564: Always Get the Biggest Pizza
07 Dec 2023Mr. Liss goes to New York.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Other People’s Code
- AirJet cooling a MacBook Air
- Keycap replacements at Apple Stores?
- Apple Stores will price-match?
- Maybe use KidArt for kid… art? (App Store link)
- How does Thunderbolt 5 “Bandwidth Boost” work?
- Idiosyncrasies of ECC RAM
- Apple 🤝 Amkor
- Apple 💩-cans 5G modem development?
- …but there’s always 6G…
- John’s window-dragging bug continues in 14.2 beta 5
- Please fix Find my Friends sharing, Apple
- Beeper Mini brings iMessage to Android… like, for real for real. 😱
- Apple’s Blue Ocean
- Post-show Neutral: Trip Report
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Chapters
- Intro
- Follow-up: Other People’s Code
- AirJet demo in MacBook Air
- Apple Store keycap replacements
- Apple Store price-matches
- App to capture kid art
- TB5 80 vs. 120 Gbps
- ECC follow-up
- Amkor
- Sponsor: Green Chef (code 60atp)
- Apple 5G modem project
- John’s window bug
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- A lab was attended
- Location-sharing secret durations
- Beeper Mini and iMessage
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Apple’s Blue Ocean
- Ending theme
- Casey goes to New York 🖼️
- Casey goes to Long Island 🖼️
- Casey goes to Fire Island 🖼️
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny we just talked last night to do to record our next member special and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent last night talking to you guys I spent you know a good chunk of today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing that conversation Finish editing that conversation and now oh, we’re back talking again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I’ll spend most of tomorrow morning editing this conversation Good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good thing are we like you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John then you want to hear from us again until next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at times. That and actually that’s very apropos because you and I were together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a week ago, actually a week ago today, was it not? It was Wednesday that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got into Manhattan and we’re gonna talk about that at length on the after show. And here’s what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna do. We’re gonna do a, what we in the biz like to call a teaser. In the after show I can explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how in the span of an hour and a half I murdered two of Marco’s vehicles and that’s your teaser for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after show. Don’t Don’t skip. I know there’s chapters. Don’t skip. You got to earn it. You got to earn it. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. BS in the meantime.
Follow-up: Other People’s Code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow up. And we have some follow up with regard to our prior member special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about other people’s code, which, by the way, those of you who reached out and said really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, but we heard a lot of really, really kind words about that. And I don’t think we mentioned on the show that that was very kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to take your time and say so. So thank you. But we have a related piece of optional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey homework. John, can you tell us about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s kind of timely. I mean, the thing we were talking about is a members special that we did where we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John me working on the CMS that runs ATP that Marco originally wrote.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was partially framed as looking at me playing with PHP, but also it was about other
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s code. And there is a great talk about other people’s code that I happened to see on YouTube by Laura
⏹️ ▶️ John Savino. And I posted about it on Amastadon this week and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes if you want to see
⏹️ ▶️ John a vastly expanded and much more professional and non-PHP focused example
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of good information in there. of it resonated with me after my long career editing other people’s
AirJet demo in MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then throwback to ATP 541.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking about solid-state cooling. I think it was in the context of follow-up. It doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we were talking about solid-state cooling, and there was a company that—I don’t remember if it’s the name—oh, it’s the FRORE,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey F-R-O-R-E is the name of the company, and they make a product called Airjet, which is a physically very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very thin, apparently solid-state, not a fan, but a thing that moves air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was an article in The Verge a week or two ago, wherein the Frory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever you call them people, the Airjet people, retrofit a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air. And I mean, it was a pretty involved, pretty kind of gross retrofit, but they put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a series of these, of these fans in there. And wouldn’t you know, when you put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey active cooling in a computer, it actually performs way better. Who’d have thunk it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And this is not a great demo for them because it was very invasive to the point where they had
⏹️ ▶️ John to mill out part of the case. Because obviously the MacBook Air is not designed to have active cooling in it. So they had to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of room. They removed a lot of parts from the computer and milled out the case and put their little AirJet
⏹️ ▶️ John things in there. They look kind of like really flat, like PCMCIA cards,
⏹️ ▶️ John but of course inside them, inside there are these little tiny, little tiny mechanical, like micro
⏹️ ▶️ John level things that swish the air out of them and make a whooshing noise. It’s kind of like a fan, but with nothing rotating.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re weird. But I’ve seen people take earlier iterations of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I think it was the M1 MacBook Air and just put like better passive cooling in, not active
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling, but just like a better heat sink. They also put a better heat sink in this by the way, but if you just put a better heat sink
⏹️ ▶️ John and better thermal paste, you can also get some mileage out of it. I’m still, I mean, I guess they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this as a, you know, hey, a marketing stunt for their product. Like, look, you know, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John your computers could be better if you bought these things from us. Wouldn’t that be great? I
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of hope that Apple doesn’t put these things in the MacBook Air because I like having the
⏹️ ▶️ John low-end laptop not have a fan at all, despite the thermal throttling. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as Casey pointed out, like, yeah, if you put active cooling in a machine that didn’t have it, it thermal throttles a lot less.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like that’s the trade-off of this thing. It’s totally silent, there’s no fan whatsoever. It will also thermal
⏹️ ▶️ John throttle sometimes. And that is a trade-off I think should, that should be in the product line for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I mean, that same trade-off exists in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, right Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the amount of trash that you’ve given me about my 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently utterly crippled MacBook Pro is approaching the amount of trash I’ve given you about your,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I was going to use a descriptive term that’s not kind about your car. But as we’ll learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later on, here’s another teaser folks, as we’ll learn later on, I’ve sworn off making fun of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your car. I’m not doing it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to stand out with a gigantic bread box Volvo you drive around it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John and also It’s not yours. It’s parked in your driveway
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and you drive it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think no, I don’t try I mean I do drive it maybe once a week at most that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequent for a car that you’re saying is not yours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s it’s very I’d say it’s once a month is a better description.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But anyways, it doesn’t matter It’s a pretty car to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that later. It’s a pretty car. I don’t care what you to say I think the Volvo I genuinely think the Volvo is pretty car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and granted I’m biased I have priors if you will to use a Marlin ism, but I think I really think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty but that’s well Well again, we’ll bigger about that later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like you know to be clear about like the thermal throttling what’s interesting about this is that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you jump through, you know substantial hoops to add a Pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated cooling setup to a MacBook Air Yes, it makes it faster because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttle anymore, but it doesn’t make it a ton faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like, and the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing with the difference between the 14 and 16 inch M3 Macs, MacBook Pros, it’s not a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So even when these chips throttle, it’s not like, you know, like the olden days of like the original, the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first generation MacBook Air that thermal throttled a lot, severely all the time. It’s nothing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like when we say thermal throttling, you know, It’s, you know, look, iPads and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones do it too. And no one ever says anything because it matters so little in most ways. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this is. Like MacBook Airs, you know, ever since they went to the Apple Silicon generation where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they went totally fanless, I think they’ve always throttled. Just, it took a while before you get there. And even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you see is maybe, you know, five or 10% slower on long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sustained loads than a, you know, something with a fan. It’s not a huge difference. isn’t like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half as fast or a quarter as fast. It’s, it’s a very small difference. And so if anything, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaks to how little anything like this would be necessary in a product like the MacBook Air that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, it is doing just fine without any fan at all. And for the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of workloads, not only does nobody even notice for the vast majority of workloads, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even say there isn’t even a difference in the vast majority of workloads that you have to be doing some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly specific things before you’re going to see these these chips throttle and even when they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the performance difference is not massive. So this is not like the thermal throttling we make a big deal of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on tech podcast because it is a difference and it is something worth knowing if you have one of those workloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in reality in almost all usage it is totally not a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t worry about it at all and it certainly doesn’t need hardware modification to take care of.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also the question of the power draw of these things. I was looking the article that we’re gonna link in the notes. I don’t think they
⏹️ ▶️ John say the power draw, but I thought I remember someone saying they were taking like five watts or something, which is a lot, like that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John much the SOC takes, but I don’t know if that was accurate. I might just be misremembering. I also don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John much power the fans take in Apple’s laptops that have fans. But anyway, if this
⏹️ ▶️ John company is actually going to pitch Apple on licensing their technology for use in, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say a future 14 inch or something, they have a long way to go, because they have to show, not only does
⏹️ ▶️ John it cool things by blowing air, but can it be as quiet or as pleasantly quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John as the existing weird asymmetrical fan things? How much power does it draw? How much cost does it add?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much space does it take up? Yeah, it’s a long way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even like, how many can they even supply? Like, this is a small startup company. Can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even make enough to be a component of the next MacBook Pro or MacBook Air? Probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if Apple gives them a few billion dollars, they can. Maybe. It’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John way everybody makes enough of anything. Apple gives them a lot of money sometimes buys a lot of machines for them. Yep,
Apple Store keycap replacements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Zed writes that key cap replacements are free at the Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as the mechanism below the key cap is functioning and parts are still available to order. If you have a vintage Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to a store that opened before your Mac became vintage and it hasn’t been remodeled since then. That’s a tall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order, but I’ll go with it. And odds are they will still have at least some of the key caps left.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a nice thing. This may later when we talk about one of the main topics, this may come up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Apple should advertise this more if it is true, which, you know, multiple people who’ve worked at Apple stores and
⏹️ ▶️ John said, yeah, we’ve got key caps and doesn’t matter if your thing is under warranty, doesn’t matter how old it is. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you come in, you’ve got a damaged key cap, it’s basically just a cosmetic issue that the switch underneath works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll just take it in the back, see if we have one spare, snap it in and give it to you. And we’ve all had experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John like that at the Apple store where what we assume is like someone’s discretionary, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, nicety, like they’ll do something for us that they don’t have to do, that maybe it’s not official policy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just nice. Like they’ll swap something for you or give you a replacement because they happen to have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this builds brand loyalty. And if, you know, if the key cap represent really is a policy,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should talk about it more. If it’s not a policy, maybe they just want it to be like a secret menu at In-N-Out where like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Ooh, you don’t know, but you can go to the Apple store, you can get new key caps. Cause I don’t think a lot of people know this. You see, you
⏹️ ▶️ John see people with laptops, with not just the ones where the, where the people’s fingers wear through the key caps, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John key caps that are weird or broken or have something wrong with them or some sort of cosmetic damage. And if you told them, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just take that to the Apple store and they’ll just give you one like, well, I bet they’ll charge me for it. Well, no, it’s free. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John mine’s not under warranty. Like people don’t know, and it will make them happier if they have it done. Now that I know
⏹️ ▶️ John this, if I have a key cap problem, I’m definitely gonna do that. I wish I
⏹️ ▶️ John have done that for my Apple extended too that I dropped my pocket knife onto and it put a big gash
⏹️ ▶️ John in the, I think it was the F5 key. It was very disappointing to me. I wish I could have just brought it to an Apple store, but they didn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but if you can find one that hasn’t been remodeled since 1975 or whatever, Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they’ll have one of those in the
⏹️ ▶️ John back. Apple extended to 1990, no, 1989, 87? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What you said, you know, you dropped it on the keyboard. I assumed that there was going to be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the E key or something like that. But no, it was the commonly pressed F5 key.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it was on, it was like the shelving units were over like where my computer desk was and the pocket knife was on the
⏹️ ▶️ John shelf and it tumbled off. So it just, you know, could have been dangerous. I think I think it just had like the flathead screwdriver
⏹️ ▶️ John part out so didn’t have like the blade out or anything But the flathead screwdriver, you know falling from a height and landing just right on
⏹️ ▶️ John the key cap of the f5 key really gouged it
Apple Store price-matches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along. Speaking of Apple stores, apparently they’ll price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey match. This was broken or discussed at least on macworld.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently up to two weeks from the date you received your device, it will price match against, and this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key, any authorized Apple reseller. And the person who wrote this article, who I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have their name in front of me, apparently did it over the phone. So they just refunded them over the phone, which is kind of cool. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that’s a thing. I didn’t know that either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if you would think that lots of stores advertising their advertise their price match to get you to shop there,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think Apple would advertise this. Maybe they don’t wanna give people free money, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes people do feel more comfortable buying from the Apple store than having to battle
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone and Best Buy to try to get someone to, you know, uncage your Apple product for you or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, Apple extended to 1990. I was close. You were close.
App to capture kid art
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and continuing right along, Abe White writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in episode 562, a listener asked about photographing their kids’ art. My latest side project was making KidArt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an app to solve that exact problem for myself and only myself as it sits unnoticed in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, this is my kind of self-promotion. It’s self-promotion wrapped in self-deprecation. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is huge Casey energy. Anyway, Abe continues, it has some niceties like organizing by artist and age, and it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the vision framework to auto crop. Very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is basically a Casey app. This is like, it’s a bespoke app that deals with photos and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco children in a way that is like exactly what one person needed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re not wrong, I can’t find the lie. So Abe continues, it has some niceties like organizing by artist stage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can use the vision framework to auto crop, but most importantly, it stores in your photos library so you’re never locked into the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we will put a link in the show notes. This sounds really good and I gotta give this a shot.
