605: Manage the Moisture Situation
17 Sep 2024More on the new iPhones, cases, MagSafe, hot tips for migration, and a special Neutral.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: It’s early 🥱
- Join us in raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s special: ATP Insider: Photo Workflows 🗣️
- Follow-up:
- John finally admits what Casey and Marco knew last week
- It’s MicroLED not Micro OLED. The offending party has been sacked.
- AirPods 4 listening time
- Case Updates
- iPhone 16 vs. iPhone 16 Pro (via Steve Stutz)
- New charging speeds
- iPhone 16 Pro demand is… not great?
- USB sync speeds
- A Public Service Announcement by Dave Mark
- Preview does support HDR
- FDA issues AirPods hearing aid certification
- Apple Watch bands
- Titanium watch bands (via Wolf)
- New link bracelet (via Josh Harris)
- Third-party cases and the iPhone 16 flash
- Apple Intelligence notification summary memes are surely coming
- Zach Kahn provides details on Apple Podcasts charts
- Huawei’s newspaper phone
- Apple starts activation locking components
- Ask ATP:
- Do our phones listen to us or not? (via Yoav Zoldan)
- How do we feel about MagSafe these days? (via Peter Wagoner)
- What are our credit card setups? (via Jonathan Cirillo)
- Post-show Neutral: A Rivian update
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Will Apple pull a Google?
Sponsored by:
- DeleteMe: DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
- Pioneers of AI: A new podcast exploring the opportunities and questions AI brings into our lives.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Good moornaaang! 🌅 🖼️
- Donate to St. Jude
- Special: Photo Workflows
- John’s apology tour
- AirPods 4 specs
- iPhone cases
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Why get Pro phones?
- iPhone details, migrations
- Sponsor: Pioneers of AI
- Misc. details
- Apple Intelligence beta flubs
- What “helps” in Apple Podcasts
- Huawei tri-fold phone
- Activation Lock on components
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code atp)
- #askatp: Advertisers listening to you
- #askatp: State of MagSafe
- #askatp: Credit cards
- Ending theme
- Neutral
Good moornaaang! 🌅
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is the morning, which is really weird to be talking to you. Like, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about my setup is different. Like, first of all, it’s light outside. That alone. MATT That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey very weird. CARRY Got the sun coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in through the windows. I got my coffee in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MATT Typically, you’re not wanting to caffeinate at 8pm when we normally record. CARRY
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There have been times when I have done that, but usually it would be something a little bit lighter, like green tea, like a little bit of caffeine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as much as coffee. But no, today, this is full-blown coffee, because this is a school morning, and I was up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early and now it’s still early. You’re getting full coffee me. I got like my just cup of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water instead of my flavored seltzer or weird hop water because I figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things for some reason just feel wrong at eight in the morning. So here we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a totally different mode here. This should be interesting. Now I did have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some trouble selecting the emoji for going live message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mastodon because so I put a coffee cup for myself and I wanted to have two other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drinks for the two of you and I could not find a glass of water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emoji. I figured the most appropriate thing would probably just be coffee, water, water,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there were no glasses of water. There was a glass of milk and I thought well maybe Casey would drink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco milk. What? Because you know you have like certain kind of like you know childlike favorites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the food and drink areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, okay, fair, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll allow it. But then I found the like fast food cup with the straw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and I’m like oh that’s Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is more on brand. I will absolutely endorse
⏹️ ▶️ John that. You should have waited for the new emoji update. I don’t think it’s coming in iOS 18
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’ve seen people talking about it. You know the one, you know the emoji I’m gonna talking about? No. There is a face with like bags
⏹️ ▶️ John under the eyes because they’re tired like the tired face that’s when that’s what you should have put for me that’s me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time and and may I just say Casey wrote that wonderful time zone post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I will have to link because the way you represented the time zones of the world with emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey was just masterful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I had to actually like because like you know some of the emoji I didn’t recognize I actually like and I was on I was riding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the boat last night like you know riding the ferry home from the beach and I was like trying to squint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see this and they didn’t have any reading glasses, so I took a screenshot, cropped it in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the built-in screenshot editor thing would zoom it in for me. I know there’s accessibility zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t gotten there yet, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, just give it time, my friend, just give it time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was looking at each one, and I’m like, oh my God, that’s genius. Oh, I figured that one out, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want me to explain, or would you rather that be an exercise for the listener?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’ll link to it, and they can see for themselves, or make it the chapter art.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Truth be told, I was slightly worried, Like I really felt like I wasn’t offending anyone with this, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never know, you never know. And people are very, have very strong feelings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about local foods or what their area is known for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought, if you’ll allow me to explain just one, I thought the bowl of rice for San Francisco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was supposed to be rice-a-roni, you know, the San Francisco treat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that might be stretching a little bit and I thought I would get some grumbling about that, but either it was so oblique that nobody caught
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or nobody minded. So, I’m happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see. I thought you were just saying they put rice and burritos in California, which is true. Well, that’s also fair. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have very strong feelings about whether rice belongs in that kind of context. And so, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought you were saying. But no, I did not catch the rice-aroni reference at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, Pilaf in the chat says, I probably would have used the avocado for California. Honestly, I probably should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the avocado. It didn’t cross my mind until Pilaf said that, but that that would have been a better choice. I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I was a little, I was trying to go for all food items cause I felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that was the least offensive thing to use and yet still kind of have a little laugh at all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time zones. And then I got, and I got to mountain time. And then I had nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What in terms of food specifically, what is that strip of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vertical space in the United States? This is I think Las Vegas is mountain time. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right? know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Las Vegas Pacific time, which is weird. It’s I think it should be Mountain time, but it is it is Pacific time. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part because it makes it easier to attract people from California because the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vegas a lot of Vegas visitors can just drive there from California right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right so I was trying to think of some food item and you’ll Colorado’s Mountain time. Well, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have bull testicles. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is that Rocky Mountain oysters? Yeah, is Was that right? Yeah, Juvie and John in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is saying a chili pepper for like, what’s that like New Mexico? That would have been a good option. Actually, I didn’t think about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I mean, it wasn’t perfect. I was doing it on the fly, but I was pretty satisfied when it was all said and done. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also particularly liked Australia’s and I’ll leave that as an exercise for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the listener.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s that. And that was having that be the last one. Chef’s kiss like that. Like I laughed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out loud on the ferry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it a… It’s perfect. It’s perfect.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am traveling tomorrow and where am I going? I am going to Memphis,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tennessee. And why am I doing it? Because it is September is National Childhood Care, maybe International
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And this coming Friday, if possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will put a link in the show notes. It may not be there when this episode is released, but I will do my best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video that will be premiering on Friday. Well, it’ll be live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Friday. And so I’m going to Memphis to St. Jude to help raise money to help prevent and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop childhood cancer. I’m going to be participating in the Relay Podcast-a-thon. It’ll be myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Kathy Campbell, Jason Snell, and we’re all going to be on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Live for 12 hours starting at noon on this coming Friday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This coming Friday would be the 20th from noon until midnight Eastern Time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so you can tune in, you can drop in and out. I’d love it for you to watch all of it, but I mean, that’s a long time. So drop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and out as you can. It should be really fun. I’ve never been there for it before. I’ve watched them, but I’ve never been there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should be a very fun time and I’m super duper excited and we’re hoping to raise some money. So hey, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. For the fifth year in a row, Relay is trying to come together to support St. Jude Children’s Research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hospital. Since 2019, we have raised well over $3 million. That is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This ad copy is just a couple of weeks old and it said over 2.2 million. and oh no baby, we’re over three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and comfortably so. And that’s super awesome. So here’s the thing. It’s estimated that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than 400,000 children worldwide develop cancer each year, and nearly half of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never diagnosed. In the US alone, more than four out of five children can survive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancer. But in many developing countries, that statistic is reversed, and fewer than one out of five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey children diagnosed with cancer will live. And I speak for all of us here at ATP in saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sucks. We don’t like that. So here’s the thing, the most significant predictor of whether a child will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey survive cancer is where that child lives. And so starting in 2018, St. Jude became the first and only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey World Health Organization collaborating center for childhood cancer. And so the goal of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of WHO, the World Health Organization, Global Initiative for Childhood Cancers, to raise the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey survival rate of six common childhood cancers to 60% by 2030. And man, that time is approaching. Ask Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. So in 2021, St. Jude and the WHO launched this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey global platform for access to childhood cancer medicines. It aims to provide free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chemotherapy medicines for the next few years to as many as 120,000 children around the world with cancer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And St. Jude is currently piloting that. And in this past April, they met with representatives from the program’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first few countries to figure out the logistical details of how the process will work to get the medicines from ports of entry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hospitals. You can read a whole bunch more about this at St. Jude’s website. But here’s the thing, how do they do all that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They do that because people like you and me give them money. It doesn’t have to be $10,000 plus, although feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free, it can be $10. And that’s also awesome. And as we record, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the week that we’re all, well, not all of us, but many of us are getting new toys. And Marco, you have thoughts about these new toys. Tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sure do. So you’ve heard me talk about this before. I’ll make it quick this time. I’ve come up with this concept called the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Offset, which is basically to try to figure out what amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might I donate to St. Jude. as a minimum starting point of what can I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider expendable that I can give to such a great cause. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also iPhone buying season and other gadget buying season. So I came up with this idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, hey, just look at whatever the base price of the gadget family is that you are buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, the base price of an iPhone, whatever the base model of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family that you’re buying costs, you go ahead and you get the higher storage. Maybe you buy a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case with it, maybe you get the AppleCare with it, you certainly have to pay sales tax on it in most places. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtract the base price from the total that you’re actually paying, and there’s that all that padding on top of that that you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tacked on in your purchase process. That is your suggested minimum donation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can swing it. And you know, these days many of us probably can, that’s great, and so if you can swing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, please do. And there’s even a website that a fan made, B-Beck made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called themarcooffset.com. If you go there, and even the website’s open source, by the way, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. So. Thanks, Beebeck. So, themarcooffset.com will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calculate this for you. So you just, you select which iPhone model you have ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you put in the total that you’ve actually ended up paying and maybe your AppleCare rate that you’re paying every month if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And it will tell you exactly how much your Marco Offset is. And that is your suggested starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone go there. Thank you. Please donate as much as you, as you reasonably can. Again, as Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, even $10 helps. And if you can do more, that’s even better. So please do what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so to do that, please go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey org slash ATP. And you can donate, again, as little or as much as you want. Here’s the thing, St. Jude won’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until no child dies from cancer. With your support, we’ll be one step closer to that day, one cure closer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one child closer. This month and every month, let’s cure childhood cancer together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please do donate to scenetube.org.atp.
Special: Photo Workflows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have other fun announcements. We recorded a new member special and we don’t need to talk about it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to hear the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco feedback. So moving on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’re going to like this listeners. You’re going to, oh gosh. Oh wow. So we, John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had this wonderful idea. John tends to come up with most of the ideas for the member special.
⏹️ ▶️ John This one was suggested by a listener actually, but like that’s the whole thing. Like people are always asking about this topic
⏹️ ▶️ John and very often we’re like, oh, we’ve talked about it before. Go back, listen to past episodes. And then everybody asks
⏹️ ▶️ John which past episodes. like, well, it’s kind of smeared over our entire 11 year history.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought we should do a member special and I thought it was a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So what we did was we recorded ATP insider photo workflows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is where the three of us detail our photo workflows, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have most I think as it ended up went from most bananas to least bananas, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibly, I think unquestionably mine is the most bananas by a very comfortable margin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I am expecting that most of my time in Memphis people will be making merciless fun of me for my bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we helped you on the show. You got lots of good constructive advice on how you might change
⏹️ ▶️ John your completely ridiculous photo workloads to be slightly less ridiculous. And I hope you
⏹️ ▶️ John took those action items as they say and did them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show. I have taken notes. I have taken the action items.
⏹️ ▶️ John five years when we do the same thing again, because this is kind of one of those topics people are always asking about and potentially our
⏹️ ▶️ John photo workflows could change. So maybe in five years we do this exact same thing and to see if our photo workflows have
⏹️ ▶️ John changed, maybe because we get new cameras, maybe because Apple’s photos app updates, maybe because we’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ John apps or whatever. We’ll see if you’ve actually changed at all or perhaps gotten worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see. I don’t know. It’s anyone’s guess. But yes, ATP insider photo workflows. And so here’s the thing. In order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear all of these member specials of which just off the top of my head, there’s probably been 15-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, something like that. If you want to hear all of them, you can go to atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can join the program for a little bit of money each month or a little bit more for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole year at a time. And you can check all of these out and we would love to have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can also get the bootleg, the ad-free version of the show if that’s your thing. So check out ATP.fm
John’s apology tour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, I believe you wanted to start the program with your apology tour. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John What do I have to apologize for? Oh, the the the the pronunciation things. All right. Well, actually, the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, that’s not what I was. I don’t know where you’re going. I’m talking about the camera control and how right Mark. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to apologize for anything there. I said I had heard conflicting reports from people who were at the event. I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John at the event. I didn’t touch a thing. I just said I heard I that I thought based on watching the keynote that it looked like it moved.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I saw people who touched the thing with their hands say that it didn’t move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and Marco and I unequivocally stated that it does indeed
⏹️ ▶️ John move. Yeah, but you didn’t touch it either. You were just going by it. You heard people say it moved, and I heard people say both
⏹️ ▶️ John things. So neither of us actually touched the thing, so we’re just going by reports. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John since then, we’ve gotten clarification. And all the people who are saying it did not move, they were fooled. I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ John they were fooled. Maybe they just didn’t pay attention. Maybe they, again, just used to the idea that if
⏹️ ▶️ John a button has haptics, that means it doesn’t move. But the camera control, in fact, does move. that has
⏹️ ▶️ John been confirmed. Reportedly, it moves about as much as the power and volume buttons. Obviously, when we get our phones, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John check that out ourselves. But just to clarify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then what did you get wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Now I have to apologize, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I see. So that was not an apology. That was a
⏹️ ▶️ John clarification, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I equivocated on the last thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I said. I had heard
⏹️ ▶️ John conflicting reports,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m clarifying which one of the conflicting reports was correct. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see. I think this is a distinction without a difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but I’ll let it slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a very important difference. But here, on the last episode, I mean, this is why I listen back to episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was listening back to the episode and I heard myself saying, I’m like, what are you saying? And during the episode, I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John something was wrong, but I just, my brain wasn’t working right. But as soon as you hear yourself say it back, you’re like, that’s not right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kept saying micro OLED, talking about the screen technology that Apple was considering using for its watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not what it’s called. It’s micro LED, because there’s like mini LED and micro LED and it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John confusing or whatever. Anyway, it’s not micro OLED. So I’m sorry for that error. Every time you heard me say
⏹️ ▶️ John micro OLED, just replace in your mind micro LED. We will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page for micro LED,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes the very specific point that the inorganic nature of micro
⏹️ ▶️ John LEDs gives them a longer lifetime and advantage over OLEDs and allows them to display brighter images with minimal risk of screen burden.
