vulnerable to every type of salesperson imaginable, is that I really wanna please people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I very much care about being there for people in my life, showing up, pleasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, making people like me. I very much care about that, to a fault. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never miss workouts, basically. I will jump through ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoops to make the scheduled workouts, in part because I am meeting a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is now a friend of mine and I don’t want to disappoint him. And anything he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asks me to do in the workout, even if it seems really hard, I’ll try it. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last thing I want to say is, I don’t think I can do that. And so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is wonderful. Again, if you’re in the market for a virtual trainer, I can strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommend my trainer. He is the best. And if you think there is like, if you think like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, he’s maybe, if you’re intimidated by the idea of a trainer, or you think it’s like some kind of drill sergeant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, trust me, this is not that at all. Like, he’s so good and so positive and never makes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel bad about yourself. And every workout is different. And you can be like, oh, I slept weird on my neck. neck hurts. He’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, all right, we’ll modify. And he’ll modify it on the fly to like you know fit whatever you need to fit. Like he’s great. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that really has changed things for me because I went from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, before training with him, I went from basically never exercising or very rarely exercising
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to at first doing it once a week, then slowly ramped up. Now we’re doing three times a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And between those, I will occasionally row or run depending on the season. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’ve finally crossed over to the point where I care enough that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel bad when I don’t work out for a while. Like if we’re traveling and have to miss a couple workouts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I really feel bad and I’ll try to like, you know, go to the hotel gym or whatever and do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so I’m, you know, so my body stays awake in certain ways. Like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of how it feels now. Like when, you know, like whenever I go on vacation for a while or I’m not able to work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while, my brain kind of feels like, oh, I really want to use my brain, but I haven’t been able to because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m out or whatever. Now my body feels like that. Like now if I’m out and I, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m traveling or whatever and can’t work out for a few days, my body gets that same kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itch to like, hey, I want to do something. I need to do something, which if you would have told me 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, that I’d be saying that right now, I would have told you you were crazy. But that’s what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m glad I’ve gone through this journey because I too, like you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably don’t look that strong because I’m not doing like bodybuilding stuff. I’m also 41, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only so ripped I can get. But I am way stronger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I’ve ever been before, even though I look about the same, I think. I am way stronger than I’ve ever been before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as you get older too, and this is one of the greatest things about having somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guide you, like a trainer or a training app or something. I would never think to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the exercises that we do. Most of them I would never think to do. And there’s all sorts of like little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird muscles that I’ve now strengthening and training and toning and everything. And that’s great as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get older because that is good for like avoiding injuries as you get older
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or chronic pain centers and stuff like that. I used to get RSI, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. I used to get back pain, I don’t anymore. And now I know like as I get older,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the areas in which you can get pain or injuries only go up as you get older.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so now I know like because I’m doing all this, you know, wonderful mixed training of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different muscles, I know that my odds of getting those injuries and chronic pain down the road are lower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that if I do get any kind of weird injury, my odds are better that I that it will heal better and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster and you know, it won’t affect my life as much maybe. And so as you get older, it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saving for retirement, like you should really start doing it as soon as you can, ideally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the earlier you start, the more you’ll appreciate that when you’re older. That’s how an exercise routine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also. When you’re young, you can get away with not doing it. As you get older, you really can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get away with that as easily anymore. And the best time to start is now, if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do something. And whatever it is, I know our friends over at Cortex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the FitBot app. I know Gray talks a lot about how that has really changed his life. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that like if my trainer ever stopped working or something, I would probably try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that next. But ultimately for me, I really need the human that I want to please for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really stick with something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quick real-time follow-up, then I’d like to hear, John, what your situation is. I was poking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generating links for the show notes, and I thought I had seen something about this, and it appears I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct. On Fitness Plus, they now have a feature called Custom Plan where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the little blurb marketing blur breeds, stay consistent on your fitness journey with custom plans. Choose your personal preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including the days, durations, workout types, meditation themes, trainers, and music, and Fitness Plus will generate a custom plan just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you. And with Stacks, which is another new thing of theirs that I haven’t played with yet, you can move seamlessly from one workout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or meditation to the next with no interruptions. Just set it and then get it. So this is more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along the lines of what I feel like I do get from the Beachbody stuff, which I think is called just Body now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never felt like I got that from Fitness Plus, particularly the plan part, like the stack thing where you roll from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one workout to another or whatever. But the whole custom plan thing, again, I haven’t fiddled with this yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I finish my current program on body, then I’ll probably at least fiddle with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey custom plan thing. And I will say that if you’re new to this, well, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk to somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, preferably like a doctor or a fitness specialist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not either of us. But the Fitness Plus stuff is a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey introduction and they’re really, really good about not being bro-y, the body