TB5 80 vs. 120 Gbps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about Thunderbolt 5 and 80 versus 120 gigabits per second. Yeah, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what happens when something sits in the show notes too long. That Thunderbolt 5 thing had been in the show notes for weeks
⏹️ ▶️ John and weeks, maybe multiple months. I don’t remember how long it was there. But one part of it talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth boost mode where you get 120 gigabits per second for display purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as soon as I saw the explanation, I realized I had known this in the past but forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey How does it get 120 gigabits
⏹️ ▶️ John per second when normally it’s only 80 gigabits per second? And 80 is twice what Thunderbolt 4 is. So that’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Thunderbolt 5, double the speed of Thunderbolt 4, thumbs up. Where’s the 120 come from? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just four lanes of 40 and they just change the direction of one of the lanes like it’s rush
⏹️ ▶️ John hour on a bridge or something. So it’s three lanes of 40 in one direction for 120
⏹️ ▶️ John and only 40 in the other direction. So when it’s in the mode where you’re driving a display, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John more bandwidth, They just send three out of the four lanes at a single direction. That is the
ECC follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to ECC RAM, at this point, friend of the show, Joe Lyon writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after reviewing the LPDDR5 data sheets, I am happy to see that when link ECC is enabled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the overall bandwidth or throughput is not impacted. This is because the regular data is transferred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the standard data IOPins, but the ECC data is transmitted on a pin that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normally used during the write and read accesses. There’s a slight penalty in latencies when ECC is enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of the extra time required to calculate the ECC data, same as in the quote-unquote sideband system-level ECC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Xeon days. But at least you’re not taking a memory bandwidth hit when ECC is enabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also somewhat interesting is that Link ECC can be enabled separately for write and read accesses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a controller could choose to disable Link ECC for writing data to DRAM, but enable it for reading data from the DRAM and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vice versa. Again, how the M3 chip actually chooses to use these features is unknown to the outside world, unless Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decides to tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of disappointed nobody from Apple wrote in to tell us, because this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re so close to just getting at the truth, because now we know in the abstract, right, so LPDDR5,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got the array, something like array ECC inside it for correcting errors inside the chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it could, in theory, use link ECC for the very short journey from the RAM chips to
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual M3 or whatever processor. We don’t know if it does that, and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not a really easy way to tell, so someone from Apple should just tell us. Are you using link ECC?
⏹️ ▶️ John All the time, some of the time, unreads, unwrites, every other read, every other write, only on Wednesdays? Let us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Inquiring minds want to know, and there’s apparently John and Joe Lyon. So the two of them would like to know.
Amkor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple, I think it was last week, established, or excuse me, announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expanded partnership with Amcor, A-M-K-O-R, for advanced silicon packaging in the U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is an Apple press release, and I will read from there. Apple will be the first and largest customer of the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amcor manufacturing packaging facility being developed in Peoria, Arizona. Amcor will package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Silicon produced at the nearby TSMC Fab, where Apple is also the largest customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So basically, when you have a gazillion dollars, or a hojillion dollars, like you were saying earlier, John, then things can happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is vaguely related to our recent discussions of silicon packaging. They talk about advanced packaging, this, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing. They say Apple silicon, but I’m assuming when they say advanced
⏹️ ▶️ John packaging, they just mean, yeah, stuff is Apple or stuff that Apple’s already doing elsewhere and not any of
⏹️ ▶️ John the newer type of things that Apple isn’t currently doing that we were discussing. And when they say Apple silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’re making like H2 chips for the new headphones or something like this is years in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure that they’re gonna be manufacturing, you know weird
⏹️ ▶️ John chiplet based m4 extreme chips in Arizona, but baby steps to getting
⏹️ ▶️ John any amount of And if anything remotely close to cutting-edge silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John fabrication in this country is great Intel is working on that Intel recently got
⏹️ ▶️ John some money from the US government to help with that a TSMC Is not a US company,
⏹️ ▶️ John but having them in the US and trying to sort of build the expertise in our country.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the biggest problems is not that it’s expensive to do here or whatever, it’s that we don’t have people
⏹️ ▶️ John who can work in those factories. So it’s kind of a personnel supply problem, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can solve that chicken and egg dilemma with lots of money if you build a giant factory and say we’re hiring a bunch of people. Hopefully that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John motivate people to learn this trade and start working in those factories,
⏹️ ▶️ John which are presumably offer some good high paying jobs because this is cutting edge stuff.
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Apple 5G modem project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even though you have, or Apple has infinite money, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are some things they cannot do. And apparently what they cannot do is generate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or create a 5G, a custom bespoke 5G modem, because allegedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, they are, they’re canning that process and they are no longer, uh, working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward making their own 5G modem. Maybe there’s conflicting reports here. Modem, maybe. There’s conflicting reports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. So, reading from Mac Rumors, according to the operator of the news aggregator account, YEUX1122,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the well-known YEUX1122, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bot, Supply Chain sources related to Apple’s 5G Modem department claim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the company’s attempts to develop its own modem have failed so far, and that Apple’s in the process of winding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down its years-long investment in the project. Separately, the leaker known as TechReve today said that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard similar reports from a Japanese supply chain source. This is pretty loosely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sourced. I don’t know how much to make of this and it sounds like, Marco, you’re not buying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not. I mean, so there’s a lot of words in here that matter. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep in mind, number one, supply chain sources. From what we’ve heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is pretty clear that Apple is trying to build a modem. There’s a lot of value for them to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their modem, as we’ve talked about whenever this rumor comes up, like, you know, the cellular modem in a phone is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large and pretty complex and substantial chip that’s in there. And so if they can do their own,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only does that, you know, potentially give them a lot of control over how it’s done, and maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do better than Qualcomm, maybe not, who knows, but you know, they’re certainly going to try. I mean, keep in mind, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there was a time when it was considered outrageous that Apple would ever make chips better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel for their CPUs, but here we are. I think it’s possible for them to do a better job if they you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if they have the talent and the resources and everything. But anyway, it also gives me the ability to possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrate it into the package of the main chip and that could have all sorts of benefits for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know things like efficiency, certainly space inside the devices, and of course costs that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s a lot of motivation for them to do this. And also you know the whole Tim Cook doctrine of wanting to control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the key technologies behind your products, the cell modem is a key technology behind their most important product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it makes sense why they want to do this and that’s why they’ve been you know apparently spending a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money and they’ve made some acquisitions in this area, some pretty big ones, you know allegedly they’re big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. So when we hear a rumor that says supply chain sources say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just gonna bail out on making a 5G modem, what that probably means,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve heard so far in recent weeks and months, is that Apple’s cell modem project is behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schedule and it missed whatever target they had set initially like they wanted it done by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know time X apparently they they have missed that target and so they’re going to you know keep working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it well supply chain sources if Apple was talking to them and saying hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to maybe need you to build a whole bunch of these for us we’re going to we’re going to need all these parts to make these or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you know whatever goes into it we’re going to need these for say 2025 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple missed their target, they don’t need those for 2025 anymore. And so the supply chain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sources might be told something like, scrap that. That doesn’t mean Apple’s not making a modem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just means Apple’s not making that modem at that time. So and and keep in mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the supply chain also, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of, you know, parties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in in the industry who really want Apple not to be making a modem and who would possibly benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple not making a modem. Like for instance, their current modem supplier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, there’s when when people want the rumor to be true or they want they want to make sure like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times you know it spreads through human nature or malice or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know usually just human nature and so I would take this with a grain of salt. There is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of reason for Apple to make a cell modem and and I believe I think as Jason pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out an upgrade this week if Apple actually actually can this whole project they would probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laying off like hundreds of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would feel it in other ways, not just somebody on Twitter or whatever. You would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel it in big ways. So I bet Apple is very much still working on a modem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just isn’t ready yet. And that means they’re not ready to manufacture it yet, and so the supply chain was probably told,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey that thing we told you we wanted for next year, we don’t need it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean if that’s the case, this is a real trailing indicator considering on past episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John as we discussed the actually fairly old story, that Apple signed another long multi-year
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with Qualcomm. You don’t do that if you got your own modem chips, you know, or you have any expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John of, and it’s many, it’s not like just like, oh, we’ll use Qualcomm for next year. I figured it was like a three-year deal, four-year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal or whatever. Yeah, but that’s not many years. Like, you know, if it was a 15-year deal, I’d say, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boy, maybe they’re not doing it. But if it’s only a few years, that probably just means they need a few more years
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like if the idea is, if this supply chain is saying this now because they sort of canceled their orders
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever. As soon as that deal was made, they’re like, well, I guess there’s not gonna be any
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple 5G modems next year because they just signed a three-year deal with Qualcomm. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John possible that like, the rumors have always been like, the first year they have
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these, say they eventually succeed and make one. It’s not like they’re gonna put it in the flagship iPhone immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even back when they did the Intel modems in like half the iPhones, that was not a great experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the rumors are like that they would put the first Apple modem chip in like the iPhone SE4
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, like some lower volume, not as big a deal thing. And it would be a slow rollout over
⏹️ ▶️ John many years. So, you know, if they haven’t canceled the car project, they’re sure as hell not canceling the cell modem project because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is really important for them to do this. They did buy the Intel’s business. And
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, considering they make so many other things, not just the SoC, but as you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned before, the H chip, the R1 chip, like they’re good at making silicon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, cell radio stuff is different in that first you’ve got the radio part of it, which is not just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, digital logic, but is analog radio technology. So I understand that’s a whole other can of worms, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has lots, already lots of the right talent and experience to get this done. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, Marco, cell phones, important part of cell phones is the cell modem. And hey, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in the SoC, maybe, just maybe, it could appear in a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Can we not? Because you know, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac, have enough room to put it anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever you bring this up, people say, bring up the thing of like, Oh, Qualcomm charges are percentage of purchase price. We went through
⏹️ ▶️ John this many years ago, around in circles in this, I believe the resolution of this was that
⏹️ ▶️ John cost is not the reason not not a reasonable reason for them to keep it out of the MacBooks, because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a percentage of the price like, Oh, I buy a $7,000 MacBook, I have to play Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John $700, because they get 10% of the purchase price or something. When that was true, even if it is still true, but when it
⏹️ ▶️ John was true, I believe the upshot was that there was a limit and pretty much everything Apple sells would be
⏹️ ▶️ John at that limit. So it’s not like it goes up and up forever and it’s just a percentage of the price. And also
⏹️ ▶️ John we have no idea what kind of deal Apple has with Qualcomm. Like when they make these multi year deals with Qualcomm, we don’t know all the terms.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple buys a lot of modem chips. Presumably they can get fairly favorable terms. But yeah, cost
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re making it yourself, you don’t have to pay, make a deal with yourself and pay yourself weird profit margins or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So it’ll be cheaper and better for Apple to have its own chips. They are almost
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly continuing this process. But it is possible that they’ve said, you know what, we plan to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a 5g modem. And at this point, we blew it by the time because the lead times
⏹️ ▶️ John on these are so long, they can know that like, look, by the time we’re done, we need to have a 6g modem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the 6g modem project that we’ve had running for several years now, that’s our new main focus
⏹️ ▶️ John to get everybody off the 5g modem, put them on the 6g modem, which of course, will will also be able to do 5G
⏹️ ▶️ John because it has to. So that could be going on, but again, product Titan has been rebooted a million
⏹️ ▶️ John times and that’s something we’re not even sure Apple should ever make. Apple should definitely make a cell mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so they’re apparently doing 6G. That’s the thing. And Mac rumors reports Apple’s work on implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 6G cellular connectivity and its devices appears to be ramping up according to Mark Gurman. 6G is not expected to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emerge on consumer devices until around 2030, for goodness sakes. That’s not that long from
⏹️ ▶️ John at the calendar, the year number keeps going up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As long as I’m still here for it, that’s all I care about. But yeah, it’s yikes. I mean, it’s not yet, I just feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s both forever away and tomorrow, but that’s neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Long lead times on Silicon, but yeah, the 6G obviously isn’t, you know, it’s dependent on whatever the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for us the countrywide rollout of 6G. If it
⏹️ ▶️ John goes as well as 5G, might be well.
John’s window bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, dare I ask, what’s going on with your window snapping, window dragging bug?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John latest? Oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John has been in the notes so long I have to update it. It just says beta 4. But beta 5 came out like what, two
⏹️ ▶️ John or something? Yeah, this is Mac OS 14. No one else is keeping up with the Mac OS. Mac OS 14.2 beta.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why do I keep installing the new Mac OS beta? It’s because I’m always looking to see if my window
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging bug has been fixed. And for the past couple of betas.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the deal. First of all, the feedback item, one of my feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John items had a status update that seemed to indicate that the fix was in some build. I forget what the details were. It wasn’t a reply,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t a comment, but up in the header part of the feedback it says like fix possibly implemented in build blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. I haven’t gotten that thing that you get sometimes which says we believe this is fixed, please verify it or your bug will be closed
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah blah. I haven’t gotten that on it yet, but I did get that status update. And I’ve been loading
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the 14.2 betas and testing them out. And my reproduction
⏹️ ▶️ John on my specific computer setup with all of my hardware was very straightforward. You just log in to users,
⏹️ ▶️ John open 25 text edit windows, drag sticky, real easy to do. It’s not subtle. It’s not like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to look for it real hard. I have plenty of videos doing it. And by that yardstick,
⏹️ ▶️ John my window dragging bug is fixed in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mac OS 14.2 beta.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you open 25 windows and drag a sticky, it’s fine, nothing wrong with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now I know too much. Oh no. that like, well, I know that
⏹️ ▶️ John as you open more windows, things get worse. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess I’m kind of like, what I would think is that the computer is powerful we
⏹️ ▶️ John have today with hardware compositing and the window manager and
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I asking you to do? Move an opaque rectangle around on top of a bunch of other opaque rectangles. It should
⏹️ ▶️ John be perfect all the time, shouldn’t it? Like there should be no degradation as I
⏹️ ▶️ John open more windows. I’m not running out of RAM. The CPU isn’t pegged. The GPU isn’t pegged. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is stressed. Nothing is happening on the system. Nothing is running. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John empty, white, opaque windows and they’re just rectangles. And I just want to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to drag one around. Should it matter if there’s a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer in Mac OS is it still does. In 14.2, if you open 200 windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s laggier when you’re dragging that little sticky window around than it is when you have 25, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, and you can hold on the option key to stop the window snapping thing from going, but like- No, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold on. What’s your baseline from like, from previous versions of Mac OS before this bug was there?