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs, the O stands for organic light emitting diode, but they’re inorganic
⏹️ ▶️ John in micro LEDs. It’s just a bunch of little tiny LEDs, very, very tiny ones placed onto the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s technology Apple couldn’t figure out. That’s technology everybody is pursuing. It is massively expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John because we don’t have an economical way to put thousands and millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of tiny little LEDs carefully placed on a thing like OLEDs and other things are kind of done like
⏹️ ▶️ John a printing process. That’s not what it’s doing. Can you imagine an inkjet printer or whatever? It makes them less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John to produce. But we don’t have a way to do that with micro LEDs. So even for a watch
⏹️ ▶️ John size screen, Apple bailed on that. They said, we can’t figure that out. Forget it.
⏹️ ▶️ John with more OLED screens. So anyway, micro-LED is what it’s called,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not an organic LED. It’s not pronounced micro-led? No, and by the way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John element that is mixed into grade 5 titanium is vanadium, not van-dium. That was just a mispronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ John on my part. So double apology there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. I love that you have, what is this, the phonetic spelling? Or what do you call these letters with like the upside down?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just copied out of the dictionary thing, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Can you actually make heads or tails of these? Because I cannot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the schwa is like, I know the E with line over it is a long E, long
⏹️ ▶️ John A, so you can say the nadium. I mean, I’m impressed. So I think I know all the, I don’t know all the
⏹️ ▶️ John symbols. That’s why I go to like Merriam-Webster site has a speaker symbol next to it and you just click the speaker and
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it audio pronounces it, pronounces it for you. So that’s very useful.
AirPods 4 specs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods 4 listening time. Also breaking news, we’re being told in the chat that the embargo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has dropped on AirPods 4. Perhaps AirPods Pro, no, I think it’s AirPods 4. We haven’t obviously had the chance to read any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them. But with regard to listening time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it just AirPods 4 or is it also these AirPods?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair question, reference acknowledged. I think it might be both. But in any case, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some listening time updates. This is from the AirPods 4 specs page, which we will link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You get up to five hours of listening time on a single charge or four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of listening time on a single charge with ANC enabled on these AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is in comparison to AirPods 3, which gets six hours of listening time with a single charge and five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours with personalized spatial audio enabled. So it’s a decrease of one hour,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not a direct Apple’s to Apple’s comparison, but effectively a decrease of one hour in each department.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of disappointing. I mean, they did make the stems shorter, but I think the batteries are not in the stems anymore on these,
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t, the AirPods 3 and the AirPods 4 have like a button cell battery I think in the body
⏹️ ▶️ John of it but the body also looks smaller so just forget about all the fancy features just the the listening
⏹️ ▶️ John time if you don’t have any of the fancy features enabled goes from six hours down to five
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of disappointing but But you know, we’ll see. I mean, improved sound quality and noise cancellation should probably be a net win.
iPhone cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have some case updates for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about cases obviously in overtime on the last episode, but now I realized part of the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with that is everyone is sending me messages telling me that I should try the Beats iPhone 16
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro case because it has an open bottom. Guess what? I ordered the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case. I
⏹️ ▶️ John will be getting that to try it out. And then the Bullstrap case that we mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John that in overtime that does have an open bottom, Ryan London also has one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I pre-ordered the, since we recorded the last episode, I pre-ordered the Bullstrap case
⏹️ ▶️ John because its shipping time seemed to be better than Ryan London. Ryan London was promising it in November or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. I was like, ugh. And Bullstrap was promising it in September. So I paid way
⏹️ ▶️ John too much money to try out the Bullstrap case that has
⏹️ ▶️ John a crater-style cutout for the camera control as opposed to the Beats
⏹️ ▶️ John case, which has the Apple quartz pass-through thingy. so I will be able to try both of those things when they arrive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for reference, for whatever it’s worth, I had been using the Bullstrap leather case for my iPhone 15 Pro for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the winter, and then when summer came by, I switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to Peak Design because it’s just better for moisture. And I just switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to my Bullstrap case. Oh man, they feel so good. Like, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather is not great for the environment. Wow, it feels good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It like, the Bullstrap leather, like it’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m looking forward to it. So the case that’s on my iPhone 14 Pro right now? Yeah, it’s very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it has aged pretty well. Like I got a couple of like scratches on the leather just from my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault and stuff. But you know, there’s generally, like I have the kind of dark gray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for that year. And it just ages very nicely. Like there’s like a slight color variations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there here and there just from wear. And the tackiness of it, now that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken in, is really nice. The buttons feel nice. The raised lip around the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bump is more of a gentle raise, as John was saying last week. So yeah, the Bullstrap slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ryan London cases are
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely good. Yeah, that’s one of the nice things about leather that’s gonna be difficult to reproduce.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said a few times in the past, I used the Ryan London one for the first year of my phone, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then the Bullstrap for the second. And the reason I swapped is because I do drop my phone occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Ryan London one had taken a lot of abuse on the corners. But one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John nature of leather is that when you get a nick or a scuff or whatever, it’s not that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John self-healing, it’s just that unlike say like Apple silicone case where when a piece flakes off, that piece
⏹️ ▶️ John is never coming back, leather kind of scuffs but then if you just kind of rub it back down in the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John direction that it got scuffed, it kind of lays back down on itself. It wears better.
⏹️ ▶️ John it wears it’s not immediately like oh this is broken I feel like the silicon cases are plastic case if you get a chip
⏹️ ▶️ John off of the corner or a piece falls off or whatever that is forever going to look and feel damaged
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no sort of smoothing that over whereas leather tends to smooth
⏹️ ▶️ John over a little bit it still felt scuffed and I still wanted to trade it up for the the Bulls drop one which is unscuffed
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s something that’s nice so yeah I keep hoping Apple will attempt to make essentially an imitation
⏹️ ▶️ John leather that It has the good qualities leather that I like, but that is not actually leather, but so far they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John made a run at that. They did fine woven, which was not tempting to be imitation leather at all, and then, This year
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying the Beats one which is just plain plastic.
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Why get Pro phones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Steve Stutz writes in with regard to the 16 versus 16 Pro. Steve writes, could you go into a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more detail about why none of you would get the non-Pro iPhone 16, even though all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you seem very impressed with it? What is it lacking that makes it a no-go? For me, this is one very simple answer, 5X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want that deep, deep zoom. I will do what it takes, as you see from this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or this in the year of iPhones that’s now ending. I got the big phone because I really wanted that 5X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was all it was for me. That being said, those colors are so, I know we talked about this, the colors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are so good on the non-pros that it really made me think. And as we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week, they really are so good. But I desperately want that 5X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even though I know it’s not the best fidelity in the world, having the ability to have some pretty strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and deep reach with my phone, optical reach, that is worth the price of admission for me in every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense of the word. Marco, what was your excuse on this one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, like I looked at it before and I did recently, you know, fairly recently have a non-pro phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I used the iPhone 12 mini for that year. What I missed mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the like 2X lens. And it’s not necessarily because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re any good because they’re usually not, and you know, now we’re up to the, yes, the 5X lens. You know, as mentioned, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optical quality of them is usually pretty rough compared to the 1X lenses. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do provide a decent amount of utility. And sometimes I do use them for actual photos that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to look at as well, where digital zoom on the One X sensor is just not gonna cut it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, the main benefit that would tempt me today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, as Casey said, the colors and the lightness of the phones, like in terms of weight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The color is less of a concern now because as I mentioned, like as they’ve shrunk the margins further and further, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bezels have gotten so thin that now I actually enjoy using a case just so I can not cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental input around the edge as I grip the phone in different ways. And I also will, as mentioned frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of lean the phone on things or stand it up on things to play audio when I’m doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the house. And I find without a case, it’s just too slippery. It has too much risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of falling off of the surface that I put it on. So that to me, like I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in the case world now, you know, for the long haul. And so that kind of neutralizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the color advantage of the non-pro. But the main reason why I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t get it now is because I am so hooked on the pro screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once you get used to ProMotion and Always-On, a phone without those things seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeably broken. And when you look at the actual pricing of the non-pro versus the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro, the price difference is not that big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in absolute terms, yeah, I mean, maybe it’s a couple of hundred bucks, but like relative to the price of the whole phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually not, you’re not paying twice as much for the Pro. Like you’re paying like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, 15% more or something like it’s, you’re not actually paying that much more for it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find that the extra features that it provides are definitely worth that extra price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. Now to lots of people, they’re not. That’s why they sell those. That’s why they sell the non-Pro phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because a lot of people don’t care or really want that extra 200 bucks or whatever it is. Like they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that money in other ways. And so I get that. There’s lots of reason why people choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those, but it’s mostly because they don’t care about the pro features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And unfortunately I do care about some of those pro features and as long as pro continues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mean the best screen features, I’m probably gonna stick with that. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting aside the camera stuff, which again, I don’t need the big cameras, but I do appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having them when I do. But for me, it’s more than anything, it’s about the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and about the fact that it’s really not that much of a price increase.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, for me, like I said last episode, it’s the 5X camera or the 3X camera or the 2X camera, like that third camera
⏹️ ▶️ John option. And also the top quality 1X camera, which is what I’m mostly taking pictures with in general. The Pro Foam’s tend
⏹️ ▶️ John to have better cameras. This year, it’s not that big of a difference, but it does have the 2X faster readout. And I do take RAWs and
⏹️ ▶️ John I do notice the lag. And then the second thing for me is probably just like the, just having the top end hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, especially when we’re coming into a year like Apple Intelligence, where every little bit of CPU, GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John neural engine, whatever has got to help because I feel like we’re pushing the limits of the thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I mean, I have a Mac Pro and I’m gonna go for the Pro phones. But yeah, the main factors for me are cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John and secondarily the CPU stuff. The 120 Hertz, I hadn’t really thought about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I prefer that as well. That’s another thing pushing me in that direction. When you pile
⏹️ ▶️ John up all these things, it’s definitely a no brainer for me. even though I also like the colors better
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 16 and I like the fact that it is both lighter and also slightly smaller. I feel like the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 16 is more to my liking, but I got a GoPro.
iPhone details, migrations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s new phones are gonna charge faster, which is exciting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe this is a report from Verge, but the entire iPhone 16 lineup can now charge at up to 45
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watts, which is up from 29 watts. The 45 watt max of the iPhone 16 easily bests the Google Pixel 9’s 27 watts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 37 watts for the Pixel 9 Pro XL, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on par with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. But these all fall significantly short of the 240 watt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word, plus fast charging capabilities of some Chinese phones. But still, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty cool. I don’t fast charge my phone often, but hoo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boy, when you need to top up in a hurry with a quickness, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so genuinely convenient to have that as an option. And I’m really glad to hear that not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only is it continuing to be an option, which I expected, but now you can do it even faster. Now, I think at this point, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is reaching for their email clients to say, oh, but that destroys your battery longevity. And that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t do it very often. But I do love that this is a thing that we can do from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I forget if we talked about this last week, I think we did, but MagSafe 2 or MagSafe 2 Plus, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That also charges a bit faster. I don’t recall the figure off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ John like 25 watts now or something instead of 15. But we didn’t mention the wired charging last time. This is exactly why I put this item in here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fast charging, being able to charge faster over wire is great, but I do worry, I mean, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. didn’t even ship a brick with their thing, the phone anymore. I do worry about people who are like, this is great, I love
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone charges fast, and then on their bedside table or wherever they charge their phone overnight, they put a fast charger.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just beating up your battery for no reason. Like if you’re about to go to sleep and you’re gonna plug in your phone, plug it into the
⏹️ ▶️ John slowest charger you have, right? Charging your battery very quickly hurts
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery. Right, sometimes you need it. Sometimes you’re like, I’m gonna be home for two seconds or I’m in an airport or whatever, use the fast
⏹️ ▶️ John charger. That’s what it’s for. But for your every day, I plug it in here before I go to sleep or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John use a slower charger. Because first of all, it’s not even gonna charge all the way if you have the optimization on it. It’s gonna go to like 80
⏹️ ▶️ John and then wait until an hour before I think you wake up and go off. But during that time when it goes from like, you know, 10% to 80,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want to go as fast as possible. So yes, the iPhone 16 can charge faster. This does
⏹️ ▶️ John not mean you should change all of your chargers in your house to charge at the maximum possible wattage of your phone. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this, that being said though, I love this ability that they’re adding. And I think this kind of, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the many things that if you look at the actual differences to the iPhone 16,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, lineup versus the 15 lineup, you know, the general reaction to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the event was, eh, it’s kind of underwhelming, they didn’t change that much. But I think that the actual story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is not that the phones are not substantially improved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that Apple didn’t do a good job of telling us how they’re substantially improved. But if you actually look at these specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there actually are lots of improvements, Like lots of little things here and there. Like, you know, faster charging over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wire. Also, faster charging through MagSafe. Also, you know, official ChiTu support that’ll make things broader
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easier in the future. Also, there’s lots of stuff like, the screen can now go down to one nit of brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the screen can get way dimmer than it could before. Lots of people want that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you’re like lying in bed next to your sleeping partner and you know, you wanna keep your screen as dim as possible while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re still reading stuff. Like, there’s a lot of improvements like that that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of all around the iPhone 16 line. You know, the 16 Pro has all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those cool new microphones and cool, and like sound quality will probably be significantly enhanced in lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things because of that. There’s all sorts of improvements like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not super flashy in a presentation. And also Apple didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attempt to show off many of them. But those actually will make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phones nicer to use in just everyday use. So again, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrative around these phones was not great in part because people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to not value that kind of thing in that context. Like if they did a presentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was all about just small everyday improvements to using these phones, nobody would care about that either. So I understand why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left some of them out. But everyone including Apple is focusing so strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple intelligence, which again, I think is going to have a slow and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe bumpy rollout, but certainly a slow rollout. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the story like PR wise, that’s the story with Wall Street, that’s the story with like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech press. But most people are not gonna be using those features every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, or they’ll be using very simplified features like as we’re gonna talk about stuff like notification summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and email summaries. Like, you know, they’ll be using that kind of stuff, but like most of the really flashy intelligence features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not gonna be everyday things. Whereas stuff like your phone charges more easily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that affects everybody. Like that can help everyone at some point. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this actually is a pretty good overall release as it looks so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see how it turns out when we actually have the phones. But I think it’ll be overall a better release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than people are giving it credit for so far. Also, like even, you know, I think another big everyday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing will be the new thermal capacity. I really think that’s going to be the difference because as I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my 15 Pro all weekend, it gets so hot doing basic things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, again, thermal management is one of those things that you don’t really think about most of the time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most iPhones, their thermal management is fine. And when you have the iPhone 15 Pro where thermal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management for the first time, I think got worse than its predecessor, or at least seemed to, you start noticing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is the thing that matters. And so then when they fix it in the next generation, like, okay, that’s another savings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bank. And on thermals by the way. So as people’s phones start arriving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Friday for pre-orders. A little hot tip, cause this will be our last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that happens. Two hot tips for your phone migration. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can now connect to USB-C or USB-C to Lightning phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a cable for migration. And apparently that is faster migration in a lot of cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So use a USB-C to see or see the Lightning depending on what you’re migrating from, cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your migrations, that will probably be faster. And second of all- I think actually