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff can get a little bro-y from time to time. Not to say it’s all dudes that are training,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but given that it came from P90X, you can see how it could get a little aggressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, it isn’t bad. Generally speaking, I actually quite like it. Again, if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filter out all the, take this chemical, that’s the only way you’ll get fit business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nevertheless, uh, with the fitness plus stuff is a really approachable way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ease into any sort of fitness and just see if it’s something that you can physically do without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurting yourself. And if there’s, if it’s anything that you enjoy. So, uh, especially if you happen to be an apple one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it’s called subscriber, um, I would definitely at least give it a whirl. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do quite love having, and this is unique to fitness plus because, you know, it’s, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integrated and all that you can see your rings right there on the screen as you’re doing a workout, which is super nice to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yourself as you’re doing this workout, see yourself cranking through your red ring and your green ring and what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. I find that to be very motivating. And speaking of rings, and I promise John, I’ll give you a chance here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I think what has helped for me is having gotten a 800
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus day street going. And there definitely have been a couple of days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I probably should have just not worked out or whatever. But on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole, I think similar to you saying, Marco, that you had someone to answer to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have this momentum that I don’t want to lose, and I think that has been helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And so, you know, I’m going to be doing a little bit of traveling soon, and I’ve been thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through, and I was talking with Marco about this, you know, what can I do for some modicum of exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during this travel window? And I think what I’ll end up doing is just going for a walk, which is not what I would normally do on a weekday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s fine. I just want to do something to get my body moving, something to close my rings and keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that momentum going. Because I probably speak for Marco, but I definitely will say for myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that too many missed days and I can see myself immediately just giving up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it, just out of complacency, like not because I desire sitting here to not work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, I actually do enjoy it like Marco was saying, but it would not take that much to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get me to be very complacent and fall into my natural state of being, which is, I’ll worry about that tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, the rings have been helpful for me, even though they’ve probably also caused me to exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at times. And maybe I shouldn’t have. John, I will stop talking now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apologize. What is your regimen? Have you worked on this at all? I think before you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quit and went full indie, I thought you had said that this was one of your priorities, but have you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to make it a priority yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate working out. I don’t like it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John not what I prefer. Or in my youth, what I wanted to do was play sports.
⏹️ ▶️ John as a side effect of playing sports, you get exercise. But that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it to get
⏹️ ▶️ John better at the sport and to enjoy the sport. And the exercise is just a nice side benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I played tennis in high school. I also ran in high school. And in running, I got terrible, terrible shin splints,
⏹️ ▶️ John which kind of ended my running career prematurely at the end of my high school career.
⏹️ ▶️ John and surprisingly has stuck with me since the age of 18 to the ripe old age of 48 or whoever the hell I am now.
⏹️ ▶️ John lurking. And what it basically does is eliminate running for
⏹️ ▶️ John me as a possible activity, which I think I probably would have done because even though running is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say it’s not that much of a sport, but it’s not like a sport with a ball or
⏹️ ▶️ John a type of skill thing. It’s more of an endurance thing. It’s aerobic activity and stuff like that. But there is a goal.
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re trying to get your times to go better or whatever, and not being able to run for exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sucks. But I hate the idea of just doing a workout for the sake
⏹️ ▶️ John of a workout, exercise with no goal in mind. And so for most of my
⏹️ ▶️ John adult life, I haven’t done any exercise or working out at all, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably not a great plan. I also didn’t do much sports
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff because a surprising number of sports things make my shin splints flare up, even
⏹️ ▶️ John something as simple as basketball or tennis, even though you’re not, don’t seem like you’re running that much, you are kind of running a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, practically speaking, especially when I was, had my jobby job and
⏹️ ▶️ John doing all my extra things at the same time, there was just no time. Kids, family, work,
⏹️ ▶️ John side jobs, all that. There’s no time to do anything. It’s part of my burnout, part of what made
⏹️ ▶️ John me leave my job was I need some time to do something, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So now in my indie career, I have carved out some time to do something. And what I’ve latched
⏹️ ▶️ John on is the thing that I can do, which is not, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John complete. So there’s still lots of holes in my thing here. But what I’ve latched onto is the thing I can do. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like running, but you don’t go anywhere. And that’s weightlifting. Because weightlifting