⏹️ ▶️ John the question, because before you weren’t looking, I wasn’t looking for this. It was like, I just, I never noticed anything having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with window dragging. Ever since Quartz Extreme in like, whatever that was, Mac OS 10.4 or
⏹️ ▶️ John five or whatever, Tiger or Leopard or something, whatever quartz extreme came out, it was the thing where they did GPU accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John compositing. As soon as they did that, Window Dragon was fine, right? And when we talk about compositing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the original versions of Mac OS X, when you had to draw a window with it’s like fuzzy drop
⏹️ ▶️ John shadow, they had to calculate the transparency of, okay, we’re laying a drop shadow over what’s behind it. Now what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John behind it and blend that together with whatever the color of, you know, gray is at that point with that transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John level. And they would do that on the CPU. Every single pixel, they do the math, they would go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and say, okay, now take this pixel and blend it with that one, tell me the result. Take this pixel and blend it with that one, tell me, incredibly slow,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Once they moved it onto the GPU, which is designed to do that, and it can do it much faster and in parallel,
⏹️ ▶️ John window dragging was like, oh, the problem solved. I can drag the window around, it never lags behind.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I decide window resizing, which has to do with the contents of the window, but just dragging, that’s done by the window server. The application doesn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know that it’s happening, right? It’s never been a problem. Only when I started encountering this bug, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously noticeable to anybody, that I started even noticing window dragging. And now that I know
⏹️ ▶️ John that apparently, you know, Mac OS 13 and 14 have this thing where as you open more windows, window dragging gets crappier. I’m always looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for, all right, well now what does it take for it to get crappy?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey How many windows do
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to open for me to notice that it’s crappy? And what I mean by crappy is you’ll grab the title bar
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll move the window around and the pointer will not stay on the title
⏹️ ▶️ John bar as you move the window around. Obviously when I had the bug, if you look at my videos, I can pull the pointer three
⏹️ ▶️ John inches off that title bar in slow motion and I can watch the stickies window move across the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John real slowly, trying to catch up with my pointer and my pointer is moving real slow and it’s like, catch up with me, sticky, you can catch
⏹️ ▶️ John me, catch up with me, right? Super bad, right? Now on 14.2, if I open 200 windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John I move it around, I can get the pointer maybe a centimeter off the title
⏹️ ▶️ John bar before, but it catches up real fast. You know what I mean? But there’s a difference between when I have 200 windows and when
⏹️ ▶️ John I have 100 and when I have 25, right? There’s a difference. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what the difference is. But anyway, I’m gonna close this bug as fixed once 14.2 comes out, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it continues to work like this
⏹️ ▶️ John because hey, the bug was 25 windows open, it looks like molasses. That doesn’t happen anymore. 25, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John as good with 25 as it is with zero, right? It’s just, it is what it is. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this little bug in my head about, but why is it not perfect?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what is it that’s not, you know, what would it take? Cause I feel like in a video
⏹️ ▶️ John game type thing, if you had like a cursor and like, you know, sometimes they make like fake operating systems for fake computers and
⏹️ ▶️ John video games, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John they did this in a game engine, you couldn’t get the pointer to stray from the pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John it was on when you held down the mouse button. You know what I mean? Like you grab the title bar, you hold down the mouse button, you move your mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John that pointer would never move from the title bar. But on the Mac, because the cursor is controlled by something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John different than the Windows server, the cursor updates and it moves however your mouse moves and the window service is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wait, oh, the cursor, it looks like the cursor moved. I have to redraw the window underneath it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree that they lag behind each other, that’s where you get separation. So I’ll continue to watch this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I am excited to learn that my long national nightmare
⏹️ ▶️ John of laggy window dragging will be gone in 14.2 so I can concentrate all my energy on our
⏹️ ▶️ John network changed. Which continues to plague people. just today I retweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody who couldn’t update an extension of Visual Studio. Why? Because Visual Studio, was
⏹️ ▶️ John it Visual Studio Code? It just said, yeah, VS Code. Visual Studio Code uses Chromium under the covers and they tried to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John involving extensions and it just failed and I looked in the output and then, lo and behold, why did it fail?
⏹️ ▶️ John Their network changed over and over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I’m seeing it semi-frequently now and it’s one of those things, I forget the term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it, but once you’re aware of it, you know, you see it all the time all of a sudden.
⏹️ ▶️ John when stuff doesn’t work like I don’t use Chrome. Yes, you do. You don’t know you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromium, but it’s under everything now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yeah, I’m seeing this way more frequently recently, and I am not loving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So thanks, John. I appreciate.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco make it happen. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still never seen it. I don’t really use Chrome based things much at all. Like as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen it. I mean, you’re using Slack. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromium based, isn’t it? Is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe so. I thought so. And I might have that wrong, but I sure
⏹️ ▶️ John most people are sending error messages from discord Slack may just be eating those errors discord will throw up a dialogue to let you know what it is
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know if like like gmail I said before if if the app you’re using is good about
⏹️ ▶️ John retrying You it just might be hidden from you that it’s making http requests They’re failing and it just
⏹️ ▶️ John retries them and because it’s all happening behind the scenes You never notice it but especially if there’s no place you can look at an error
⏹️ ▶️ John console or something. You don’t know that it’s happening But honestly, that’s preferable. If VS
⏹️ ▶️ John Code was better about retrying, this person wouldn’t have had that problem, but you know.
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A lab was attended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about, uh, we’re going to do another tease apparently for the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why was it and how was it possible for me to destroy two of Marco’s vehicles in the span of 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes? Uh, or maybe 90 minutes, whatever it was. Well, that’s because Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I were both in Manhattan, uh, basically a week ago. Uh, and we were there for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro Developer Lab. And I would like to at this time tell you everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco and I are allowed to tell you about the Vision Pro Labs. So buckle up. Wait, you just did. I just did. Shoot, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I just did. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all we got. We attended a lab. That is all we are allowed to say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you were telling me before that, like, you can’t even characterize it. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. So you’re just like, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell you anything about the lab. Well, can you just tell me if it was good or bad? That would be characterizing it. And you’re not allowed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that either. So a lab was attended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Yep. A lab was attended. So there we go. Uh…
Location-sharing secret durations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to levy a brief complaint. Marco and I were trying to rendezvous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the hotel we were staying at in Manhattan. And Marco hit apparently 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walls of traffic all at once and did the thing that one would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect a good friend of yours to do. And what Marco did was he said, all right, rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having me update you or you requesting an update of my location every five minutes, how about I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share my location with you? So far, so good. How is it five or 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or however many years in find my friends when somebody shares their location with you, unless I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey missed it, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t, when somebody shares their location with you, it says Marco is sharing his location, would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you like to share yours so far so good, but the thing is, how long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Marco sharing his location for, because if he was sharing his location for, I think the option is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rest of the day, or maybe it’s like an hour,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one hour rest of day and forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? So, what if Marco was sharing his location just for an hour, which was enough time in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theory for him to reach our mutual meeting point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spoiler alert, I did do it just for an hour, thinking it would be enough time, and it definitely was not enough time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to Long Island traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. But here it is, so you share for an hour, and then Captain Thirsty over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here is like, yes, forever, yes! And then I look like a dork, because you were trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do what you thought was necessary, nothing wrong with that. And here I am like, sure, stalk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me forever, why not? And I just wish that Apple would make it clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the other person has done. Is this like a privacy thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t wrap my arms around? They have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so careful with this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I do, yeah, I get that. If you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about all the possible ways that this could potentially be abused by creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people or jerks. Like they are just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful with this. And even if they go a little bit too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful on some of these features that are like about location sharing, I would say that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Be extra careful. Be overly cautious in this. Because even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metadata being shared can be abused by someone somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can’t think right off the top of my head of why it might be bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell someone how long you have shared location for, but I think it’s best in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as careful as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And so, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe you wanna avoid the situation. Maybe you’re being pressured to share location with somebody through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of work obligation or some kind of societal norm or just some other kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pressure. And you’re like, all right, fine, I’ll share location. And then you’re like, yeah, but for one hour. And then maybe you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get out of that situation in some other way in the meantime, and then you’re not sharing location with them forever. and they don’t know that until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re long gone or whatever. Like, there’s always, you gotta figure like, how could this be abused?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, chances are, every little detail of any kind of location-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything on iOS has been considered to death by people inside of Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought to death, pushed to death, experimented with to death, and unfortunately, you know, hacked to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco death by anybody on the outside who’s trying to get around it. So, you know, they’re being cautious here probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for very good reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, totally. I totally agree. I just wish it was clearer to me, and maybe this is my own failing, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the threat model is that, you know, what specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do they think they’re preventing? Because I agree with you, like be precious about it. And I don’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that flippantly, like be precious about it and don’t leave an avenue for this to be abused. I just wish I understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because this doesn’t happen to me often, but on the occasions it does happen, I always feel so guilty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t know how to reciprocate appropriately. Like, you know, what if you shared your location forever? And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, screw you one hour, eat it, you know, like, it’s not a big deal. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish it was more clear. And and that’s why when I send these, what I always do is I say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m about to send you my location for the blank, you know, I’m about to send you my location for the next hour, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m about to send you my location, you know, forever, whatever the case may be. And it shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It should be clear what the
⏹️ ▶️ John is. You’re overthinking this, but you just pointed out why they would want to keep it private because if it’s if it’s in one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is now where neither one of you knows, then you don’t have to worry about you can just make
⏹️ ▶️ John your own decision. Right? I know you what you want is I want to reciprocate I want to know so I can so I can make
⏹️ ▶️ John a decision based on what they did. But the flip side of that is you are free to make your own decision without declaring
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the other person. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean? Yeah, just like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, if he’s shared it forever, and you share one hour, he might be insulted. But knowing that both of you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s not automatically sent to each other, you can make your decision in isolation if that’s what you want to do. What
⏹️ ▶️ John your complaint is, I can’t make my decision not in isolation, but of course you can, because you can just ask Marco, how long did you share it for?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the same way, when you don’t want to make it in isolation on your end, you send the information. I just shared it with you for an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour. So the current system probably is a better bet than the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Although you could have used the check-in feature if you could figure out how to do that, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s true. I didn’t think about that. That would have been a really good time for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John even know how to activate that. I see it advertised occasionally. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to do that. So, if memory serves, what you got to do is, I’m going to try right now, you go into messages, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to send a message, you hit the little plus, and then I believe if you scroll down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, there’s, it’s the, the icon is a yellow checkbox and it says check in. And then I think there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a prompt or a wizard or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all it is. It’s like, is that one way or two way? I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how that works, but. I think it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John way. I think in this case. You should, should try it. I think it’s more for like when you’re on your way home so they know, or if you’re, if a kid is going somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to know whether they got there or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, but. It is. been a perfectly valid use. And now I kind of regret that we didn’t think to use it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would have been a perfectly valid use case here. But yeah, that’s my complaint for the day. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please and thank you.