⏹️ ▶️ John on the wire thing, I think you have to have iOS 18 on both phones. Is that true? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, I don’t know. I mean, just to be safe, I would say, maybe before attempting
⏹️ ▶️ John the migration, upgrade your old phone to iOS 18 to make sure that’s not a limiting factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can not confirm this, but it’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and then secondly, speaking of hot tips, phone migration is often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttled by thermals. And so if you can figure out ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively cool both phones, so definitely take them out of their cases. That is like number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing if you want your phone to run cooler is take it out of its case. But also if you have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my crazy fan coolers that use thermoelectric instead of in a little MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan, that’s a good time to use one of those. Lower tech, if you have like ice packs, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can like rest your phone, obviously manage the moisture situation. But if you have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially if you have like those big gel ice packs, like if you just like rest your phone on one of those, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have enough capacity to rest both phones on one of those, while somehow, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess, what’s powering, if they’re connected to each other, you might have to manage the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s part of the problem of connecting them with a wire is you better have sufficient battery charge to do the migration.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably should. If they’re both fully charged, you should be fine. but be aware that unless you have some weird Y connector
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing, you’re not going to be powering the phone. I guess you could MagSafe power them during the
⏹️ ▶️ John you have heat. But then you’re blocking the ice pack with the MagSafe puck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever. Right, and MagSafe makes more heat. So yeah, maybe your best bet might be to plug both of them into power and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to make them do wireless. But, you know, that’ll depend on how much data you have to transfer. But anyway, manage the thermals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the migration will go a lot faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is literally a hot tip. All right, and then do we want to talk a little bit more about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demand of these new phones?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because we just come off the question of like, why are we getting the 16 Pro and not the 16? And it’s interesting to see
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly how the rest of the world is reacting at least in a week one, according to Ming-Chi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so this is a report from 95Mac. This is, the slug is lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 16 Pro demand. And so according to Kuo, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is down 16%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to last year. The Pro is down 27%. the Plus is up 50% and the 16,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just plain vanilla 16 is up 10% as well. I’m telling you those colors,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but look at the, so here, this is interesting. Like basically the Pro phones are down, I think makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense because it’s a testament to how good the non-Pro phones are this year. Like even regular people who don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about the specs or whatever can see that the non-Pro and the Pro have all the same
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons on them. Like, oh, have you heard of the new camera control? That’s on the non-Pro. Action button, that’s on the non-Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the things you can see, yes, everyone can see that there’s one fewer camera, right? But like the non-pro phones
⏹️ ▶️ John look good this year. And second is, remember they were talking about like the plus phone, like, oh, no one buys the plus phone. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap enough compared to the Pro Max. People just buy the Pro Max. The plus phone being up 48% again,
⏹️ ▶️ John according to these estimates based on supply chain, yada, yada, yada, is pretty amazing because it shows that people
⏹️ ▶️ John who want a big phone are looking at the Pro Max and going, plus Pro Max?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re not, what does the Pro Max have, however? It has all those pro features with the ProRes video, everything no one cares about.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got the extra camera. And what people are saying is, actually, I’m gonna take the Plus this
⏹️ ▶️ John year, right? If these things are to be believed. These are really weird numbers for like week one. You know what I mean? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John week one, you would expect it’s all the early adopters or whatever, and I am kind of surprised to see the Plus phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, these are not Apple’s numbers. These are estimates based on supply chain, yada yada. Who knows how accurate they are, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting to see the breakdown this year. And unfortunately, this is when we see this, we’re like, oh, it’s great. It shows
⏹️ ▶️ John how good the plain 16s are this year. When Apple sees this, they’re like, we should make sure the plain 16s are
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, the plain phones are a little bit worse than the pro phones because Apple likes to see that differentiation. They like
⏹️ ▶️ John to push people up market to get the more expensive phones. But in the years when the pro and non-pro
⏹️ ▶️ John phones are closer to each other, I bet Apple’s margins go down because fewer people buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that’s a good point. We talked just a moment ago about connecting via cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve been really unreasonably excited to try this for migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year, because migration is always such like a bummer. And I am of the opinion that doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phone-to-phone migration is what I typically do. I’ll typically start by doing an encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup to my computer just as a backup. The key here is to do an encrypted password-protected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, because then that saves all your like Wi-Fi passwords and things of that nature. And I’ll try to do that like the night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I get the new phone, but then for actually transferring, I typically do a phone to phone transfer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it usually works really well, but takes something like two to three hours. It takes forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was debating between trying a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of like USB-C ethernet dongles and putting them both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on ethernet on the same network, seeing if that was faster. But actually looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this, I might be able to just connect phone to phone with a standard USB-C cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on Apple’s comparison page, you can see the differences between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the different phones. And I will say that another benefit of the Pro is that the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max feature the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C connections that are capable up to 10 gigabits per second. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 16 and 16 Plus are the lowly USB 2.0 from 804 years ago, with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speeds up to 480 megabits per second, which is 20 times slower than the Pro phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. So I’m gonna give that a shot. I’m gonna do, I’m gonna probably use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hilariously expensive Apple Thunderbolt USB-C cable, which is completely unnecessary, but just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I know that the cable’s not the problem and we’ll see how it goes. And I’ll probably stick them on ice packs, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, this 20X thing, this is a stat that Apple actually puts on their website, which is rare. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John they put it on the Pro specs to try to show like, this is how much better the Pro is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John 20X, I know we mentioned this last episode we were talking about the phones. But I just wanna reiterate again, always said last time, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh you get the faster USB, the slower USB, and you may be hearing that and thinking, ah I don’t care how fast the USB is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever, it’ll be like just a little bit slower. 20 times slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a lot. It’s not that the Pro phone is so fast, it’s that the non-Pro phone is so, so slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And usually it doesn’t matter. Like usually, because if you have a non-Pro phone, again, you’re probably not trying to pull off like video
⏹️ ▶️ John files onto your external SSD or do all sorts of big, usually it doesn’t matter at all, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John on this one day, when we were all transferring our data from our old phones, be aware
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you have a non-pro phone, even if you’re transferring it to a pro phone, you’re going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably going to be slower than doing it over Wi-Fi, depending on how good your Wi-Fi is. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a shame. They should probably change it eventually, but just be aware. 20x slower on
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-pro phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Dave Mark had a really good reminder. And by that, I mean a piece of information I was not aware of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we talked about on the show Casey. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a long time ago. John. It was more than it was more than an hour ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John You were aware and you became unaware title.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for those of us who are buying new Apple devices, there’s a support document.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put in the show notes and reading from that. If you buy a new iPhone or iPad and don’t have enough iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to back up your current device using iCloud backup, you are eligible to get temporary iCloud storage. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will give you enough time, which apparently all of us knew they will give you and like a month or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and give you basically unlimited asterisk dagger, double dagger storage for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just transferring your device. And then once the transfer is complete, they will reclaim that storage on their end and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will lose it. But that’s really cool. I’m impressed by this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is, I think it’s been out for a year or two now. I highly recommend people do this because it’s a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re getting free storage for the purposes of doing your phone transfer. Take it, take the free storage
⏹️ ▶️ John for this transfer. I would also encourage you to actually pay for the storage to have this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, backup permanently, but even if you can’t or don’t want to, it’s free. It’s there’s no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like they take your credit card and sign you up and you have to remember to cancel or anything like nothing like that. It’s just free
⏹️ ▶️ John temporary storage for the purpose of transferring your stuff. It’ll let you do an iCloud backup. It will keep that
⏹️ ▶️ John backup there for some period of time and then they will just chuck it away. There’s nothing you need to remember to do or cancel or whatever. So take
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of but we will link to the Apple document that describes this in the show notes.
Sponsor: Pioneers of AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Pioneers of AI, a new podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What will the AI revolution mean for jobs, for our kids, for our relationships
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and our daily lives? A new podcast called Pioneers of AI is your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trusted guide to this emerging technology. Host Rana Elkayoubi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an AI scientist, entrepreneur, author, and investor exploring all the opportunities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and questions AI brings into our lives. So listen to Pioneers of AI with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. And we will also link to it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, Pioneers of AI is the name of the new show, new episodes every Wednesday, listen to Pioneers of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much to Pioneers of AI for sponsoring our show.
Misc. details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stu Maschwitz writes with regard to HDR still images preview absolutely does support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDR display still images try any sample at EXR or HDR file you can find I’ve got an EXR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test pattern you can download and we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not sure how to make EXR files but the demo file that one of the demo files shows like a gradient that just
⏹️ ▶️ John goes from like you know black to various shades of gray down to white but the white is like super
⏹️ ▶️ John max HDR white. If you want to blow your eyeballs out on your screen, it’s just how bright it will go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Open that image and then look down at the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news as of just a day or two back, Apple has received their FDA Food and Drug Administration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorization to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids. Reading from The Verge, just days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after Apple announced a new hearing aid feature for the second generation AirPods Pro, the US Food and Drug Administration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or FDA has authorized the software that powers its functionality. In a press release, the FDA describes Apple’s solution as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, the first over-the-counter hearing aid software device. Very good stuff. Very, very good
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. It’s tough for Apple that relying on the government to hit the deadlines or whatever, because Apple would have loved in the
⏹️ ▶️ John presentation to say it was FDA approved, but they missed it for like two days. So they just have to say, we think approval
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming very soon. And yeah, there you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. With regard to the watch bands, the new watch bands, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Milanese Loop, I think, or in even maybe a couple others, Wolf writes that the watch band really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is titanium. It’s inspired by the steel version, but the band is all about the titanium. That’s what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says in the description at the Apple Store, which reads, the titanium Milanese loop, Milanese, Milanese, whatever, features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aerospace grade titanium mesh with a secure parachute style buckle inspired by stainless steel mesh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey historically used by divers and designed for ocean activities. Made of lightweight titanium, it’s perfect for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is just an asterisk though. That is the new Milanese with the ultra style that has like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ultra clasp on it. That one is titanium. The other Milanese
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loop that comes with the Series 10 option and that has the same magnetic clasp that we’ve had forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one is still steel. And the new link bracelets are also still steel. Oh, interesting. They are color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matched to the new titanium watch bodies. But it is the colors of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco titanium being applied to steel for the other ones. Only this new ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Milanese with the ultra latch style. Only that one is titanium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not catch that. Thank you for the clarification. And speaking of watch bands, Josh Harris writes, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first time that Apple sold a gold colored link bracelet. The only other one they made was the 24 karat gold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version given away to celebrities with the launch of the series zero. As a gold fan, I was pleased to see it’s finally official. Wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why it took so long. I am not a gold fan, but I am happy for Josh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they ever sell the 24 karat gold? No, they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was so Josh’s right. So they there were a couple of like, you know, when back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the Apple Watch launched at the very first one and they had the gold one, they would like make they would like give it to certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco celebrities to wear at certain events to promote it the way like fashion people do that kind of stuff. So like there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point there were like a couple of times when a celebrity wore one to an award show or something and they had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gold link bracelet at that time to pair with the gold watches to use in that context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was never for sale to the public. Do they take it back like when people borrowed jewelry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for the Oscars? You know, do they give it back. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would assume so because remember like there was there were a couple of instances of that where like the celebrity was wearing the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was showing that likes the like spacey setup screen on the watch screen and you could see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in pictures like they didn’t even set it up. They hadn’t set it up right. Yeah it was just showing like the setup screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the blinking 12 on the VCR of celebrity watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then coming back to case corner the third party third party iPhone 16 cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you You had opinions, John, about what to do with the flash. Do you want to tell us about this? I mean, I know we talked about it last week, but
⏹️ ▶️ John revisit? Yeah, so the Apple case did what I thought all the cases should do, which is put a little opening
⏹️ ▶️ John for the two cameras on the plain old iPhone 16. So slim, just a little capsule, and then just put a little hole
⏹️ ▶️ John for the flash that’s hanging out near it. I was afraid what cases would do is, ah, we have to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John hole for the two cameras and the flash. Let’s just make one big hole that covers them all. And I was afraid they would make it like triangular.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s cases didn’t do that. They’re great. link we’ll put in the show notes to at least one case that got lazy and
⏹️ ▶️ John said you know what we’re gonna make a capsule opening for the cameras and just a little separate capsule opening for
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know flash and I just think it’s clumsier to do it this way it looks kind of like a three leaf
⏹️ ▶️ John clover instead of a capsule so you know results
⏹️ ▶️ John vary be careful when you’re buying a case and consider one of the advantages of your
⏹️ ▶️ John non pro phone is that you can have a smaller camera thing sticking out there’s no no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John to have like the For example, look at this one. It’s got like the ridge that prevents like the cameras from touching the the
⏹️ ▶️ John surface If you put it face down the ridge is also around the flash. No need for that. The flash is flush You don’t need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John that ridge around it It just makes for a bigger thing on the back of your case So I don’t like that and some people are
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it surprise surprise
Apple Intelligence beta flubs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Apple Intelligence is not officially a thing yet. You know, it’s in beta. And we saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a post from Joe Kimberlin, who had screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a series of toots from a friend of the show, Ben Rice, and Ben Rice McCarthy, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. And so this summary was Ben had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared UK-based museum recommendations. And then Joe had put in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toots that comprised this, which was Ben favoriting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that said finally, somebody else favoriting something that related to museums,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that same person mentioning that’s not for some of us. Like, you have to look at these. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John great job describing
⏹️ ▶️ John them. No, it doesn’t mention museums. So here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it does. It’s at museum shuffle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Right, yeah. But that’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. See? So the summary is attempting to summarize three separate notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ John and the three separate notifications include a username that is at museum shuffle.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the person’s username. Do you think they only post about museums? Is it the only thing that is on that entire
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? Nothing in the body text of these three notifications mentions museums at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. The only thing that is museum related is one of the people’s usernames.