⏹️ ▶️ John has the same kind of number go up mentality as running. I guess in running it’s number go down, right? But like, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s essentially the game, right? There is a gamified component of it. There is progression. Oh, my
⏹️ ▶️ John time is getting better. I’m lifting heavier weights. It has the advantage that
⏹️ ▶️ John lifting weights doesn’t take as much time because you do a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John sets of a handful of reps, and it’s really hard to do, but it’s over
⏹️ ▶️ John relatively quickly. And even if you have like 30 seconds between them or whatever, it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t take a really long time. Unlike if you’re doing some kind of aerobic exercise, you might have to do it for a very long
⏹️ ▶️ John time to get benefit from it. But you know, five sets of five reps with a weight that’s just at your
⏹️ ▶️ John limit that you slowly increase over each week as you do it, that
⏹️ ▶️ John does something and it’s better than nothing. I still need much more aerobic exercise that I’m getting. I still
⏹️ ▶️ John am not really doing a complete workout. I should still really be playing sports, but it’s not really a surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, but maybe a surprise to people who have young children and think, oh, it’ll be so much easier when they’re older.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe there’s a period in the middle there where that may be true, But once you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey start getting towards high
⏹️ ▶️ John school in the end and like the whole rush of college and the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole college application process and SATs and driver’s licenses and the teen years in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a big push kind of towards the end of like getting the kids out of the nest that
⏹️ ▶️ John involves a surprising amount of parent involvement. So much more than you had been doing when they
⏹️ ▶️ John were like 12 or 11, kind of at the same level that you were doing it when they were much younger, only
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s much, much worse because they’re full-fledged people. And the things they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John are more like have adult annoyances because now they have to deal with bureaucracies and you have to help them
⏹️ ▶️ John navigate them. And it’s just, anyway, all of that is to say that although
⏹️ ▶️ John I have carved out time, I do the weightlifting about three times a week, I’ll put a link in the show notes to a
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey Johnson’s couch to barbell program, which is loosely what I initially based
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was doing on and bought a bunch of weights during COVID. like so many other people did. And I’ve upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ John that weight set a few times and have an adjustable things. Now I don’t have a very fancy setup. I don’t have a home gym.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a gym membership. I don’t want to go to the gym. That’s another good thing about weightlifting. If you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy, the right kind of heavy objects for lifting, you can do a surprising number of exercises in
⏹️ ▶️ John your house. I think Marco is also doing all his exercises in his house with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey limited equipment. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need, you don’t necessarily need a gym to do stuff. And believe me, the weights I’m lifting are
⏹️ ▶️ John not heavy, but they’re heavier than nothing. And that is what’s important.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the few periods of time when I have like, you know, I didn’t do any working out when I was on my Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ John vacation and then I came back from it. You feel it. You skip a week and you’re like, what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it also doesn’t help that I’m, you know, old and put getting close to 50 or whatever. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, like it, it shows me that something’s happening and I guess what number goes up. You know, you started
⏹️ ▶️ John out listening this much weight and then after a week, you had five more pounds and you have another five more pounds and you had another five more pounds,
⏹️ ▶️ John like eventually you get to a limit where, I mean, I eventually I’ll get to the limit of my, my weight sets where
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t put on anymore, but I haven’t reached that yet. Uh, so that’s what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than nothing, but it’s not enough. And so my, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always like, Oh, tomorrow it’ll be better. Right. My current plan is like, okay, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ John one kid in college now and one kid going through that process. When I have both kids out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the house and in college, then I won’t be, which I’m currently driving my daughter to school
⏹️ ▶️ John in the morning, picking her up in the afternoon, driving her to see her friends in the evening, driving her to her driving lessons,
⏹️ ▶️ John driving her to her driving test, which is scheduled for December. And we’ll see like lots of driving people around. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John good exercise, but that does occupy a large portion of my day dealing with, you know, kids
⏹️ ▶️ John activities, driving to get my son at school, driving him back to school, which I did today, a lot of driving.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so even though I have more time and I have I have carved out three days a week to do exercise. And I have tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John pack an efficient kind of exercise in there, because again, I think weightlifting is very time and space efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to do more. And honestly, if I get more time, you know, my daughter goes off to school, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna do a sport. I don’t wanna work out. Like weightlifting, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy the weightlifting either, even though it’s kind of gamified. Would much rather be doing a sport. But in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the results that I see, like capabilities gained. Before you couldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John X and now you can do X, right? Weightlifting does have that going for it. It’s just super boring and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not really into it. So I really want to get back into sports, but tune in in about a year and a half.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I have, a year and a half, two years, I don’t know what it’s going to be. When I have both kids in college, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, you know, not destitute and living on the street at that point, I’ll hopefully be
⏹️ ▶️ John doing more exercise. This is how much college will cost for Maggie. You got to put it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey clip from the Simpsons. It’s terrifying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even want to think about it. Scholarships kids. It’s just to put a period on the sense from my point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of view, to build on what I think both of you have said, it is a pretty amazing feeling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly as someone who has always associated himself or self-identified as a nerd, as someone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not strong and not fast for more than about, you know, 50 yards. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is extremely cool to get to the point that I need to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, that I need to pick up a bigger weight than I did before. And then what’s really amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when you have to order a bigger weight than you previously had. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember exactly when it was, but Aaron and I both needed a set of 40-pound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumbbells relatively recently, a few months