Beeper Mini and iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news a day or two ago, just a couple of days ago, Beeper Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I had heard of Beeper before, and I think it’s been under several names, several different flavors of Beeper, Beeper this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beeper that. But Beeper Mini brings iMessage to Android. Yeah, sure it does. We’ve heard this many times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, and many times before we’ve seen what that means is, there’s some VM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s running Mac OS that you’re supposed to send your credentials to, and then it sits in messages,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it forwards all your stuff back and forth, and so on and so forth. And it’s gross. It’s gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a huge threat to your security. It’s just everything about it top to bottom is disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Except that’s not what this is doing. What this is doing is apparently it is legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to Apple servers and having you present your, your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number as, as an iPhone. And it will allow you to register for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest to gosh, first party I messages. and it will communicate with Apple’s, you know, APMS servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly. There is a proof of concept written in Python by a high schooler that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still on GitHub, last I looked. And I have not played with the code myself, but a friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quinn Nelson over at Snazzy Labs, he put together a really, really great, like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute video on it, wherein he has a Linux laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not an Apple laptop running Linux. It’s an honest to goodness, like System 70, System 76, I forgot what it was called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait people actually have and use Linux laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, apparently youtubers do but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a laptop with Linux on it. I don’t know a system 76 specifically dedicated to Linux laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s correct. Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that to be correct. I mean, otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing would work on it, right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Wi-Fi no sound great. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly exactly Well done. Well done gentlemen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but anyway, I’m right and I know Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah Has it has it though? But anyway, so yeah, so this legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to work I don’t know what specifically Apple could do in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to shut this all down but I am stunned that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has lasted more than five minutes and I do think as in as a engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercise this is extremely cool I don’t know how I feel about it more broadly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that but as an engineering exercise I cannot believe anyone was able to do this much less a high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey schooler operating on his own Incredibly cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it because I think Quinn had the exact right analogy in his video. It’s like Hackintoshes. It’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly like that, right? Because, so here’s the thing. If Apple’s running the iMessage service, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem for Apple is, how do I know that the thing using the iMessage service isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John a real Apple device? An iPhone, a Mac, whatever, right? That’s actually a pretty hard
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. And Hackintoshes have the same problem. You saw
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to run Mac OS on this computer. MacOS is like, wait a second, how do I know this computer is a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and not like a PC that you’re tricking me? It’s really difficult to do that. There’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John so much you can do with the hardware to make it appear authentic. And
⏹️ ▶️ John most of that stuff, it’s kind of like DRM, right? The information about the authenticity of the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John has to be sent to Apple. Like you have to leave the machine and go
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple and say, I am legitimate. And there’s stuff you can do with secure enclaves and things like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, what Apple has done and the reason Hackintosh exists is they do lots of stuff with like, oh, you need a legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ John serial number, I need to be able to look it up on my Apple database and that’s a lot of how Hackintosh
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff works and that’s how this works, right? So high school student doing it, that’s really cool and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s the same as the people who figure out how to get Mac OS on PC hardware, you just have to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever Apple things that you are a legitimate piece of hardware that you’re supposed to be installing on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the push notification servers, apparently can be convinced not with not too much
⏹️ ▶️ John difficulty, right? You just need to know, have some fake, essentially fake credentials that you can send.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, the thing Quinn says in the video is, well, why doesn’t Apple just block
⏹️ ▶️ John the fake credentials? Because in the GitHub repo, there’s one set of fake credentials that like makes it masquerade as a serial number
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a legitimate phone number, why they just block that problem solved, right? But then you just get
⏹️ ▶️ John another one, right? As he was showing a hackintosh tool where you can essentially randomly generate like
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac serial numbers for Hackintoshes until you find one that’s a real one because Apple has services that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, you know, look up your serial number with or whatever, right? It’s actually kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to deal with this. There are possible solutions to get increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John draconian involving again, the secure enclave and cryptographically secure stuff, but like, like all security stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other side of the security coin is convenience. And the more difficult Apple makes
⏹️ ▶️ John this for Hackintosh people and for this messaging things, the more spillover there
⏹️ ▶️ John is and possible inconvenience for their legitimate customers. And practically speaking, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s probably not gonna be a ton of these customers. What’s Apple’s best tool to get rid of this? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John technical, it’s always legal. Lots of things may be technically possible, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has a lot of lawyers and lots of things that you can technically do, Apple may not want you to do and can stop you from
⏹️ ▶️ John doing legally. We’ll see if it raises to that level of concern. There are also technical things they can do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John why do the cat and mouse game with tech? Why does Apple do the cat and mouse game with Hackintosh? They do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in a kind of a half-hearted way, like Hackintosh is still possible. They’re harder than they used to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s not that many people making Hackintoshes. Apple’s not super duper concerned. Those people probably weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy Macs anyway. So they do do things to thwart Hackintoshes year after year after year,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not dedicating billions of dollars to it, right? It’s not that important. We’ll see what happens with
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I feel like with this thing, like I have to imagine that when you
⏹️ ▶️ John use any legitimate Apple product, there’s some screen that none of us reads that says, you agree that you only use official
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple devices to talk to, let’s say our iMessage servers. You know what I mean? That’s gotta be in there somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re probably already in violation of some agreement where like, because you know, they’re using Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. They’re sending messages. The beeper also has servers by the way, because the beeper server is like when your phone is off, the beeper servers
⏹️ ▶️ John are listening to Apple servers. But anyway, bottom line is they’re using Apple servers. They’re sending data
⏹️ ▶️ John to them, they’re receiving data from them. That’s not free, right? That’s a service that Apple provides to
⏹️ ▶️ John augment its products and almost guaranteed there’s something in some agreement that you have to agree to
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get an Apple ID, for instance, or do anything that says, hey, you’re only allowed to use Apple servers
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a legitimate Apple device or whatever. So this is way better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the thing where you run a Mac mini at a data center and sign into it and give strangers access to all your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it may survive a lot longer than those, especially if it stays kind of like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obscure that only tech nerds know about it and not many people use this app, but considering Bieber is charging two dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John a month for this service and they probably want to grow their business, I’m not sure how obscure it’s going to stay. So I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting, but I would not bet a lot of money that it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to take over the world and continue to be a real thing that people rely on in a year or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like whenever you’re dealing with any kind of hack like this, you know, I’d say the same thing about Hackintosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you said, you know, it’s a good example. It’s a fun thing to experiment with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I wouldn’t buy new hardware for it that you wouldn’t otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy. I wouldn’t make long-term plans about, you know, assumptions that it will work in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I sure as heck wouldn’t build a business on it. That’s for sure. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a wonderful technical feat that people figure out ways around this stuff. That’s great and I kind of love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole hacker mindset that makes people want to do this kind of thing. That’s great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what makes it even riskier than a Hackintosh is a Hackintosh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might work just fine for you on your desk indefinitely as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you don’t do software updates that might break it or whatever. But iMessage is a service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That can break at any time. Yeah, you know, John, which I was right, like it would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a pain in the butt for Apple to kind of play cat and mouse and try to intentionally keep breaking this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the reality is like when you’re talking to a service that is that is out of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control. Apple can do a lot of things on its end that can break you at any time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, unlike a hackintosh, like, you know, you can control when your hackintosh turn you know, does it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer updates, you can turn off auto update and you can be careful of what you do and everything. And maybe you can get it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run for a while. But with this, you don’t control when your thing keeps running or breaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is out of your hands. So I would strongly recommend if you want to experiment with this, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool, have fun with it. But like, I wouldn’t, for instance, you know, buy dedicated hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this that you can’t afford to lose or the or make any assumptions that you can’t afford to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have broken for you unexpectedly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, the reward is you get to use iMessage, which is probably not the best of all
⏹️ ▶️ John the cross platform messaging services. So, uh, yeah, I mean, I guess if you’re in high school and all your friends have iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John and you feel left out by all means installed on your Android phone and run it for, it probably lasts through junior year or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but, but you know, for regular people, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I’m not sure there’s an appetite that everyone’s like, Oh, finally I can get iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Android phone. Like people have Android phones who are not caught up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the status of blue bubbles, which I I have to imagine is most people with Android phones because a lot of people have Android phones
⏹️ ▶️ John are already using whatever the most popular cross platform messaging app is in their
⏹️ ▶️ John WhatsApp line, WeChat, whatever, all that stuff. And from my own kids, I can see my own kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like they’re dedicated to one messaging platform. They use like, for some people, they have to use WhatsApp. For some
⏹️ ▶️ John people, I don’t know if they use line or they use all sorts of things. They use iMessage for some things. Some people it’s SMS
⏹️ ▶️ John through iMessage, green bubbles, blue bubbles, WhatsApp. It’s not like anyone lives a life
⏹️ ▶️ John of such purity that you can somehow choose a single messaging service and only use that, unless you’re one of those people who
⏹️ ▶️ John refuses to talk to anyone, unless they’re using Signal or whatever, but that’s not the way most people
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Some people in your life, some things that you have to do, you have to use messaging app, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, someday maybe your kids will be in school and you’ll have to go to a Facebook page. It happens to everybody.
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Apple’s Blue Ocean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So a couple of months ago now, uh, John did something unheard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of. You blocked for like the third time this year or something like that. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make of this. Are you feeling okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m doing average last year. I did. Let’s see four months
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the year. I blogged some of them this year. I’ll end up doing four again. Um, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s average. I promise at least one post a year
⏹️ ▶️ John on average across multiple years and I’m holding up that end of the bargain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. So let’s talk about this. What is Apple’s blue ocean?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is something I had it in mind for a while and I you know I’ve I kept thinking about writing this and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just too nebulous. So I tried to focus it The blue Asian ocean thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is something we’ve talked about on the show before I I it’s not a very long article so you can read it, but I summarized
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the article. Blue Ocean is a thing that I first heard about related to the Nintendo Wii.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m getting it already secondhand. I believe it was like a business book or some business paper
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, big thing in the business world that business people are now mad that everyone else is
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a more pop culture reading on it. But mine is the pop culture reading on it. And the reason it came up in the context of the Wii
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Wii was Nintendo’s console with had the big remote control thing that you wave around to play games. But the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Wii is that was the generation of console when all of the other console competitors were going high definition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of standard definition television, it was HDTV, and Nintendo did not,
⏹️ ▶️ John which seems like a terrible decision. Everyone else is going high def, every other console
⏹️ ▶️ John generation before it had been all about, you know, Nintendo’s 64, 64 is bigger than 32, we have more bits, we’ve got blast processing,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got 3D, like everything is about
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics, power, and technology. That’s how you sell game consoles, and the Nintendo says, we’re not even gonna do high definition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody else is doing it, but we’re not. That was their example of the blue ocean strategy because
⏹️ ▶️ John the red ocean is over there where all the sharks are just eating the fish and blood is filling the
⏹️ ▶️ John water. We’re trying to kill each other to get all these fish, right? That’s saying we gotta have better and better graphics,
⏹️ ▶️ John better and better technology, faster CPUs, faster GPUs, more memory, bigger hard drives,
⏹️ ▶️ John more, you know, more, more, more. That’s the red ocean of game consoles that existed for pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire history home game console, starting with the Atari. It was a red ocean based on competition
⏹️ ▶️ John over who can make the most powerful console that still is a reasonable price that people would buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue ocean was, while all those sharks are over there filling the water with blood and eating everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in sight, we’re gonna go way over here where there’s nobody. And believe me, there was nobody over in the let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey make a game console
⏹️ ▶️ John that standard definition with a weird remote control, TV remote control that you wave around. That was a blue
⏹️ ▶️ John ocean. Now, the Blue Ocean purists who say, that’s not what Blue Ocean is. Blue Ocean is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John about making new markets. And we did not make a new market. It was the game console market or whatever. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I meant when I say the pop culture definition of Blue Ocean is like, let’s go
⏹️ ▶️ John compete along an axis that our competitors aren’t interested in. Microsoft and Sony were not
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in making a standard definition game console that costs a lot less money that was the size of three DVD
⏹️ ▶️ John cases on top of each other that had a motion control. There was nobody over there. It was a blue ocean,
⏹️ ▶️ John no blood in the water, Nintendo’s all by itself. Now, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something that none of your competitors wanna do is really easy. Often they don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John do it because it’s a dumb idea. We turned out not to be a dumb idea. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the trick of the blue ocean strategy is to go to a place where your competitors are not and also
⏹️ ▶️ John have it be a good idea. So in the context of Apple, what I’ve been thinking about is what
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple’s blue ocean? because Apple has done a lot of blue ocean-y kind of moves. No, they haven’t made entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John new markets, so arguably they’ve come close with things like the iPhone and hey, maybe the Vision Pro, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’ve done a lot of things that their competitors were not interested in doing that ended
⏹️ ▶️ John up being successful. Like, you know, even something, making a candy-colored computer with
⏹️ ▶️ John no floppy drive. Their competitors were not interested in doing that. They had plenty of opportunity to do it. There’s no technical
⏹️ ▶️ John innovation in the iMac that anyone else couldn’t have done. You can make a PC with no legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John ports that’s all in one, that’s teal and shiny and plastic. In fact, everybody did do that after the iMac came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that was an example of Apple going where, you know, other people aren’t. And there’s other things they’ve done like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I think the examples I give in the article is making a smartphone without a physical keyboard. Other people
⏹️ ▶️ John actually had done that, they just did a crappy job of it. You know, the iPod, something that was probably technically
⏹️ ▶️ John possible for any company to do. It’s not like there was any special Apple sauce in there, especially since Apple at that point was not
⏹️ ▶️ John very good making tiny little consumer electronics like that. But Apple did do it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors were much larger and bulkier and competed in the long different axes. Anyway, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been thinking about this is one specific thing that I keep thinking that Apple could do that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John blue ocean II, that I think would work pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the window of time, this is not something around the article, but the window of time for them to do it is finite.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this article, you know, we’ll look back on this article at 2030 when and we have our 6G modems in our Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll say, oh, they didn’t age well. For any of these things, there’s a time limit based
⏹️ ▶️ John on the technology, and I’ll explain that in a second. So the thing I’m suggesting is that Apple starts
⏹️ ▶️ John selling products with removable batteries, which sounds ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey One of- Never
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. Arguably, one of Apple’s blue ocean moves was getting rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John replaceable batteries. Everybody had replaceable batteries in their cell phones, and in their laptop computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in both those cases, Apple said, you know what, we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna sell you a laptop, the battery’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sealed in, you can’t even remove it. And there was nothing stopping anybody else from doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a technological innovation where no one could figure out how to seal a battery inside a case, but Apple chose to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it and stuck to their guns. And that ended up being a good move. And a lot of PC laptops do that these
⏹️ ▶️ John days as well. Same thing with cell phones, you used to be able to take the batteries out of them, now you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why would they ever go back on that? What would be the point? Because the advantage of the sealed in battery
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about it when the PowerBook 17 came out, 17 inch came out, the first one to seal the batteries in,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think. Obvious advantages, it makes your devices smaller, more reliable, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can fit more battery inside of them, they’re lighter, like just, you know, up and down. Disadvantages have
⏹️ ▶️ John also always been obvious and pretty much everyone has decided, yeah, but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages,
⏹️ ▶️ John so don’t worry about it. And the disadvantages are, you know, the battery dies, it’s harder for you to replace,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to bring it in to get service, to get a new battery, You can’t take extra batteries with you and
⏹️ ▶️ John just swap them in. So we have all these battery packs that we connect with USB or MagSafe. All right. We’ve come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John all these solutions. No one thinks about this. No one thinks it’s a big problem. Right. But.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is a window of time with current battery technology where Apple could be
⏹️ ▶️ John out in a new part of the ocean where there are no competitors selling its products based on a feature that
⏹️ ▶️ John no one else has because it’s too hard to do well. And as Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Sirugi said, when it gets really hard, that’s where Apple excels, because it’s so hard that only Apple can do it. I don’t know if that’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if that’s the spirit, they should give it a try. What would the advantages be of removable batteries? We know the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John I just described, but the big advantage that is increasingly important to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with their environmental initiatives. Lots of electronic stuff gets thrown
⏹️ ▶️ John out because the battery is no longer good and it’s too annoying or expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John or both to replace. You can replace a battery in an iPhone. You can replace a battery in a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t really do it in AirPods, that’s a bummer. But like people don’t do it because like, oh, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem worth it because it has to take it in to get serviced and how much is it gonna cost? And Apple doesn’t let third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John do it because then you get like a thing that complains that it’s not legitimate batteries. You have to pay Apple’s prices and how much does it
⏹️ ▶️ John cost to replace a battery in an iPad? It costs how much? And people don’t do it and they just end up recycling
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? If you’re lucky, they recycle it. If you’re unlucky, they get thrown in a garbage somewhere or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make a device that lasts longer, as in has a longer useful life, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to swap out that battery. And that is related to battery technology because the rechargeable batteries we have now,
⏹️ ▶️ John they wear out in a not too long period of time. We have all had devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that we say, well, this would still be good as like a kid iPad or a phone that I would give to my youngest child or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the battery’s dead And it costs me $80 plus an annoying trip to somewhere plus a trip to get it back
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it replaced. So I’m not going to bother and I’ll just find something else right.