⏹️ ▶️ John that, okay, I gotcha. And so this is an example of some of the limitations of Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John Features when attempting to summarize things. It just gets fed a bunch of text, but apparently it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t understand which part of this text are just at mentions of people who are in the conversation, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that that’s a username, and which parts are the body text, which is what you’re supposed to be summarizing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, it’s all text to me, so if someone’s username has museum in it, I’m like, this must be a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John about museums. I mean, maybe, but also maybe not. This is definitely an area of improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do think that, we had a couple items about this already, and we’re gonna have another one in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think that when Apple Intelligence actually ships to people with 18.1 or whatever, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like this may end up being kind of like a meme topic of like, let’s all make fun of the dumb things
⏹️ ▶️ John our phones say when attempting to help us by doing something simple as like summarizing
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of texts. You got three text messages, it’s up to the little computer in there to summarize them to give you a single placeholder
⏹️ ▶️ John item so you don’t have to read all three. In theory, that’s a useful feature, but in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you see that summary, like should you trust it or do you have to expand the
⏹️ ▶️ John things anyway? Like because you could see this and say maybe someone’s giving me UK based museum recommendations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s just museum shuffle was that mentioned in one of the things that’s messed up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is going to be just you know a problem overall in like when for Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be summarizing notifications. Well Apple intelligence only knows the raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text of the notification that is provided by the apps to the system like there’s an API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you provided a couple of text fields and that’s it. They don’t know the context that this is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from an app where this is a Twitter-style username. They don’t know that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope maybe over time, like the maybe the better solution to this would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as Apple adds APIs that help us use Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, let alone better. Not that I’m bitter that they are launching this entire system with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no APIs, But anyway, maybe they will be able to give developers separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fields to say, like, all right, here, you know, here is the text to show to the user. And then here is a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text, you know, property to fill out on this object. That is the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the text to give to Apple intelligence as what is the intelligence representation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. So maybe and that would maybe like strip out usernames and markup and stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be up to the app to do that by the way like is very very often these services don’t do this I
⏹️ ▶️ John last time we talked about this I forgot to use the correct terms of art but it’s in band metadata versus out of band metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John in band metadata is what most services like Mastin on or Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John especially back in the day used to use where that you know at museum shuffle or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of the body text of the thing and if you want to separate it
⏹️ ▶️ John you the the developer of Ivory or whatever Mastodon client has to parse the text, find
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that are at mentions, extract them, so on and so forth, as opposed to a system where
⏹️ ▶️ John the metadata was out of band, where there was a separate thing, even if it’s just something as simple as, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter did this in later years, ranges of saying here’s the string, but the range from character zero to character 15
⏹️ ▶️ John is the first username and the next username is here and the next username is here. Again, something is always parsing this and
⏹️ ▶️ John determining that, but like to essentially not have to have every single individual
⏹️ ▶️ John app suddenly become like a parser to find all the URLs, find all the at mentions, so on and so forth, and
⏹️ ▶️ John reconstruct it. Again, I think modern Twitter slash x does a better job of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Mastodon also does a reasonable job of that with links and stuff. But for systems like
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo said, that are just like, oh, I’m just going to chuck this text over the wall to the notification system, that’s insufficient
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple Intelligence to figure it out. I feel like Apple Intelligence could be trained to know things like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, when you see an at mention or a hashtag, what those things are, because they’re culturally common
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that it’s worthwhile training on that. And it wouldn’t have to know the context. It doesn’t have to know that this app is a master
⏹️ ▶️ John on an app. I’ve just see something looks like an app mentioned the same way humans do. We parse it out or whatever. And you could still run
⏹️ ▶️ John a foul of that and make a mistake. But it definitely seems like Apple intelligence needs
⏹️ ▶️ John more slash better training and there’s no way on the phone itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what people think about Apple intelligence. They think they’re going to somehow like, I wish I had a way to correct it so it would
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not happening like the only thing that’s changing the weights in that model is when Apple releases a new version of that model
⏹️ ▶️ John Which could happen every day if Apple wanted it to but that probably knowing Apple is not going to but there’s no feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John Mechanism for you to somehow train the model by correcting it and telling it. No, this
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t to be out in museums There’s no mechanism for that right now So which is disappointing but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the reason we’re gonna have what we’re gonna have to live with whatever foibles these things have which really I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like impacts their potential usefulness, which is what cable is talking about cable. I think this is the second or third appearance
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about Apple intelligence in beta. Well, here he is again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, uh, cable writes testing Apple intelligence on my Mac has led to many existential feature questions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, with an asterisk, which we’ll get to, but it definitely is funny how it has it out for my dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so this is a screenshot of conversations with, uh, two people, Megan and Steven,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, in the summary is agree with cable. cable. Stephen responds with nonsense.
⏹️ ▶️ John So rude. That’s the summary. I mean, assuming this is a conversation on the light cable with his parents.
⏹️ ▶️ John One parent’s response was characterized as nonsense by the summary system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lovely. The aforementioned asterisk, why? How does this help? I’m still opening the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emails and the messages regardless of the summaries. In fact, I’m more likely to open them more urgently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interrupting my work quicker because the summaries can sometimes miss key information and I don’t want my brain to think I read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them when I didn’t. The emails that prioritizes for me are often just emails about cancelled calendar events already reflected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my calendar. So what is the goal? To read my email less? How does this help that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is part of the thing with any kind of assistance, right? If you ever like a have a human assistant that you hire
⏹️ ▶️ John to help you with things and your human assistant tells you, okay, on the agenda today, you’ve got meeting
⏹️ ▶️ John x with this person meeting y with this person, you have to do this thing or whatever. That assistant is not
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable. If after the assistant tells you that, what you do is then go to your calendar and confirm everything they said
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make sure they didn’t make any mistakes because what if they forgot that you have to pick up your kid from school and they didn’t mention that? That’s the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John reason you have the assistant, is to make it so you don’t have to do that. But with these type of assistants,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re not very smart and often make mistakes, if you have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John and double check everything they did, is it saving you any time or would you rather have not just seen
⏹️ ▶️ John it at all? And like Cable said, the worst case scenario is you look at the summary And your brain tells
⏹️ ▶️ John you, okay, I’ve dealt with that. I’ve read that. I saw what it had to say. I can safely disregard that because this
⏹️ ▶️ John email is just telling me something that’s not important. But little did you know that there was something very important in that email and because you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t read it, but instead you read the summary that was generated for you that was inaccurate, you now think you
⏹️ ▶️ John dealt with it. And then, I think we’ll all learn from this with someone saying, you didn’t pick up little Timmy at
⏹️ ▶️ John school? I emailed you about it. And it’s like, yeah, I read that email. You didn’t say anything about that, but you didn’t read the email. You read the summary
⏹️ ▶️ John and thought you had read the email. So this, I mean, it’s hard. Like we were talking about like the friend
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? What can this technology do in a way that fulfills
⏹️ ▶️ John the requirements? Summarizing notifications and email may be
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond the capabilities. Even though it sounds like such a simple thing, maybe beyond the capabilities, if it
⏹️ ▶️ John fails in ways that are a problem for you
⏹️ ▶️ John and that, you know, like they require you to read the actual email. Cause then it’s like, what’s the point of the summary then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can’t triage based on the summary if you can’t trust what it says. So I feel Cable’s frustration, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John this is still a beta, we’ll all see how we deal with this. I hope you can actually turn this off, like don’t try to summarize
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications for me, like I see the goal, like we all get lots of notifications and it’s annoying seeing a giant stack
⏹️ ▶️ John of them like oh I have to read through them and see if any of them are important or whatever or I have to go through all my email one by one. We all hate that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We would love something to help us out, but if the thing helping us out is untrustworthy, I’d rather just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t try to help and I will just continue to go through my own notifications email myself.
What “helps” in Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then front of the show, Zach Kahn writes with regard to Apple podcast charts. I think this was an ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few weeks ago or something like that. Um, asking, you know, hey, does following
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on overcast or Apple podcast or what have you, does that actually help? And so if you’d like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig into the specifics behind that. But Zach provided three different links, uh, with regard to how all that works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the scenes. And I’m happy that Apple provides us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you, I tried to read those documents and I, the, the, the The question was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the question was like overcast, like would just following and overcast do anything to Apple Podcasts? And Marco answered no, it doesn’t or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then the other question was like, what does following do in Apple Podcasts? And we had all sorts of theories. Yeah, does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it help the show? Because everyone always says, please follow us, it helps the show. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this document does kind of confirm that that’s the case within the realm of Apple Podcasts, but it doesn’t go into the nitty
⏹️ ▶️ John gritty detail of exactly like how they calculate all these lists and what the algorithms are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco still- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, they don’t want to reveal that people, the more you reveal about that, people will
⏹️ ▶️ John game it. Right. And so if you’re expecting to go into these documents and say, finally, now I know exactly what happens when I follow
⏹️ ▶️ John something, you’re not going to find out that kind of detail. But it’s telling you, you know, directionally, here
⏹️ ▶️ John is the here are the actions that you can take. And those actions feed into these things in
⏹️ ▶️ John a way that we’re not going to describe to you because you game it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think actually this section is a really, really, really great summary of both what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks at and why. So this is from the link that we’ve phrased a summary in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it says, top shows and top episodes. While the exact algorithm cannot be shared to protect its integrity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the charts measure a mix of the following. Listening. When listeners are engaging with episodes, it’s an indicator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of content popularity. Follows. When listeners follow a show to receive new episodes, it’s an indicator of their intent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to listen. Completion rate. When listeners complete episodes, it’s an indicator of content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quality. I like that. I mean, it makes sense. Now, granted, it’s not super specific, but I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that not only did they say this is what we’re doing, but here’s also why we’re doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Spotify gathers similar shots. That’s for his podcast. But of course, for our show, where a significant portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of our listeners do not use Apple podcasts, all those listeners doing all their activity
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to our podcast don’t factor into this at all. Like there is no, as far as I’m aware, equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the Nielsen ratings back in the day where it’s like a cross section of all humanity watching television as
⏹️ ▶️ John determined by this, hopefully representative sampling. We don’t have that, right? We have Apple podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you use the Apple podcast app, they can track your behavior and your behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John influences their top charts. But if you’re using literally any other podcast client, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has no idea what you’re doing. Like because Apple doesn’t host the feeds, the feeds are hosted on the individual people’s websites and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. And you know, again, if you’re an oddball show like ours, where the majority of our listeners
⏹️ ▶️ John are not using Apple podcasts, we’re just losing out on that activity,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is one of the many reasons why we’re unlikely to ever appear in any kind of top charts. I mean, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re a tiny podcast, we’re not going to appear there anyway. But just, it’s just part of the system that we have. Podcasts are
⏹️ ▶️ John very open. But the things like that are
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily sort of islands in individual isolated islands of
⏹️ ▶️ John statistics, because nobody has an overview of everything, which I think is good. Like, we don’t want someone to have an overview of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John but just FYI nobody does.
Huawei tri-fold phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally for follow-up, Huawei has a newspaper phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a tri-fold. It’s so ridiculous, but I mean, hey, if you like it, you like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The replacement of this, or the screen replacement of this, or no, no, no, not the screen replacement, excuse me, the whole phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is quite expensive. So reading from The Verge, Huawei has officially announced the world’s first dual-hinged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey triple screen foldable phone in China. The prices for for the Mate XT Ultimate Design start at $19,999 or about $2,809
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the 25 gig storage model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s roughly $300 more than a brand new 16 inch MacBook Pro. 256 gig storage module for almost $3,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John They couldn’t give you more than 256 gigs of storage. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All models are equipped with 16 gigs of RAM and two additional storage variants are available that cost 22,000 won or about 3000 bucks for 512 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 24,000 won or about 3,300 bucks for one terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Chinese retailer Vimal reported 3.7 million pre-orders before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pricing was announced. Whoopsies.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s yeah. So folding phones, they’re still trying different ways to fold them. Like I waited
⏹️ ▶️ John for the one that folds up like an old paper map that you can never get refolded
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco correctly in the car. Right? Just a
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic thing that folds and like, wow, like this is really pushing the limits. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does unfold to a really big screen, but like, it’s like a full-size iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John practically. It looks bigger than an iPad mini, at least, but that’s such a strange,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it does look like when it is folded, you can still use it as just a regular phone because the top third of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is still visible, you know what I mean? Because of the way it folds, but, folding. People
⏹️ ▶️ John are trying everything they can possibly think of, and I guess there’s enough customers out there saying, that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John cool, I wanna have that because it reminds me of a sci-fi show, and then once they get it, they’ll determine, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John actually a good phone, or is this just like a gimmick that I spend the first month showing everybody I know? Look at my phone, it unfolds
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, huh? And then just, you know, it gets old. Or I mean, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the I Am Rich app. Look at my phone, it costs $3,000, huh? Oh my God. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, whatever makes you happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, but I’m glad people are trying crazy stuff like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that we have this foldable screen tech that has reached the point of maturity that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can actually start having a decent number of products out there on the market that use it. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing weird experimentation with gadgets. You know, phones have been these kind of boring rectangles for so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long that, you know, it’s been a mature market. These boring rectangles are here for a reason. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like them overall and never bet against them. But I’m happy to see experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that we haven’t seen in a while. Like we haven’t really seen this level of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form factor experimentation since the very early days of the smartphone era. and now we’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of crazy ideas and most of them are gonna be terrible, but some of them are gonna actually have some merit and they’ll be fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m happy to see this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, agreed on all counts.