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ago, I think. You’ve got to get the adjustable dumbbells. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have adjustable ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, I had those. I hated them because they’re so big and clunky. They’re very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John I love them. I love to be able to just dial in the weights. They are kind of big and clunky, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that’s part of the challenge that makes them more harder to deal with. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I get that. Because I did, when I was using the smaller weights, I was using non-adjustable ones, but then I had to go the
⏹️ ▶️ John next size up, like Casey’s talking about. And at that point, I just went adjustable and I don’t regret it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, one way or another, but the point is just that, you know, when you’re ordering something that facilitates 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds, be that because It’s literally 40 pounds or because it can, you know, add plates or what have you to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 40 pounds. That’s a cool feeling. And then, you know, eventually we needed a 50 pound dumbbell and we’re getting to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we probably need a second 50 pound dumbbell. And we didn’t get two at the time because we didn’t think we would need a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of us are kind of getting to that point where we’ll maybe need 50 pound dumbbells and that’s, that’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome feeling. And it, in the same way, like you said, John, that you’re seeing a time go lower and lower as you’re running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, seeing my weights go up and up is, is a really rewarding thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never had that experience as a kid. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neither did I. I don’t, I mean, John was the most athletic of the three of us probably, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was never strong, but I was always, uh, yeah, I was, I felt like I was athletic and even when I, before I was working
⏹️ ▶️ John out, a good judge is doing crap around the house. Like, uh, to compare before I
⏹️ ▶️ John was lifting weights and after I was lifting weights, uh, both of those eras, I had to carry my
⏹️ ▶️ John downstairs freezer up and down out of my basement. And it felt similar both times. Like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John even when I am totally doing nothing, I’ve been coasting on good jeans, essentially, to
⏹️ ▶️ John not be terrible. Like, I mean, it’s, I don’t know, you know, maybe I’ll feel when
⏹️ ▶️ John I get old eventually, but it’s like, I still feel like I can do all the things I did. I could spend an entire day crawling around a
⏹️ ▶️ John crawl space and, you know, picking up things in the yard or going up and down
⏹️ ▶️ John on ladders all day or like whatever, and I have no problem doing it. The only difference is that
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m not, in my pre-working out times, I would be more sore the next day, or
⏹️ ▶️ John these days probably not sore at all, but I can still do it all. I don’t get out of breath doing
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I do need more aerobic exercise, but I’m coasting on good genes a lot for that, so that
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be shored up. I like bike riding too, but I feel like I’m gonna die being hit by a car, because I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John live in a bike-friendly place, so the risk-reward trade-off is not great. So then you’re like you’re driving your bike
⏹️ ▶️ John to a bike trail. That feels like weird and wasteful. So aerobic activity is still a problem. A stationary
⏹️ ▶️ John bike so boring and I don’t have room for one in my house. So it is still a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I’m working on. But, you know, we’ll revisit this topic when both my kids are in college to see how much better I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think the the best answer to that is figure out something that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get in your house, like whether it’s a stationary bike or elliptical or a rower or something, some kind of aerobic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine that you can tolerate that can fit somewhere somehow in your
⏹️ ▶️ John in a child’s bedroom. I’m no longer lives with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I mean, honestly, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what a lot of people do. Like there’s a reason for that. I think that is the ultimate the answer because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, generally like yeah, weightlifting is great, but you’re right. You should also be doing some kind of aerobic
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I’m walking the dog every day, but you know what that’s like. I mean, it’s a test is technically aerobic. I’m walking a few
⏹️ ▶️ John miles every day and I walk at a brisk pace, but me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s ideally you’d have more than that. But yeah, I mean, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I to Casey like the number of times that somebody has called me strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life. I can probably count on one hand, but they’ve almost all been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the last two years. So and I remember every single one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that it means a lot to me because I was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scrawny nerdy kid. You know, I was not very athletic. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually was held back in t-ball for an extra year. You couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the t. Oh, that’s brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I just kept yeah anyway. So but like you know to to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be you know growing up that way for and spending most of my life that way and then you know at age 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know to be able to to do to have someone else notice that you’re strong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not the common case in most of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not strong either and my son has zero ounces of body fat his entire body and is young. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was doing my weight workout when I first started, I encouraged him to, this was
⏹️ ▶️ John over the summer after his freshman year of college, I encouraged him to do one workout with me and he’d won and he’s just like, I’m never
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that again. He could do it. Like it’s not like he couldn’t do what I was doing, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John was at the point where I was about to increase the amount of weight and he He was just like, the next day he was complaining about how sore
⏹️ ▶️ John he was and everything. So I think he’s got college student bod, which is, looks fit from the outside. Again, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got six pack abs, not an ounce of fat as an entire body, but he’s weak. He’s small and weak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the problem is once your metabolism slows down and you get a little older, that becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, take a look at my midsection. This is your future, so. Yeah. and I guess especially as they are so distinguished