⏹️ ▶️ John At the high end, if we could sell you a iPhone that you say, like, my iPhone is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not slow. I got a top of the line one, but three years into using it all day, the battery is
⏹️ ▶️ John going and now I have to wear a battery case or bring a battery pack with me. And it’s just, you know, same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with the Apple watch. Well, that’s a harder sell because it’s not hard to get a remove battery to that. we’ll talk about that in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can make a device last longer, that’s better for the environment and people are more satisfied with their product. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a business model, like we talked about the key cap things that fits well
⏹️ ▶️ John with premium brands. You know, Nordstrom taking the exchange of your snow tires,
⏹️ ▶️ John buying something for an expensive luggage company or buying these stupid expensive chairs that we’re all sitting on that have like 12
⏹️ ▶️ John year warranties, like if anything breaks in those 12 years, you paid so much money for this chair,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry about it. We’ll fix it for free for 12 years, which is unheard of. That’s why the chairs cost so much money,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But people are satisfied with that. You’re selling a premium product. There should be a premium experience. I just heard the
⏹️ ▶️ John very Scottish CEO of Volvo on the decoder podcast doing an interview essentially saying
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re trying to sell rather than subscriptions to heated seats are services that make the ownership experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of a Volvo better. Like, hey, we’ll come and was like in Sweden or whatever. It’s mandatory that you
⏹️ ▶️ John change the snow tires in the winter. So since everybody has to do it, don’t worry. Nintendo knows that you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a Nintendo. I’m reading. Wow. Volvo knows that you have to switch the snow tires.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will for a price come to your house, swap your snow tires, take your summer tires, store them for you and bring them back
⏹️ ▶️ John later. That’s awesome. And you don’t have to worry about making an appointment to get them swapped. And can you get it in and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like, or figuring out what you like, Volvo will do it for you. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, for what it’s worth in the States, it started during COVID. And as far as I know, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing. They do something called, they were calling Volvo valet and they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come to your house, pick up your car, bring it to the service center, service it, bring the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car back and have you sign something and, you know, do whatever payment you need to do. And then they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take off and that’s that. So you have not really interacted or you’ve, you’ve never left your house. You’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interacted with somebody once or twice, I guess, for like five minutes each and and that’s it. And we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done it in a long time because the car only goes in once a year. And even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve brought it in the last couple of times, but we did do this once or maybe twice, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. And it was, to the best of my knowledge at the time anyway, completely free. Now, granted the servicing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of European cars is a fortune, but there was no obvious added cost and no line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item for the Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Valet service.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing. If you can provide additional value, you can charge more money, right? If you like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I mentioned this in the article, it’s like all these benefits of replaceable batteries, environmental benefits,
⏹️ ▶️ John the satisfaction with your product, to getting a longer life out of it, all those things go against
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the goals of Apple, which is their financial, you know, their financial
⏹️ ▶️ John goals, which is like, if you don’t buy a new iPhone, we don’t make money. So doesn’t Apple want you to keep buying
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones? That’s the balance that all these premium brands have to make. If Apple makes a
⏹️ ▶️ John product that lasts longer, that is better for the environment, they can charge more money
⏹️ ▶️ John for it if people are more satisfied with the product. And that’s that whole chasing the, you know, up the price ladder, which
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple loves to do. Those services that Volvo provides, whether they’re free or not, Volvo also wants to provide like insurance and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. Like, don’t worry, Volvo’s getting their money somehow. These services, like you said, the service itself at the dealership
⏹️ ▶️ John is expensive. The cars themselves have higher margins, right? There’s a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ John that money as long as you’re delivering the value. Now, the reason I can’t bring up replaceable batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John as a possibility is because like it’s hard to do. It’s hard to do that well. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are lots of obvious problems with raceable fires. What about waterproofing? What about starting fires? What about
⏹️ ▶️ John when the battery starts to swell? What about taking the battery out and the thing turns off? Like, you know, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have a battery inside it to keep it going while the battery is removed from it. What about how ugly it is? Everything gets bigger. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John gets heavier. Lint gets caught inside there. You have like tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. And that’s why this is why this is a possibility for Apple to do. If they can
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to do replaceable batteries well and deliver the benefits with fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John of the drawbacks, they will be the only one out there doing that and it will be harder for people to follow them. A lot of the innovations that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has done have been quickly followed by their competitors. Unlike Nintendo, who has had more durable benefits,
⏹️ ▶️ John like no one was chasing them to do standard F consoles. People didn’t really chase them into motion controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s really hard to chase them. Well, let’s just make a game as good as Legend of Zelda. that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to copy, right? I think a good replaceable battery would also be difficult to copy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is my suggestion to Apple. It’s not a prediction, as I said in the article, it’s not a prediction, it’s a suggestion,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a time limit on it, because if and when battery technology improves and batteries wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John out after three years is no longer a thing, you missed the window for this, right? This is only relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John now because so many products that we have end their life prematurely
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the battery going bad. And again, with the 2030 thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and the carbon impact of all their products or whatever, having products with a longer
⏹️ ▶️ John useful life is valuable. It’s valuable to Apple and it’s valuable to customers. And I feel like there has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a way for them to handshake on that value and come up with something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is beneficial to both. And then Apple can brag about it like crazy. Our computers last
⏹️ ▶️ John three years longer than average because we have these replaceable batteries. And you know, they can pick a product. Just do
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the phone, just do it on the iPad, just do it on the watch, just do it on the Mac. It’s like you need to do it across all of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but figure it out, find out a way to do it, make it a big selling point. Hell, they kind of sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of already have replaceable batteries for the headsets, so maybe they’re going in that direction because there is no battery in the thing, and the one battery
⏹️ ▶️ John you have is easily replaceable, so you could just swap it for another one. Of course, the whole thing turns off when you unplug it, so they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John to work on that. But yeah, that’s my thoughts about this. And I know it flies in the face
⏹️ ▶️ John of what everyone thinks, because especially in the Apple world, like when Apple does something, they get rid of the floppy drive, they get rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John optical drive. Like, you know, they make these moves and eventually Apple fans
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well, that’s just the way it has to be. We complained about it in the beginning, but it was obviously the right thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re never going backwards. Why would we ever go back to that? We’re not gonna re-add optical drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not gonna put floppy drives back on. But replaceable batteries, I think are different, especially because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John environmental handle, because the benefits of them never went away And batteries still
⏹️ ▶️ John have the problem where they wear out. And so many of our things are battery powered. And we use them so, so much
⏹️ ▶️ John that so many of us experience essentially battery death as the end of the life of our products.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can think of pretty much every one of my iPhones, like my only dissatisfaction with
⏹️ ▶️ John it when I got a new one and I’m on a two year cycle, was that the old phone’s battery is kind of wonky. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should have just got the battery replaced instead of getting a new phone, but I’ve got a tech podcast. So I got to get a new phone every two years.
⏹️ ▶️ John But- Sorry. Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a hard life. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but yeah, that’s like, I feel like this is a common experience of batteries going bad. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is not just like some weird tech nerd thing, replaceable batteries, who cares? Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has experienced the pain of batteries going bad in a device that’s otherwise good. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John most people alive today remember what replaceable batteries and things were like, just because so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things still have replaceable batteries. Our phones don’t, but other things in our lives do have replaceable batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John replaceable batteries are good, Apple could make a really good version of replaceable batteries, give it a stupid branded name that we
⏹️ ▶️ John would make fun of, but make it really, really cool, and I’m here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you, you know, obviously one of the big, one of the big, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco naysay arguments against something like this, is even, assuming even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple could do a really good job designing, like, a battery door, a battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco module, you know, whatever it would be, that would, you know, make this easier and better, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively give replaceable batteries. Even if they could do a good job of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that the cynical take here that’s most obvious is they make a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from sales of new devices that maybe wouldn’t have been sales of new devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, no, I covered
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but- Of course, of course that’s against our financial interest, but it’s the same thing with everybody who sells anything that lasts longer, like our stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John chairs that we’re sitting on. You figure out how to make the math work, how much do I have to charge for this stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John chair to provide a 12 year warranty, right? To make the math work out. And the only way you can charge
⏹️ ▶️ John more is to deliver additional value. So you have to put something in the product that people are willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay more for, and then you charge more for it, and it all works out. Like the expensive luggage that if anything
⏹️ ▶️ John breaks on it, they’ll replace the zipper for 50 years or whatever. Like, it’s not easy, but it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that lots of products do, including current Apple products, I would argue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, one argument against, you know, having any kind of replaceable battery thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest arguments that was given throughout the history of this transition of going to permanent batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically we’re able to make the product better this way in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better in ways people will care about and therefore buy more. So for instance, one kind of argument would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically go something like, well, if we made this laptop have a replaceable battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it would be a little bit bigger and a little bit thicker, and therefore nobody would want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that is probably true at some point to some
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it would be bigger and thicker, but the nobody would want it is difficult because they did just make the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and thicker and nobody cared. Like that’s the amount we’re talking about, a few millimeters. Like your laptop that you have now
⏹️ ▶️ John is thicker than they were back when Johnny Ive had designed the case. Nobody cares.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s important for Apple to not assume that whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lesson they think they might have learned 10 years ago would still apply today or in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. Because what happens is over time, people’s priorities change, device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tech and consumer product fashion changes. And so as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we go forward in time, I think more and more people are getting environmentally conscious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco More and more people are kind of having a backlash against the most extreme consumerism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rampant waste.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and especially people who don’t have tech podcasts, who aren’t tech enthusiasts, they don’t wanna buy a new phone every three years
⏹️ ▶️ John because the battery ran bad. They’re happy with their phone as it is, they don’t want the hassle of replacing it, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna pay for it to replace, and they don’t wanna buy a new phone. They just want their battery to be like it used to. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in getting a new phone constantly. And that’s from the tech enthusiasts, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I’m gonna buy a new device anyway, what do I care? But regular people aren’t like that. If you’re not into
⏹️ ▶️ John tech, you just want a phone that works, and if it continues to work, like it’s less disruption of your
⏹️ ▶️ John life to just keep using your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, like the hard part is like, how do you get Apple to be willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a risk like that when it would most likely result in fewer unit sales
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now that’s, they have to figure out like, cause obviously the value delivered by removable batteries is not equal
⏹️ ▶️ John across their product line. They had to figure out where is it the most valuable, right? It’s probably not the most valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John in the watch maybe, because it’s so tiny, who’d want to even mess with that little tiny battery or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I’ll tell you what though, the watch is where you need it pretty.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I know that’s the problem with current battery technology. It’s where you need it the most, but also nobody wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fiddling with like, can you imagine trying to make a replaceable battery in the watch? That is probably the hardest
⏹️ ▶️ John problem and you’d lose them. Like the kids would swallow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Right, and see also AirPods too. Like I would say the watch and AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are probably where this is needed the most because they have the smallest batteries that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last the shortest time before it becomes hard to use the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we talked about when the AirPods first came out, the idea of having the stems be screw on and unscrewable and
⏹️ ▶️ John have that essentially be the battery part of it, but that’s not how they’ve, I think in the new AirPods, the battery isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even in the stem anymore, so it doesn’t even matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are definitely some legal or regulatory challenges here too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for the batteries, if they are removable, if they are consumer replaceable, what you just said, a kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might swallow it, They have to think about that. Like there are certain regulations.