Activation Lock on components
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, apparently Apple is doing activation locks on individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone components. So reading, this is a bit long but I think it’s worth it, reading from 9to5Mac, in 2013
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s introduction of Find My wiped out a huge chunk of the market for stolen iPhones, since they could no longer be simply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reset and sold as a working phone. All a thief could do from that point on was strip an iPhone for parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Back in April, Apple announced that it would be addressing that issue by extending activation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to key iPhone components. Requested by customers and law enforcement officials, the feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was designed to limit iPhone theft by blocking a lost or stolen iPhone from being reactivated. If a device under repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detects that a supported part was obtained from another device without an activation lock or loss mode enabled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calibration capabilities for that part will be restricted. The release candidate builds of iOS 18 enable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey activation lock for iPhone parts. The feature, as previously described by Apple, links to your Apple account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only to your iPhone, but also to components such as the battery, cameras, and display, based on their individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serial numbers. It won’t completely solve the problem, of course, as it doesn’t cover all components, and there may be some who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will accept a lack of calibration and annoying alert messages in return for a cheap repair. But it will make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a huge dent in the market for stolen iPhones, because most people won’t buy a device with obvious issues, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when those issues suggest it may contain stolen parts. The downside, of course, is that the move makes it harder to repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPhone using parts harvested from legitimately acquired, broken devices. Apple has already introduced the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to remove activation locks from Macs when wiping them rather than when setting them up as new. This is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple Business Manager 2, so enterprise companies and customers will be able to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey activation lock from entire batches of managed devices when preparing them for sale. All that is needed now is to ensure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this also covers activation lock for parts. On the one side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this obviously is a real bummer for third-party people that are legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and are just trying to get cheaper repairs by, you know, harvesting a phone for parts that maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen is shattered because I was washing my car or something like that. And yet the camera is fine. And I get that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a real bummer for them. But I would say that broadly, this strikes me as a pretty good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple’s always fighting this battle. They have been since the iPhone was introduced. So it used to be the gray market
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and the market for stolen phones. And this is this is a good way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it with technology. Like, you know, stopping people from stealing your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John People think about that and it’s like, oh, tie it to my wrist with a cable or give people electric
⏹️ ▶️ John shock when they get like, no, that’s not how you solve these problems. That’s how a five year old solve these problems. You solve it by
⏹️ ▶️ John making it not a profitable thing to do. And Apple has been slowly chipping
⏹️ ▶️ John away at that as saying, if you, if someone does steal your phone, what good is it to them? How much
⏹️ ▶️ John money can they make from that phone? And if you keep pushing down that amount of money and increasing the hassle,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will reduce iPhone theft simply because it is no longer as profitable as it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still, there is some profit, not every part is activation locked, but Find My and activation
⏹️ ▶️ John lock on parts go a long way towards making it much more difficult to make money
⏹️ ▶️ John by stealing people’s phones. Now, since this is a technological solution, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John another technological cat and mouse race. Like, okay, well, what is locked about them? Can that encryption
⏹️ ▶️ John be broken? Do people mind? Part of the thing is that the parts will work, but they will
⏹️ ▶️ John not be able to be calibrated, and you may think, who cares about calibration? But many parts in the phone, in particular
⏹️ ▶️ John things like the screen, calibration is a surprisingly big part of what
⏹️ ▶️ John makes them work, because they’re not perfect pieces of hardware, and the calibration process sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of makes it so that the system knows, for example, how much voltage and how much current do
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to supply to every single little sub-pixel to get it to emit the amount of brightness
⏹️ ▶️ John that I expect it to emit and that varies across the screen. It’s not like I just apply the same current and voltage across
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole screen and you get a uniform image. You don’t. The screens have variations. Your screen will look weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and bad if it is not correctly calibrated. And so they’re not like even now
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not locking it out entirely like they do with like the face ID sensors where I think they just don’t work at all
⏹️ ▶️ John period. But things like the screen I think they’ll work but they won’t let you calibrate them so they’ll look bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they’re really trying to make it so that if you someone steals your phone and harvest parts from it,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the most valuable parts are less valuable now because they’ll only be someone
⏹️ ▶️ John only buy them knowing they can sell them to somebody who is accepts having alert dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ John come up and complain about, you know, unauthenticated parts or whatever and also accepts the fact that their
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is going to look worse. And yeah, the flip side of this is that everybody who does phone
⏹️ ▶️ John repairs legitimately thinks this is terrible, you’re locking down these parts, I can’t have my business anymore because I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock the parts, only Apple can do it or whatever. Really, I think it’s not that Apple can do it, only
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who owns the device can do it. So businesses having a way to like mass unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John and wipe their phones before they resell them, that’s important. Like this article says, Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John have the ability to do that. If you wanna sell your Mac, you wanna wipe it so that your Apple ID is totally divorced from it and it
⏹️ ▶️ John removes the activation lock. So owners can do it, but someone who just stole your phone, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do it because they don’t have your password or will see past conversations about shoulder surfing your lock
⏹️ ▶️ John code. And there was a toot that just went by this morning that reminded me of this, this article in the Gothamist
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about messages that have been sent to somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John by the people who stole their phone. Because the people who stole their phone obviously are not the
⏹️ ▶️ John brightest thieves. But they, the phone is locked, right? And they need
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be unlocked for it to become useful. So they’re sending messages to sort of social engineer, the owner of the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone to say, Hey, can you essentially remove this phone from your Apple ID, like deactivate, find
⏹️ ▶️ John my remove it from your Apple ID, which would then unlock it and open it up so that they could use it as a phone. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John send us a series of messages trying to coerce slash fool this person into
⏹️ ▶️ John unlocking their phone culminating into violent threats at the very end, which is not fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it just goes to show like certain caliber of criminal are already
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrated by the features that Apple has. They think, hey, I got a stolen phone. This will be great. I can use
⏹️ ▶️ John this as my phone or resell it as another phone. And they realize, oh, no, I can’t do anything because it’s activation locked and I don’t know how to get
⏹️ ▶️ John around that. So let me try to harass the original owner into unlocking
⏹️ ▶️ John it for me. And this original owner happens to be smart enough to know what they’re doing. But I can imagine this approach working
⏹️ ▶️ John more than 50% of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because people, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, people don’t know what activation lock is. They don’t know all these details. They just know their phone was stolen. If they get a message
⏹️ ▶️ John that says some of the things that these messages say, like, oh, you’re about to be charged and I have your
⏹️ ▶️ John financial information and I’m going to sell your phone and all your information is on and everyone’s going to get it. People don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if that’s true or not, right? So they’ll just be like, oh, I’ll do whatever they say and unlock the phone and then they’ll go away, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And by unlocking it, all you’re basically doing is, you know, letting them use your phone as a fresh phone and sell it for
⏹️ ▶️ John full price or whatever. So it doesn’t actually harm you to do it, but screw the criminals. Don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s unfortunate that this has to be a thing, but here we are and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s doing their best to try to ride the line between blocking out third party repair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, shops and whatnot, and also just helping us not get our phone stolen, which would be preferred.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had their rationale for this was in that product longevity document that we talked about where
⏹️ ▶️ John they explain why they do this. It’s not to screw over customers, but it’s to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so that parts that are essential to security like Face ID and Touch ID can’t be spoofed or faked
⏹️ ▶️ John with third-party ones or whatever. They didn’t even talk about the theft angle, but I feel like that is another big side of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do kind of love one of the Apple approaches to discouraging theft is like, all right, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steal these phones but we’re gonna make your screens look bad that is like the most Apple thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your colors aren’t gonna be quite right no one would ever use a
⏹️ ▶️ John screen that doesn’t look uniform right people will use their phones with giant spider web of
⏹️ ▶️ John shatters across it for a year and a half but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they won’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John it if one side of the screen is slightly brighter than the other.
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#askatp: Advertisers listening to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Jov Zoldin writes, how do you explain to non-tech people, especially family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your iPhone does not listen to you to show you ads? I can never get them to believe me. I think cross-site tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is hard to understand, and the conspiracy theory is more attractive. Do you have an easy to understand explainer video, maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this got complicated in the time between we added this to the show notes and when we started talking about it just now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s been a couple of news reports. titles, Cox Media Group brags it spies on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users with device microphones to sell targeted ads, but it’s not clear they actually can. That was from TechDirt, we’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to show notes. And then from 404 Media, here’s the pitch deck for quote, active
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening, quote, ad targeting, which is also not great. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really know how to answer this question anymore to be completely honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we get this question all the time. People are always wanna know whether their phone is listening to them
⏹️ ▶️ John or they just write to us and insist that their phone is listening to them. And here’s why and they give some story about
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened, right? First of all, let’s just say that we’re talking about iPhones only. I have no idea what’s going on Android
⏹️ ▶️ John respect to this, but in the realm of the iPhone, it is extremely difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the microphone to passively spy on people when people are not using
⏹️ ▶️ John your app and haven’t given their permission. Those are a lot of caveats. Apps can trick you into giving
⏹️ ▶️ John permission app, whatever wants to use the microphone allow maybe some you know someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has a phone hit allow on that ages ago and forgot about it right and now that phone
⏹️ ▶️ John has that app has microphone access right but people who insist that their phones are listening to them
⏹️ ▶️ John will say things like I know I never gave this uh app uh
⏹️ ▶️ John access to the microphone or I don’t even have the Facebook app installed but I visited their website and I think it’s listening to me now
⏹️ ▶️ John right people have all sorts of conspiracy theories about it and they’re backed up by these anecdotes that we know
⏹️ ▶️ John are explained by not simple but non-obvious ways they track
⏹️ ▶️ John you across the web, whether it be local storage, cookies, the fact that you’re coming from the same IP address,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sitting in a group of people. I never even looked up, you know, swing sets,
⏹️ ▶️ John but immediately I got an ad for swing sets on Instagram. Well, it’s because the person sitting next to you looked up swing sets and they’re coming through
⏹️ ▶️ John the same Wi-Fi thing as you and yada yada, right? Like there’s a million ways that they can track you that are not listening to you, But
⏹️ ▶️ John humans have a much easier time thinking, well, if I was trying to spy on somebody, what I would do is I would listen to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John like with my ears, audio, right? And they think that is the most straightforward way to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re doing. And it’s not. We have the ad industry has so many other ways to track you
⏹️ ▶️ John that are so much better developed that do not require listening. That said, as every single
⏹️ ▶️ John time we’ve talked about this issue, one of the things we have said is, oh, believe me, they would love to be listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. It’s not that they wouldn’t do it if they could. They want to do it. They’re trying to do it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re trying to do it. It’s just that Apple is pretty good at stopping them. So this Cox Media Group bragging
⏹️ ▶️ John that say, hey, we have this technology that lets you sell targeted ads based on what people say because we listen on the microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve been pitching that for years, and I’m sure that they have that technology, and I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it will totally work if someone gives it microphone access. But those are a lot of ifs
⏹️ ▶️ John in that stack there, right? That’s why these stories usually detect our one because they’re usually pretty skeptical
⏹️ ▶️ John and sort of paranoid about being spied on or whatever, but even tech turrets have been like, okay, well, they can pitch you
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can provide this technology, but they should also have to explain how you’re going to get past the fact that you can’t get access
⏹️ ▶️ John to the microphone on the iPhone unless the user gets permission or whatever. Show me the,
⏹️ ▶️ John do they have some technical hack to get around that or they’re just using social engineering or whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the end though, this is kind of one of those things where people feel bad if
⏹️ ▶️ John they think something is listening to the audio of what they say, but somehow they don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad if something is tracking them using cookies and IP addresses and other sort of weird
⏹️ ▶️ John hacks, right? That one doesn’t feel as bad because it’s not a human experience, right? They would feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad if a human was listening in on them. When a computer is listening in, it’s more like a human to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t care about tracking of their data otherwise, right? So it’s difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain to that person like, look, the end result is the same. They know you’re thinking about swing sets,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they pulled that out of the air or just got it because someone who is on the same Wi-Fi router as
⏹️ ▶️ John you looked up swing sets, even though you didn’t do it, it doesn’t really make a difference in the end, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But people want to feel it’s kind of like the discussion of free will I had on rectus, which I don’t want to bring up on this show,
⏹️ ▶️ John but feel free to find that episode if you can figure out how to use Google and find it in the show notes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s what’s actually happening and And then there’s how you feel about it. And how you feel about it is so much more important
⏹️ ▶️ John in this scenario. People feel terrible about being listened in on. And yes, as Casey said, this story,
⏹️ ▶️ John this Cox Media thing coming around again, and again, I believe this exact same company several years ago was pitching the same
⏹️ ▶️ John exact thing. Well, anyway, it’s another news cycle. Here they are pitching it again, getting themselves into the news. All this is
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do is reinforce in the minds of conspiracy theorists that their iPhones are constantly listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to them because they’re like, well, it’s proof. They said they did it. They admitted it. How can you not see that? and
⏹️ ▶️ John the nuances are lost on them. And so in the end, as with many conspiracy theories, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John convince anyone they’re not true. You can’t prove a negative. And one thing that is true is that
⏹️ ▶️ John every advertiser wants to do this and are constantly trying to do it. So it’s not outlandish that one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John could eventually break through. But to show that one of them has broken through, you would need a little bit more proof
⏹️ ▶️ John than we’re provided here. So I would say it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to be avoid tracking in any form whatsoever. If you’re really worried about something listening to you should worry more
⏹️ ▶️ John about your voice control cylinders, which literally are constantly listening so they can hear you say the wake word
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. They can’t hear the wake word if they’re not constantly listening. Supposedly they’re throwing away
⏹️ ▶️ John all the audio that doesn’t contain the wake word. But we know from past stories that sometimes some audio
⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re awoken accidentally is stored on servers for long period of times and listened to by humans
⏹️ ▶️ John for supposed QA purposes or whatever. If you don’t like these things, don’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ John something that is constantly listening to you and put it in your house. Same thing with cameras. You hope that they’re taking that
⏹️ ▶️ John video and putting it up on their servers and no human has access to it and it’s end-to-end encrypted. Is it? Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not. That’s why you really have to trust your vendor. I think Apple is one of the most
⏹️ ▶️ John trustworthy here because they are constantly fighting this battle because Apple does not make its money through targeted ads to the
⏹️ ▶️ John same degree that Google does and Amazon has lots of things to advertise to sell to you. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s a difficult situation And I would say to this person, you’re probably not going to convince anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly just let them believe what they want to believe, because in the end, how is it going to even change their behavior? Are they not going to have a phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they not going to have an Apple phone? Because I think Android is better than this. Just Just let them do what they want.
#askatp: State of MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peter Wagner writes, it’s been four years since MagSafe came out for the iPhone. I’d love to hear your take on the current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state of MagSafe and your thoughts on it as part of the iPhone ecosystem. I really love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Qi charging, and I personally use Qi charging every night to charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone. MagSafe specifically, I also like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think that isn’t as important to me as a Qi charging. Although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that I say that, I look at my Pro Max with its pop socket on the back, and I wonder if I’m doing MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dirty by saying it’s not that important to me, because actually having something that I can, no, you know, I take this all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in post. But actually, now that I think about this, between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pop socket that I probably will give up once I get my human-sized phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also the MagSafe battery pack that Apple made years ago that I got kind of on a lark because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two jerks wouldn’t buy one, and I figured one of the three of us should, that I actually freaking love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use it that often, but oh my word is it nice when I do need it. That’s really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the Qi charging. So yeah, actually I take it all back. I’m only in on MagSafe. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you on that. I mean, I’ve been using it pretty regularly since it came out. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my typical like, you know, bedside charger is just a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco puck with that like micro suction tape on the bottom of it to keep it on the nightstand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the next to it is an Apple Watch charger with the exact same thing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice kind of minimal nightstand charging setup that works very well. And MagSafe, Qi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging in general is great for lots of reasons. It’s not a perfect thing. Like wireless charging, as mentioned in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past, wireless charging is a little bit inefficient. And so you do end up losing some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that power and making more heat as a result. That’s why it’s inefficient. It’s turning some of that into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat as waste. And so that has a number of negative effects, most significantly that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of warming up the battery more than necessary as you’re charging it. And so that’s, and that’s not amazing for battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health. And of course you are wasting energy. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Qi charging is very convenient and it has a lot of other benefits too. Like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have Qi charging pads and lots of different things that you wouldn’t have like, you know, a plug for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can, as we mentioned earlier on this show, you can power something via Qi while you are using its port for something else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are also not wearing out the port by plugging it in every night if you’re sitting on a charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pad instead. So it avoids a lot of those kinds of problems. But the problem with Qi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the biggest inconvenience as a user with Qi charging is getting it centered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and occasionally missing. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe, it was Apple basically saying, hey, you guys, this was a good idea, this wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging thing, but let us do it right for you. And sure enough, Apple made a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modifications to it when they made MagSafe, most notably the magnets that automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco align it correctly. And you don’t have to worry, is it centered? Is it a little bit off? Did I miss last night? My phone’s not charged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like no, MagSafe, it centers it every single time. It has never failed. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a 100% attachment accuracy rate as far as I’ve had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was way higher than I ever had with Qi. And so, and as a result, like look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see the Qi 2 standard now, Qi 2 was basically the industry saying, oh, you were right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, they’re bad. And then saying, oh, let’s actually take what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple did and make it the new standard, basically. Which is not the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the industry this has happened, by the way. But anyway, so that magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alignment is such a huge improvement. And that allowed them to do things like have higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wattages. Because one of the limitations of original Qi also is like, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of imprecise, inefficient, kind of broad area coverage that you have to do, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably unsafe to put a lot of wattage through it for in terms of heat management and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. So with MagSafe, one of the reasons MagSafe chargers were able to charge at higher wattages than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Qi chargers is that Apple was able to know like, okay, well, if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is connected in this, like if it recognizes it in this certain way, we know it is properly centered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know it’s very close and within these certain tolerances and therefore we can safely apply more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current in there and we know that less of it will be converted to waste heat and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco et cetera. And so it’ll be safer. So again, another big advantage of Qi too, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helped a lot that they can raise the water zone to make it more useful. So I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things where again, looking at the iPhone 16’s advances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you told somebody like, hey, how much do you like MagSafe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’d be like, I guess it’s fine. But if you actually took it away and we went back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a world without it, we would realize, oh, we actually really missed that. Like that’s actually a very useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So many things have gotten better as a result of it. You have things like car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounts that can just stick it on there. You don’t have to like slide it into like a bracket with a dock or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not quite aligned right or bends out with your case thickness or whatever. Gets rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that. You have the bedside situation. Again, a lot of things become easier there. You have the accessory ecosystem, like Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PopSocket, like the wallet. You have all these things that are now able to either mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the phone or make the phone easier to use in some way or more convenient to use in some way because of the MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design on the back. So it has a lot of those little life improvements. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually very happy with MagSafe. I’m even happier that they’ve made it even better with the iPhone 16 series,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allegedly, with the larger coils and the higher wattage. That’s all gonna be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think MagSafe is a huge success on the phone and I look forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to continued improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, even as somebody who does not use MagSafe to charge pretty much ever, mostly because I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna deal with the heat and degradation or whatever, and I don’t mind plugging the thing in, it’s just made a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John difference in my life simply because I have cars without CarPlay. And what I was doing before, it was what
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco described. You had a thing that clipped onto a vent and it was like a big clampy jaw thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to like open up the clampy jaw and put your phone in it and hope that it stayed in there. And by the way, if you want your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge, now snake a stupid cable that you have to route from wherever your USB port is in your thing and plug it
⏹️ ▶️ John into the bottom of the phone and now you’re ready to go. But with MagSafe, I get into the car, take my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John thunk, it sticks exactly where I want it to be. It doesn’t fall off when
⏹️ ▶️ John I go over bumps and it’s charging and I didn’t have to do anything. I just stuck it there and when I get out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the car, I take it out. And obviously this is barbaric for people who have CarPlay, but you know, not everybody has CarPlay. What a difference
⏹️ ▶️ John in my life this has made to have a dashboard mount that I just stick my thing to and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I like the fact that it is charging, but the magnets, the magnets are key, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do have a MagSafe puck on my bedside table and mostly what I use it for is I put my little AirPods case in it because I don’t really care
⏹️ ▶️ John if I wear out the battery in my AirPods case because it’s not a big deal and I can get a new case if it has ever been a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it hasn’t been. Unfortunately, the battery in the AirPods themselves wears out quickly, but hopefully the heat generated
⏹️ ▶️ John from MagSafe charging my AirPods case is not transferring too heavily to the AirPods. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got new ones arriving soon. So yeah, I think MagSafe is great. Like the good thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John it is that it lets, first of all, if you don’t like it, it really doesn’t take anything off your phone. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure it adds some few grams of weight for those magnets or whatever and the charging coil, but it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change the appearance, doesn’t add a giant hump, doesn’t like make it heavier or bigger in a way that people care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, right? But second, everybody can choose what it is they like about MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think of it as just a magnet to hold a wallet to the back of your phone? Do you use it for 100% of your charging? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it a replacement car mount for you that’s better than your old one? It can do lots of things for lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ John people. So even though you might look at it and say, well, I expected like never to see a wire again and the port to disappear
⏹️ ▶️ John from my phone and that didn’t happen, therefore MagSafe is a failure. I think it’s been a smashing success. I think everybody finds something they
⏹️ ▶️ John like about MagSafe and it can improve their life. And for the few people who don’t find anything they like about MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t bother them. Great feature. Yep, couldn’t agree more.