⏹️ ▶️ John AirTags are the example, because they use standard button batteries. But they’re not like the watch, because the AirTag batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John last a long time, unlike the watch. But I mean, that’s the reason they did replace all the batteries on the AirTags, is like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s untenable to make a product that price was sealed in batteries. And it would be wasteful, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So most of the mass of that product is the battery. And it’s a standard battery. They didn’t even make their
⏹️ ▶️ John own. They didn’t even come with a great solution. I don’t even particularly like how they do the battery on the AirTag. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to twist that thing and never feels quite right to me, but they did it. So, I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one end of the spectrum. I’m thinking something, you know, for the more expensive products. But I don’t know where to deliver the
⏹️ ▶️ John most value. Obviously, people have their individual needs. Like, I wish I had this on my phone or I wish it had
⏹️ ▶️ John on my laptop. iPad would be really weird. I talked about this in the article. Like, if you make the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad replaceable, the structural integrity of the product disappears. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you take a battery out of an iPad, It’s like, okay, so now it’s just like a two millimeter thick screen
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. There are hard problems here for sure. But I, you know, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not my son, I’m asking Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to rise to the challenge. And I would be excited by how they would brand it. Like if they came
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a good solution and gave it some, you know, dorky name and some weird kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like MagSafe, you know, not that, you know, connecting things with magnets was an amazing innovation, but they branded, it works really
⏹️ ▶️ John well. loved it so much that when they took it away we complained until they brought it back. And as you said, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an ebb and flow to technology market and that’s, that’s the,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the beauty of the strategy. Everyone else is like, well, sealed-in batteries are it. We’re never going back to the other way. And Apple could be like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? Let’s not close the door on that. Let’s look, you know, until and unless we get solid state
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries last for years and don’t die after three years. This is the time for us to potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John Find a little section of blue ocean where nobody else is even trying this and see if it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. And you know, if it’s not a good idea, like try it on a low profile product and retreat. They did it
⏹️ ▶️ John with touch bar, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear what you’re saying. And my first knee jerk reaction is no freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way because I just, I can’t fathom a way to do this that isn’t trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, I know that that’s like the whole point, right? You know, is that Apple waves its magic wand over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this problem and suddenly it’s all…
⏹️ ▶️ John do you feel about the AirTags though, speaking of the way to do it that’s not trash, because I think it’s kind of trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I actually think the AirTag approach is fine. Like it’s not terribly Apple-y, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John does it feel, how many of those batteries have you replaced? Does it feel good to replace them? I can never tell if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s like… They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last about a year, I would say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I can never tell if I’ve got the new battery in securely, because you have to press in and like twist and…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, I recently had to like restore an AirTag to like it’s unpaired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco status, so I can pair it to a different account. Have you ever had to do that? You know what the process is? Is there a pinhole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere? No, you basically just pop the battery cover on and off five times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a row. So you basically boot it up, you know, five times in a row, and then it plays a different sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect. And then you can pair it, then it shows up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on the phone. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if I could accomplish that. It’s so hard to twist that little thing, it’s so slippery. It’s like smooth metal or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, to answer your question, like I don’t think it’s a premium feel, but it doesn’t actively like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bother me or anything like that. I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I feel like that’s the bottom of the barrel. What I’m envisioning is the premium experience, like not magnets,
⏹️ ▶️ John but imagine the battery equivalent of MagSafe. I mean, the best comparison is probably Power Tools.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, they all have some standardized crappy battery that they have for
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Dewalt Power Tool, your Makita Power, they all sell their own bespoke. You can only buy this type
⏹️ ▶️ John of battery because it fits into these. That’s like the Fisher Price kind of like big, tough toy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine that but an Apple techie version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, again, I, I think I’m struggling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting past the vision of how, how does this, what does this look like? And something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where there is no extra space anywhere. But let’s assume, let’s assume it’s possible to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it work, even though I’m very skeptical about that. The thing that the, the trump card that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have, I really got to stop saying that, but anyway, the, the ace in the hole that you have. have. He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ruined so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like red hats. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still sore about the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I am still sore about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hats. Still sore. But nevertheless, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ace in the hole that you have though is that Apple really cares about the Earth’s blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oceans. See what I did there? And I really think that the environmental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact is the way in which this starts to make a lot more sense. And everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else I can think of, I’m not sure I’m with you on this, John, but the environmental side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it. And yes, I actually, that’s not fair. I do agree with you that if they could make it work, you know, if we could wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our magic wand and make it work and make it work nicely, that is a competitive advantage. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something that would bring people to the, to their products and their platforms. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just find that hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John believe. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they could sell Apple branded batteries and prevent third parties from selling.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t you? Got a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of Apple synergies in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re right though Casey, the climate angle is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at Apple as a company, what’s important to them, and number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one seems to be, well, between money and making good products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re really good at making money. And they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they have to choose between being stingy to make more money or giving away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little too much, they’re stingy to make more money every time. They always choose very consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that point. And so it’s hard for us to look at something like this and say, how could they possibly ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a choice that would result in possible lower sales? But I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environmental initiative is one of those areas that actually is powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that it might actually push them to sway in that direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. And you know, they’re not going to sway in that direction all the time, of course, they’re a big company, they’re really good at making a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that is one area that they also care very much about, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like up to the highest levels of the company. And therefore, like, you know, if you’re going to get through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook’s spreadsheets to make him make less profit, what can do that? Health and environmental stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I bet environmental stuff, though, I don’t think you have to go through his spreadsheets, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they believe that I think they’re right, that environmental stuff is good for the spreadsheets
⏹️ ▶️ John in the long run. And I would make the same argument about this is like, look, this is not we’re not doing this as a charity
⏹️ ▶️ John project. Even though in the short term, you’re going to see like you’re going to take some losses, and there’s going to be R&D and
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth. The whole idea is that you’re going to be out there in the blue ocean in the same way that the Wii was the best selling console
⏹️ ▶️ John in that generation. It was standard definition, it had a remote control on it. The idea is you’re going to make more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the whole point of the blue ocean. There are no competitors, you’re the only one out there. No one else thought this was even an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John worth entertaining. So of course, when you come out with a thing, everyone’s laughing at you. It’s like, what a dumb idea. And then it sells a whole jillion of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Again, you got to pick the right one. It’s easy to do something none of your competitors are doing and flop on your
⏹️ ▶️ John face. But I’m what I’m saying is, I think this is potentially one of the right ones. So if you’re going to sell it to him,
⏹️ ▶️ John cook, you don’t have to say, well, because you care about the environment so much, you should do this, but it’ll make you less money.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it will also make you more money. Like that’s, I think that’s part of the reason they do this environmental stuff. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, Apple converting itself to use all renewable energy and all of its data centers
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of its headquarters and all of its factories. That’s good for Apple financially
⏹️ ▶️ John in the long run because everyone’s going to eventually do that. And if you’re ahead and you’ve done it first, you reap the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John before everybody else. Setting aside all the PR angles, they’re going to be a more modern
⏹️ ▶️ John company that pays less money to run itself. That stupid donut that they made with it
⏹️ ▶️ John being like, how much does it cost to heat and cool that the way they did it, which cost them bazillions of dollars up front
⏹️ ▶️ John over the years, that’s going to make its money back because the old dumb buildings that are heated and cooled the dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John way cost so much more money per square foot or per person, right? That’s the pitch.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not you don’t go to Tim Cook and say, lose a little money to be good for the environment. You say, be good for
⏹️ ▶️ John the environment and also make more money. And I think that’s how most of these things were not that, you know, that all they care about
⏹️ ▶️ John is money. But it’s like it’s win win if you do it the right way. And the real kicker for the environmental stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things they can do with the environmental stuff, recycling, reusing renewable energy,
⏹️ ▶️ John carbon offsets, all that. In the end, as many people point out, and as Apple itself knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only real way to make a dent in this stuff is to do things like
⏹️ ▶️ John use less packaging, like, oh, we’re using recycled cardboard, no, just use less, whatever you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using, use less of it, make the box smaller, take boats and not planes,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so how do you make a dent in the big picture? Keep products for longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like don’t throw them away. Don’t recycle them. Don’t don’t don’t initiate that churn in the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John machinery of like now we have to reharvest the cobalt from those batteries and send it to a factory and restart
⏹️ ▶️ John like slow that down. Make the products last longer in the customer’s hands. That
⏹️ ▶️ John makes Apple less money. Then you got to figure out a way to charge more like that’s that’s the pitch. The pitch is like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re never gonna make a dent in the environment by just like using a better plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John for your cables Right, but having everyone keep their iPhones for one extra year would make such a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John impact on the environment that it would just like if they have some environmental goals that they want to get to,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only way you really move. And you don’t like making the boxes smaller and selling fewer of them for more
⏹️ ▶️ John money. Should do the Jerry Maguire code. Casey, do you know this one? Jerry Maguire,
⏹️ ▶️ John please. I can’t ask Marco. He doesn’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen it once a long time ago, but show me the money, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the part everyone remembers, but the part I remember from it is remember It’s a memo to the company and sends it
⏹️ ▶️ John to the whole company. It’s not a memo. He says it’s a mission statement. Do you remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ John no. Anyway, his pitch, he’s a sports agent, Marco. You’ve heard of this guy. Tom Cruise is playing the lead.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s a sports agent. And this company is like they get all the, they sign all the big name athletes and take a percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of their money or whatever. It’s sports agents, right? His memo, here’s the pitch in his memo. Fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John clients, less money. I may be misquoting it. But as you can imagine, that pitch does not
⏹️ ▶️ John go over well in HQ. What I’m saying to Tim Cook is, fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John products, but more money.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ 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, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John a meme too Accidental, check podcast so long.
Casey goes to New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a lot to talk about. We need to do a trip recap. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of what we’re talking about will have to do with the lab.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey But everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. About, I don’t know, it was like a month, month and a half ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized that there are Vision Pro Labs in New York, which we cannot talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, I think I can say, I’m very happy that Apple brought these to New York, so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to fly to California. I was dreading, like, when they announced the labs in, I believe, early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall, they announced the locations, or late summer, no, I think it was still in the summer, it was early.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They had labs in a few places around the world, but the closest places to the East Coast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were either California or, I think, London was not that much further.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was, there was nothing anywhere on the East Coast. So then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later in the fall added New York City labs. And I’m very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thankful for that because I would all fall, like, you know, I had this, all this stuff going on in my life with the move and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, the last thing I need is to have to fly to California this winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s for some few day span here and there to get, you know, an unknown amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of unknown experience with this unknown device. Like, you know, it was, that was a big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was dreading having to do that. and I was afraid of that eventuality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by having options in New York, that made everything dramatically easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those of us on the East Coast. So thank you, Apple, for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, indeed. And so we both registered for labs on the same day. This was, I think, Thursday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 30th or something like that, somewhere around then. And sure enough, we both got selected, so we got to go to the lab.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got there by doing the most un-American thing that I have done in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took a train. And did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know- Did you like watch soccer on the way? Like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have. Excuse me, sir, it’s football. Thank you very much. But no, I did not watch any soccer on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way. But did you know that trains are actually freaking great? Who knew? Why didn’t the Europeans say something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this? We should have been told. We should have been told. Well, their trains are great. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how great ours are. Well, it’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that because I dedicated an entire day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to traveling up and then an entire day to traveling back. And I got on the train here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Richmond and I got off the train in Penn station and then, you know, reverse the trip two days later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and I gotta tell you, it was pretty freaking great. Like when I travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via plane, I am a ball of stress. Charitably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the moment I leave the house, but realistically, from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning, I am just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walking stress ball. And when I took the train,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I left the house. I got a ride from a friend because Aaron was dropping the kids off at the school at the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I walked into the train station, waited a few minutes and I walked on the train. And then I walked around the train when I wanted to walk around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the train. I went to the cafe car when I wanted to go to the cafe car. And then eventually I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to New York. Now, admittedly, I did get there like 90 minutes late, but nevertheless, I got to New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was pretty freaking great. I know that, you know, a lot of the reason that we can’t have good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trains here is because we are not, say, compared to, you know, Great Britain, we are not a wee island nation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, in the areas where there are trains, they’re pretty great. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty awesome. So, Marco and I, we arrive in Manhattan. And Marco, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one obvious thing that you and I should do if we’re in Manhattan around dinner time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I think it’s only fair that I have to figure out, I have to try this amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life-changing, wonderful pizza that you are constantly raving about. It’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pizza in New York, and it changed your life. You already tried it. We already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, but did you know? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit frozen, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so non-members might not know that we did actually try Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pizza frozen on a member special shipped to us via GoldBelly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can listen to the member special at hp.com.com.com to hear how that went.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I will spoil it slightly and say I don’t think it went super well for a Casey’s Pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. And honestly, even myself and my family who had had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, Aaron’s had a Johnson bleaker many times. And, uh, I, and I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kids have had, once they had had mail order, uh, pizza that a friend had gifted me, which was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind. Um, but even we said, you know what, the ones that were sent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, for the member special were okay. Like they were still good in our opinion, but they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not stellar. And so, uh, what did we do? We went the two of of us to John Zbleker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I, I genuinely don’t know, although I have a theory. Uh, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Marco just put on the happy face when he was there or if he legitimately, legitimately thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, but I think it’s the latter. I think you, and I’m going to give you a chance in a second. I, I feel like you legitimately thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was good, but one way or another, we had, uh, John Zbleker. Uh, there was a brief question as to whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should get the larger of the two of the available sizes or the smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there really wasn’t. I thought there was a question and you immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You had a question, I had an answer. Exactly right. You always get the biggest pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Exactly right. No one ever says, I wish you ordered less pizza. Right. Always get the biggest pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s what we did. And it was a critical decision on Marco’s part because between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of us, we ate the entire pizza. And for me, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey promise I’m gonna give you a chance here. For me, it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect. I mean, it is the same restaurant it’s always been. I mean, I think they, strictly speaking, changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entrance a little bit or added an entrance, if you will, because we went in not the normal entrance that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m used to from literally a decade ago, but in spirit, it is effectively the same restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The pizza was the same, I remembered it. It was so, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And I am so glad that whatever you thought on the spectrum, I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad that at least you got to experience it the real way, the proper way. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Marco’s credit at the time, you know, of course I interrogated him about it and he very much put on the happy face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the point that it seemed legitimate to me that you genuinely enjoyed it. Now that I am no longer within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arm’s reach so I can’t punch you in the face if you say you don’t like it, what did you actually think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I liked it, but… Oh, come on! I think the environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the actual restaurant, you know, it’s this classic old East Village
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restaurant. It has like their stuff all over the walls. Like, it’s like, you know, there’s pictures of all the celebrities who have been there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone’s like carved their initials into the wooden benches and everything. So there’s like, there’s a lot of personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the actual restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Call that ambiance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And you know, when you see something like this, that’s always fun. No matter where you find that kind of personality, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of restaurant, that’s always fun when you find that one. When it isn’t just like, you know, some Chili’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has created this across America artificially. It’s not that. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real thing. You could tell this place had real history. I like that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Manhattan small restaurant, crammed full of tables. I like that it was crammed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so full of tables that our neighboring table to us was actually just like a foot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. So we could totally hear everything they were saying. They could totally hear everything we were saying. We actually talked to them for part of the meal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like that kind of thing, like where you’re kind of like forced to be communal with the people around you, because it’s just that crammed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. See also the Hofbrauhaus that we went to in Munich, I really enjoyed it for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey reason too. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so I really enjoyed the place and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the atmosphere, the experience of it. It is an experience. The pizza
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was good, but first of all, it is different from what most New York style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pizza tends to be these days. Mainly it is it does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the same crust style.
⏹️ ▶️ John We noticed that when it was frozen, that the crust was not like the usually expected to be flat, flat pizza. And then like a rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John crust. That’s sure. Some New York style.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah. And we could tell that it was flatter than that. But it’s more of a what they call like coal fired type of pizza
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s got the leopard spotting on the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like a it’s like a like a wood oven. Like, you know, that like the yeah, it’s that that kind of pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost like a large personal pizza, you know, And even their biggest pie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was by most pizza places in New York, I would call it a medium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s probably fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, what do you call it? Frank Pepe’s is also like this. If you’ve ever had their pizza, it is also
⏹️ ▶️ John not New York style. Obviously, it’s not New York style. It’s not New York pizza, but like it has the same crust profile.
⏹️ ▶️ John I realized that because we have a local instance of it and I get pizza from there occasionally. I’m like, you know what? This reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me of the, not the taste. It doesn’t taste like John’s Oblique, but the shape of the crust is like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but anyway, it was better than the frozen version by by a decent margin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah But you know it was it was not perfect. They did burn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the crust I noticed that Some people like that yeah, it’s a choice. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just I enjoyed the atmosphere This is a place that you go for the atmosphere and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the history first and the food second But that doesn’t that isn’t meant to be an insult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the food was good, but not super memorable But the atmosphere and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything around, the experience was very memorable. So that was really great. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appreciated that. It was very fun. I would totally go back. I even, we are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our current time-wasting TV show is Friends, and in some of the B-roll in Friends,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it showed the East Village, and it showed the old John’s Oblique or sign. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know where that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey now. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. But anyway, so it was a great experience. I would absolutely go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, but the pizza itself, it was good, but if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in New York, you can get good pizza every 15 feet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t better than everyone else’s pizza. It was just good New York pizza in a really great experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I appreciate that, and I think that that’s a fair characterization.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was good pizza in New York, but it wasn’t, as you pointed out, it wasn’t like stereotypical New York pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ John good thing. I feel like that’s a change in my lifetime is that there is more
⏹️ ▶️ John non New York pizza in New York City. You know what I mean? Like different kinds of pizza, more sort of the, like again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of, you know, coal fired, artisanal, leopard spotted bottom. That’s not traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John New York pizza, and there’s way more of that now than there used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true, yeah, I’ll give you that too. That, you know, if what you’re picturing is New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco York pizza, this is not the style of pizza you’re picturing. It’s close, but it’s not the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, you know, what you’re picturing by New York pizza, usually with those words is what slice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places serve. You know, the big puffy crust, the pretty large slice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, you know, like the very even cheese. Like, that’s what you’re picturing. That’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they serve there. But what they serve there is good. But, like for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would go there for the experience first. Not, you know, not that I have to have that particular pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s fair. But I’m glad, I’m genuinely glad that you got to go. I’m glad that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t associate John’s Oblique with the admittedly subpar frozen meal experience that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey costs so much money. So I’m glad that your opinion has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed for the better. But yeah, so after that, we went back and had a drink at the hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar, which was weird but fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we went to the lab, which we cannot speak of.
Casey goes to Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Marco had had the idea a few days, or I guess a week or two before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, we’re going to be so close. Why don’t we stay at the Beach House
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the lab? And so that’s what we did. And we took the subway up to Grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Central, which by the way, I had yet to experience express transit. And that was super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The last time I’d been in Manhattan, I needed to go and buy myself a MetroCard. Then you had to do the arithmetic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out whether or not you wanted like an unlimited card or a single fare or what have you. and I just swiped my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was awesome because now like now all of the entire New York subway system now has like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular phone Apple Pay kind of support and that express transit thing where you don’t even have to like activate it first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was so nice to have that because it took them a while to build it out to all the stations and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a very nice change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was really great. So then we went to Grand Central, then we got on Long Island Railroad and then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arrived at the car which I know this isn’t unique to an electric car, but it is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful. And Aaron’s car can do this. Uh, John’s cars can’t, my car can’t, cause you can’t do this with a stick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, uh, it is pretty delightful getting into a car that is already heated on a cold day. Like I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that in my car and John, you can’t either because they would roll away if you started them remotely because you leave them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in gear. But, um, it is pretty nice. And, uh, and that was quite delightful. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, where do you go if you find yourself on Long Island for, in my case, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first time in 20-ish years? Well, obviously, you go to Emilio’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But should be, for listeners, that’s John Syracuse’s favorite pizza place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We went to Emilio’s, which is John’s beloved pizza place from his youth. One of two. One of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two beloved pizza places. Yeah, okay, fair enough. And so we went to Emilio’s. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked to me as though this place had been freshened up sometime in the last 60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, but it did not appear to me that it had been meaningfully changed in the last
⏹️ ▶️ John It has been changed multiple times when I lived there and multiple times since I’ve gone. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, physically, the place has changed a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, either way, we went in and we got some slices, which is the thing you cannot do at John’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we got a Sicilian corner piece.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got, what else did we get? Shoot, we got some garlic knots, which I am very grumpy, by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way, Marco, I didn’t tell you this, very grumpy that I didn’t either steal those and take them home or at least have one in the morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you had gotten them out for me, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lyle Troxell Yeah, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for breakfast. Jim Collison And then I completely forgot about it, and I’m very grumpy that I didn’t have any more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s my fault, not yours. So we got garlic knots, we got the Sicilian slice. I should just pull up the picture. We got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was very enthusiastic about us trying. Lyle Troxell The
⏹️ ▶️ John crostini? Jim Collison Yeah, something like that. Lyle Troxell Crostini? Crostino. Jim Collison That’s it. Lyle Troxell She’s a big fan of the Crostino.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dangers of the Crostino by buying it. Jim Collison Yeah, it’s basically like fresh sliced tomato, fresh mozzarella dollop, and some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sweet red peppers.
⏹️ ▶️ John On a crust that’s supposed to be crispy, but you just put a lot of watery stuff on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it quickly fell apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And then a couple of slices of traditional triangular pizza. I don’t even remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what specifically it was, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was all— Like a margarita style, but with some basil in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I came to this the way Marco came to John’s, which isn’t a bad thing, but I I don’t have 20, 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years of nostalgia powering me in this experience. It was unquestionably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very good. The crispine or whatever, it was a little soggy, like you had said, you know, but both of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentlemen have said, it was, you know, trying a little too hard to keep away all of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moisture and it just, it lost the fight.
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially if you’re getting crispine, if you’re buying it by the slice, that’s been sitting there for a while. So you, what you really want,
⏹️ ▶️ John it needs to be fresh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey honestly, for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to get pulled off.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair. Yeah, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was very, very good. I mean, I’ll take John’s any day of the week and twice on Sunday, but you’re also fighting.
⏹️ ▶️ John would have said, speaking of the garlic knots, if you can get one of those Sicilian slices, don’t even eat it, just bring it home, wrap it in foil and
⏹️ ▶️ John then reheat it in your toaster oven the next day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to, I can just go there every day if I want to,
⏹️ ▶️ John great. It’s like lasagna in that way, I feel like it is better reheated at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, there’s not a lot like that, and I’d buy it. I would definitely buy that this is one of those things. It was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I would take John’s, but you’re fighting 20 years of nostalgia. no way or 30 years of nostalgia. There’s no way you’re going to beat that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was unquestionably extremely good. It was very fast. People, they were very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would absolutely without a shadow of a doubt go back. If I find myself going to Fire Island again anytime soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will probably ask Marco to facilitate either, you know, a takeout order or have us eat in at Emilio’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do have a restaurant there as well. Like so the restaurant, so the restaurant had a couple of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John dishes that I remember vaguely fondly from my my youth, but the restaurant is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the other thing, so there’s Emilio’s and there’s branch and Ellie’s and this is weird family history between them. But the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is the pizza, at least the Sicilian pizza is the same in both of them, which is super weird, but not that far
⏹️ ▶️ John from each other. And again, there’s, there’s a family relation or there’s some kind of falling out about ownership anyway. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the restaurants branch and Ellie’s has a sit down restaurant and Amelia’s has a stand restaurant and those restaurants are nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John like each other. And the branch and always restaurant I could mostly endorse for a straight up the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ John very bog standard, old style Italian restaurant. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Emilio’s has always wanted to be a little fancier. As you can probably tell from the decor, they just felt like they’d been a little bit fancier.
⏹️ ▶️ John They put some sun-dried tomatoes in your pasta in 1994. Ooh, big deal, sun-dried tomatoes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s what Emilio’s is.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s still some good stuff in that menu, I think, but it’s definitely different. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna sit down, if you wanna go to a sit-down Italian place, go to Branch & Alley’s across from my old high school and tried that. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John pizza is pretty much the same in both places. No crispino at a branch in Alice though. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably fell apart on the way there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, it was good. It was definitely good. I’m definitely glad we did it. And it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making me so hungry with all this pizza talk. You’re killing me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. You could have had some, as I said to
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of something that you would probably keep, freeze that Sicilian and ship it to me. Goldbelly, where are you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said to Tina, who I enlisted numerous times to try to convince your sorry pain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my butt to come and visit us. That’s not gonna happen. You’re the worst. But I said to her the following
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day, I think the day I got home, you know, John could have been having leftover Emilios right now. He could have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but he chose not to. And that’s on you, John. That’s on you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll be down there this summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so we go to bed that night. We actually, I don’t think we have time to talk about it now, but Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did something truly terrible and a good friend would not have done this. But I asked him to play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me Sonocera 100s and eventually Sonocera 300s. We don’t have time to belabor it right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but my God, I regret having listened to both of those because holy crap, they sound so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you are a terrible human for having indulged me in that. So thank you, but no thank you, sir. You’re welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, they’re really phenomenal speakers. I’m really stunned by them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know Sonos pretty well at this point. I’m still stunned. you
Casey goes to Fire Island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The next day we wake up and I was treated to a very beautiful sunrise, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was lovely. And Marco and I chatted and we had breakfast. I made myself some scrambled eggs and then Marco insisted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I put some boom boom sauce on it. And I got to tell you, it’s pretty tasty on the scrambled eggs.