#askatp: Credit cards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jonathan Cirillo writes, what are your credit card setups? For example, Amex gold for X, Apple card for Y, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, for me, I feel like we talked about this at some point in the past, but for me, um, Aaron and I share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this obviously is what works for us. It won’t work for everyone. We share, um, one primary checking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account, one primary savings account. Obviously we have investments and other things like that. And then, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one primary credit card. And so, uh, when we were both working years, like traditionally working years years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, 95% of our paychecks went into that shared account and that’s what pays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bills, that’s what pays for food and everything else. And then we would siphon off just a little bit to personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey credit cards that only we individually have access to, which are basically used for either,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to buy this and I don’t want to hear you complaining about it for either of us, or I’m buying you a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gift and I don’t want you to know about it. And so that’s basically our setup. It’s very boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The credit card we have gives us a little bit of cash back, I’m sure I could be maximizing my points and whatnot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth, but that’s not a game I’ve ever really gotten into. So my setup is really boring. Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we share the same credit card account. Basically all our retail purchases go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that and then we pay it off every month and that’s basically it. Marco, what about you guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Timmins Also fairly boring. I have the standard setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a nerd who was a nerd in 2006, which is I started out having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Amex Blue Cash card, which was like the nerd pick to do back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had that for a while. At some point in the last few years, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crossed over the threshold at which it made more sense to get the Platinum card,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s one of those cards where there’s an annual fee, but if you spend more than X, you’ll end up coming out ahead with the points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. And there’s all sorts of other benefits with the Platinum card. Among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit cards that offer various perks and benefits, especially if you travel a lot. It’s one of the good ones to get, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look into it if you care. And if you spend stupid amounts of money, then it will usually pay for itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, not everybody takes American Express. And so I used to just have the American
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Express as the credit card, and I would just use my regular bank debit card, which was a visa,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anything that wouldn’t take it. Then at some point, that visa, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number got stolen or something, and it really freaked me out because debit cards do not provide nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much protection as credit cards in fraud situations because with debit cards they’re actually like directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking the money and there’s usually some protection from your bank but you don’t have as many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protections as you do with credit cards and that kind of freaked me out that I was like giving direct access to my bank account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to so many vendors that wouldn’t take American Express and so at that point I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got some other Visa credit card that was recommended. I don’t even remember because I hardly ever use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anything. So my current setup is I have the Amex Platinum for anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will take it. For anything that won’t, I’ll use that backup Visa. Oh, it’s an Amazon Prime Visa. That’s right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I switched over. It’s an Amazon Prime because those actually also provide pretty good benefits. And anything I buy from Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have that as the default payment method because I think it’s It’s like 5% off. It’s a pretty substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discount on Amazon purchases. And so if you buy a lot from Amazon, it’s worth having the Amazon Prime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card. And also if you buy a lot from Whole Foods, because it’s the same deal. Anyway, Amex for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that take it, Amazon Prime Visa for whatever doesn’t. And then my bank card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only ever used in my bank’s ATM. Like, so it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to my bank’s ATMs, that is the only place the debit card is ever put into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s used for nothing else, mostly just for safety and to avoid the inconvenience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that getting stolen.
⏹️ ▶️ John We are a credit card family. My wife, in particular, has opened up many credit cards over the years. We’ve pared
⏹️ ▶️ John it down. But our system is generally one shared card.
⏹️ ▶️ John We both have the card. I think at various times it might have had different numbers for the two of us, but most of the time it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John had the same number, but with two different cards with two different names on them. Yeah, that’s airing to me. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically our main credit card that we use for everything. is also an Amazon Prime Visa, just like Margo’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we buy so much stuff from Amazon and unfortunately Whole Foods. And that gives like
⏹️ ▶️ John good cash back, reward things, whatever, and everybody takes it, right? It’s taken everywhere, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We never got into the whole Amex thing or anything like that. Obviously we do have debit cards for our bank and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just don’t use them, right? I personally also have a quote unquote corporate credit card that is the credit card
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to my business account. Oh yeah, same. In theory, I’m supposed to use that for
⏹️ ▶️ John all business expenses, and I do for recurring business expenses, like as we’ve discussed before, if you have an LLC in Massachusetts,
⏹️ ▶️ John you pay some godly amount of money every single year just to maintain that LLC, which is why everyone opens theirs in Delaware or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But anyway, mine is in Massachusetts, and so every year I have to pay that. And so any sort of recurring fees like that, or like
⏹️ ▶️ John my business telephone that I pay for, another recurring fee, I connect my business card, which is just another
⏹️ ▶️ John visa connected to my business bank account, which is in a different bank entirely. I connect all that up to
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Doesn’t matter, I’m a single member LLC, and it’s passed through for tax purposes. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually matter, but just at the end of the year when you’re trying to find all your business expenses, if you can just look at one card
⏹️ ▶️ John and say everything on this card is business expense, that makes it, our life, easier for us to gather stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that we then hand off to our accountant to say, here are all the business expenses or whatever. I don’t always follow
⏹️ ▶️ John that, unfortunately. Sometimes there’s some things that I forget that were on the other card or whatever, or there’s a mix of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we figure it out. And the thing that both of you didn’t mention that I’m sure is absolutely true for
⏹️ ▶️ John all of us is that when we buy stuff from Apple, we use our Apple card, because it’s like whatever, 6% back or 3% or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever percentage back. Is that not true of you too? Like whenever you make an Apple purchase, you use your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John card? I don’t have an Apple card. No, neither
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I. You don’t? Really? At the time, I guess I haven’t looked recently, at the time, it wasn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth the additional, like, you know, whatever the very tiny benefit was for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over just buying it on my MX, it wasn’t worth it. But that might be different now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, yeah, I think there was, I don’t know what the percentage is now, but I think briefly, especially when Apple Card was brand new
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was buying new Macs, it was like 6% discount when buying Apple hardware or something, I don’t think that’s still true. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I use my Apple Card whenever I buy anything from Apple. My Apple Card pays
⏹️ ▶️ John for my iCloud, when I just bought my phone, that was on my Apple Card. Like anytime we buy Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that is on Apple Card. And that’s the only thing we use our Apple Card for, mostly because Apple has no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea how to make a good credit card interface. Like there needs to be a website, Apple, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can go and see all your transactions. Have you heard of the web? But instead they’re like, oh, just go to the app and scroll.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you can’t see all your transactions? Tough luck. Oh, you want them printed out in some kind of report? Tough luck. Like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re so bad. But I do it to get whatever the discount is for buying Apple stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically with your Apple Card. And I don’t use the Apple Card for anything else because for anything else, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John other cards I have, including our main Amazon Visa card, give you more cash back or points
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that you should be getting. So Apple Pay, when I double tap the side
⏹️ ▶️ John button to pay with Apple Pay, that’s paying with the main family Visa card, right? And I have to remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes I forget this, remember any time I’m actually buying something from Apple, when I double tap the side button, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, face ID, select the Apple card first, because, you know, you can pick which card
⏹️ ▶️ John you want on a per payment basis and do that. And yeah, I hate the stupid thing at Whole Foods
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have to like scan your stupid QR code for the Whole Foods. Can’t they just know, can’t they just know
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever I pay with my Amazon Prime Visa thing, they’re all the same company. Like, can’t you just figure it out?
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, you got to scan the stupid code and then find out the code didn’t even give you a discount on any of the ridiculously expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John items you bought this time. It’s annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you what, man, you make fun of Whole Foods. I shopped at Whole Foods for a long time when I lived in Westchester.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There currently is not one anywhere near my house on Long Island, and I miss it. I like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had the Whole Foods lifestyle and now I’m away from it. I actually really miss it. Whole Foods for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its faults is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Next time you go grocery shopping, just double the bill and send me the other half. You can get that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco experience. It’s real easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I send you all my garbage groceries from Stop and Shop and you’ll give me all the nice stuff from Whole Foods?
⏹️ ▶️ John The only other good benefit of Amazon and Whole Foods coming together
⏹️ ▶️ John is that returning stuff. You can just go to Whole Foods with your thing and just give it to someone at a counter and say, here, take this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is nice. It doesn’t even have to be packed up or anything. It has to be in the box or whatever. We’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m returning this. Take this. That is convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, real time follow up from the chat. Apparently card dot apple dot com. Thanks to Zach Knox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, that is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I know their website is terrible like they used to not have one at all and now they have one end is terrible like They’re just they don’t they need to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at every other credits or our website to know what what the bar is and they’re they’re Just below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode Squarespace pioneers of AI and delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the member perks is you get ATP overtime, a bonus topic every week. This week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on overtime, we’re gonna be asking, will Apple pull a Google and actually abandon a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running service? We will find out in ATP overtime this week. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long.
Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have some updates about the Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, now did, to the degree you’re willing to share, did you call in favors? Did you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey special treatment? What is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I didn’t even want to try that. I don’t want a car that I can only get serviced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a reasonable amount of time by calling in special favors. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not how I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live my life. I don’t want to be, you know, beholden to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although to be fair, what most people said is you don’t have to call in a special favor if you just sign up for the appointment,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. And then just wait because you listed severe things in your appointment, they will
⏹️ ▶️ John bump you up on the schedule. Nothing you have to do. No special treatment. They have no idea who you are. That was the things that people were saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is what people told me. Here’s what actually happened. I created a ticket with the items
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it that seemed pretty significant. Like I think not being able to move the driver’s seat is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty substantial safety issue. Not being able to fast charge on highway trips reliably is also a pretty significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue. Not having any air conditioning in early September, I would say is a pretty significant issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I waited like a day or two after submitting it to see because people said that that should happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t. And then I ended up like there’s like an interface in the app where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco message the service center like on the same thread as your service request. So it’s like a little chat interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I submitted a couple questions in the chat. I’m like, hey, I’m hearing that maybe the AC coolant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also used to cool the battery and maybe that might be related to my fast charging issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it safe to drive this vehicle without the AC working? Because right now the AC doesn’t work at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that, I bet they love it when people self-diagnose and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco write in with
⏹️ ▶️ John their theories about what might be wrong with their car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m sure, but still, you know, we heard from a bunch of people that apparently the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AC refrigerant system is used to charge the battery, or is used to cool the battery pack also.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so therefore, if the AC can’t cool, maybe the battery can’t cool either.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, this second part of what you did is a great customer service hack. By mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ John in what is presumably an auditable area of text chat
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, is it safe to drive my vehicle, should fire off all the warnings of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John either A, don’t answer this question, or B, if they do answer it, that’ll be great to come up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the lawsuit later when you say, hey, I asked if it was safe and you said it was safe and then my car caught on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, leave a paper trail for things like that, everyone. That helps. So you know, I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chat like you know, is it safe to drive if the batter, if the cooling system is not working? Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not hear back
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. That’s one of the options. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John answer that don’t answer that yeah, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no response. I was not moved up ten days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later. They finally called me. Let me tell you what I did in the meantime. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did you sell the Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God! Oh no! Oh no! So I decided, let me see what my options are here. Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because as I’m sitting there waiting for like a week for a response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not getting anything, I’m like, okay, I don’t think this is going the way I expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I said, let me just go see what are my other options out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said, let me just go see, you know, what are my other options out there? So I drove the Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, Marco, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Long Island. There are BMW dealers every 20 feet. I wanted to look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kia EV6, the Ioniq 5, and the BMW iX. For every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other model that people suggested, I really, either it was a Tesla, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s reasons I don’t wanna do that, or it was something that does not fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I stated were my priorities, which is I need pretty long range. I would like a decent amount of interior space and cargo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space. I would like it to have a hatchback or a liftback trunk. And I would like it to be a model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has existed for more than a year or two. Like I want something that’s a little bit more established and ideally from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an established car brand, not a startup like Lucid or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But the i5 doesn’t have a hatchback or a liftback. You can get the M5, the electric
⏹️ ▶️ John M5, or the non-electric M5 wagon, but is there an i5 liftback?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the iX I’m saying is the one I was looking at. You
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t look at the i5 or the i4, the two that I suggested?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did look at the i5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually, I didn’t test it, but I sat in one in the dealer, I looked around. So the i5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically their BMW’s electric five series. I loved driving a five series sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, it was great. The problem is that was before I was ruined by the Model S big liftback style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I love the cargo advantages of a liftback. So I really don’t want a standard trunk anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I don’t need it. Secondly, you figure like, what are you optimizing for? If you pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sedan over like a crossover or an SUV, what you’re optimizing for mostly is efficiency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe physical footprint size. And when you compare the range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iX actually, I think, has longer range than the i5 or at least it’s or at least similar because they put a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit bigger battery in it. Also, the 5 Series has such a big footprint now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the length and width of the 5 Series of the i5 is almost the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the iX. So if you compare them, the iX is just basically a slightly taller
⏹️ ▶️ John Significantly taller, but that’s part of the problem of BMW’s strategy of essentially making, we make a gas version or an electric version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the same car. The i5 has enough room for a gigantic internal combustion engine under the hood. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John you take out that engine, the car does not get any smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and especially does not get shorter or narrower. So like, I think when you compare the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measurements, the i5 is something like, it’s like an inch or two narrower, but it’s like the exact same length as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iX, or it might even be like an inch longer or something. That’s why I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John you should look at the i4, but a backseat might be too small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the 4 Series, the way they make it sportier is they really crush
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the backseat, both headroom, and the cargo is not great either in that. Anyway, so that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the BMW I was looking at was the iX. I’ve also just heard great things about it. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so all this is like I’m looking around like, all right, let me see like what are my options if I if I do want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade in the rivea and like what are my options here and then how can I get around the issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you know it’s broken. Just don’t say anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Adam said, you know, let’s go because I was describing like the options to him because and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like after school one day he he like just come from sports practice and he was tired and I’m like, all right, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for one car dealer and I’m like, all right, do you want to go to like the small fun one? I was thinking the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ionic five or you want to go to like the big cushy one and he said, let’s do the big cushy one on me. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we go to we go to see the IX first of all inside Adam was immediately won over by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has this like accent lighting. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John RGB lighting for your car. It is kids would love it. I had no idea this was there. So every all the cars
⏹️ ▶️ John have this now. It’s so terrible. I hate it so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, it’s so fun. So yeah, like along every window strip on the bottom of each window and then like a couple of lights throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cabin. There’s these RGB lights and Adam’s like, oh my God, make it purple. So we know we made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it purple during the test drive. And he’s like, all right, this you got you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy this car. You’ll be shocked to learn that Mercedes has like named themes
⏹️ ▶️ John like they have with signet with associated signature sense. So it’s not just like, oh, you can change the colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, we’ve we’ve carefully selected these particular themes that involve a sound environment
⏹️ ▶️ John and a color scheme of the RGB lighting and a scent and it’s just like oh come on that’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and BMW has like the ix has a bunch of weird stuff like that but anyway so Adam is like super into it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I mentioned to the salesman I’m like hey and because as soon as of course you know I knew what I was doing I pulled up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I parked the Rivian directly in front of the sales showroom so everyone could see it and it’s like this glorious yellow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodness and the salesman immediately like hey how do you like that Rivian and he said the yellow was the best color they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it anywhere like oh he knows Rivians okay like okay and this guy has good taste. I’m off to a good start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you like that Rivian, what was your answer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, it’s a great off-roader, you know, it’s a really fun car. All those things are true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love it when it’s working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, he mentions his girlfriend happens to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the manager of Rivian’s service place in Brooklyn. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no! And so you were like, well, sit down, son. We have to have a chat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are the odds?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, you’re not making this up. This really, genuinely happened. That’s incredible. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is worth the reveal. Oh my God, this is so good. Now I’m gonna be mad if you did sell the damn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, all right, now I’m working with a different situation than I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want good Rivian service, go to a BMW dealer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the moral of the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so I mentioned to him, I said, I decided it was okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reveal something because of that. I said, listen, I have two problems. Problem number one is that my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worth too much to trade it in for a lease. Problem number two is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air conditioning does not blow very strong right now and it’s a long wait for service and I can’t get a service anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the only thing you mentioned? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which is probably, I mean, in all fairness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is true, but there is more. But in all fairness, that is probably the root of both problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Self-diagnosing. So I mentioned those problems. And I think this anchors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the deal in my favor already. Because he’s like, well, if we took that in, I could get that taken care of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much faster. I’m like, great. So anyway, we do the test drive. I freaking love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iX. It’s just ridiculously nice, like way nicer than I expected it to be based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on reviews and everything. From the inside, you can’t see the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey course, it’s hideous on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But look, who cares? I don’t care how my car looks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s coming from a banana. We know he doesn’t care what it looks like on the
⏹️ ▶️ John The R1S is an attractive vehicle. The IX, less so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll give you that. But anyway, I freaking love it. So I’m like, all right, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me see what my option here is. So I’m like, hey, what would you do for me on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Rivian? And so he has the manager come out and appraise it and everything. Now, I went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there. I had looked up on websites. I looked on cars and bids. I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on AutoTrader. what do these things tend to go for that are, because there’s not that many R1Ss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are on the used market, so there’s not that many data points. But there’s enough that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a number in mind and I’m like, all right, if this is roughly what they sell for in private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales to enthusiasts, I’d be happy to take at least 10% lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that from a dealer trader. And I know I’d probably be fighting even to get that. They offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just barely a hair below the private sale price. Oh wow. So I was like, hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to get the Rivian service manager’s boyfriend at another car dealer. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a surprisingly good opportunity all of a sudden. So I’m like, let’s run some numbers here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What could we do on the lease? How can we work this? So through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a surprisingly small amount of squeezing, it turns out there were a lot of lease incentives at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the IX for some reason. I don’t care why. I know there’s like an LCI coming out next year. I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about to be updated. It’s probably going to get the Tesla port next year as part of the LCI, which is BMW’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco term for mid-cycle refresh. I know they’re going to improve some of the looks of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside because people don’t like it. I really care about none of those things right now. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through just these wonderful lease incentives, it brought the price of the vehicle down like $12,000. I’m like, huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m going to do this trade-in for a price that is way more than I could get, than I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no trouble whatsoever, and they’re going to give me a big cut off the lease,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m going to prepay most of the lease with the part of the value of the trade-in, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to give me a check for the rest. Huh. So I did it. I now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own an iX. Now- What color? It’s the Blue Ridge Mountain one. basically looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a shiny sky blue. It’s like if the sky was shiny that is how it looks. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get the 50 or the 60? I got the 50. I didn’t test drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 60. They didn’t have one then. I got the 50 because I test drove the 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was extremely fast. Like it’s I would say it’s a similar difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like when back when I was getting my Model S when they had like the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-range one versus the at the time I think it was the ludicrous now it’s the plaid but at the time I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ludicrous was the high-end one at the time it was like I you know you could go to 0-60 in like four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds or three seconds basically and the the ones that were four seconds that’s incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast for a car that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the three-second one I remember with the Tesla I test drove that one and I believe I described on the show as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if like I was getting punched in the chest when I would floor it like it was actually kind of unpleasantly fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I I decided with this one, like the X51 or the 50X drive, whatever it’s called, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote slow one is already so fast. This is plenty for me. And it gets longer range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s cheaper by a lot. And there’s more of them in stock everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John What was the color again? Was it the Phytonic blue metallic?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ridge mountain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it doesn’t look that blue. That’s why I was looking for the blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but look up actual pictures of it. The configurator does not really show what it’s like. Did
⏹️ ▶️ John you get, what trim level did you get? Did you get the weird sport trim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing? Yes. So the thing is, to get one locally that’s in stock, because I ask, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the order time? And the lead time on an order is like three to four months. I don’t really want to wait that long. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a time in my life when I really cared about every one of those details. I don’t care anymore. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. I just need a car that works.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes sense. You’re going to have the car for like six months anyway. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John no. I’m going to have it for at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years. I leased it. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put the Rivian cost towards the lease as much as they would take, so the lease payments are like $120 a month. It’s mostly prepaid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s incredible. And it’s just, and it’s no, there’s like no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interest. And like it made no sense not to. With all the lease incentives, they brought the price so low, it made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no sense to do a cash buy or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Rather than me asking you what wheels you have, can you just send us a picture?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, let me try, hold on. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a great car. I really, because I’ve been in, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Tesla first and then Rivian, I have not really had a super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luxurious car in a while, like since the BMW times. The luxury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level has certainly increased in the time that it’s been. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is certainly like the luxury technology has gotten substantially better. It is just an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice ride. Like, it still feels very much like a BMW. Like, it is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sporty. You know, the handling for a vehicle that’s not super small, the handling is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Compared to the Rivian, it’s night and day. I mean, the Rivian was a much bigger vehicle, but the iX really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives incredibly well. The suspension, and this doesn’t even have the air suspension, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular suspension is like super cushy and soft, but you still feel a little bit sporty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the handling. Like, it’s a great balance. Like, look, BMW knows how to make cars that feel good to drive. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their whole thing. But the luxury level, like, the cabin is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quiet. When you close the windows, it’s so quiet. A lot of little details that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian, I think, hasn’t figured out yet. Like, for instance, with Rivian, like, there was pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no position at which you could roll down the driver window and no other windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it not do that like ear pumping thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, buffeting or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever, yeah, whatever that’s called. But with the iX, like it just doesn’t do that at any level that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can find. Like when you close and open the windows, you don’t get that like ear sucking, whoosh, you know, like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t do that either. There’s like, you know, little stuff like that that’s just, you know, they’ve been making cars for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time, they engineer the crap out of them, they know how to do it really well. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to get out of an established car company. You know, what took me away from BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago was the wonderful advantages of EVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s when I went to Tesla. It was because they were just, EVs are just that good that it was worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me changing brands and taking a risk and giving up some of these things like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the EV drivetrain. But this is also now that same EV drivetrain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now back in established car brands. And that’s exactly what I was looking for making this change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m actually, so far, I mean, look, I’ve now there is one snag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had the car for about 20 hours. Oh, no, mark. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the seat stop moving? I was I was sitting in front of my kid’s school picking him up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this message shows up on the dashboard warning high voltage system error.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get you can continue driving, but please have the system checked by your nearest service center to prevent malfunctions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and subsequent damage and this lease is a new car right brand new car. It had like 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miles or something, 40 miles on it. Like I had it for less than 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get a service center error. You gotta be kidding me. So of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course, you know, I called them up. I’m like, hey, a little problem. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what? They got me in same day. They had given me a loaner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another IX. So they give me the same model car as a loaner. And I was out the door
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they had it back in their hands in like two hours. That’s service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t expect products to be perfect. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things go wrong, especially, you know, a version one of a car, of course, a lot of things are gonna go wrong, but like, I know things are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go wrong. What I need is for things to not go wrong most of the time, and when they do go wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to be easily fixed. Like, and I said this last time, like, that’s my priority with cars. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need them to be perfect. I know they’re not perfect. I need them to need very little from me in terms of maintenance and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. Like I need them to mostly work. And if they have a problem, I need it to be easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved. And even though I am very stressed out that my brand new car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a problem, I looked it up, it seems like a somewhat common software flaw with IXs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens sometimes and they get fixed and they never have the problem again. So it should be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still have it. They’re gonna, I believe they’re gonna be giving it back to me today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey When did it go in? Thursday or, yeah, Thursday.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they did give me a loaner immediately. At this point in the story, I start to wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John how many terrible electric car related tragedies would need to befall
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco before he started looking at Hondas. I think it’s a lot. I think it’s way more than his
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey half of the map.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the love of God, John, there are cars other than Hondas. Jesus Christ, my guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or a Toyota, right? But like, I mean, I don’t, first of all, I want to say to everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s listening, don’t let this discourage you from getting electric cars. Marco is being extraordinarily unlucky here. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the standard experience, as evidenced from his years of using electric cars before this. He’s just has incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John bad luck. But given your incredibly bad luck, I am wondering how much bad luck would it
⏹️ ▶️ John take for you to be like, screw
⏹️ ▶️ John going back to internal combustion. I think it would be a lot, but I really feel like you’re being tested by the universe here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not going back. A brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new car. Cause like, cause really like, even now that I’m driving around a service loaner, even now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving this car, you know, week almost a week later it is so nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a really really nice car and I’m also very happy now to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be back in the carplay world and the ix has very good carplay support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I you know when I back when I had the Land Rover briefly and I had carplay in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember saying on the show that it was a little disappointing and like whether I had it or not I’d be fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s that’s true but what I realized like when I when I drove the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rental that kept breaking last two weeks ago or last week whenever I was when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drove the rental it had carplay and so I and so I was able to get used to it really quickly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know get back into it when I then went back to the Rivian after using carplay it it felt like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car was broken it’s like wait how do I control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I switch from overcast back to music like there was just there were so many little friction points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like you know what I really need a car that has CarPlay because first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all it is better it is better by a lot and I have nothing really bad to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Rivian in general I think the Rivian was a fantastic vehicle that I just had some bad luck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with part of the problem was indeed my fault for denting it part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it was inherent problems that actually predated that when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was cleaning out the Rivian getting all my stuff out of it there was there’s this area there’s like a sub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trunk area where you lift up the thing in the trunk and below it is like another area and below that’s another area below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as I was cleaning my stuff out of that the sub like the lowest part of the sub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trunk was wet everything in it was wet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hadn’t rained in days all the stuff in it showed signs of long-term water damage like I had a first-aid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit there it was moldy and to throw it away like there was like there’s there were like I had like a couple of like tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they were all kind of just messed up from long-term water damage so there were multiple issues
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer your problem right good luck to the girlfriend of the BMW salesperson