⏹️ ▶️ John S1 You skipped out when you went to his house. He drove you across the sand, right? Wasn’t that fun? MW It
⏹️ ▶️ John was, but it was dark. S1 That’s even more fun to see the deer jumping out in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MW Exactly. But yeah, I mean, it was enjoyable and it was not as terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I expected. Actually, I should say, it is when, when you had talked to Marco about driving on the sand, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said this to you that night, what I envisioned was the sand of a summer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beach where it is flat and there’s like maybe one set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of tracks from like the quad or whatever vehicle is used to collect trash. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a summer beach, Marco. This is a winter beach. And the winter beach is nothing but ruts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as the eye can see. And that I did not expect. Again, once you think about it for even a flash,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s quite obvious that’s what’s going to happen. But I did not expect that. And it was funny watching Marco try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey navigate it. Or I shouldn’t say try to navigate it. That implies you’re bad at it. But you know, to say, oh, well, it would be a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easier over here. But there’s a small chance you get sucked into the ocean. So you probably don’t want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it was fun. And it was informative and interesting. But because it was so damn dark,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there wasn’t but so much I could really do other than bounce my way across the sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we get up the next morning. We decide we’re going to do a biking tour of the town.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Marco has his bike. And he said, hey, would you be cool with using Tiff’s bike? I was like, yeah, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s approximately the correct height. And I only need it for, what, 15 minutes? So yeah, absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco starts taking me on this tour. Everything is going well. And we are, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my recollection anyway, at basically the extreme end of the tour at approximately the time in which we would turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around. And Marco had gotten slightly ahead of me because I haven’t ridden a bike in years for more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three feet. So I was giving the bike a little bit extra chutzpah in order to catch up. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of a sudden I realized, well, that doesn’t feel right. This particular bike is belt-driven, but you could think of it as chain-driven.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the same basic principle. And it appears that somehow I have popped the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey belt off of the rear sprocket. So here it is, I have borrowed Tiff’s bike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve now broken her bike. And so we pull over, I mean, we were on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deck or a walking path or something like that. We pull over, we quickly ascertain that yes, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably repairable, but nevertheless it is broken. And I’m thinking to myself, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is undesirable because I do need to at some point get to a train station. And although I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought we had more than enough time to walk the bikes back to his house, We are, after all, at the extreme end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the journey, and that’s going to take a lot more time than I think either of us had allotted for this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extravaganza, but that’s okay. So Marco and I fiddle with the belt a little bit, and we were able to get it on enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to basically limp it home. That works out just fine. We get to Marco’s beach house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We make a, I was gonna say a half-hearted attempt. It was a full-hearted attempt, but over extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short amount of time to repair the bike, and we were not successful, unfortunately. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bike is, as per our discussion before we got on the show, still in a state of disrepair, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still my fault. And I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really bad about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be clear, I said it was no big deal. This bike is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old, belt-driven, priority coast bike. It’s probably a 10-minute fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t yet have the time to give it those 10 minutes, and it isn’t that pressing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but literally the belt just fell off the rear thing. We couldn’t put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on by fingers because I have to probably move the rear thing to let the belt get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back onto it, but that’s fine. It’ll take me like 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I’d still, I feel bad. I felt bad, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, I don’t talk about bikes much, but I tell you what, the priority bikes and bikes with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco belts in general are amazing. And I can strongly recommend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you have a reason you need a chain, And there are some instances where chains are still better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless you have a reason you need a chain, go belt next time you have to buy a bike. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. And I can strongly recommend priority bikes in general. We have a whole bunch of them and they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so apologies again, public apologies this time to Tiff for at least temporarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breaking her bicycle. That was certainly not my intention. I don’t think it was from negligence or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was just a crummy set of circumstances, but here we are and I do feel bad about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s fine. We make it back into Marco’s credit. He has been super chill from the moment it happened until this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very moment, super chill about the whole thing. It’s not his bike. It’s not his bike, right, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, about that. So ostensibly, it was not the point for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think a lot of the point for Marco, for us going back, all the way back from Manhattan to the beach, only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to return the following day, like 12 hours later, was for me to have an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to drive his truck on the beach. And so now it is daytime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have left behind a lightly broken bicycle, but nevertheless, we set off. Marco says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me in a very kind way, I think it’s for the best if I drive us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the house to the sand. I think I would have lasted five feet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I was in the driver’s seat before I said, nope, actually I’m good, you take care of this. Because the clearances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a freaking Rivian are not great driving around your wee little beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey town. It, it, it gave me all the shivers watching, watching you very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deftly, but nevertheless, it gave me all the shivers watching you navigate out to the beach,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless, we get to the beach, we switch drivers and next thing you know, I am heading to the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we, I guess there’s several different places that you can hop from like the kind of more inland
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area onto the beach. And Marco, please interrupt me when you’re ready. Um, and we had aimed for one and we didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t look closely at the tides or the calendar or anything like that. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we rose, we go crested over the hill to eventually go down the dune onto the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I was not looking more than like 10 feet in front of the car. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really understand what the issue was, but Mark says, hold on, hold on, and I look out and I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, there’s not much beach there as it turns out, because it was high tide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as much as I would have loved to, you know, bombing up the water and down on the beach and so on and so forth. That did not seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a good way to start my first beach driving experience. And so, you know, we reversed our way back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We went through the inland area a little bit further and then eventually we wound up on the beach proper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We get to the beach proper, the Rivian is laughing at everything, as am I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is laughing at everything that is being put in front of it. Everything is going swimmingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am behaving. I have not at this point started trying to do drifts or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. I haven’t tried to, you know, fishtail on purpose or anything that nature. At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this point, I’m just trying to get us up the beach because it is not challenging,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is certainly more challenging than one would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. You have a lot less control than you think you would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yeah. It’s, I guess the best analogy I can give is imagine if you were driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in quite deep snow, but thicker or perhaps heavier or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just more resistive anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than snow, like sandy, if you will, than snow typically is, right? And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that’s kind of what it was like. And once you end up in a rut, which, you know, that’s not a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing if you’re following somebody else’s tracks from earlier, but once you end up there, it takes a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprising amount of torque and energy and strength, if you will, to get the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of that rut. And you could arguably, I guess that’s actually the closest this car will be to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly self-driving is because you could have taken hands off the wheel and not even thought about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point. But anyway, so we’re like two-thirds of the way down the beach, which I don’t know, how many miles would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say that is, Marco? Like three or four or five? It’s about three. So, let’s call it two miles down the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m getting to the point that I’m trying to eyeball a place that’s maybe a little less ruddy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a little flatter so I can start doing a little bit of fishtailing and burning out and so on and so forth. I haven’t started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet, but I’m eyeballing it. And I noticed at a glance, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of dialogue, and I quickly read it aloud, and I don’t remember the exact words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it said, but it said something along the lines of…
⏹️ ▶️ John Her network changed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Her network changed, yeah, right, that’s it. How did you know? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says something along the lines of, you know, there is a fault, reduced power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, what? And so I said, well, I said to Marco, oh, I just read this, and then sure enough, somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the dash, it says, you know, reduced power, top speed, I think it was 19 miles an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ John It probably deactivated some of the cylinders.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that, yeah, that’s what happened. Yeah, it’s at least two of the eight cylinders, right? So, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, next thing I know, the car is now in, as I later found out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a friend who works at Rivian, actually, that’s colloquially referred to as turtle mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, I’m now in turtle mode and limited to 19 miles an hour. Now, on the sand, 19 miles an hour is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sufficient. Like, I didn’t really need to go, I wasn’t really going more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s about as fast as I go most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. So, so far, no big deal. However, at some point, we need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave the sand. And as I said, getting out of a rut requires a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of torque, which means a surprising amount of depth, if you will, to the accelerator pedal. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on. Marco doesn’t know what’s going on. I said to him at the time, well, later, I said to him, and I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again now publicly, I am so thankful that it was Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car and Marco in the passenger seat for this because had the roles been reversed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not have been chill like Marco was because Marco was extremely chill. You’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John shatter that windshield in a second with your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was extremely chill, extraordinarily chill, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, first of all, I’m already dying. And second of all, if this was my car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would have been better or worse. Like it, I, it was, it would have been terrible. So thankfully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco had the presence of mind and to, to just chill because I was probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough stress for both of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you just reboot in safe mode? Well, hold down the shift key on the steering wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you slow down? This is my story, John, and you’re ruining it because that’s exactly what we did as soon as we got off the sand.
⏹️ ▶️ John tech skills come in handy again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? So we pull off into the area where I guess, Marco, you had told me at the time that people will re-inflate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their tires, what have you. So we figured out how to reboot the thing. We reboot the thing. And at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am dying because this is Marco’s effectively brand new car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have now broken. Not to mention the f***ing bike that I just broke half an hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. So this is not a good morning for your guy. I am not happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something like I have had such a wonderful time with one of my best and oldest friends for the last 48 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is how I’m leaving him is, well Marco, enjoy your broken bike and broken car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, not only that- Also, you’re going to miss your train.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Right, that’s exactly what I was going to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only that, we have to go on what I would call an interstate, I think Marco would call it a highway, you weirdo Californians would call it a freeway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have to go on one of those things where you’re supposed to be doing like 65, 70 miles an hour. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was my biggest worry because like at the time, like it was saying like, you know, contact Rivian service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, okay, well, if my car can only ever go 20 miles an hour until I go get it serviced somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, first of all, you have to get it serviced off the beach. Like, the Rivian mobile service vans can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come onto the beach. They don’t have a permit. So, like, so they, I would have to keep getting off the beach anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it off the beach requires going over a couple of bridges and highways. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m like, okay, first I have to get through that at 20 miles an hour, you probably very much angering everybody around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me and possibly being a safety hazard and then second of all like well then where do I go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope I don’t have to bring this to a service center and it would be you know a logistical challenge to do that but then second of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had timed this all out for you to make this train at a train station that is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know 10 minutes away at 60 miles an hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know how are we gonna get there now in some kind of reasonably safe way at 20 miles an
⏹️ ▶️ John is why you needed me here. You’re planning trips without enough safety margin for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a flat tire or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and normally I do have that kind of margin. But this was a hyper-compressed trip. And so I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing my best to try to do everything and yet have enough time for almost nothing. I also should mention,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I skipped a step. As Marco and I are discussing how to proceed with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turtle mode, Marco Marco says to me very sternly, very politely, but very sternly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please don’t stop. Because if you stop, then there’s a very good likelihood we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to need a tow. And that ain’t going to happen anytime soon. Like you were saying a moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you’re not exactly going to find a tow truck that is going to want to, or perhaps even be capable of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting onto the beach. So that was advice that I took to heart quite seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and quite immediately and very much made sure that no matter what happened, I was always making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was really weird. I’m like, you know, whatever, whatever error code the car is throwing or whatever subsystem is failing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you stop, it might not let you start again. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, Mark, it was extremely chill. And I’m so very thankful that you were because I was into some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree, large, large degree remain a walking ball of stress about all this. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we do we do the reboot, we take off, and it’s clear immediately, things are still not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And I am really starting to want to crawl in a hole and die. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had made it, I don’t know, a few hundred feet, I don’t know, maybe a quarter mile at most.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like all of a sudden it felt like you had pressed the accelerator harder. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I knew that you didn’t. And about that same time that I was like, Oh, then you looked at me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you looked down or looked at me or whatever and said, Oh, Oh, Oh, we’re back. Next thing you know, we’re back and better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever, baby. And, uh, and we were able to make it to Babylon train station. no problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and life was good outside of the fact that I murdered Tiff’s bike and I almost murdered Marco’s brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new car. I had a very enjoyable trip and I’m really glad that I went but oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word that morning was something it was something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was not your day. It was not the Rivian’s day either. What was the problem with the car? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually called Rivian because when I did the reboot and when it showed that message,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a brief message appeared on screen that says something like, captured diagnostic. Yeah, I figured the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took a cyst diagnose, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I put it on the feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So, I figure, you know, okay, well, that probably means it’s being uploaded somewhere, maybe, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very connected car. So, I gave it like, you know, a few days, and I called them. Like, hey, by the way, this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened on this day at this time. It said it captured diagnostic. Can you tell me anything more about, like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually the problem was, so maybe I can, like, avoid something in the future? Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe did the motors overheat? Did the suspension overheat? Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, what could this have been?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s related to Casey, you know, like blaming himself and saying, well, Casey, but you were just
⏹️ ▶️ John driving the car, right? It’s an off-road vehicle and you were off-road and you were
⏹️ ▶️ John driving it in a straight line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and by the way, and like, in between, like, since this happened, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driven across the sand on the same route probably seven or eight times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s been fine. And I’m not like babying the car more than necessary. I’m doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the same that I always do it and it’s been 100% fine. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know what happened. But anyway, I called Rivian and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they basically said they can’t really look at it remotely, like they don’t have access. And like I have to bring it to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service center to figure out what actually happened. So I’m not going to do that. But if it happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, Obviously than I will because other than other than that one little weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happened when Casey was driving It’s been an amazing sand vehicle. It has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Ridiculously good off-roader for this context like and like the landward or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limber defender was a very very good off-road vehicle This for the sand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t speak to other off-road needs But for the sand the Rivians even better by by a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco margin that’s saying a lot because the defender was really good But the Rivian as a sand vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome. It is so good. It has so much power, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much traction. It is just a ridiculously good sand vehicle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I want to know what happened. Because if whatever happened was like, oh I made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the motors too, or Case made the motors too hot, it shows you the motor temperature on the off-road extra gauge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cluster thing, so I can watch that. I actually I have been watching that like since since then I’ve been watching to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like, all right, if I drive it kind of harder in the sand, you know, this temperature goes up to like, you know, 190 degrees. Is that too much?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I still I haven’t seen the error case happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, so I can’t tell you, you know, but who knows? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I knew what happened, but nothing bad has happened since then. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. And I wish I knew, I don’t know if maybe like a chunk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sand lodged itself somewhere, the other interesting piece, which probably was unrelated, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only other thing I saw or that we saw the auto hold feature where you come to a stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the car holds the brakes for you, you can take your foot off the brake, but you don’t move. Um, it, it explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that that was disabled, which made me wonder, a, it could be like the air suspension or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like Marco had said a minute ago, or perhaps is there something with the brakes that got upset and it just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to get this 900,000 pound vehicle going more than 20 miles an hour. I don’t know. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the brakes felt wrong to me when I was driving it, but I mean, I wasn’t really getting on the brakes much because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to freaking stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But generally on the sand, you don’t want to use a lot of braking because it makes you dig in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it seemed fine to me. I don’t know. As it turns out, it appears that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything worked out, you know, Tiff’s bike at least at the moment notwithstanding, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it was not my morning y’all, not my morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, thanks for visiting. Thanks for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosting. I’m very glad I did. But, but yeah, it was it was really lovely to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spend time in New York, which I hadn’t done in quite some time. It was lovely to spend time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Marco which I haven’t I mean, we hadn’t been together since 2019, which is criminal, I tell you, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was great to see the beach house. It was great to get the tour of the beach town.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m so glad that even though I went up on a Wednesday, came down on a Friday, and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have figured out a way to spend more time both with you and up north in general. Nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really glad it worked out, and I’m really glad that we were able to make it happen for both of us. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully, sometime in less than four freaking years, I can get back there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we ate a lot of pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we ate way too much pizza, and I have no regrets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, there is no such thing as too much pizza. system works.