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes but like and that’s this is part of why I’m not really complaining about my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car breaking immediately than having to be in service I’m like hey you know what I’m not gonna say much about this look you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this you’re getting me back that’s fine just I’ll have my car back I I think today will be good. Anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just version one car company stuff. Like when I had the Model S back in 2016,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla had already been selling the Model S for a couple years and they had the Roadster before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like they had already been selling cars, making cars for a little while. So they had worked out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the 1.0 beta problems. Rivian is not there yet. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be there in another couple of years. I think, you know, two, three, four years from now, like when the R2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out and hopefully the cool R3 comes out, I think they’re gonna get there. I think they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really be an amazing company in a year or two or three. It’s gonna be great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones I sell now are great with just some asterisks. If they need service, it’s kind of a pain in the butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t have that many service centers. They’re backed up 10 weeks, whatever. There are some asterisks on buying it now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bones of a good car company are there. And the cars are very good, as long as you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some weird bad luck in certain things. But the cars are very good. So I have nothing bad to say about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian, and I would be happy to consider going back to them in the future. The one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really gets me, that gives me pause for them, really, is their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CEO’s stance on not doing CarPlay and on insisting that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all the software themselves, I think is pretty wrong. And I trust,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he seems like he’s a pretty good CEO, pretty capable person. I like the way his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head, I like where his head’s at in most ways. But when you look at what people use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay for, what they’re, what Rivian is trying to do, Tesla basically says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not even going to try to replace CarPlay, we’re just going to not have it and screw you. And we’ll keep adding weird games to our cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t play while driving, so why? But what Rivian says is like, we’re going to try to integrate the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the car so that you don’t need to use CarPlay. And so, you know, they, when I bought the car, it had like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it had Spotify and title as the music options. They have since recently added Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, when I look at how many CarPlay apps I have on my phone, when I actually go through like the pages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pages of CarPlay, I have like 15 CarPlay apps at least. There are various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, like I tried out that service Blink, Blinkist, whatever it is, that gives you like summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of books like in 15 minutes. I honestly, I don’t think I recommend that service. I have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really gotten much value out of it, but I decided to try it anyway. And like they have a CarPlay app. And so as on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, on the rental car, up to upstate last weekend, I listened to some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco books, like some, well, some book summaries that somehow remove all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value of the books.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco should have had Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Intelligence do it. They would have said, this book contains nonsense, next book. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feature sounds pretty, I mean, most of my email is nonsense. So I think that that might actually be a useful summarization thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are so many apps like, you know, Instapaper has a CarPlay thing where you can have articles read to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s CarPlay apps for things like ordering pizzas and stuff, like if you can order your pizza on the way home from your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay app. Like there are so many CarPlay apps that are too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrow audience, or just they’re never gonna rise above the level of what somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Rivian or Tesla would integrate into their own systems. And using it from your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is almost always better because your phone has the latest everything. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually a better computer and a more recent OS than the car will have. It will have better connections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to data and to things like whatever your services and logins and data things are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone will already be connected to all of them. The phone will always be better. And then the phone also, like Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also mentioned, like the CEO mentioned in a recent interview, that they have to work on messaging. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How are you gonna do that over Bluetooth? There is very basic support in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth protocols for messaging things, but it’s pretty limited, it’s pretty basic, whereas CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just works correctly. You can message with iMessage, you can message with WhatsApp, whatever you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use, it’s already on your phone, it’s already connected, it’s already logged in, and it works perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need to do things with that via voice, Siri does that for you, you can do it through CarPlay. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to account, you’re never going to encompass what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your users wanna do with CarPlay by building in your own software piece by piece like this. You will never cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all. And even if you do cover it all, your versions will be worse than the versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone. Some of which because car makers aren’t that great at making software, and some of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the phone just has inherent advantages that the car makers can’t match. So I really think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very wrong-headed approach to car infotainment. The idea that you’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replicate what everyone uses their phones for, it’s just never gonna happen. You’re never going to get the breadth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the quality of what you can do on a phone with CarPlay and Android Auto and whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re never going to match that. And Rivian, they have decent software. Their driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directions and their maps are still not good. They still get place names terribly wrong. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re never going to match Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps. You’re not going to match it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s specialty things like my Fire Island sand driving mapping app. like a specialty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mapping app that can’t I never made it work with CarPlay because it’s too small audience but like that I could have made a CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of that I could never integrate that with Rivian and Rivian will never come to me to integrate it with their system there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of specialty needs like that we’re like yeah maybe maybe like the you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can probably say like 80% of what people use is this handful of top apps but how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people out there use zero other apps that don’t fit in that in that bucket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably not a lot. I bet almost everyone has one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not be satisfied by Rivian’s built-in deals or software that they have and if you even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things it’s a bad experience to own that car as a result. So it is totally wrongheaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to continue to not integrate CarPlay and to actively say we’re not even going to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. So anyway that being said that is the one thing that I that I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care for Rivian for. Otherwise, I think they’re making great vehicles and they have a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future ahead of them. Just right now, it is still very much in that beta period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I learned from this experience, I do not want a beta car. I do not want a beta car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. I don’t even want a 1.0 car company. I want like a 3.0 car company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want somebody who’s been around the block for a few times. And then finally, going back a little bit to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the luxury angle. What Tesla does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had to solve the significant economic problem of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge cost center is the battery and you have to somehow put a car on top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that feels like it’s worth that price. But as a result, like you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have as expensive of a cabin and other features on top of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a $40,000 battery and still be as good as cars that cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same as you that have gas engines because gas engines are just inherently cheaper than giant batteries. So the Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approach, which Rivian largely took on as well, is we’re going to try to get in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ballpark of similarly, you know, specced cars, like in we’re going to like hit a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price point and we’re going to try to be as nice as, like, you know, in the case of the Model S, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, an S-Class, which is is why they named it that or you know a 5 series or 7 series or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever like another luxury car with a gas engine that’s around this price point we’re gonna try to get as nice as those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they just can’t and they never have and they never will because you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mercedes for the S-Class they have X dollars of margin over the cost of the engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend on making the car really nice in other ways and Tesla just has way less of that margin to spend because the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so expensive. So the way, so what Tesla’s really are, are fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic and kind of mid-range interiors. Like it’s, they’re not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super cheap, but they’re not super nice. And they’re pretty minimal. Oh, we’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much email. You’re right, but we’re going to get so much
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget also that the other place they save costs is by leaning into the futuristic aesthetic and say, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Remove everything from the interior of this car. Remove every button, every opening, every stock,
⏹️ ▶️ John every control, remove everything, because every one of those things you remove saves you money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Like they say it’s for minimal, you know, aesthetic and this is the future, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conveniently, it also saves them a bunch of money. So that is probably a large driver of those decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what you get with Tesla and Rivian is fairly economical interiors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not super luxurious. On top of amazing drive trains that have these giant batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and these awesome motors. Like that’s what you get with those EVs. With the iX,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is more than a Rivian, although with the lease incentives, it gets very close. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you get is an actual luxury car on top of a really great battery and drive train. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is where Tesla and Rivian are going to continue to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete very well. And this is where I think they’re most vulnerable to competition from the big players.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, yes, establishment, service networks, things like that, those are huge factors. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you compare what you get just in terms of interior quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and luxury niceties and just general luxury levels, what you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the other brands is typically a lot better than what you get from Tesla and Rivian. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Rivian, I was getting it to be an off-roader, first and foremost, and it is great for that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fantastic for that. It is the best off-roader I’ve ever driven. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a like, you know, $90,000 luxury, as a $90,000 EV SUV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not compete in terms of niceness. You know, things like, you know, noise levels, just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, ride quality, handling quality, a lot of different luxury features that are inside. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nice, but it’s not luxury nice. And Tesla, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think not only is Tesla not luxury nice either, I think the modern Teslas are even worse than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones I had. Like I recently was in one of the new Model S’s and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeably less luxurious than the ones I had. Like, cause you know, they’ve had a pretty big revision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then. It just feels like they’re cheaping out on everything possible to try to squeeze more margin out of the cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re basically riding around like a plastic box on top of an amazing drive train. And it’s, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another reason why I didn’t want to go Tesla. Because the new Teslas feel like cheap, decontented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of the ones in the past. And even they were like decently luxurious, but not super luxurious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, all that is to say, I don’t have the Rivian anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John One question about your new car. Can you use the Tesla Supercharger network with an adapter?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Officially, no. And in fact, this was actually, so when I was moving the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over from the Rivian, I brought my Supercharger adapter and I just stuck it in the door pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the driver door pocket, because the iX does not have a frunk. They just filled up with engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and other stuff. Like they put, they filled up with components. So there is no frunk for you to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t, you actually officially can’t even open the hood. There is like a special way you can open it if you really have to, but officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, you’re not supposed to open the hood. The front BMW logo, you like flip it up and that’s where you pour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in windshield washer fluid. And that’s it. Yeah, remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mercedes, the Mercedes EQS, their S-class electric version, the same deal, you’re not supposed to open the trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what they did for the windshield washer fluid is even more ridiculous. Like you think the BMW flipper thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is ridiculous. They added a door to the front fender
⏹️ ▶️ John that opens up, and this thing slides out for you to put. They cut into the sheet metal
⏹️ ▶️ John of the car to make this. Of course, it’s all electronic, and this thing slides out, and this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John hinges out, and you pour it in. It’s like, just let people open the hood. I know you only want them to add the
⏹️ ▶️ John fluid. Just let them open the hood to add the fluid. Stop cutting holes in the side of your car and making these little mechanical things, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the BMW 1 is not even the worst in this regard. the German manufacturers love
⏹️ ▶️ John to, and VW as well, in some cars, love to fill that front part of the car with the other stuff, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, hey, we got all this space, we could give it to people for storage, nah, let’s just fill it with stuff, and so they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and one other thing to mention too, the iX has little spray washers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the front and back cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, that’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one thing, I wish Rivian had that, because every single time I got out of the Rivian, like in a parking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot, I would have to lick my thumb and wipe it across the rear camera, because it would get covered in dirt and crap all
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things that manufacturers are doing with that is having the backup camera hidden, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re not backing up. So
⏹️ ▶️ John exposed to road spray, and it just flips up. But I do kind of like the ones that are always visible,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I feel like being able to see out the back while you’re driving forward, which you can do on a Tesla and other cars, is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually convenient. And if you’re going to be looking at it all the time anyway, it’s still going to get dirty. But yeah, the washers. So I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it harkens back to the 80s when they put those little tiny windshield washer blades And the squirters on the headlights, do you remember those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I mean, we never had a car with that, but I’ve seen them and they look cool as hell. Yeah. One thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, so the iX, so TIFF has the i3, as mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s from 2019 or something like that. One of the reasons why I was comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back to BMW is that the i3, despite being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years old now, we’ve never brought it in for service. It has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very low needs. And that being said, we also have very little mileage on it. I think we’re only up to like 7,000 miles. You
⏹️ ▶️ John do need to change the oil in your range extender. Please bring
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it in. There’s gotta be sludge
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point. Probably, yeah. It’s mileage and also time, time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Well, and the thing is like, I have to bring it in because one of the back tires has a slow leak. So I’m like, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it serviced in some way anyway. So like I might as well bring it in and have them do everything. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that car, the i3, It’s one of the best EVs I’ve ever experienced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not because it’s a great all-arounder, it’s not. But it is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remarkable EV drivetrain. It never loses charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we can park it at the ferry terminal, we can park it for like a month and come back and it has the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same charge. It does no phantom drain as far as I can tell. The EV drivetrain has never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caused us problems. It has never had any issues. It has never reported any issues. It just runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliably. Different temperatures, sure. Gotta run the heater AC, sure. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a, like for such a, for such a relatively early EV platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was surprisingly mature from day one. I’ve been hearing that from reviews and everything about the iX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, that like, whoever BMW has working on the high voltage systems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of my error message that my car had after 22 hours, It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is remarkably mature as a platform based on what people say in reviews and stuff. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can charge it at full speed, at any temperature, it’s fine. Like there’s all the different, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various gotchas that a lot of kind of first gen EV platforms for manufacturers, a lot of them have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW didn’t have those. Or at least if they did, it would have been even earlier i3s than what TIFFs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, which was reasonably late in the product cycle. So what I’m buying into here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty mature technology stack. And I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love, you know, the i3, it was one of those, you know, kind of based on a concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars that you get into it and they’re like, we’re gonna make this thing futuristic. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever that meant when the i3 first came out, and I guess when was it around like 2016, 2015, whenever the i3 first came out, they’re like, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. So we’re gonna make everything carbon fiber and eco-friendly. There’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these like scratchy eco materials on all the dash panels on the i3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, it’s a weird car, and then you get into it and it makes weird sound effects. Like when you start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up or turn it off, it’s like all these science-y, spaceship-y sound effects. And I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that crap. I love the weird personality they put into that car. Well, the iX,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did the same thing, but just newer and better. The amount of personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that car, in the iX, They have these fake sounds that Hans Zimmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco composed that like, the car has its own entire soundscape. And yes, you can turn it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. I don’t think I’m going to. You can pick different ones too, right? Yes, you can. Like there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of weird BS in it like that. And I kind of love that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Tesla, their whole thing was we’re going to strip out most things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars usually have and we’re gonna add in some dumb games that you can play while you’re parked and that’s about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian was like, we’re the adults in the room. We’re not going to add dumb games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can play, but we will make a car that just quietly works really well in these adventure scenarios. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not gonna, Rivian is not fun. They are chill and cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The IX is like a bunch of Germans on ecstasy. We were like, what can we do for the future?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s just, and it’s so weird and fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a high-end luxury car. So like it doesn’t it’s not like it’s not like weird quirky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s more like This is that this is a version of the future from somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drug haze that I absolutely love it is so full of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Personality it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John sharper image car But it’s nicer than that and by the way marker. You’ve gotten distracted Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John charging bring it back. Oh, yeah Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry I took it straight. Oh my word. Anyway, so yeah, so I had the Tesla charger in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco door pocket when I brought it back to them and because the error was the high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voltage system, the service place called me like an hour after I dropped it off, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, we found this Tesla supercharger adapter in your car, did you by any chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that? I was like, no, I’ve had the car for like 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours, I haven’t even plugged it into anything yet and they’re like, are you sure you didn’t use it? I’m like, yes, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t go to a supercharger in this one night. I had the car. I’m pretty sure I would know that like, yeah, I’m positive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks. And they’re like, well, you can’t use those with the I X. We have not officially certified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to work when both, you know, so it is kind of funny. That’s like if you happen to bring in a BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco electric vehicle for service, it’s kind of like removing your third party ram before you bring in something to an apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place for service. Don’t don’t leave your supercharger adapter in the car because they will blame it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably for whatever problems you are having.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you go on long trips, are you going to stop at a Tesla supercharger and use your
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter or no? Yes. Because why not push your luck? Your luck’s been so good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Tesla, I think Tesla itself, I’ve seen actual examples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people doing it. It does work. You just have to, like so what Rivian had with Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a data sharing deal where like, you could just plug it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the supercharger would recognize who you are and bill you through Rivian. The superchargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with adapters work with lots of other EVs that don’t have that deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially the Tesla superchargers that have magic docks. That’s the one where the adapter is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the supercharger, you don’t have to own one yourself, it’s just in there and you can like, log into the Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and authorize the whatever bay number you’re on, you know, all right, unlock number four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a and that’s what I’m parked at and you could go in the app and you can give Tesla a credit card and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pay for it yourself and then you can unlock it with their built-in adapter and plug your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car in. Lots of EVs work with that including allegedly BMWs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the service center people say is we haven’t officially announced anything but you know really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works. So that I do I do intend to actually do that when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time comes, but that time certainly has not come yet. Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congratulations on the new car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one other thing too, now that we’re talking about charging, one of the reasons why I felt comfortable doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three-year lease starting now on a car that doesn’t have the Tesla port,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year, when these cars start rolling out that actually have Tesla’s port, there’s gonna be an IONIQ 5 update,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just announced that it’s gonna have it starting next year, there’s gonna be a BMW iX refresh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alleged to have, but I think has not been officially confirmed, starting sometime next year. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably in about a year, these cars are going to start rolling off that have this port into the market. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if those don’t work, like, everywhere on day one, that’s going to be an annoyance and a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a version of buying a 1.0 car. And also, right now, if I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an adaptable CCS car that is adaptable to Magic Dock Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chargers and some other Tesla chargers that that can take the adapters directly. I feel like that gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me actually more options right now. Now three years from now when this lease is up, I think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to want an NACS port car because at that point there should be more movement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the charging infrastructure because like right now you pull up to a lot of places and there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly CCS plugs and like maybe one or two NACS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugs on like a custom charging station or you can go to a Tesla charging station and then they’re all Tesla plugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like there’s right now it’s it’s enough of a mix in North America that I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right this second would prefer to either have just a Tesla car which can use their network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only but you know it’s it’s known to work everywhere or a CCS car that’s adaptable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by all accounts the iX is adaptable it just does not officially you know certified to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know certain things yet so fine we’ll work on that when the time comes and again in three years from now I think that I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will flip. I think in three years from now there will be enough NACS support across different brands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it will start to become worth it to just have an NACS car at that point, but we’ll see. Right now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy to lock this in and plus you know like my home chargers are CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like there’s all sorts of like you know there’s benefits right now to keeping it CCS, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know the next car I buy will probably be not that. But hopefully that is at least three years from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. We will see. Well, congratulations. I can’t believe that either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us went crawling back to BMW. And honestly, I’m not sure if I would have expected me or you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go first, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, just by the numbers, the sheer number of cars rotating through the households, you’ve got to put your money on